“Fair’s fair,” Tommy said. “I’ll do my share.”
But he felt a sudden dizzy apprehension when he began practicing the steady, head-down pendulum swing which was the first step of a catcher’s work. He had mastered it once, but had forgotten. Lucia came down to practice with them, to handle the bars for Mario. Over Tommy’s protests, she insisted that the catch trapeze should be reinforced with a “cradle”—the foot brace used by women catchers. With the feet tucked through the brace, the catcher was less likely to lose his grip than with the leg hold of experienced men. Time enough for that, Lucia insisted, when he was used to the weight. For some days he only worked at timing his swing to the empty trapeze, with Lucia calling the beats. Finally, after many tries, Mario said, “Okay, let’s go.”
Tommy had forgotten that the catcher could not see the flyer’s hands, only the loom of the hurtling body. Nevertheless, with some old precision clicking off clockwork awareness inside him, his hands went out by instinct, and their wrists locked together with a slight jerk.
“See,” he quipped, “nothing to it.” He thought, We move as if we had only one heartbeat, and instantly forgot it again. He was startled to discover that supporting Mario’s weight seemed no harder than supporting his own; the strain on shoulder muscles was fierce, but momentary.
It took him much longer to master the second half of the catcher’s work: releasing the flyer at the precise instant for his return to the bar. Lucia watched them work for days, in skeptical silence, and her silence was disquieting. Tommy wished she would say something, if only to criticize. As in the early days of his training with the Santellis, he was always achingly tired, shaking with fatigue, his arms and wrists always sore; the unaccustomed muscles would not harden fully to the strain for years.
Angelo was as good as his word, and Tommy worked for five days as stuntman in a slapstick comedy, falling down ladders and into bathtubs for the comedy star. He wondered why Mario had never tried this work, and it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps, with an arrest record, some doors might be closed to Mario. But Mario, as it happened, brought up the subject of his own accord.
It was late, and Tommy was half asleep in their room—periodically Lucia spoke of fixing up another room, but somehow never got around to it—when he realized that Mario was not beside him, but standing, silent, at the window.
“What’s the matter?” Tommy did not know anything was the matter until he heard himself ask; on the surface of his mind he would have thought Mario had simply gotten up to go to the bathroom, or for a cigarette. Not until the words echoed in the dark room did Tommy realize that yes, something was wrong, and the awareness of it had simply not surfaced before.
“Tommy, do you really like stunt work?”
“Sure. And I can use the money, God knows.”
“Are we that broke?”
“Well, every little bit helps. And if we have to mount our own act, we’ll need it. We really need a new net this year.”
Mario said with suppressed violence, “Trying to show me up?”
Tommy sat bolt upright in bed. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it, knowing you’re doing something I can’t?”
Tommy stared at him, still not understanding. “Look, would you rather I hang around sponging off your family? I’m not going to be anybody’s kept boy, Mario. We’re just going to have to accept the fact that unless we’re working together we’re going to be separated now and then. I wouldn’t make a fuss if you went off and taught at the ballet school again. Why are you getting on my back about this?”
“But did you think—” Mario scrabbled in the night table for a cigarette. “Is that what you think, that I was mad because Angelo got you a job and not me?”
Tommy had, without verbalizing it, but now he didn’t. “No. But it’s a cinch something’s bothering you.”
Mario made a funny sound that might have been a laugh. “I misjudged Angelo, then. I thought he wouldn’t be able to resist telling you all about it—that I chickened out on it. That I’m scared to hell to have you doing all that stuff, trying to break your goddamn neck . . . .” His voice went off into a thin croak. “Not that it matters, but it’s a neck I happen to think a lot about. Worry about.”
Tommy couldn’t manage a word. If Mario had suddenly kicked a window out of the house he would have been less amazed.
“Angelo’s been doing stunt work every year—riding rodeo, taking falls—since there were movie stuntmen. He got me some calls once. About the time I—got thrown out of college. And”—Tommy heard him swallow in the darkness—“I panicked. Muffed it. Scared shitless, that’s all. Chicken.”
“Jesus,” Tommy whispered, “and you spent five years working on a triple. And they call it—what is it?—salto mortale.”
“That’s different. Not the same thing—not the same thing at all! I know what I’m doing on the bar, know just where every swing will take me. But that business of coming down hard, all sprawled, every which way—” His voice faded out. “I can’t take it. It’s just plain cowardice.”
“What the hell, Mario! A fall is a fall—you do it by instinct!”
“That’s what Angelo tried to tell me,” Mario said thinly in the dark, “but I can’t seem to get the message across from my brain to my—my muscles, or my guts, or whatever’s in charge.”
Reason told Tommy that he had hit a raw nerve, a pocket of unexpected illogic, and that he should leave it alone; but he couldn’t. “Go on,” he said, trying to defuse the tension by clowning in the old way, “you just can’t make yourself do anything that doesn’t look pretty. You need the spotlight and the applause before you risk your neck.”
The dresser drawer squeaked as Mario pulled it open. “Probably you’re right,” he said, and his voice was neutral, flat.
“Where you going?”
“Nowhere. Go to sleep.”
“Mario, I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up and go to sleep.” Whatever he said now, Tommy knew, would only compound his offense, so he stretched out again, and in the long silence suddenly knew that to say nothing would be worse. Mario’s withdrawals, his sudden let-me-alones, were a reflex—probably from a childhood when any urgent need for attention or sympathy had so often had to be shelved until after the show or after the season. Now sympathy only disturbed Mario; it seemed very necessary that he should never seem to demand attention or warmth. And he repelled it most when he needed it most. He pulled on jeans and shoes and was already out the door when Tommy realized this. He got up and went after him.
“Come back here, you idiot! You know I didn’t mean anything. Don’t be a damn fool. Hell, Mario, do I have to make up a list of every damn thing I’m scared of?”
Mario relaxed, laughed, and let Tommy bring him back to the bed. But as they stretched out to sleep, Tommy thought, wretchedly, I never tell you the one thing I’m afraid of most. You, sometimes. And he knew things would never be right between them until he could tell Mario this, too.
CHAPTER 5
It was the last day of the old year. Barbara had come for dinner, but even to Tommy the Santelli house seemed empty. Lucia, wandering back and forth from living room to kitchen, remarked half a dozen times to anyone handy that it hardly seemed like New Year at all. She called Mario in to open a bottle of wine, as if determined to make the occasion as festive as possible anyway, but the house was full of ghosts. Mario, his face drawn and silent, looked as if he could see them in every corner.
But neither of them, as they went up to put on clean shirts and jackets for dinner, spoke any of the missing names. They were starting down the stairs when Mario cocked his head to one side to listen.
“Is that a car in the drive? Maybe Liss and David drove down from San Francisco. Even that would make the New Year for Lu.” The doorbell rang, and Mario lengthened his stride. “But Liss wouldn’t ring . . . .”
Lucia was already in the hall. Halfway down the stairs
, Tommy heard her wordless cry of welcome and delight, saw her caught up into Johnny’s arms. When he let her go, she was radiant. Tommy had always suspected that if Lucia had a favorite among her children it was Johnny. Even troubled as she had been by Mario’s long absence and disappearance, she had not reacted like this to his homecoming.
“Matt, come and see—”
“Matt? Is he here?” Johnny let his mother go, strode to the foot of the stairs, and caught his brother in a fierce hug.
“Hey, fella, I always knew you’d turn up someday,” he said, holding Mario at arm’s length and staring at him. “Where in hell you been? Jail or someplace like that?”
“Someplace like that. Tell you all about it someday, huh? Good to see you again, Jock.”
Johnny held out his hand to Tommy.
“Hi, kid. Where you been all this time?”
“Army,” Tommy said. Johnny was still thin, bright-eyed, restless; he looked like a college boy. “What you been doing?”
“You mean you didn’t see us on television? Network show, broadcast everywhere, big spectacular—Circus Days and Nights, they called it.”
“Liss said something about it,” Mario said. “Only I wasn’t where I could watch any television.”
“Or anywhere else,” Johnny said, and he sounded aggrieved. “You had no business staying away so long. We did a special about Barney Parrish, and the triple. Jim isn’t flying now, so you and Simon Barry are the only ones doing it, and he’s got no style! I wanted you for that, the worst way, and I couldn’t locate you!”
“For heaven’s sake, Johnny, don’t start scolding him before you’ve been in the house ten minutes,” Stella chided. “Hello, Mario, I’m glad you’re back!”
Johnny insisted, “But if I could have located you, you could have had coast-to-coast exposure on television, could have made a big comeback, with the triple—”
Mario shook his head. “I haven’t done a triple since I split with Lionel.”
“You haven’t—” Johnny stared at him, his mouth open.
“Let him alone, Johnny,” Stella said sharply. “Go and get the luggage out of the car.”
She held out both hands to Tommy. She was expensively dressed, her hair swept up, and for the first time that Tommy could remember, she was wearing makeup. If he had seen her somewhere, he thought, he wouldn’t have recognized her. But as he took her hands, recognition came: hard, callused, a flyer’s hands, dried with resin. The nails were still ragged, bitten short. For all the years, the success, the expensive clothes, she was still Stella, his Stella, as when they had been two alien children in a strange and bewildering family. He hugged her tight, with a sense of real homecoming.
There were still many empty places at the long family table, but Lucia said with satisfaction, looking down to Joe at the far end, that it was just like old times.
“Last year was dreadful,” she said. “Johnny couldn’t get away from New York, and Angelo was on location in New Mexico. And we didn’t even know where Matt was. Or Tommy.”
Tommy found himself wondering about Lucia Gardner. Mario had told him, once, that although her marriage had lasted only a scant seven years, she had never even considered marrying again. Papa Tony had said it, once: Our family eats people up alive. It had eaten up Lucia. At least, she had preferred it to a family of her own. Tommy reflected soberly that he had done the same thing: He had chosen of his own free will to come back to an adopted family, not to start his own. Joe, at the head of the table, was pouring the wine. The world might change, but the Santellis went on and on.
Lucia asked, “What are you going to do this summer, Johnny? Are you going back to Starr’s?”
“No future in that. The circus as we knew it is dead, Lucia.”
“I don’t believe that,” she protested.
“Doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, it’s true. There’s Starr’s, and there are eight or ten little traveling shows wandering around in the boondocks, and that’s that. Who wants to cart around a whole circus by railroad when every zoo and entertainer in the world is right at the other end of your television switch? The movies killed off vaudeville, and television is going to finish off it—and the circus—for good and all.”
“Television?” She stared at him, disbelieving.
“Television is where the future of entertainment is going, Lu.”
“No!” she protested. “Who will want to sit at home and watch a little box when they could go out with their family? Television, it is only a fad. I will not have one in the house.”
“You wait and see, Lu. Ten years from now, every family will have a television set just the way they have a car and a radio.”
“Oh, sure,” Angelo scoffed. “They were saying ten years ago that the helicopter would replace the family car, there’d be one parked on every roof!”
Lucia protested, “You cannot tell me that a day will come when no one is interested in the strange, the unusual, things no one else can do—”
“I didn’t say that. It’s the old-style shows that are going. Starr’s already gave up their tent, or didn’t you hear? They’re only going to play in big arenas now, like Madison Square Garden. There are a few tent shows out in the backwoods but they won’t last long. How many shows are listed in Billboard now?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “And twenty years ago, there were over a hundred. See? People’s idea of entertainment, that’s what’s changing. But there’s always going to be some interest in acrobats; the softer people’s lives get, the more they go in for spectacular endurance stunts. And television is the perfect showcase for that.”
Mario said good-naturedly, “Then maybe I’m not out of a job after all.”
“Hell, no. Only you’ll be doing it on television. I signed for another circus show sometime this spring—same people who put up the money for Circus Days and Nights. How about it, Matt, you ready to get back into flying?”
“Provided we can get a catcher,” Mario said, and Johnny nodded.
“No problem. I’ll find you one, or work with you myself. You used to be pretty spectacular.”
Mario’s smile was good-humored. “What difference does it make? On one of those television screens—what are they, about a foot across?—how the devil can you see the fine points of flying when the flyer’s maybe two, three inches high?”
“Yeah, but against that, just think, you got maybe two, three million people watching you! And you know what a close-up lens is? People will be able to see flying close up, the way they never saw it before. And now they have a slow-motion camera—”
“Gimmicky,” Angelo said. “Why would anybody want to watch flying in slow motion? Speed’s what flying’s all about.”
Johnny shook his head vigorously. “No. You’re wrong, Angelo. Listen, they’re using it in baseball games, football, so you can see just how a runner slides into a base, how a triple play went when it was really too fast to watch. Remember how every show, we got people asking questions, wanting to know everything, all about how it was done? Now we can show them.”
All evening, Johnny bubbled over with energy, enthusiasm, a thousand plans.
“What you need is a manager, Matt. Anybody in the business will tell you I’m about the best there is. While you were away, I worked on a movie, but it didn’t pan out—life of Barney Parrish, would you believe? You want to hear something real hokey? What do you think about me doing the triple?”
Mario said, in flat disbelief, “I wouldn’t believe it. Not even if I saw it. You? Never.”
Lucia said, “Gianni, you are making fun of your brother—”
“Tell him, Angelo,” Johnny said.
Angelo laughed and shook his head. “I saw it and I still don’t believe it, but that’s because I know how it was done. I didn’t say anything at the time, Lucia, because I didn’t want you to get the idea I was going back to flying. But when they were working on that Parrish movie—the one that fell through—Johnny and I did a few days doubling for the flyers, him
flying and me catching.”
Lucia said, “You are not going to tell me that you did a triple, Johnny?”
“Nope,” Johnny said, “but I sure as heck faked a good one. I did four, five back doubles, then they cut and spliced it together. Pure fake, trick camera work.”
“That does not seem to me honest,” Lucia said.
Johnny shrugged. “Show business. Simon Barry did get one triple on film, but my fake looks better than his real one. If I had done a real one, half the audience would have thought I faked it, anyhow.”
Mario asked, “What happened to the movie?”
“They never finished it,” Johnny said.
“They ran out of money,” Angelo added, “and there was trouble with the stuntmen’s union. I heard a rumor a while back that they were going to make it again—there’s an actor called Bart Reeder who’s crazy to do it.”
“Well, I don’t want any part of it. The damn show’s a jinx,” Johnny said.
But Mario was frowning, his mind fastened on another detail.
“Bart Reeder? I used to know a guy by that name. Started out on the legitimate stage, then got a few parts in the movies, about the time I lost track of him. I wonder if it’s the same guy I used to know.”
“I never met him,” Johnny said. “I don’t know whether he can act his way out of a paper bag, but he’s getting a big buildup as a romantic star, playing in bare-bosom historicals with Louise Lanart, and they talk like he was the greatest thing since Valentino. But most actors can’t act these days, and you’ve only got to turn on the radio to find out most of the singers can’t sing.”
“Oh, he’s a good actor,” Angelo said. “Hell of a good star. Handles himself good, too. I doubled for him in that pirate movie. He didn’t really need a double—he could have done his own work—but the studio was afraid he’d tear up that maiden’s dream of a face of his.”
Johnny threw back his head and guffawed. “Talk about press-agentry! The idea of giving Bart Reeder a buildup as the biggest romantic hero— Just between you and me, he’s a real screaming swish, the biggest fag in Hollywood!”
The Catch Trap Page 59
