ANGELO SANTELLI FLYING AND REFORM SCHOOL
Temperament
Tears
and
Tantrums must be deposited with the management (for safekeeping)
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE.
All around the border were silly little crayon sketches of flyers: a monkey hanging by one foot from a trapeze, a girl with a long pigtail jumping through a hoop held by a grotesque figure with a huge mustache, a catcher hanging upside-down and consulting a huge watch whose hands pointed to midnight. The figures were amateurish but had a shrewd element of caricature; the mustached figure was obviously Papa Tony and the pigtailed girl bore a strong likeness to Mario, with the family’s slanted eyebrows. Tommy burst out laughing. “Who on earth did this?”
“My sister, Liss,” Mario said. “She was about fifteen, I guess.”
“What do the Italian words mean?”
“‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’” Mario translated. “They’re supposed to be written over the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno.”
Tommy chuckled. “Flying and Reform School, huh?”
“It was during a winter layoff,” Mario said. “Angelo was just letting us start doing a few easy catches and picture tricks. And—well—Liss is temperamental. So one day Angelo yelled at her. Some perfectly ordinary remark—ordinary for Angelo, that is. Something like ‘Keep your big fat bottom tucked in’—you know how tactful he is.”
Tommy laughed, remembering several of Angelo’s more tactful comments. “Oh, sure.”
“Well, Liss was so upset or offended or outraged or whatever that she dropped off into the net and had a screaming tantrum right then and there. And Angelo—he never did put up with that kind of stuff—came down and spanked her. So Liss went into shrieking hysterics and roused the whole house, and Lucia came down, and Nonna, and Lu slapped Liss with a wet towel. All things considered, it was the rumpus of the year. Liss was a pretty chastened kid by the time she went upstairs, and after she was calmed down Papa Tony gave her his Lecture Number Three—the one about discipline and self-control—and barred her from the practice room for a week. That’s the next step in what old Mario used to call ‘suitable punishment’—one step more serious than the floor-polishing routine or getting your pocket money stopped. Well, when she came home from school the next day, she sneaked into Angelo’s room and thumbtacked this up under his bathrobe, and when he went up for his shower after rehearsal, there it was, and you could hear him howling with laughter all over the house. Well, we all got such a laugh out of it—and actually, I think Lucia had a word or two with Angelo about anyone Liss’s age getting turned over his knee and spanked like a baby—that for the first and last time in family history, she got let off, and Angelo brought this down here and put it up in the place of honor. We’ve kidded him about the Flying and Reform School ever since.”
“Your sister must be quite a girl.”
“She is.” Mario kicked at the muddled heap of clothing. “Come on, let’s get started. Next year I can push all this busywork off on you, and I guess you’ll be stuck with it until Clay grows up.”
He gathered up a handful of black tights, shrunken like snakes, and thrust them at Tommy. “Here, look these over for worn spots and moth holes. If they’re hopeless, chuck them into this carton for the rag man. If they have a couple of thin spots, put them over there, and Lucia and Liss—when she gets here—can patch them up for practice.”
Tommy sat down, the tights in his lap. They smelled musty, but through the mothball smell there was the old, familiar odor hanging about them of resin, sawdust, and sweat, the smell of his childhood. Mario was sorting a clutter of sneakers and slippers.
“Angelo should have thrown these out last year,” he said, pitching a pair of worn cloth pumps into the rag box. “Did you get enrolled in school all right? One of us should have gone with you.”
“It was okay. They put me in the second year high.”
“What time do you get out in the afternoons? Around three?”
“Well, that was part of what I wanted to talk to you about. Mrs. Santelli—I mean, your mother—only she’s Mrs. Gardner, isn’t she?”
He broke off, remembering the encounter just a few minutes ago in the upstairs hallway, when he had been explaining the school arrangements. She had said, with one of her pretty and definite gestures, “Oh, Tommy, everyone here, down to my grandson, calls me Lucia. Why should you be the only exception?”
He had demurred. “It doesn’t seem polite somehow, Mrs. Santelli—I mean, Mrs. Gardner—”
And she had said, with her soft laugh, “See what I mean? It’s just too complicated any other way.” But the soft voice had the whipcrack of authority.
He repeated this to Mario now. “I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem—well, respectful. My mother would have a fit. You really think I ought to?”
“If she wants you to, why not? We all do it. According to Angelo, it used to give my father fits, too. When Liss was just a tyke learning to talk, Lu made it very clear that she wasn’t going to be called Mama, and we all grew up calling her Lulu. And Papa Tony was always just Papa to all of us. I think he’d die of the shock if anyone, even Clay, said Grandfather to him. Why argue? Call her what she wants to be called—seems to me that’s the really polite thing to do.”
“I guess so,” Tommy agreed doubtfully. “Anyhow, she offered to take me up to school this morning, but I said I could go by myself. All the schools are split shift, though, and I got put on a morning shift.”
“Great,” Mario said. “I can keep my job at the ballet school a few more weeks. If you were going to school afternoons, Papa Tony would want me to quit work right away so we could all rehearse mornings.”
“Well, I guess it’s all right, then.” Tommy poked his finger through a moth hole. “I don’t know, your mother will have to be awful good at patching if she can mend these.”
“Oh, murder, I should think so,” Mario said, “Chuck it in here with the rags. Are they all as bad as that?”
“No, these have a couple of thin spots on the feet and that’s all.”
“Well, that’s something.” Mario was turning a rather worn black ballet shoe in his hands. “How did this get in here, I wonder?”
“Mario, tell me something—I’ve meant to ask. How did you ever get started teaching ballet?”
Nervously Mario turned the slipper inside out and then right side to again. “Oh, I don’t teach dancing. Just acrobats and tumbling, for the kids who are studying ballet. But I started out to be a dancer, before I ever did any flying.” He stared at the slipper in his hands. “Liss and I were enrolled in ballet school when we were just babies, every winter. Then after Joe and Lucia had their accident, all year. Johnny never was interested, or Mark, but I kept it up. The year I was sixteen, they offered me a position in the regular corps de ballet with the Studio Ballet group. But that year Papa Tony had his heart set on taking all of us on tour. And—oh, I don’t know—once I got on the road I sort of fell in love with the circus all over again. I did quit flying again for a year, later—Grandfather Gardner wanted me to go to college. It was the same year Liss got married. He said he’d send me to college up at Berkeley, where my father went—he’d pay all my tuition, living expenses, everything. I didn’t want to by that time. I was just getting so I could catch and hold on a double, and already I had this thing about doing a triple someday. But Angelo said I should give it a try for a year, so I did.”
“So you went to college?”
“Yeah. Don’t laugh. I thought I might like to teach school some day.”
“I’m not laughing. I’d think you’d be a good teacher,” Tommy said. “So many real creeps take up teaching. You know—you’ve been in school.”
“But I haven’t. I never went to school. We were on the road all the time. When Lu was the star of Starr’s, she was important enough that they got a tutor for us kids, but after the accident I just sort of lived at the ballet school. B
ut I passed my college boards all right. I was supposed to have a high IQ or something like that. I kind of liked college.”
“So why did you quit?”
“I didn’t,” Mario said, his face suddenly a complete blank. “I got thrown out.”
“But why?” Tommy burst out, shocked.
Mario looked cold, alien and completely grown up, a stranger. “You ask too goddamn many questions. If you’ve just got to know, I got drunk. I got into trouble—real bad trouble—so I got sent to jail, and then I got thrown out of school. Are we going to sort this damn wardrobe or are we going to sit around asking each other nosy questions?” He flung the faded ballet slipper into the carton.
Tommy bent his head over the mound of clothing, his face stinging as if Mario had slapped him. He ran his fingers carefully along the seams of the tights, rubbing each heel and toe for thin spots, looking all along the crotch of each pair for torn places. As so often with Mario, Tommy had the feeling that he was blundering around a dark and unfamiliar place. He never knew when he was going to say or do the wrong thing.
As far back as when Mario had first been teaching him to swing on the bar, Tommy had encountered the same unfathomable temper. For a few minutes Mario would be friendly, patient, encouraging; even when he laughed or yelled, it was in a friendly, companionable way. Then, always without warning, as if an invisible wind had changed, his mood would shift and he would say roughly, “That’s enough—now scram, run along.” At first Tommy had blamed his own stupidity or slowness to learn for exhausting Mario’s patience; later he had begun to wonder if Mario’s attention span was brief. More recently he had realized that it was something else, something more than ordinary irritability; to understand that it had nothing to do with him, with Tommy, at all.
Mario was kneeling on the floor, his head bent, shaking out ornate, spangled vests and belts. Tommy watched him out of the corner of his eye. His hair grew low on his neck, and he needed a haircut. He had on faded dungarees and a worn black turtleneck sweater—Tommy wondered how many of them he had, and if he ever wore anything else—and flat woven Mexican sandals.
“Kid—” Mario said at last.
“Yeah?”
“Look, you hit me on a nerve, that’s all. I’m sorry I blew up that way. It’s a long story and not a very nice one. I’ll tell you all about it someday. Here, come help me sort this mess. Throw all those towels over there; they’ll all have to be washed.”
Tommy came and began to sort through the muddle, separating tights from belts, spangled tops, towels, and robes. Mario picked up a roll of the inch-wide muslin tape with which they bound their wrists and fiddled with it, rolling it tighter. “Tom, something else. Do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“You know they’re going to bill you as Tommy Santelli? Well, listen, I’m not asking you to lie or anything, but if I take you anyplace with me—and I might—I’m just going to introduce you that way and let ’em take it for granted you’re my kid brother, okay? Even if I call you Tommy Gardner, don’t contradict me, huh?”
“Why, sure, anything you say,” Tommy agreed, confused.
Mario raised his head and now he was grinning again. “You see, I take what Papa Tony said real serious. What he said, you know, was mostly for my benefit. Not yours.”
“I don’t get you,” Tommy said, completely baffled.
“You mind being my kid brother?”
“Heck, if you can stand it, I can,” Tommy said. He was thinking, again, that you never knew where you were with Mario.
The next morning, downstairs in the huge practice room, they began work. Tommy caught a glimpse of himself in one of the old mirrors while they went through a few preliminary stretching and bending exercises: thin and long-legged, in an outgrown T-shirt and gym shorts. Long ago he had overcome self-consciousness, but he felt troubled by his relative stiffness.
Mario—bare to the waist, in shrunken black tights patched at knees and feet—was holding the bar fixed along the wall and stretching his legs alternately above his head. He turned and grinned.
“It won’t take you more than a day or two to limber up again. Remember, I’ve been working out all winter—naturally I’m in condition.” He pulled himself up on one toe. “You know the worst thing that ever happened to me, just about? I was, oh, maybe fifteen, and I was practicing for a dance recital. I was real proud of myself because I could do all the fancy stuff, high leaps, fast spins, flips, pirouettes, you know—did you know a ballet dancer learns to pirouette just like a flyer, just the same way exactly?—and I could kick higher than anybody else. And one day Mr. Court—he was our instructor—Mr. Court scowled at me and said, Trouble with you, Matt, is you’re not a dancer, you’re just a goddamn acrobat!’ I was still young enough to go home and bawl over it.” Mario laughed. “The funny thing was, he didn’t have the faintest notion how right he was. He didn’t know Liss and I came from a circus family; he was just using the word as a sort of catchall term of abuse.”
Tommy laughed uneasily. “Well, when I was a kid, Dad said that the worst thing you could say to anybody in show business was ‘May all your children be acrobats’!”
Mario let go the bar and started across the floor. “Come on, let’s get the net strung up and surprise the others when they come down.”
They worked in silence, Mario curt and preoccupied, stopping every few minutes to check and supervise Tommy’s fastening of a rope. When they finished testing it. Mario somersaulted to the floor.
“Wonder what time it is. You’ve got to get ready for school, and I’ve got to shave and go to work—my first class today is at ten-thirty. We could leave it till this afternoon. Everybody will be down here then.”
Tommy felt unreasonably disappointed; not till now had he realized just how eager he was to get back to work. Mario watched him, then shrugged. “Oh, well. Might as well see if we’ve still got our timing. I haven’t been up myself since last fall.”
As Tommy climbed the ladder, the looming walls, hard and confining, seemed to close in on him. He glanced uneasily at the trapeze, calculating the arc of the swinging ropes. Suddenly he envisioned himself cracking his head against one of those too-close walls. Holding with one hand to the ladder, he glanced uncertainly at the skylighted ceiling. If you swung too far, too high, you could hit it . . . .
“Keep your mind on what you’re doing!” Mario shouted. “That ladder’s twisting like a snake!”
Rebuked, Tommy put his mind on his climbing, feeling the jolt of Mario’s weight on the ladder behind him. He stepped off onto the platform, then turned to steady the ladder as Mario got off. They stood together for a minute, Mario whistling a little tune under his breath. Then he said, “Andiamo,” and signaled to Tommy to pull in the bar on its long hook. He gripped it a time or two, but was unsatisfied. He reached up and slapped his palms around the resin bag, then took the bar again and swung off, working up into a smooth, straight, arrow-neat swing, the four straight practice swings with which he always began rehearsal.
Then, swinging back to the pedestal board, he dropped off. Tommy reached for the bar and caught it, and it flew up, striking Mario on the elbow. He overbalanced briefly, catching an elbow around the guy ropes, and snarled, “Watch what you’re doing! If you’re going to catch the bar when I drop it, catch it—don’t shove it in my face!”
Tommy said, “Sorry,” but Mario had already taken the bar in his hands again and swung out. The trapeze swooped out, the man’s body weighting it into a perfect arc; he pulled up, rolling over the bar in a neat turn. On the backswing, so swiftly that Tommy could hardly follow the separate movements, he threaded his ankles through his looped hands and swung there, his body arched into an inverted hoop. Then he flipped over and around the trapeze, hung briefly by his ankles, and dived into the net, landing on his back and letting the taut cords toss him high.
Wading toward the ladder, he called up, “Your turn!”
He stood beside Tommy on the board, frown
ing, as Tommy took the bar.
“Head up, more flex in your elbows, and take that scowl off your face—you’re not a weight lifter!”
Tommy swooped off into space. For a moment it seemed that he was flying straight at the opposite wall. At the end of his swing Mario yelled, “Change around!” but he had missed the timing. On the quick, twisting pass where he shifted hands and flipped his body around to face the platform, he missed his grip. Mario shouted, “Let go!” but already, by reflex, Tommy’s muscles had tightened in the snapping twist as he plunged down—he knew enough not to try to hang on with one arm—turned, struck on his back, and bounced up.
“Well, at least you still know how to fall,” Mario called, “but what happened?”
Tommy started to say that the enclosing walls had seemed too close, then swallowed the words back. “I dunno, just missed.”
The door creaked and opened. “Hey, boy,” inquired a familiar voice, “getting an early start?”
Tommy turned, his feet tangling in the meshes of the net. Mario shouted, “Angelo!” and dived off the board. Tommy tumbled sidewise as Mario hit the net beside him. Mario vaulted to the floor and ran across the room to where Angelo was stooping to unlace his shoes. They hugged one another, and Angelo grinned at Tommy as Mario let him go.
“Getting off to a flying start on the season, huh?”
In city clothes Angelo looked heftier and shorter, almost completely unlike himself; only his voice and his grin were familiar. “When did you get in?” Mario asked.
“About four this morning—didn’t you hear us? Lucia came down and made me some coffee, and we’ve been sitting in the kitchen ever since, talking.”
“No, I didn’t sleep here, just came in early to put the net up before going to work. How was Mexico?”
“Hotter than hell, as usual, and just as infuriating. Dust, no water you could drink, horses getting sick, and that damn flying act spent more time chasing the señoritas than thinking about what they were doing. One of them did too much chasing in the wrong spots and wound up with a dose of you-know-what, and I had to finish the season filling in with the flying act, damn them all. We broke up at Laredo night before last. Tessa really had a ball—she came back chattering Spanish so fast even I couldn’t keep up with her. She even wanted to see a bullfight, but I figured I had to draw the line somewhere. But she was all excited because she made a little friend down there and was a special guest at her friend’s First Communion—there was a special Mass in the mission church for the kids. And of course she made a big hit with everyone in the show. She rode in the spec, and a girl in a Roman-ladder act taught her to do flips and hand balancing. Even put her in a mechanic one day and let her up on one of the ladders. I put a stop to that damn fast, of course. But just three days later I had to climb up and haul her off the aerial ladder—she climbed up to the platform all by herself, the little devil!”
The Catch Trap Page 11
