Tommy voted for the drive-in. The long day of sea and sun had put him out of the mood for the noise and racket of an amusement park.
They lingered at the drive-in over trays of fried chicken, and then there was a long drive back in the darkened car, up the coast; it was past ten when they crossed the city limits. As they moved through the twisting canyons, where great estates lay fenced behind gapped darknesses, the car’s motion was lulling. The radio was playing jazz, muted, throbbing, stirring some heartbeat intensity under the layers of drowsiness. Tommy felt full and sleepy, his forehead stiff with the beginnings of a bad sunburn. He closed his eyes and after a while stopped being aware of the turned corners. In the warmth and darkness he curled up, rocked in the motion, and drowsily realized that his head had fallen against Mario’s shoulder. He started to rouse and pull away, but in the very act sighed and slid back into the cozy darkness.
Without any sense of elapsed time, he realized that the car had stopped and that his head was lying across Mario’s lap. It was a faint movement that had roused him: Mario had leaned forward to switch off the radio. Still in a child’s incurious twilight, between sleep and waking, he knew that Mario kissed him softly on the temple. He held to the pliant drowsiness for another moment, until Mario moved away and straightened; then, feeling the dream and the darkness recede, Tommy stirred and sighed.
“What is it? Where are we?”
“We’re home, Tom. Wake up.”
He had nevertheless the impression, as the last scrap of dream fell softly back into darkness, that they had been sitting in the darkened car for some time, and that only the quiet attempt to switch off the radio had brought the interlude to an end. He seemed to remember Mario murmuring something to him like, “Oh, hell, not here!” but already he was beginning to wonder if he had dreamed it all.
“What’d I do, fall asleep?”
“Yeah, I guess you were pretty tired.” There was a new note in Mario’s voice, one Tommy had never heard before. He reached over and opened the car door. “It’s late. You’d better go in the house. Maybe I’ll stay and sleep over.”
“Well, now Johnny’s gone, there’s an extra bed,” Tommy said.
Mario hesitated. “Look, there’s a light on downstairs. Somebody’s still up. Guess not—if I go in now I’d just catch the devil for keeping you out so late. You go on in.”
Because he sensed that in some fashion Mario was troubled, Tommy began, child-fashion, clowning. “Aw . . . not coming in to tuck me in and rock me to sleep?”
Mario laughed nervously. “Yeah, I’ll rock you, all right—if I can find a big enough rock.” He aimed a blow with an imaginary missile. Then his hand closed gently around Tommy’s wrist. “I’d have taken you out to my place to spend the night if I’d thought of it. Only now, if Lucia’s waiting up and heard the car, it would just mean a fuss. Some other time, okay? ’Night.”
Tommy knew he could not argue or insist. He wasn’t sure just why. “Thanks, Mario. I had a swell time.”
“Any time.” Mario slammed the car door behind him and drove away. Tommy walked up to the house, wondering what was the matter—why, after such a long day of new experiences and companionship, he felt suddenly so heavy and lost, so filled with weary sadness and melancholy. He blinked in the dim light of the hallway; Lucia called out from the big room, “Matt? Tommy, is that you?”
“Just me.” He came to the door. Lucia and Grandmother di Santalis were sitting before the fire. The radio was playing softly, and he wondered if it was the same station.
“Matt isn’t with you?”
“No, ma’am. He had a long drive back to his place, I guess.”
“I wish he’d stay here,” Lucia fretted. “It’s so senseless—there’s plenty of room here! Do you— Good heavens, Tommy, you’ve got a terrible sunburn!” She got up from her chair, and for the first time since he had been in the house, Tommy noticed that not all her movements were graceful, that there was hesitation and awkwardness that looked like pain. “Come and let me get something for it.”
“Oh, it’s all right. Please don’t bother—”
“Just come along. Don’t argue.” She led him into the kitchen, where she smeared his face with something that felt cool and stinging. “You’ll be peeling for two weeks. Is it on your shoulders, too?” She peeled his shirt down. “Well, I should think so! I hope Matt had sense enough to put something on his.”
“I guess he was pretty tanned already.” Across Tommy’s memory flashed a picture of Mario’s naked shoulders, burned to gypsy brown, sea-water standing on them like jewels.
Lucia put the cap back on the bottle. “Don’t put your shirt back on over that stuff. I’ve got three sons all older than you are, Tommy—I’ve seen naked kids before this. If I were you I’d sleep without your pajama top tonight. And take this upstairs if you need it for your legs or your rear end. Want something to eat? Sandwich? Milk?”
“Milk, I guess, but we had supper.”
“Filling yourselves up with junk, I suppose,” Lucia scolded, handing him a glass. “Honestly. Matt ought to know better. Bringing you home with a sunburn like that. No wonder he didn’t want to come in and face me.”
Grandmother came through the kitchen door with her uncertain steps and stood watching Tommy drink his milk. “And why didn’t Matt come? It is so unfair—he and Elissa are always together, and poor little Johnny, he is like an orphan since you sent Marco away. It is always wrong to separate twins—che il Dio ha fatto due . . . and Elissa is too much with the boys, a tomboy—”
“Nonna dear,” said Lucia gently, “it isn’t Johnny, and Liss is grown up now with a baby of her own.”
“Elissa . . .” The old lady frowned and said something in Italian that this time Tommy could not follow. Evidently she was wandering in time again, for he caught the words “sempre” and “cosi, come tu stressa, Lucia!”
Lucia sighed impatiently. “Yes, Nonna darling, you told me,” she said softly, “but Elissa is very happy now with her husband and her baby, and so is Lucia. Please, cara, go to bed.”
Lucia laid a hand on the gnarled old wrist, but the old lady twisted away. “No, Carla,” she said with asperity, “I tell you—non m’inganni—Lucia is too much like me for that. I tell you, that child, she is miserable, miserable to stay here with me and look after the baby when her heart is out there with the others. In your day and mine it was different—the girls were back at work within a month after their babies, and worked as long as they could before the next one. But this Matthew, this husband of hers, he is an americano, he does not understand; the minute he knows, he is all afraid for her, and again he will insist—”
“Stop it!” Lucia shouted. “Stop it, shut up—shut up, and let me alone! Damn you, damn you, old witch!”
Tommy gasped. He had never heard anyone contradict the old lady before, never heard Lucia’s gentle voice raised. She whirled on Tommy in sudden rage. “Get out,” she whispered, between her teeth. “Get out of here! Go upstairs! Let me handle this!” Then, with an effort, she unclenched her fists and drew a long breath. She wet her lips with her tongue.
“I’m sorry. I’m tired,” she said, “and sometimes it gets on my nerves.” And, though her smile was kind, he saw the lines of pain biting again at her face. As he turned to go, he saw her take the demented old woman’s arm and lead her gently from the room, and he wondered at her control. He went slowly up the stairs through the sleeping house, and as he closed his door behind him, trying to take out the day and look at it, he found he could only remember a dying line of fire at the edge of the sea, and a fading dream, and the hopeless melancholy in Mario’s tired eyes.
CHAPTER 11
As March passed, the Santelli house seemed empty and quiet. The routine of daily work had slackened; their act was settled for the season and the practice sessions became perfunctory run-throughs.
Tommy found himself oddly restless. He had mastered all the simple tricks he would be allowed to do this year; the others were
resting, laying off, enjoying the spring weather. In a few weeks, he knew, they would leave for winter quarters, and spend about a week there, in the last-minute pandemonium of arranging the acts and dress rehearsals and settling upon their other duties with the show, before Lambeth went on the road.
More and more he felt at loose ends. At school he was a loner, an outsider, a shadow among the other students. He recited in class, turned in his homework, even now and then stopped to drink a Coke or glance through magazines at a newsstand with his classmates, but he felt he was not really there at all. Sometimes he found himself remembering the old question of his early childhood: In the winter, do they turn off the audience, too? He knew they did, because he was among them, and felt that they weren’t there at all. And, in a curious way, he wasn’t, either. Not out there, among them. The only place he existed, now, seemed to be within the confines of the practice room. Only there did he know what he was doing or where he was, and he worked and practiced until even Mario, the perfectionist, told him sharply that enough was enough. As the days ticked away on the spring calendar, his inner tension grew. He missed Johnny’s loud voice and unsquelchable cheerfulness, he missed Stella, he even missed Liss and the noisy, tiresome baby. When he felt he would burst with it, out of sheer nervous inability to stay still he would go down and try to dispel his stored-up energy on the trampoline, repeating the old gym exercises with persistent violence.
One day Lucia called him into her sewing room and measured him, showing him the sketches for his costume. Tommy had worn fanciful costumes all his life and had always enjoyed assembling and caring for them, but the costume for his first season as a flyer was somehow special.
Traditionally the star flyer in the Santellis’ act wore gold from head to foot; for many years this had been Papa Tony. Last year the decision had been made to put Mario at the center and dress him in gold: gold tights, close-fitting fleshings of cloth-of-gold, gold sequins. But after watching Mario and Tommy run through their duo routines, Lucia had insisted they should be costumed identically. The debate had raged on for nearly a week, until Angelo had startled Papa Tony, gravely offended Lucia, and amazed them all by raising his head at the dinner table one night and saying wearily, “This whole damn thing is beginning to bore the devil out of me. What difference does it make, anyhow? Why not forget the gold and pick some other color? I for one am getting good and sick of all this green-and-gold business, like a flock of goddamn parrots!”
Barbara snickered and hastily hid her face in her napkin.
“The Santellis have always worn gold and green,” Lucia protested.
“Dear Lulu, I know that,” Angelo said, putting down his fork. “I’ve been in the act for a lot of years, and I’m neither blind nor—unfortunately—deaf. I have been sitting here and listening to you hash it over for a week now, and—”
“If you don’t like my costumes, Angelo—”
“Lu, damn it—”
“And don’t swear at me!”
“Lucia, Lucia,” Angelo said, with a sigh that seemed to be ripped up from his very depths, “I never said that. But this whole debate is damned—excuse me—this whole debate is nonsense, and you know it as well as I do. If we changed our colors every year, there might be a grain of sense in it. But we never do. So why not simply make up the costumes any way it suits you, without all this fuss? Nobody’s arguing! Or, better yet, order the things ready-made and give yourself a rest!”
“You don’t want to wear green and gold, Angelo?”
“Oh, damn it, Lu, I’m trying to tell you, I don’t give a damn—I don’t care what I wear, as long as the damn thing fits me. What I don’t want is to listen to this everlasting, this endless, this goddamned fuss!”
Lucia flushed. “I admit I take a certain pleasure in dressing the act and in seeing the Santellis wear what they have always worn. Is that a crime?”
Angelo leaned his head against his clenched fists. “Forget I brought it up.”
“No, now you have started—I don’t wish to be tyrannical. Let us listen for a change to your artistic preferences.”
“Lu, lay off,” Mario muttered. “Angelo didn’t mean—”
Angelo shoved his chair back. “I’ve said my piece. We’ll wind up wearing green and gold like always. Matthew couldn’t change it, Cleo couldn’t change it, and God help us, I can’t change it either, and I don’t know why I bothered. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. A-a-a-men!”
“Basta!” Papa Tony said sharply. “There is no need to be blasphemous! Such talk I will not have in this house! Respect to your sister, Angelo, or leave the table. As for wardrobe, it is her concern, and none of yours!”
“That’s what I was trying to tell—”
“Enough, I said,” Papa Tony cut him off.
Angelo stood up, muttering, “No dessert, thanks, Barbie. Excuse me, everybody,” and stormed out. Tommy, his head bent over his plate of pudding, heard Angelo’s steps recede and the slam of the front door.
Lucia said, and the hurt in her voice was obvious, “Papa—am I so unreasonable? This is all I can do for the act—am I such a tyrant?” He reassured her in Italian, and Tommy sat eating his pudding and frowning into his plate. How untypical of Angelo! They all took him for granted, a steady anchor among the volatile Santellis, hard-working, practical, dependable. What had gotten into him?
Once, Johnny had called Angelo, disparagingly, “a first-rate second-rate performer.” And although he had been shouted down at once, Tommy secretly felt that Johnny had put his finger exactly on what Angelo was. He was competent and painstaking, he looked good in tights, and his easygoing good nature made him pleasant to work with. His sense of timing amounted to genius—Tommy was still too young to value that at its full weight—and his great strength gave them all a sense of security when they leaped to his strong hands. But he had none of Papa Tony’s flair, none of Mario’s style or driving ambition, not even a trace of the family flamboyance. Tommy realized, with a small sense of shame, that Angelo seemed dull to him. He was such a nice guy, Tommy hated to admit it to himself, but he was dull. And even more secretly, Tommy said to himself, Why, I’m more like the Santellis than he is.
~o0o~
On the day before their departure, Tommy went down into the change room with Mario, to clear the lockers of forgotten oddments, while Papa Tony and Angelo were helping Lucia transfer their possessions to the house trailer in which the Santellis lived on the road.
“Funny,” Mario said, looking across the deserted ballroom while he fiddled with the straps on a leather wrist guard, “now nobody will come down here till next winter. Oh, Barbie may come down to work on the barre, or Clay may bring some of his pals down to play on the trampoline, but—we sort of pack this place up and take it along with us.”
Tommy smiled shyly. He knew precisely what Mario meant. He had felt on his first day that here—in this bare, cold room—was the heart of the house, and Mario had said it, too, showing him old Mario di Santalis’s motto on the wall. But now Tommy knew it was not on the wall at all. It had been built into him. It lodged in all of them. He started to say it, and then stopped and swallowed hard. He didn’t have the words, and they would have sounded corny anyhow. Mario, standing there lazy and smiling in his stocking feet, gave him a warm grin that started behind his eyes and spread all over his face.
At that moment, Tommy could have burst open with the emotion welling up inside him. He was one of them. He belonged. His whole life seemed to have been poured into a passion fiercer, purer, and more intense than anything he had ever known or would ever know again. He looked up at Mario again and grinned, bursting with happiness. He wished he could think of something to say. Just something to let Mario know how he felt. But there wasn’t any way you could say things like that.
“We going to put on a show for the family, the way Johnny and Stel did?” he asked instead.
“Sure. We always do.”
“Where did Joe go?”
<
br /> “Down to the ration board to get coupons for the gas to drive to winter quarters. We’ve been saving up coupons all winter, but if we can get any extra we’re going to need them. You know Papa Tony—he wouldn’t buy on the black market. Johnny got some that way and I thought Papa was going to have kittens.” There was a considerable silence.
“Really,” Mario said at last, “Uncle Angelo shouldn’t have jumped on Lu that way about the costumes. You know, Johnny and I have had our rows, but I can forgive old Jock damn near anything just for what he did for Lucia this year. Asking her, instead of Papa or Angelo, to work on his act with him. Johnny acts like an awful jerk sometimes, but he can be a heck of a nice guy.”
Tommy said, “I got an idea that the whole thing practically bored Lucia to pieces.”
“So she fooled you, too?” Mario smiled tenderly. “Yeah, she puts on one hell of a good act, doesn’t she? That’s why it was such a damn nice thing, what Jock did. He got out of the family, and he acts like it doesn’t mean a thing to him, but he was the only one of us who had the decency to do that for Lucia. She was the greatest one there was, you know. And she remembers, even if she acts like she doesn’t have a thought in her head beyond the spaghetti getting cold.”
He leaned against the wall. “I remember the day it really hit her, that she wouldn’t be flying again. She was in and out of the hospital, with casts and operations and all that stuff, but eventually she made a wonderful recovery—the doctors had thought she’d be lame for life. But she did get better and she came out and rehearsed with us for a couple of weeks, acting like she was all ready to go in the show again. We could all tell that her shoulders were giving her hell, but she never said anything about it to anybody. She’d go upstairs and cry sometimes, but she never said anything. And then one day she came down after rehearsal and she said, ‘It’s no good, is it, Papa?’ And Papa Tony just shook his head a little and said, ‘It’s your neck, cara.’ But she said no, that was the hell of it—it was everybody’s neck. She said, ‘And this year all three of the kids are in the act, too.’ And then—so help me God, Tom, it’s the only time in my life I ever heard my mother swear—she said, ‘Goddamn it, I might as well be on crutches! Why the hell did I go through it all?’ Then she walked out of the practice room and went upstairs and she never set foot in the practice room for the next three years. It’s only the last couple of years she’s been coming down again to watch the kids. She didn’t gripe about it—she never said anything at all. I think it would have been easier on us all if she had.” He sighed and stood up. “I guess we’ve got everything. Bring along those towels for the washing machine, will you?”
The Catch Trap Page 19
