Smiling with the most innocent friendliness, Stella put out her hands and tugged him up to his feet. They ate in the kitchen; it was very late when they finished putting the dishes away. The big living room, fireless, was too gloomy for sitting, so they sat on the stairs for a few minutes before Stella drew her hand across her eyes.
“Tommy, I’m sleepy. Do you mind if I just say good night and go up now?”
“I guess I will, too. There’s no telling, they may not be back till three or four in the morning, or they may even spend the night with their people up there.”
On the landing, on an impulse, he caught her narrow arm and pulled her, unprotesting, against him again. “Stel,” he whispered. His whole body had suddenly come alive in imagination, and he was struggling with wonder: How would it be, then? He hugged her against him, but she broke gently away, shy and demure again.
“Tommy, don’t. Don’t. Please.”
He backed her against the wall, holding her there hard and at the same time a little worried about hurting her; her bones were so small and so close to the surface of her skin. He didn’t want to talk. He said into the curve of her neck, “Stel, let me come in for a while.”
She shook her head mutely.
“Why not, honey? Why not?”
She touched his cheek gently. “It wouldn’t be nice. Not here in their house. And suppose they came back all of a sudden? And anyway—Oh, hell,” she said, stood on tiptoe, and brushed his lips lightly with hers. “You’re a nice kid, Tommy. Use your head.” She turned swiftly away, broke free, and went into her room. The door shut, firm and final.
Tommy went into his room, suddenly very tired. He shucked his clothes and got in between the cold sheets. He could not chase away the image of Stella in her bed alone at the end of the hall. With a sort of tactile memory he felt again her cold, wet face against his and the awkward softness of her thin body bundled in the heavy warm robe. Briefly excitement stirred in him, but he was too tired even for that.
He lay seeing random pictures in the darkness: the tremble of the MG wheel between his gripping hands, the rain beating on Stella’s bare head, his mother standing in the rain before their trailer . . . the windy tremble and sway of the aerial ladder in the high Arizona wind on a blustery day . . . . Dreaming now, he felt the sway of the ladder beneath him, Mario and Liss—or no, it was Stella—on the board just above. Then he stepped up on the board and handed the black taped bar to Mario, who gripped it and soared out, flying, free . . . . Then Tommy saw that the rigging was at the very edge of the canyon, the edge of the world, and he and Mario were swinging out in their duo routine over the great gulf, and far below them the rushing noise of surf . . . . He made a stifled sound of protest, murmured, “Uuuhh—” and sat up in bed. Through the opened door, the light from the hall was shining in his eyes.
“Ssssh, it’s only me,” Mario whispered. He looked tall and unfamiliar in his pressed dark suit and tie; he was carrying his shoes in his hand. He closed the door softly and came, in the stream of moonlight, across to the bed.
“It was so late when we got in, Papa Tony told me to stay over. I’m sorry I woke you up—I hoped I could get in without disturbing you.”
Still a little dazed by the dream, Tommy sat up and rubbed his eyes. “You can put the light on if you want to.”
“That’s all right.” Mario put his shoes down and sat on the bed to loosen his tie. “Were you and Stella lonesome here all day alone? You should have come—it’s a nice drive up that way. What did you do?”
“Stel took me out and taught me to drive the MG.”
“Hell,” Mario said, “I’ve been meaning to teach you all winter, but I keep forgetting. So Stel beat me to it! More fun to drive an MG than that old wreck of mine, I guess.” A billow of white shirt fell to the floor. He walked to the bureau, moving lightly in the semidarkness. “All this junk in the bottom drawer here . . . Yeah, here’s some pajamas. Come on, we can talk in the morning—just move over and go back to sleep.”
Obediently Tommy moved over against the wall. Mario sat down on the edge of the bed to draw the pajamas up over his legs. Suddenly Tommy was embarrassed because he slept naked. He could see Mario very clearly in the moonlight, buttoning up the buttons. Mario turned and touched Tommy’s bare arm, lying on top of the blanket. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I sort of got out of the habit of wearing anything,” Tommy muttered.
He heard Mario laugh under his breath. “If you spent the winter in a flea trap like mine and had a landlady as stingy with the heat as mine, you’d sort of get back in the habit real quick.” He lay down, pulled up the blanket and turned on his side, his back to Tommy.
“You want some more of the pillow?”
“No, this is fine. ’Night, Tom.”
“Good night.” Tommy shut his eyes and lay very still. His bare leg was just touching the cloth of Mario’s pajamas; he moved it carefully away, afraid to disturb Mario. He opened his eyes again and lay looking at the moonlight. Mario stirred, and Tommy held his breath; the other made a slow, drowsy, settling-down movement and turned on his face, his arm pushed under the pillow. Tommy, lying very quiet next to the wall, listened to Mario’s quiet breathing, his own eyes dropping shut . . . .
Suddenly Tommy realized that he had slept again, for the moonlight was gone from the room and it was black dark outside. It seemed some movement of Mario’s had roused him; he slept restlessly, shifting from side to side. He lay facing Tommy now, his warm breath, his arm lying across Tommy’s bare chest. Tommy felt stiff and cramped from lying so still. He moved carefully to free himself, but the movement made the bed creak, and Mario stirred again, drowsily muttered something unintelligible, and stretched out his arms. Startled wide awake, Tommy flickered through an instant of abashed resistance, then let Mario pull him against his chest. They lay curled up together, back to front, Mario’s arms wrapped around Tommy’s waist, their knees bent into a close-fitting curve. Tommy shut his eyes, comfortably. They could sleep perfectly well like this, he thought. It was perfectly all right. It seemed quite natural to fit into Mario’s arms like this. Tommy wanted to sleep, he felt that he really ought to be asleep, but instead he lay quite still, awake but sleepily enjoying it. He knew in a dreamy sort of way what he would try to forget later: that he had always wanted Mario to hug him and hold him like this.
He was slipping back and forth over a razor edge of sleep, pictures rising and sliding away in his mind: Mario, standing with his arms around Johnny; swinging, his body curved into a perfect arc; the soar, leap, and drop as they passed each other; the jolt of catching the trapeze, letting it take and toss you higher, higher, into the launching flight across space—an arrow of streaming light, a dart of fire . . . . Mario standing in the change room naked, his face beaded with sweat, jerking the towel in vigorous swipes over his wet shoulders— Abruptly, startled out of sleep with the shock almost of a fall, by the tense trembling tautness deep in his body, Tommy realized, with a sudden shamed fear, what was happening. Suppose Mario should know, should notice? He tried cautiously to free himself from the warm, disturbingly close embrace, but Mario was hugging him tight, his face pressed roughly into Tommy’s bare shoulder blade. Scared now to the point of panic, Tommy straightened out of their close-folded embrace and rolled free.
He felt, rather than heard, the rhythm of Mario’s breathing alter; then Mario, his hands firm and aware, tightened his grip firmly on Tommy’s shoulders and rolled him over. They lay face to face, just barely touching. The drowsy sense of comfort had been startled out of Tommy; he was wide awake now and rigid with embarrassment, an almost frantic awareness. Oh, Jeez . . . an’ I thought I was dreaming . . . what a hell of a time to be getting up hard . . . .
Mario’s cheek felt rough against his. He smelled of sleep and sweat. For a moment Tommy, deep in confused excitement, had thought Mario was awake, too, but now he was quite certain he was not. Disregarding Tommy’s nervous, careful attempts to free himself, Mario pulled him clos
e. In a sort of shaken wonder, Tommy let himself be folded into a close embrace; he thought fleetingly, through a taut, scared, erupting tremble. He’s asleep, he doesn’t realize . . . . Then, beyond thought, beyond control, he fell into a strange confusion of tumbling images: the sudden roughness of a hairy chest crushed to his own, bone-hard; a touch accidental like scalding; the unbearable random torture of Mario’s hand like a hot iron at the small of his back, still within seconds of the first touch, as he felt the unyielding bones of rib and hip and leg crush and refuse to give way in that painful embrace. He was still thinking, He’s asleep, he’s got to be asleep, he doesn’t realize or he wouldn’t as the hot-iron touch became an embrace, a brief and convulsive struggle, and a falling, empty dizziness. On an indrawn gasp, with a sudden savage twist of his head, Mario kissed him on the mouth; Tommy felt the thrust and convulsion and leap of breath in him, and then the slow fall of quiet. Dim and incredulous now, and a little light-headed, Tommy dimly knew—as Mario sighed and stirred, as if shifting to a deeper level of slumber, relaxing softly into heaviness, his arms still around Tommy’s waist, that he had not ever been awake at all. Jeez, how low can you get, Tom junior? Abruptly he shut his eyes and dropped into a bottomless pit of sleep.
He slept quietly and heavily this time, without stirring. When at last he roused, it was with Mario’s hand on his shoulder, the dark eyes bending over him, smiling.
“Wake up, stupid! Surprised? We got in so late, Papa Tony made me stay over. You were sleeping so soundly, I don’t think you even turned over when I came in.”
Tommy started to say sharply, “Are you nuts or something? We were talking, you dope!” and then, in some glint of Mario’s eyes, in some touch of memory, in the vague, relaxed warmth in his own body, he knew what Mario was trying to say to him without saying. So it was like that. He should have known, if he had bothered to think, that such a thing could not be carried into daylight and leave them able to face one another. Whatever it had been, drunkenness or sleepiness—What the hell, maybe he thought I was his girlfriend—it was something that must be swiftly repudiated.
“Yeah,” he said slowly, “what time did you get in, anyway? I was sleeping like a log.”
CHAPTER 10
One morning late in March, Tommy went down to the practice room to find Johnny there alone, dressed in street clothes but barefoot, fiddling with the springs on the trampoline frame.
“Playing hooky, Tom?”
“No, school’s closed.” Tommy tossed his shoes in the box. “Where’s Stella?”
“Upstairs with Lucia for a costume fitting—we’re taking off soon. The hayseed circuit starts early, and the Gardner-Kincaid team is what you might call broke.” He gave a final tug to the braces of the trampoline. “You any good on one of these?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t been on one since I was a little kid.”
“Nothing to it. Angelo set it up when we were kids—guess he wanted to have something Mark could do with the rest of us.”
“Mark’s your twin, isn’t he? None of you ever talk much about him. What’s he like?”
“He’s okay.” Johnny added slowly, “It isn’t so much that we don’t talk about him, but—oh, this is a hell of a thing to say, but I keep forgetting there is any such person. I never see him anymore. He has a heck of an affliction for a Santelli: He’s afraid of heights. Papa Tony could teach a deaf man to conduct the Philharmonic, but he couldn’t do a damn thing with Mark. The kid was willing enough, but any time he got six feet off the ground he’d turn green, drop off, and go away and lose his lunch. Didn’t Matt tell you?”
“He once told me he lives with your relatives up in San Francisco.”
“With my father’s relatives, yes. After my father died they wanted to adopt all four of us—there was even a kind of custody fight, a row about whether Lu was a fit mother, traveling all over the world the way she did. Fortunately Starr’s is the most respectable show in the world, and nobody could look twice at Papa Tony and doubt he could bring us all up by the straight and narrow. So Lu got to keep us—God knows why she bothered. But when we got older, Mark liked living in San Francisco, and after a while Lu started leaving him there every season. He’s graduating from Berkeley this year, unless the Army gets him.”
“Mario went there, too, for a while, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Johnny’s mouth shut like a trap, and Tommy knew that again he had trespassed on some family reticence. Then Johnny shrugged, leaning on the trampoline frame.
“Mark’s not a bad guy, but we don’t have a lot to say to each other anymore. It’s like he’s sort of a distant cousin or something instead of my brother. The only one of us he ever sees is Liss—Dave Renzo was a college pal of his, a fraternity brother or something. We all figured Liss would stay with the show, marry somebody with the circus. But she went to spend one summer with the Gardners, and—well, you know how Lu is. All the time we were with the show she watched Liss like a hawk—never one minute out of her sight, pigtails and pinafores and no lipstick and no dates, and if any man with the show said three words to Liss outside the ring, there was Lucia or Uncle Angelo standing over them. So when Liss went to stay with the Gardners and they treated her like any other girl twenty years old, I guess she got drunk on freedom or something. And the next thing you know, there she was, married to the guy. The Gardners, of course, thought it was simply marvelous—one more of their grandchildren out of show business and settled down with a nice young man doing something respectable.”
Johnny gave a short laugh and jumped up on the trampoline. “Heck, you don’t want to hear all this ancient history, do you?” He bounced once or twice, building momentum, then flipped over backward into a tucked-up somersault, landing on his feet. “Come on up and try, Tom.”
Tommy hesitated, for he was in street clothes; but then, so was Johnny, and anyhow, the trampoline wasn’t trapeze equipment. He jumped up beside him.
He miscalculated in his first attempt to somersault and struck Johnny in the chest; they fell in a heap together. Unlike Angelo or Mario, however, Johnny did not yell or laugh derisively at his clumsiness. Instead, he said encouragingly, “Take it easy, now. Try again. Here, let me show you—keep your knees bent just a little—” He flipped up neatly, then came unrolled, demonstrating how to take the weight. “Steady—steady—that does it.”
Once he had caught the knack of timing for two to work on a trampoline together, Tommy proved an adept pupil, and soon they were bouncing over one another like a pair of enthusiastic young frogs. Neither of them noticed the passing of time until Mario opened the door suddenly and said, “Good Lord, have you two been down here all this time?”
“Since about eleven.” Johnny rolled off the canvas to the floor, and Tommy followed. The hard floor seemed unsteady after the springy surface of the trampoline. “You ought to do some tumbling with him, Matt; he’s good. Nice timing.”
“I know. I want to take him to the ballet school someday and show the kids some stunts.”
“Well, you watch him in that crew of pansies,” Johnny warned good-naturedly.
Mario laughed. “I meant the little kids, brother John!”
Abruptly, all trace of joking gone from his tone, Johnny said, “Matt—listen, let me ask you something. How do you all stand it?”
“Stand what, Jock?”
“The way Papa Tony treats you all. And not just you. He treats Lu and Angelo just the same way he treats the kid here. And you, you’re his star flyer. Why don’t you ever tell him where to get off?”
“Because the old boy’s forgotten more about flying than I’ll ever know. And I want to get as much of it as I can. He isn’t getting any younger, you know.” Mario’s sober face cracked suddenly into a grin. “And much as I hate to mention it, fellas, you are in street clothes and caught in the act—literally as well as metaphorically, if you follow me, I’ll get the dusters.”
“Oh, no,” Tommy groaned.
“Look, down here on the trampoline—�
�� Johnny protested.
Mario’s loud laugh raised echoes in the high gallery overhead. “Objection overruled. I cite the famous case of Gardner versus Santelli. Remember Liss’s shorts, the pair with the buttons on the cuffs? Angelo told her they weren’t safe, and she told him all her tights were in the washing machine, and do you remember the judge’s final words on the case?”
Johnny grimaced. “Yeah. He said, ‘Well, kitten, you can go and put your shorts in the wash, too, when you finish up the floor.’ You know, Matt, I let Tommy in for this. I didn’t change, so he probably thought the trampoline was okay. Oh, hell, I guess the floor needs polishing anyhow—we’ve all been too law-abiding this year. Time was when it got a good polish every day or so. We must be growing up. Never thought a month would go by that I didn’t break some kind of rule and get in trouble.”
Tommy took the lightly oiled cloth and began polishing from his corner. Floor and cloth smelled faintly and pleasantly of cedar oil. Johnny worked in silence for a few minutes, then laughed.
“Funny. I swore I’d never do this again, that I was a big boy now and finished with all this crap. But—being here in the house—it has a funny effect on me. Funny peculiar. I sort of like doing it.” He rubbed the cloth in wide swipes over the shining wood. “Makes me feel like a kid again, with the old man pasting into us. He came down and watched us rehearse last night. You know how he is—can’t just watch anybody. Pretty soon he started in on Stel—”
The Catch Trap Page 16
