Mario whistled. “Bart playing the great lover? That ought to be something to watch!”
“Hell, the man’s an actor, whatever you say about him. But you knew Reeder a hell of a lot better than I ever did.”
“Not all that well,” Mario said defensively. “He hung around the studio a lot, that’s all. Not much of a dancer, but he got to be a damn fine acrobat.”
Keno whistled suggestively. “I can imagine. Bet he was a cutie in tights!”
“You’d better believe it,” agreed Mario, laughing.
“You ought to know.”
Mario laughed again, looking away. Then, looking straight back at Keno, he said, “Look, for your information, Bart hung around a lot with me because I was presentable. I didn’t swish all over the place, and he could be seen with me without giving himself away in straight places. Christamighty, Eddie, you aren’t jealous of me and Bart, are you?”
“Should I be?” Keno asked, and with a sudden flare of jealousy Tommy recognized the name. Bart Reeder. He had seen him in cowboy movies and adventure movies, playing villains and sidekicks. Well, he supposed that in this part of the world, being in the movies was nothing special.
Eddie sighed. “Oh, well, we can always say we knew him when.”
“How’d you hear about it, anyhow?” Mario asked.
“Dropped in at the Circle Square last night—it’s all over the place,” Eddie said. “Bart was there celebrating. Asked about you.”
Mario shook his head. “You can have my share of Bart Reeder and welcome. I don’t go for the rough stuff, and he had some pretty fancy ideas that turned me off.”
“Give me a hint,” Keno said.
Mario shook his head. “Not in front of the kid. But knowing you, I can tell you right now you wouldn’t go for it.”
“Yeah,” Keno said, laughing strangely, “you do know what I like, don’t you?” Abruptly he jumped up off the bed, exclaiming with a sweeping motion, “Oh, my dears, I have an afternoon class I just can’t cut again! Be seeing you, Tommy.” He grabbed up his sweater, and ran. “Have fun, kids—think of old Uncle Eddie tonight,” he called back as the door slammed, and Mario met Tommy’s curious look with a shrug.
“Queer sort of character. I mean, peculiar.”
“If that was a question,” Mario said, “‘queer’ will do.”
“He acts so—” Tommy gave up, not able to find a word, and Mario supplied it.
“He swishes. Yes, he does. It’s an act, you know. No reason he couldn’t act as—as masculine—as I do. He’s just braver, and—maybe—a little more honest.”
“Yeah, but how’d you like it if I went around actin’ like that?”
“I’d probably break your neck. If Angelo didn’t break it first. Like him?”
“I guess so. Only he acts like he owns you.”
“And suppose he does?” Mario gave him a hard, level stare.
Tommy started to flare up; then his anger muted into stoical dignity. “That wasn’t necessary. If you only wanted to bring me out here to show me your new boyfriend—”
“Hell, no. Oh, Keno owned me—or sort of borrowed me—for a while, a couple, three years ago. It never did amount to much. He was just somebody I could talk to, somebody I didn’t have to hide from or tell lies to. Keno’s mostly talk, anyhow, and you know me.”
“Yeah. An’ sometimes you make me wish I didn’t.”
Mario went to the door and bolted it. Then he came back and held out his arms to Tommy. Shaking, Tommy went into them. Mario pulled up his head and kissed him and muttered against his mouth, “Say that again, Lucky. Say that again.”
And once again, out of the winter of despair and loneliness, Tommy felt that curious inner security boiling up and filling him, flowing into his emptiness, filling him from head to foot, the solid rock on which his life was built now. With Mario, he felt like himself again.
“Miss me?” he finally got confidence to ask.
“Hell, no, I’ve had the whole damn ballet corps in and out of here, haven’t even had time to change the sheets— What the hell do you think, kid? Why do you think I didn’t dare write you, not even a Christmas card?” Mario kissed him again, so hard it hurt. But he was smiling now, the tense, screwed-up tautness around his mouth relaxed. He ran his fingers over Tommy’s chin. “Well, what do you know about that! I bet you’ve started shaving. I feel better. Now I’m not corrupting a beardless youth; you know what the Greeks had to say about that.”
Tommy said, his head still on Mario’s shoulder, “All my life I’ve heard people say the Greeks had a word for something or other, but I never knew what it was they had a word for.”
Mario chuckled. “Believe it or not, this was what they had a word for, and they were about the only ones who ever did have a word for it that you could repeat in polite society. They were expected to have boyfriends, and to love them—it was real respectable, everybody did it.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not. I’ll show you in a book sometime. They wrote love poems to their boyfriends and everything, and nobody minded. People expected it.” He got up and rummaged briefly in the bookcase, shrugged, leaned back, and quoted, smiling:
“‘Love and friendship are found in their purest form between men. In Sparta every boy of good character had a mature lover who was a teacher to him and a model of manhood. The feeling was that this would serve as an inspiration to virtue and bravery in every young man, so that he would wish to show courage and bravery before his lover. Both lover and youth would rather die than act in any dishonorable manner in one another’s sight.’” He smiled at Tommy and said, “Aristotle. Maybe you heard about him in history class in school, but I bet they didn’t teach you that.”
Tommy shook his head. Something swelled in him that was almost pain. He had always known this, somewhere deep inside himself, that Mario brought out the best in him, inspired him to strength and courage, forced him to do just a little better than his best. He said in a whisper, “That’s right. That’s so right, Mario.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it? Only that’s not here and now. Tom, would you like a drink? It’s off season, so it won’t matter. It’s just kind of a symbol thing; I’d like to—to have a drink with you.”
Tommy felt the familiar melting pliancy spreading inside him. “Sure, anything you say.”
Mario went to the corner shelf and took down a bottle. “Just red wine. Like Lu has for dinner. I never touch anything else. The only time I ever drank hard liquor, I wound up in jail. I’ll tell you all about that someday.” He took a couple of clean small glasses off the shelf and ceremoniously poured a little wine in each. He handed one to Tommy and they stood looking at each other for a moment.
“Well,” Mario said at last, almost in a whisper, “have we got a toast? To us? To a good season? To what the Greeks had a word for?” He was kidding it, to hide emotion, but it was the old, gentle, familiar look in his eyes, and Tommy felt as if he were being, though gently, turned inside out.
He grinned and said, trying to break it, “I’ll give you a toast, okay? How about, ‘Keep it off the platform’?”
They drank, laughing at each other. Mario took Tommy’s glass and put an arm around him.
“You know, I can’t figure people out. Angelo, especially. Johnny and Stel get in trouble, and Stel nearly dies from it, and what’s Angelo’s first reaction? To rush them off to a priest and make arrangements for them to live happily ever after. Yet here we are, you and me, not making a bit of trouble for anybody, and happier than most people ever manage to be. and if Angelo found it out, he’d half kill us both and make sure I wound up in jail and you got sent to a reform school. Can you figure it out?”
“I’m not trying.” Tommy wrenched the glass out of Mario’s hand and put it down on the bed, but it rolled off onto the floor. It rolled there silently, back and forth, and finally came to rest, unnoticed.
CHAPTER 20
The halls of the Santelli house were quiet when Ma
rio and Tommy arrived early the next afternoon. After Mario helped Tommy put his clothes away in the room that was to be his again this year, they went down to the practice room.
The familiar smell of the room—floor polish, metal polish, dust—struck Tommy with a curious sense of homecoming. The swinging trapezes made faint bright shadows on the floor. Angelo. standing at the foot of the aerial ladder, turned and gave them a quick wave. Tommy, kicking off his shoes, noticed that Angelo was holding the ropes of a mechanic. The ropes went up through a pulley to the ceiling, and down through the swiveled loops on the leather belt that Liss, on the platform, was fastening around her waist. Dressed in faded and patched tights, her hair braided and thrown back, she was standing with one arm around the rope, frowning in concentration as she struggled one-handed with the buckles. Beside her was a short, dark woman in a close-fitting coverall. Tommy did not recognize her until she turned, but Mario stared, then shouted:
“Lucia, what are you up to now!”
She laughed. “I grow impatient! I am the old ring horse going through my paces . . . . Did you get Tommy all right?”
“Sure, he’s here with me,” Mario said. She spotted him and waved. Tommy, returning the wave, remembered with a shock that as far as the family were concerned, his bus had just come in, the night past did not exist. He thought, Dammit, why does it have to be like this? but here in the practice room, that thought just passed like a flicker through his mind and was gone.
Tommy looked around the room. At the catcher’s end of the rigging he recognized Barbara, swinging back and forth in the catcher’s trapeze. It had been reinforced with a “cradle,” the foot brace used by women catchers and beginners instead of the leg hold used by experienced men. Below her Johnny, barefoot, in old dungarees roughly hacked off above the knees, was counting as she swung.
“One, two, three—that’s it, pick it up a little— Hey, is Liss ready?”
Liss jerked at the rope on the mechanic. “It’s too tight. It hurts. Do I have to wear it?”
“Yes,” Angelo said harshly. “Your timing yesterday was rotten, and you know it. It used to fit you fine. What have you been doing, gobbling French fries? Or are you expecting again?”
“No, damn it,” Liss shouted, through Lucia’s little cluck of reproof, “Johnny had it fixed to fit Barbara! I don’t need it and I don’t want it! Matt, you tell him I never wear one!”
Angelo leaned against the support pole of the aerial ladder and said, “Kitten, unless I’m catching you myself, you damn well put on that mechanic, and you wear it until I tell you to leave it off, or you come down off there.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Lucia, and turned Liss around with one capable hand, strapping the belt buckle tight.
Mario laughed, and Liss yelled angrily, “It’s fine for you to laugh! You never wear one!”
“Sweetie,” Mario said soothingly, “you want to keep your arms and legs pretty, not all messed up with rope burns like mine.”
Tommy went over to ask Johnny, “What’s going on here?”
“What does it look like?” Johnny took his attention off Barbara’s swing for a minute. “With any luck we might have an all-girl flying act in a season or two, if the girls will get down to business. Come on, Liss,” he shouted, “what you waiting for?”
Suddenly serious, Liss took the bar from Lucia. They were all very quiet. Liss went off the board, swinging neatly, taking the trapeze on the backswing beneath her bent knees, stretching her wrists to Barbara. Barbara made the catch, a little raggedly, and Johnny yelled, “Wait for her to take you off the bar next time, Liss—you’re” still grabbing! Barbie, keep your elbows bent a little more, or something’s going to happen to that shoulder! All right, Angelo, let her go.”
As Angelo lowered the ropes of the mechanic, letting Liss drop slowly into the net, somebody said behind Tommy, “Hey, aren’t you speaking to me this year?”
He turned to see Stella looking up at him. He held out his hand, but she threw her arms around him and hugged him. She looked thinner, and there were little lines around her mouth that had not been there last year. She felt so frail Tommy was afraid to return her childish hug. He said awkwardly, “Mario told me you’d been sick.”
A shadow crossed her smile. “That’s right, I fouled Johnny up right in the middle of the season.” She hesitated. “I guess maybe he told you we’re married?”
Tommy nodded. You fouled Johnny up? he thought, incredulous. Like hell! Sounds to me more like he fouled you up, but good. But he didn’t say so. “You’re okay now, aren’t you, Stel?”
“I guess so. The doctor says I can go back to work, maybe next week, if I feel okay.”
Barbara touched his shoulder. She was taller than Tommy now, a squarely built girl, with curly brown hair, pink-faced with exertion. A towel was thrown over her leotard.
“Hi, Barbie. What you doing up there?”
“What’s it look like? I fussed at Lulu about flying until Johnny said he’d teach me to catch—so here I am.”
“Aren’t you awfully light for a catcher?”
Johnny heard the question and turned to say, “That’s rubbish. Size doesn’t matter—that’s all baloney! That’s an old fairy tale, that the catcher has to be the biggest man in the act! There’s a trick to it, that’s all. You never catch at the full stretch of your arms, and you take up when the flyer hits your wrists. Stel can catch me without hurting herself at all. I taught her for a stunt, because it looks so unexpected, a little thing like her catching someone my size.”
“Just the same,” Mario said, joining them, “I like having a catcher solid enough to take the weight. Sooner or later the strain is going to tell. The shoulders are always the weak link. Remember what happened to Barney Parrish? That fall he had wouldn’t have laid him up more than a week, but when the shoulder muscle tore, that was it.” Mario made a chopping motion. “Finished. He never went on the rig again. And he was the best there was.”
“Oh, hell,” Johnny said, “I used to catch you, and you’re taller than I am.”
“But not on any of the big tricks. Just when we were kids. I feel a whole hell of a lot safer with Angelo.”
“Look, the momentum of the bars—”
Tommy turned away. He had heard Johnny and Mario argue before, endless wrangles over technique which solved nothing and convinced neither of them. Stella, too, shrugged and said, “I better get back to work.”
“I thought you weren’t working till next week.”
“Conditioning exercises, that’s all. I was sick so long, all my muscles are out of shape.”
Angelo signaled to Tommy. “Go get dressed. Let’s see how badly you’re out of shape after the winter layoff.”
He went and scrambled into a pair of tights. When he climbed the ladder, Lucia was still on the platform, and Angelo had climbed to the catcher’s trapeze. The girls had gone. Lucia said, “Now that the kids are out of the way, we can get down to business,” and he felt oddly complimented; she ranked even Liss among the amateurs, while giving him professional status. She passed him the bar neatly and expertly. “Slide your hands a little closer to the center. Look, try holding your thumbs over the bar, like this.”
Tommy tried it. “It feels awkward.”
“Yes, at first. But it balances better, and you never hang up getting off. Watch Matt—notice how he places his hands.”
Angelo called, “Ready?” from the far end of the rigging. Tommy swung several times, and at Angelo’s insistence, dropped and climbed to swing again. Finally Angelo dismissed him, saying, “Not bad; you didn’t let yourself get out of shape at all. Nice work, kid.”
Tommy went into the change room, then backed out, embarrassed for inside he saw Stella, half dressed, sitting on a bench with her head in her hands. Liss, kneeling beside her, put her arms around her and said something Tommy couldn’t hear, and Stella shook her head.
“No, I’m okay, I just get so mad. I just—I just shake. I can’t trust myself, because every t
ime I let go my arms get wobbly. Liss, it’s been days—”
“I know, Stel, I know,” Liss comforted, hugging her. “Your muscles have gone soft, that’s all. I know how awful it is—I went through it after Davey was born—but once you get your strength back, it will all come back, honest. You never lose it. Look at Lucia—she hasn’t been on a bar for nearly ten years, but her timing is still perfect, you saw. Come on, honey, you come upstairs and take a nice hot bath and I’ll rub your back.” She chuckled. “You’re doing just fine. And at least Johnny takes it for granted if you’re a little beat up when bedtime comes around.” They began to laugh together, and Tommy, abruptly realizing what they meant, backed the rest of the way out, his cheeks turning dull red. He went upstairs to get dressed, not even wanting to go in for his clothes lest the women realized they had been overheard.
~o0o~
Life quickly went into routine again. Tommy enrolled in school; he and Mario began their regular morning sessions, Johnny and Barbara joining them regularly, and sometimes Liss. Now that there were four flyers with Papa Tony, they began work on a double synchronized pass in midair to two catchers using the duo rigging that Tommy and Mario had used the season before. Johnny made jokes—out of Angelo’s hearing—about confetti acts, but he was a good catcher, strong and secure. Mario was practicing the triple intensively again with Angelo. Johnny worked with Liss and Lucia and Barbara; Stella was still not strong enough to go up. But Papa Tony said nothing about which routines would go into this year’s act, or even which of the family would go on tour with them. He seemed to be waiting for something.
Then, one afternoon, Lucia called him away to the telephone. When he came back he stood watching them for a while, then asked, “Matteo, are you ready to let us see a triple?”
“Tomorrow, Papa,” Angelo said. “He’s been working all day.”
“Tomorrow, then. Upstairs, all of you, and dress.” But he stopped Mario at the door. “Don’t leave the house. I want to talk to you—all of you—after dinner, in the living room.”
The Catch Trap Page 36
