The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Oh, Lord,” Tommy said suddenly. “Stella. Nobody told Stella. And Johnny went to—went with Papa Tony.” Then, looking at the shaken Angelo, clinging to Mario’s arm, he knew he had to volunteer.

  “I’ll go tell Stella.”

  Walking across the grounds to the women’s dressing tent, he realized that the performance was still going on, the band and the applause as loud as ever. Were the people in the audience all ghouls? Could they see something like that and not care? Could they watch a bunch of clowns flipping around and laugh as loud as ever?

  He found Stella near the entrance of the women’s dressing tent, and even then a flicker of relief struck him that she had saved him the necessity to speak to the matron and ask her to pass the word for Stella Gardner; even if she had been his own wife, he could not have entered the women’s tent. She was a childish, vulnerable little figure, all alone at the entrance, an old gray corduroy coat pulled over her dress; but somehow the fact that she alone had had the presence of mind to dress fully, when Johnny and Tommy had only pulled on pants and shoes over their tights, was a hardening, bracing thing.

  She ran to him and caught his hand, holding it hard. “Tommy,” she whispered, “is he okay? What happened? Is his neck broken? Johnny couldn’t wait and tell me—one of the girls told me he went in the ambulance. What is it?”

  There was no way for Tommy to soften it, and he didn’t try. “He’s dead, Stel. He was already dead when he hit the net.”

  “Oh, no!” Stella blurted, and crossed herself. “Oh, God, how awful for Angelo—”

  “He’s taking it bad, Stella,” Tommy said, and put his arms around the girl, holding her tight. They clung together, once again aliens flung together on the outside of their strange world.

  Then, quickly straightening herself with an odd, grownup little gesture, Stella said quietly, “Mario’s got to stay with Angelo, then, and Johnny went with the—went with Papa Tony. But Joe and Lucia have to be told, and we ought to send them a wire right away before somebody hears it on the radio or something. Or—look, Tommy, it would be awful for Lucia just to get a telegram. Have you got any money? I’ll call her long distance, and—and try to break it to her kind of easy.”

  For the first time Tommy realized the hard steel core of this young girl. He reached into his pockets; there were only a few coins.

  “Not enough to call California with. You better call collect, or ask the boss for some money to phone.”

  “Is there anybody else I ought to call?”

  “Liss,” Tommy said. “I can get her number out of Mario’s address book. She lives in San Francisco—”

  “No,” Stella said, shaking her head. “Liss is going to have a baby, and a telegram or me calling would upset her too much. I’ll tell Lucia and let Lucia break it to her. I’ll have to go off the lot to find a pay phone—no, wait, I bet Woody would let me use the phone hookup in the office—”

  “For something like this? Sure. You want me to come with you, Stel?”

  She shook her head gravely. “No, you better go back and stay with Mario and Angelo.”

  He watched her walk away toward the office, looking like a child in the shabby old coat. Then he went back to the men’s tent, bracing himself for what lay ahead.

  It was like a nightmare that went on and on. There was the quiet, painfully present curiosity and sympathy of all the men in the tent. There was the necessity for Angelo to talk to the police, even to sign a paper authorizing an autopsy so it could be officially determined whether Papa Tony had died of injuries from the fall, or from heart failure or heat stroke. “No, no, I will not do it,” Angelo insisted. “It is not decent or right he should be cut up and mutilated after he is dead!” Only after a Catholic priest, a police chaplain, had come to speak with him did he, reluctantly, sign the consent form. Tommy found a moment to whisper to Mario that Stella had telephoned the family.

  Supper time came and went, but none of the Santellis had time or wish to go to the cookhouse. There were papers to sign; the police chaplain stayed to help Angelo through the dreadful formalities. The police came back and asked Angelo a few more questions—this time, mercifully, in the office, away from the eyes and ears of the dressing tent. To Tommy, this questioning added the final grotesque, almost indecent note, hearing plain-clothes detectives ask them all if Angelo had been on good terms with his father. Finally, in a bullying way, they asked Angelo himself.

  “How about it, Santelli? Were you and the old man on good terms, huh? You fight a lot?”

  Angelo’s face still looked gray and pinched. “No, Papa and me, we always got along fine.” And then, delayed, the shock registered in his face.

  “Dio mio! You mean you think I could have hurt him? I, his son?”

  “It does happen,” the cop said flatly. “We get plenty of cases where a son wants to be rid of his old man. And it looks like you might have had a good chance, an old guy like that in a dangerous act.”

  Angelo stared and crossed himself. “Dio! Have you people no decency?” he exploded, and Tommy was afraid he would burst into tears again. But he managed to control himself.

  “I loved my father,” he said at last, when he could steady his voice. “All my life I worked with him—how long? Since I was a little boy twelve years old. And ever since my brother, Joe, fell in the ring with my sister, I have been his catcher, all these years—all these years—” he repeated. “So many years I am catching him in the act, and you think, you dare to think I could hurt Papa—”

  Tommy had never heard even a trace of accent in Angelo’s rough voice before this, but now it came through, almost as strong as Papa Tony’s. “God forgive you for that wicked thought, as he may strike me here today! It is hard enough to know—to know Papa died here—in these hands—without that, too—” He covered his face with his hands and was silent.

  The priest, standing behind him, bent and said something in Italian to Angelo, and Angelo replied in the same language. The detective, growing restless, muttered, “Can’t he speak English? He was speaking it okay a few minutes ago. What did he say, padre?”

  The priest frowned at the detective.

  “What he said, sir, was only ‘Try and tell them how willingly I would have had God take me instead.’”

  The detective shifted from foot to heavy foot. “I been talking to some of the other folks on the lot. They said the old man rode you all pretty hard.” He looked around the small, bare office, out the window at the cluster of tents and dressing tops, the rides on the midway rising beyond them, the cluttered backyard. Tommy could see the contempt, the alienation in his face. The police officer despised them, despised them all. They were an alien race, foreign, wandering, at opposite ends of the world from the respectable solid citizens of the town; they were capable of anything. At last the detective shrugged.

  “Just doing my duty, Mr. Santelli. Could have been an accident at that; no proof either way.” With that, he left the office.

  Later James Woods came to them in the dressing tent, where the men of the show were getting ready for the night’s performance. He looked at Angelo’s bleary face. “Look, are you sure you can go on tonight, Angelo? I can cancel the Santellis this one night, if you want to.”

  They all knew what he was thinking. A local boy with a press camera had caught the ghastly crumpled sprawl of Papa Tony’s body in the net and raced off to his local paper in time for an evening headline: circus star falls to death from son’s hands. Someone, unthinking, had brought a copy into the tent.

  But Angelo said firmly, “No, I’m okay. I’ll go on.”

  Young as he was, Tommy knew that after a circus tragedy there was always a certain proportion of the audience which reappeared to stare at the act that had met with misfortune. Part of the tradition was to confound this curiosity by going on precisely as usual, revealing nothing.

  “Look, Angelo, I know how you old troupers are. But I don’t know as how I’m so crazy about putting you out there to be stared at, even if the
re are a few ghouls would come just to stare. Let me cancel the Santellis just this one evening.”

  Johnny and Mario looked at one another and moved a little closer together, behind Angelo. With an outstretched hand they drew Tommy into their tight circle, and Johnny said, “Cancel be damned!”

  Mario’s voice held quiet arrogance. “It’s good of you, Woody. But this is all we can do for Papa Tony, don’t you see?” And Angelo, raising his head, his eyes glinting, abruptly rose to his feet as if held upright by some inner reserve of pride and tradition. Tommy could almost hear Papa Tony say, the night Angelo had been clawed in the ring:

  The Santellis are always ready.

  Heat still blanketed the city, rising thickly from the ground, but a faint, cool breeze stirred under the stars as they walked toward the performers’ entrance. As they crossed the ring under the lights, Mario and Angelo walked together side by side, their capes swinging rhythmically. They parted two and two at the foot of the ladder as if this was the usual pattern of their act. With one foot on the ladder, it seemed to Tommy that he could still see the confusion on James Woods’s face, and a strange, bleak pride braced him through the sick emptiness in his chest. When he reached the pedestal, turning to step out of the way for Mario, he found himself moving to make room for Papa Tony at his side, and shuddered. He touched the small medal pinned inside his shirt collar, without really knowing he was doing it.

  Because of the backstage death, which had caused disruption in the routine between shows, James Woods had passed the word for a “quick show,” each act cut to its essentials. The show would run only two hours and a quarter instead of the usual three hours. The triple had been canceled—Mario had conceded that—and as he finished the act with the two-and-a-half he normally did in its place, Tommy, watching Angelo closely, saw split-second panic crossing his face as Mario went whirling into his hands. Their wrists locked, slipped slightly before they gripped again. Later, when they were dressing, he saw on Mario’s wrists a pair of dark, matched bruises. Mario saw the direction of his glance, but said nothing.

  The merciless velocity of the teardown could not wait for death or tragedy; the evening performance was over by ten-thirty, and by midnight the circus train was ready to pull out. Before going to his own car, Johnny stopped in the compartment Angelo had shared with his father—Stella, of course, even chaperoned by her husband, could not enter the sleeping car reserved for single men—to ask, “Anything I can do here?”

  Angelo shook his head. His face looked numb and swollen. He was sitting in the lower berth of the compartment, Mario and Tommy on the trunk that almost filled the rest of it. “No, everything’s all taken care of, I guess. You know, the backyard’s a pretty callous place. I remember how we had to leave Joe and Lucia in the hospital that night, not even sure whether Lu was alive or dead. Even Liss couldn’t stay. And all we can do now is to leave Papa Tony in a strange funeral home, with nobody but a strange priest to make sure he gets sent home decent.”

  Johnny sat on the bunk beside Angelo and put an arm around him. Earlier, all through the teardown, people had kept coming up to them, offering sympathy, a warm handclasp, asking, “How can we help?” and shyly saying, with obvious sincerity and even a few wet eyes, how much everyone had liked Tonio Santelli. Kindly meant as it was, that had been an ordeal. But now they were left alone, and though all the men in the sleeping car had known and liked Papa Tony, they were giving the family the only thing they could: a thin closed door, a brisk, noisy going-about-their-own-business, to give a frail illusion of privacy for their private griefs.

  Johnny said, “Uncle Angelo, want me to stay with you tonight?”

  He shook his head. “And leave Stel all alone? No, Jock, you stay with her. I’m all right, and anyhow, Matt and Tommy are right next door if I need anything.”

  Another long silence. Finally Johnny said, “I was thinking about the night Joe and Lucia got hurt, too. We had that big private car on the Starr’s train, and before it pulled out, Cleo came and tucked us kids into bed. By the time Papa Tony came in, we were all bawling again. Poor little Liss—remember how she tried to mother us that night? Mark was the worst, crying and carrying on. Big as he was, Liss had him on her lap, trying to rock him.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Angelo said hoarsely. “The lot of you in those striped red flannel nightgowns all you kids used to wear. I couldn’t do nothing for you, but Papa Tony came in and sat down on Liss’s bed and took one look at you kids and said—remember, Matt?—he said, ‘Here, here, this is no time to hold a wake, and better to pray for your mother than cry for her.’ And he put his hand under Liss’s pillow, where she kept her rosary, and started in to say a Hail Mary, and all you kids stopped crying, one by one, and started saying it with him.” He put his face in his hands again.

  “Yeah,” Johnny said softly, “but he had the right idea, you know.”,

  “E vero.” Angelo fumbled on the shelf, took out a string of small blackened beads, and began murmuring in Italian. Johnny and Mario bent their heads and started repeating along with him in English.

  The Apostles’ Creed was not familiar to Tommy, but when Angelo began the Our Father, he recognized the Lord’s Prayer and joined in. However, when they began the Hail Marys, he covered his face, and behind his closed eyes he felt the ache of tears. He felt that he ought to be praying, too, but about the best he could do was to repeat to himself, over and over, intensely, “Oh God, be good to him, please,” and it didn’t feel right; it felt as if he was play-acting, dramatizing something that was real and awful. The repetitions over and over surprised him, and he was also embarrassed, like most Protestants, before the openness of Catholic prayers. Angelo was saying them in Italian, but Mario, next to him, was praying in English, and Tommy, listening to the repeated Hail Marys, found himself confused and distressed; they had all gone very far away and he felt that they all had some comfort he could not share. Mario, his face behind his hands, his eyes shut, was murmuring:

  “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee . . . .”

  Tommy sat silently beside him, feeling his throat tighten as the prayer came round, again and again, to the softly repeated now and in the hour of our death. In the hour of our death. In the hour of Papa Tony’s death. He was desperately afraid that he would cry. It seemed a very long time before they finished and Angelo tucked the rosary away again. He looked calmer, and his voice was steady. Tommy felt that the family really wanted to be alone. He said a muted good night to Angelo. The man put an arm around his waist and hugged him.

  “You know, Tom, he loved you, too. Just like one of us.”

  “I loved him, too, Angelo,” Tommy said, and knew that his eyes blurred with tears, “like he’d been my own grandfather.”

  “I know, kid.” Angelo pulled him close and kissed him. “Good night, figlio. God bless you.”

  Tommy went to his own compartment, shucked his clothes, and got into the upper berth. He did not sleep, listening to the rails clunking and rattling, and now and then the haunting wail of the train whistle sending its eternal cry into the night.

  Who’s lonely? I’m lo-o-onely.

  He no longer knew if the wetness on his face was for Papa Tony or for the sadness of that cry. After a long time he saw dim light from the corridor and Mario came in, sat on the edge of the lower bunk, and began to undress. Tommy bent over the edge of his bunk and whispered, “How’s Angelo?”

  “Out. The nurse gave me some pills for him, and after a while, I managed to get him to take them. They must have been powerful stuff; he went out like a light. You poor kid, aren’t you asleep, either? Come on down, if you want to.”

  Tommy clambered down and got in beside Mario.

  “This thing’s hit Angelo so bad, none of the rest of us have had a chance to feel it yet,” Mar
io said,

  “They were awfully close.”

  “I know. Joe and Lucia drifted away—not their fault, of course—and Angelo was all he really had.” Mario was silent for a moment. “You know, though, I’d like to go that way. He never had to be old, or sick, or crippled. And he lived to see us on the way up again.”

  “He never got to retire and stay home and take life easy, though.”

  “He’d never have retired, Tommy. He loved to fly. And he died just having finished a big trick, hearing applause, knowing— I ought to be horrified knowing he died suddenly, without having a chance to make his peace with God—”

  “What did he have to make his peace with God about?” Tommy asked. “He was a good man!”

  “I keep forgetting you weren’t brought up Catholic. It’s supposed to be awful to die without a priest, and a chance to confess any sins you still had on your conscience. But”—he swallowed—“I can’t help being glad he died on the rig. Doing what he wanted to do. I’d hate to think God wouldn’t understand.”

  Tommy said fiercely, “I wouldn’t think much of a God who wouldn’t.” Papa Tony had emphasized to him how merciful, how quick, the death of his own parents had been.

  And I didn’t know. I wasn’t even there when they died.

  Then, with a maturity tragically beyond his years, he realized that he really belonged here with Mario.

  “I loved him so much, Tommy,” Mario said. “He was all the father I ever had. I don’t remember my real father at all.”

  “Mario, he was so proud of you. He knew you were going to put the Santellis right up on top again.”

  “I’m glad I could even do that much for him. I failed him so often.”

  In the dark, Tommy hunted for Mario’s hand and held it, suddenly knowing the right thing to say. “Listen, Mario. Papa Tony knew about—about you and me, you know.”