“I guess she’s right,” Tommy said, thinking of Stella.
“What I’d really like to do is dance in the movies, only I guess there are ten thousand chorus girls who all have the same idea,” Little Ann confided. “I guess I’m better off where I am.” Ann finished the cake and threw the crumbs to a dog sniffing hungrily around the lot. “Let’s go in and clean up all this stuff for Aunt Beth before we dress for the night show— Hey, what’s going on over there?”
A little knot of men were gathered near the door of the Santelli trailer; the radio inside was turned up as high as it would go. Ann and Tommy ran to the trailer, and Ann asked Angelo, at the edge of the crowd, “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Ssshh,” he said imperatively. “I think the war’s over or something—”
“Not yet,” Tom Zane said, stepping down from the inside of the trailer, “only they just dropped some kind of super bomb on the Japs. An atom bomb or something, big enough to destroy a whole island or something like that.”
“Serves them right,” said one of the men in the crowd.
“Don’t say that,” one of the women implored. “My son’s in a Japanese prison camp! If they bomb him—”
Papa Tony came out of the trailer, shaking his head. He said, “It is a terrible thing. But listen, there is the signal for the show. I have to turn off the radio now and go do the night show, war or no war.” He strode off toward the rigging truck; behind him the others lingered. Mario came over to Little Ann and Tommy.
“Happy birthday, Ann. Nice party?”
“Very nice. Aunt Beth made a lovely cake, and I got some nice presents. How did you know I liked that English lavender soap?”
“Asked Margot, of course, how do you think?” But he looked distant and grim.
“What’s the matter, Mario?”
“Too bad this had to happen on your birthday—the bomb and everything. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those dates everybody remembers, like Armistice Day.”
“Just for some old bomb on the Japs?” Little Ann said. “Come on, now!”
“This isn’t just ‘some old bomb,’ Little Ann. They dropped one bomb on one Japanese city, Nagasaki, and the whole city went up in flames. Just one bomb, and they think it killed almost a million people. That’s more people than have seen Lambeth Circus since the show went on the road fifteen years ago. And they dropped one more bomb on another city—Hiroshima, I guess—and about a million more people died. Just two bombs. Can you imagine it?”
“Well, they bombed us. At Pearl Harbor.”
“Yes, but those two bombs killed more people than all our armies put together. Men and women and babies and old people, all together. There’s nothing left of those cities. Nothing, just a burned hole in the ground.”
As Mario and Tommy went toward the rigging truck, Tommy asked, “You think this is the end of the war?”
“Got to be,” he said, and fell silent again. Just as they stepped into the rigging truck, he added, “Don’t talk to Papa Tony about the war, huh? His attitude is sort of ‘Wars come and wars go, but we’ve got a show to do.’ Okay?”
“Sure,” Tommy said before he climbed up and started getting into his tights.
Later, in the backyard, Jim Lambeth came up to them.
“Heard the news? About the bomb?”
“Who could help it?” Mario replied.
“What do you think?”
But Mario was not to be drawn. He said only, “Well, if the war ends right away, maybe we can get some new truck tires this season.”
“Yeah,” Lambeth said, “and somebody to work as rig men and roughnecks instead of teenage boys and old drunks!”
Mario watched him go, his face cold and set. Tommy, still hearing in his mind what Mario had said about the bombing, suddenly felt the whole reality of the war crash in on him. Before it had been something distant, something that meant ration books and no candy in the stores and shortages of gasoline for the car. “Mario,” he said, after a minute, “did it really kill two million people?”
His face turned away, Mario replied, “I don’t reckon anybody went out and took a census. Come on, we’ve got a show to do.”
That night—and a few days later when Japan surrendered—Tommy went on thinking, It ought to mean something more than this. But in general, behind the scenes at Lambeth, most of the show people reacted in much the same manner as Lambeth himself: Sons, brothers, and fathers would be coming home, new tires were once again a remote possibility, and the concessionaires on the midway talked with hope about the end of sugar rationing. Mario did not speak about it again, and Tommy wished he would; he felt he would like to talk about it. But Mario had withdrawn again. He and Tommy saw each other twice a day during the show and worked side by side on riggings, but Mario might as well have been at the other end of the world.
One morning when they went out for rehearsal, Sue-Lynn Farris, doing limbering-up exercises with Margot near the net, broke away and ran to Mario, looking up at him excitedly and talking fast. Tommy could not hear what she said, but. Mario smiled good-naturedly and shook his head. “Come on, now, Matt, don’t be mean!”
“Sue-Lynn, you said yourself you haven’t been on a flying rig in six months. Can’t be done, is all.” He gave her a friendly pat on the arm and went on past.
As they were climbing the ladder, Tommy asked, “What’s she want?”
““What do you think? Oh, damn,” Mario said, glancing back. Sue-Lynn was climbing after them. She stepped off on the platform with a mischievous grin.
“Told you I wasn’t going to take no for an answer!”
“Look, Sue-Lynn, you want me to get in trouble with Papa Tony?”
The girl only laughed. “Come on, sourpuss. I learned to swing when I was about ten years old. Let me try just once.”
“Guess it’s the only way to get rid of her,” Mario said, resigned. “Give her the bar, Tommy.”
Sullenly Tommy pulled it in by the hook and passed it to her. It was the first time he had ever seen Mario give way when it was a matter of professional competence.
“She’s got a lot of nerve,” he grumbled, but Mario was watching her swing out, his eyes narrowed, as she braced the bar behind her waist.
“Good muscles. Out of practice, of course, and not very good style.”
Sue-Lynn dropped off again, releasing the trapeze into Tommy’s hand. “Told you,” she said, laughing.
“Yeah, not bad. Uh-oh, here comes trouble!” Mario muttered as Papa Tony came to the foot of the ladder, obviously breathing fire. He shouted to Mario in Italian, took a breath and shouted again. “Come down from there! All of you!”
Mario gestured elaborately to Sue-Lynn. “Ladies first.”
It was five solid minutes before Papa Tony paused for breath in his torrent of abuse. One of the solidest Santelli rules was that no outsider ever went on the flying rig without his personal permission.
Sue-Lynn said meekly, “It was my fault, Mister Santelli. Matt told me I couldn’t come up and I just went up anyway. Really, I do know what I’m doing up there. My father is Pete Challoner—”
“I have never heard of him,” Papa Tony said icily. “Now, if you will excuse us, young woman, my troupe and I are in rehearsal.”
Angelo had come up in time to hear the last of it. He poked Mario in the ribs. “Come on, Matt, you know better than to take your girl up on the rigging, not without asking Papa first!”
“I didn’t take her up,” Mario protested.
Papa Tony, gazing thoughtfully at Sue-Lynn, who was walking away, said slowly, “So, Matty, I suppose it is only fair. After all, I allowed Angelo to teach Teresa to fly. Only another time, ask me first. Not after.”
Another morning, when no rehearsal was held, Mario, in jeans and the high-necked black sweater he wore to the ballet school, with Sue-Lynn in a flaring skirt, stopped by the Zane trailer.
“Didn’t you say something one time about going skating with Little Ann? Sue-Lynn sa
ys there’s a big rink in this town, and she’s a whiz on skates. I’m not so bad myself. Go get Little Ann, why don’t you, and we’ll all go together.”
Before the warm, expectant grin on Mario’s face, Tommy sensed, without really knowing, why Mario had arranged the foursome; he felt simultaneously warmed and exasperated. In the car, the two girls sat together in the back seat. Later he stood with Mario at the edge of the rink watching them bend over to fasten their skates, fair curls and dark braid side by side. Now that he knew Sue-Lynn better, she did not look so much like Liss, unless, as now, he could see only the dark braid and the graceful bend of her waist from behind. Little Ann had told him she had been married and divorced. Beside her Little Ann looked almost unformed, her bleached hair frizzy and her dimpled, snub-nosed face round and babyish; Sue-Lynn called her “Sugar” and “Baby.” The gap between Sue-Lynn and Little Ann seemed to widen the gap between himself and Mario, until they were not a foursome but two widely separated couples with little in common, whirring noisily around the floor. Little Ann was a fair skater; they spun and crossed easily, taking the fast corners at a glide, bending and swooping like a pair of swallows. Tommy watched Mario holding Sue-Lynn’s crossed hands, leaning toward her as they cut sharply in and out of the other skaters, whirling into the center in a fancy figure.
“Show-off,” Little Ann said. “She does the same thing on the web. Front and center all the time.”
Mario, Tommy thought, wasn’t doing anything to stop her. Little Ann glanced at him again and said, “Mario’s good on skates, isn’t he? Is he a dancer?”
“Yeah, I guess so. He teaches in a dance school, winters.”
“I thought so. The way he holds his hands. I sometimes go to a ballet school in the winter. It’s a good way to keep in training.”
The four came face to face at a corner, and Mario held out his hands to Little Ann. “Change partners?” Stunned and blushing, Little Ann took them and moved off, looking almost clumsy, and very young, beside Mario’s gracefulness. Tommy, feeling equally awkward and far too young, found himself left alone with a polite, bored Sue-Lynn, wheeling round and round in silent circles. He came home raw-edged, spoiling for a fight, cold inside and out as Mario went off with Sue-Lynn. Inside their trailer his mother was sitting on a kitchen chair mending the toes of his tights. Tommy felt all his bottled tension explode.
“Mother, for gosh sakes, I can look after my own costumes—do you mind?” He almost grabbed them off her lap, but her hurt face, open-mouthed with amazement, stopped him.
“Why, Tom Junior,” she said, blinking and startled, and he realized that he had really upset her.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I guess I sort of got used to doing my own work. You’ve got enough to do without looking after a big lug like me.”
“Now, Tommy, what do you think mothers are for?”
“Yeah, but I’m grown up now,” he said. “I learned how to look after my own stuff last winter.”
“What’s the matter with you? Didn’t you have fun skating? That’s a nice girl of Mario’s. They’re going to make a lovely couple. I heard she’s a flyer, too, one of the Challoners. Your father and I worked one summer with the Challoners; it was the year before you were born, before we came to Lambeth. Sue-Lynn was only a kid then.”
She held up the tights for his approval. “There, that ought to do. Until you and Little Ann get married and you have her to look after your mending and patching, you’ll just have to make do with your mother.”
“Holy Moses,” Tommy yelled at her, turning red, “I go out skating with a girl and you’ve already got me married to her! Lay off, willya?”
She smiled, teasing. “Well, you certainly need somebody to look after your clothes. Everything you own is a mess. Anyone can see you’ve been doing your own mending.” Tommy, who had learned to stitch, mend, and repair very neatly during his work with Ma Leighty on costumes, was shocked and dismayed by this remark, not old enough to perceive the feminine pride behind it.
“What’s got into you, Mother? You had me working with Ma Leighty on costumes almost before I could read.”
“That’s different,” Beth Zane said obscurely. “I just don’t like to see a man sewing, that’s all. It doesn’t seem manly somehow.”
“That’s a lot of bullshit!” Tommy exploded at her, and she sat staring at him, dull angry red spreading in her cheeks.
“How dare you talk to me that way? Is that what you learn from the Santellis?”
Tommy gulped, swallowed hard. He could imagine what Papa Tony would have said if anyone had spoken that way to Lucia. He bent his head and muttered, “I’m sorry, Mom,” biting his lip against the need to pour out all his rage and resentment. Dimly he realized that it was not his mother he was angry at anyhow.
He said, “I wish to heck I could live alone!” and banged out of the trailer.
CHAPTER 18
It would almost have been better, Tommy thought, if Mario had been deliberately avoiding him. Then I’d know. But they spent as much time as ever in one another’s company—continually, casually—and that somehow made it worse. Tommy was troubled by vague anxieties, disturbing fantasies, the shame which Mario had been at pains to suppress. He knew the tension was building to explosion and was numbly carried along, not knowing how to check it.
One morning in September, Margot called a rehearsal of the web act, and Tommy turned out with the other men who held the ropes for them. Afterward, he and Little Ann walked back together to her trailer for a cup of coffee.
“Sugar?’
“No, thanks, I got out of the habit during rationing. But I’d like some milk if there is any.”
“Just evaporated.”
“Ugh. I’ll drink it black.”
“I like it.” Little Ann tilted the pierced metal can over her cup. “It tastes like cream.”
“It tastes like nothing to me,” Tommy said. “What were you and Christa giggling about?”
“Promise not to tell?”
“That stuff’s for girls. Who’d I tell? And why?”
Little Ann glanced around cautiously to make sure no one was within earshot. She was wearing a checked pink gingham playsuit, and her hair was pinned up inside a kerchief. One or two small snail-rolled curls stuck out, crisscrossed with bobby pins. He wondered why girls did that with their hair. Lately all he ever saw of Little Ann’s hair was a couple of pin curls, except during the show.
“My mother would have conniptions if she knew I heard them talking this way. You know there are some people say Mario’s a pansy—you know what that is, don’t you?”
Tommy felt the familiar hard knot clamp tight under his breastbone. “Sure. What about it?”
“Well. Sue-Lynn Farris said she knew better than that, and Christa asked how did she know, and—well, Sue-Lynn told her. Just told her straight out.” Little Ann was pink, and she giggled uneasily. “Honest, I thought I’d sink right through the floor! I never heard a girl use words like that. Boys, sometimes, but not in front of women. I thought a nice girl would die before she’d say something like that straight out in front of people.”
The clamping sickness under his breastbone had turned into a stunned cold, but the control he had learned did not desert him. “Heck, I could have told your dirty-minded little pals that. Mario’s no more a pansy than I am.”
“An awful lot of people have said it.”
“If people don’t have something to talk about, they’ll make something up,” Tommy said coldly.
“You think Mario and Sue-Lynn will get married? She’d fit right into the Flying Santellis, too, wouldn’t she? Dark, like she is, anybody’d think she’s one of them, don’t you think? And they make an awfully handsome couple.”
“I get so sick of girls yammering,” Tommy blurted out. “It’s all you ever think of—who’s in love with who and who’s going to get married to who—you make me sick!” He got up and stalked out.
Offended, Little Ann called after him, “Well, you asked me,”
but he paid no attention.
Dressing for the matinee, Tommy had room for only one thought through the sick, cold knot under his breastbone.
Keep it off the platform. Whatever happens. This is work. However we fight about other things, don’t let it affect that.
Mario was late. Angelo was smoothing his hair, and the place was full of the clove-laden scent of hair lotion. Papa Tony was playing solitaire on a checkerboard balanced on his lap, his head a little to one side, listening to the band, keeping track of the pace of the show. They were “all ready when Mario came in and started to get out of his clothes.
Papa Tony said icily, “Buona sera, Signor Mario. You are favoring us with your presence at the matinee?”
“I’ve got plenty of time,” Mario said cheerfully, sliding into his tights. Tommy was sitting on a folding chair, filing a rough place from one of his nails; he clenched his fists, feeling the end of the nail file bite painfully into his palm. He could see, out of the corner of his eyes, the slender perfect body. It made him physically sick to think of Sue-Lynn slobbering over Mario.
“You’re quiet today, Lucky,” Mario said, holding out his leather wrist guard. “Here, lace this up for me, okay?”
“Sure.” Tommy found he could control his voice perfectly well. While he threaded the straps he asked, “Going for the triple today?”
“Guess so.” Mario tested the tension of the wrist straps. “Thanks.” He turned, fidgeted with the hem of his cape. “You forgot to brush this one, Tommy. What’s that on the edge, horse manure?” He wrinkled a fastidious nose.
“You dragged it on the edge of the ring when you came out. You know as well as I do where the horses step when they go past there.”
“Well, it’s your job to clean the damn thing!”
“You go dragging it in horse shit, you can clean it yourself,” Tommy flared. “I’m no ring boy to clean up shit after you!”
“Basta, you two!” Angelo turned around, his face taut. “You can’t go in the ring like that. Here!” He flung the brush to Tommy. “Whatever it is, get it off!”
The Catch Trap Page 32
