“I guess I better turn out the lights and find some candles,” he said at last. “We don’t need Lu asking a lot of questions.”
CHAPTER 7
Three days after Reeder’s first visit, Mario bit into a piece of toast at breakfast, spluttered, and jumped to his feet, his chair scraping sharply back from the table.
“Did I bring you up in a pigpen, Matt?” Lucia said tartly.
“Sorry,” he said thickly through a napkin. “Filling or something came out of my tooth. Ouch!”
“Dr. Ashland’s number is in the little book in the hall,” Lucia said. “Call the answering service right away, and he can probably see you this morning as an emergency.”
“There are all those people coming in this afternoon for that publicity thing with Reeder—”
“You’ll be through by then, if he sees you as soon as his office opens,” Angelo said. He glanced at his watch. “If you can be ready in fifteen minutes, I can drop you off a block or so from his office. Tessa, it’s cold, get your sweater.”
She went silently for it. She had grown into a dark, quiet girl, so soft-spoken and prim in her severe school uniform that Tommy once wondered aloud if she was considering becoming a nun. Mario insisted it was only a phase she was going through, that Liss, at her age, had been equally solemn and pious. Tommy found that difficult to imagine and said so, but Angelo and Lucia both agreed it was true.
The three of them left, and Tommy was having a second cup of coffee when Johnny appeared. “Matt sleeping late this morning?”
“No, he had to go to the dentist. He said he’d be back in time for the publicity people Reeder’s bringing in this afternoon.”
“He’d better be.” Johnny reached for the coffeepot, poured a cup, then leaned his elbows on the table, staring at Tommy,
“Tom, you know him better than I do. Level with me, fella. What the hell is wrong with Matt, anyhow?”
“I wish to hell I knew, Johnny.”
“When he’s good, Tom, he’s so good. Even now, he’s better than most of the flyers around, but he hasn’t got that extra something he used to have. Maybe if he could get the triple back—”
“He misses Angelo, of course.”
“Yeah, but that’s been six years, and anyway, I’m not that bad a catcher.”
“I don’t think it’s that, Johnny. I think—I don’t think he believes in himself anymore.”
“That’s a load of bullshit,” Johnny said. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken up that ‘positive thinking’ crap.”
“I didn’t say I had. It’s Matt we’re talking about.”
Johnny frowned, ignoring the plate Lucia set before him. “Well, whatever it is, I wish he’d get over it. I wanted to build this show around him, give him star billing, and the way he is now, I can’t.”
“Yes, I know.” Tommy sighed. There was no way he could discuss the real problem with Johnny. In desperation, hoping to avoid one of Mario’s self-destructive crises, he had beaten Mario; he had had no choice except the choice he could not make, to walk out of Mario’s life, leave him abandoned and helpless to the inner forces ravaging him. He had hoped it would put an end to the storms which left Mario so torn by guilt and self-hatred that he would have been a wreck for weeks afterward.
But although Mario had seemed to understand—And at least it means we’re not going to by slugging each other all the time—it was as if the final flicker of the old light had been extinguished in Mario.
“I wish Angelo would come back and work with him.”
“Me, too.” Johnny nodded. “He was always the only one could straighten Matt out when he got like this. Matt would take it from him, but damn it, Tommy, I’m just his kid brother!”
“Well, we’ll work around him this morning, if we can get Stella to haul herself out of the sack.” Johnny looked grim. “I think sometimes she’s as bad off as Matt. She doesn’t say much about it anymore, but I think after this show I better quit the circus and take a nice, respectable job in production. Then maybe some adoption agency will take us seriously next time we apply.”
Tommy said, “It would be a hell of a shame if there weren’t any Santellis left in flying.”
Johnny shrugged and didn’t answer that. “Pour some more coffee, Lu, while you’re up. I’ll take some to Stel and see if I can get her awake.”
Tommy went down to the practice room, his mind full of what Johnny had said, and Liss before him: So the Santellis, four generations, reached their height in Matt, and it’s all going to end with him. And now it was beginning to look as if even Mario . . . Loyally he cut off the thought and began to check the riggings.
After a time he began to think about the trick they were perfecting. It had been Tommy’s own idea, a trick which was not, strictly speaking, part of the flying-return repertory at all, and would never have fitted into a regular flying act; but it had seemed to Tommy to have some of the alien, dreamlike quality that Johnny wanted. Early in rehearsals, he had brought it up to Johnny.
“Can Stel do a one-and-a-half?”
“Sure. Blindfolded.”
“No point in doing it blindfolded,” said Tommy, “but listen to this. I make some kind of cross; then Stel comes out and does a straight flying pass over me as you let me go—so far, everybody thinks it’s just an ordinary flying pass. But instead of coming back to the bar, while you’re swinging with her, I turn and hang by my knees, and when you let her go, instead of her coming back to the bar, I catch her—see? Catcher-to-catcher. She’s real small and light, and here’s the gimmick: I can see this with one of those slow-motion cameras, all of us moving together in slow motion, sort of dreamlike . . . .”
Johnny slitted his eyes, visualizing it. “It might just come off, at that. Sounds good. Only you couldn’t let her swing all the way back; you’d have to pull her up on the backswing.” He walked over to where his coat was hanging and rummaged in the pocket for pencil and paper.
Tommy asked, “How would Stel feel about being a human baseball, thrown back and forth between two catchers?”
“She’ll do it if I tell her to,” Johnny said confidently. “That girl can do absolutely anything. Only thing is, she doesn’t know it yet. If I went up on the rigging and said, ‘Okay, Stel, throw me a triple,’ she’d do it. And someday I’m going to do just that.”
Tommy stared, laughing. “Stella? A triple?”
“Why not? Cleo Fortunati did it a few times before she had that fall. No, quit laughing, Tommy. Stel could do it. She does a forward double, and that’s supposed to be as hard as the back triple.”
Stella had been agreeable when the new trick was explained to her.
“What made you think of it, Tommy?” she had asked.
“Dunno. I guess I was remembering a picture I saw of the old act they called fly casting—two catchers on fixed trapezes, throwing a flyer back and forth between them—and I wondered if anyone had ever tried two swinging trapezes instead.”
Now, waiting for Johnny to come down with Stella, Tommy morosely mulled over what Johnny had said upstairs. Maybe, if Stella did a triple right under Mario’s nose, it would shock him into trying it again. Or would it upset him enough that he would never want to try again?
Johnny and Stella joined him, and after an hour’s work Johnny declared himself satisfied. “We’ll do it in rehearsal this afternoon. It’s going to look spectacular when they get the slow-motion cameras in. The two moving catchers, and the flyer moving between them—I can see a kind of dreamlike quality to it, as if none of us were quite real.”
As soon as Mario came back, Bart Reeder brought a man from the studio’s publicity department and a couple of men with cameras. They interviewed Lucia, and even talked to Joe, about the Santelli tradition, and photographed Bart everywhere: on the pedestal with Mario, climbing the ladder, falling into the net. It was nearly four o’clock when the publicity man called off the photographers.
“I think we’ve got all we need, but I’d like a few shots of you people
rehearsing,” the photographer said.
Johnny shook his head. “Not till the act’s shaped up a little better.”
When they had gone, Mario said, laughing, “Never thought I’d see the day when you’d turn down publicity, Jock!”
“There’s publicity and publicity,” Johnny said shrewdly. “I want people to be guessing about this, not seeing little bits and pieces of it and getting the wrong idea.”
“You don’t mind my inviting Reeder to stay, do you?”
“Heck, no. I was noticing what a quick study the guy is—did you notice, already he walks like you do? Watching him climb the rope once, I thought it was you. Somehow I got the idea an actor mostly studies voices and words, but he seems to do it with his body.”
The first part of the rehearsal went well, but when they showed the special trick they had worked out, with the two catchers, Mario, to Tommy’s amazement, flew into a rage.
“Just who had that bright idea?” he stormed.
“You don’t like it?” Stella asked, puzzled.
“Like it? Are you nuts?” His face was contorted with anger and contempt. “You call that flying?”
Mario flipped off the platform and into the net. As he stalked toward the change-room door, Johnny called down, “Hey, we’re not finished!”
“I am,” Mario said. “Looks like there’s no room for flying in this act.”
“Hey, wait—” Johnny slid down the rope. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, anyway? We’ve got work to do!”
Mario swung around as Tommy and Stella joined him and Johnny on the floor. “Who had the idea for that bastard routine? It’s a crazy mix-up of casting, flying return, and balance stunts! It’s cheap, showy junk, and I don’t want any part of it!”
“This kind of thing is beginning to bore the hell out of me, Signor Mario!” Johnny blazed. “I’m managing this act, in case you hadn’t remembered, and I okayed it.”
“I should have expected that of you! You pulled that once before—that kind of cheap, crummy exhibitionism!”
“Cheap!” Johnny exploded. “If you think it’s so goddamn simple, I’d like you to go up there and try it!”
“Look, if I go up there and do it first time out, will you take this mixed-up bastard stunt out of the act? Sporting bet, Jock. It’s beneath any flyer’s dignity to do a cheap trick like that, but if I do it, will you pull it out of the routine?”
“No, damn it, I won’t. Nobody’s asked you to do anything that’s beneath your fancy dignity. And where do you get off anyway, blasting us all to hell like Papa Tony on his worst days? ‘Cheap exhibitionism,’ ‘vulgar displays,’ all that crap! Get one thing straight, big brother: I am managing this act, and you’re working for me this time. God damn it, Matt,” he finished, looking wretchedly at his brother, “I don’t get any kick out of pulling rank on you, but I don’t have the time for this kind of temperamental bullshit!”
Mario leaned against the change-room door. “Tommy and I signed for a straight flying-return act, not a lot of cheap monkey tricks!”
“As a matter of fact, it was your precious Tommy thought up this cheap monkey trick!”
“That’s right, Mario,” Tommy said. “It was my idea. I’m sorry you don’t like it—”
“Look, Matt,” Johnny interrupted, “as a favor to me, will you explain what you’ve got against this stunt? It seems to me that it fits right in with the theme of the show. Flight Dreams. Try to think of it in slow motion. You’ve got three moving bodies here, each moving at its own rhythm, but all synchronized with each other, dreamlike, weaving—sort of sensual. See?”
“But it’s not flying,” Mario said.
“So what? Listen, Matt, people want to see new stunts. We’re halfway through the twentieth century—hell, I thought you understood this when you signed for this show.”
“Let me try to explain,” Mario said slowly, striving to curb his anger. “You were saying, flight dreams. Sensual, sure. But subtle. There’s a kind of—of purity about flying. Pure, perfect. You don’t need flash. You’ve got—I guess you’d have to call it the poetry of motion. Artistry. Can’t you see that cheap, showy tricks just detract from the—the dreamlike purity of the flying? You don’t even realize how hard it is, or how much effort it takes, because it looks absolutely perfect, natural. Like anybody could do it, the way you can do things in dreams.” He stopped to draw breath, and Tommy, seeing the spark newly kindled behind his eyes, thought:
My God! I thought that was gone! But he’s still got it, and if Johnny kills that off in him again, I’m going to break his goddamn neck!
“I don’t think I see it,” Johnny said. “I know you mean what you’re saying, Matt. But try to see it my way for a minute. Dreams are complex, mixed up, and that kind of slow-motion interweaving, in and out, crisscross—”
Mario shook his head. No longer angry, he said with passionate seriousness, “Jock, you’re wrong. Honest to God, I see what you’re trying to do, but you’re dead wrong. You say dreams are complex. That’s the point, Jock: Dreams aren’t complex. They’re perfectly simple, stripped down to basics, like a little kid sees things. You don’t want the audience to gasp and say, ‘My God, how does he do it?’ That’s just one step better than the ghouls hoping they’ll see somebody fall and break his neck. Flying is supposed to look like one of those flight dreams, so simple that people can’t believe they can’t do it themselves. That’s what you want with your talk about flight dreams. Just pure, simple, perfect. So everybody watching will want to cry, because they know somewhere inside, in their guts, that they had wings and could fly once but they just forgot how.”
His voice was actually shaking. “Back when we were little kids, watching Lucia. And—and Barney Parrish. I used to dream I could fly, and when I woke up I’d be crying because I’d forgotten how. That’s what we want, Jock, to make people feel like that again.”
Stella’s voice was vibrant with emotion. “Johnny, I know what he means. He’s right, Johnny. And we’re wrong.”
“Christ Almighty,” Johnny exploded, “you, too?”
“Johnny, he’s got the right idea, only I couldn’t have put it into words like that. We ought to be big enough to admit it when we’re wrong.”
Johnny looked from his brother to his wife, baffled.
“I can’t see it myself,” he said, “but I never did get into all that great mystique of flying. I’m just an acrobat, and to me a stunt’s a stunt. But you two are better flyers than I am. It really means that much to you both, then?”
“It’s what flying is all about, Johnny,” Mario said. “Can’t you see it?”
“Stel, are you going to take his side?”
She bit her lip. “Johnny, it’s not a question of taking sides. It’s just that what he said, that’s what flying is all about, and what we should be doing in the show is to try to make people see it.”
“Hell,” Johnny said, frowning, “if you both feel that strongly about it, there must be something to it. Forget the damn trick. I’m just sorry we spent so much time and effort on it. Tom, looks like your trick’s out.”
“That’s okay with me,” Tommy said. “What Mario said sounded about right to me, too.”
Johnny’s mouth twisted in a wry grin. “I won’t debate aesthetics.” Snobbishly, Tommy was surprised that Johnny even knew the word. “So if we can get back to practical matters for a minute, if we yank that trick we’ve got a hole in the act you could drive a rig truck through. So what are we going to do instead? Put your great aesthetic sense to work on that, huh?” But by the time he reached the top of the rigging he was laughing, and Tommy thought, That’s another way he’s like Papa Tony—I never knew him to hold a grudge.
But the brief passionate spark he had seen in Mario had faded again. It’s still there, Tommy thought, down under. But oh, God, is it buried.
It used to come out when he was flying. It still does, a little. But it doesn’t come out anywhere else. Not even . . . Abashed at his own tho
ught, he nevertheless carried it through to the logical end: Not even in bed, not anymore.
And then the discipline of rehearsal took over again and he had no time for any other thoughts. When they were finished and in the change room, Johnny pulled his sweater over his head, laughing.
“You know, Matt, I think that’s the first fight we ever had that I let you win. It’s not fair—you always get the girls on your side. When we were kids, it was you and Liss against me, and now it’s you and Stel!”
Mario was sitting slumped on the bench. “I don’t get any kick out of fighting with you, Johnny.”
Tommy looked at him in dismay. He ought to be on top of the world. For once he didn’t let Johnny argue him down. Mario had managed to be persuasive, even eloquent, about something that meant a great deal to him. But he just sits there looking like death warmed over!
Johnny saw it, too. “Hey, Matt, what’s eating you? Something wrong?”
“This damn tooth. Dentist put in some kind of temporary filling, and it hurts like hell—I have to go back in three, four days. And I still have to take Bart home. His car’s in the shop.”
But, Tommy knew it was not as simple as that. Mario just did not react to pain that way; Tommy had known him too long to be deceived. He had seen Mario do some of his best flying with raw sores on his wrists and open net burns which must have been giving him sheer hell. Troubled, not knowing what else he could do, he said, “Take it easy, Matt, I’ll run Bart back home. You’re in no shape to drive anyhow. You go on up and take some aspirin.”
“Aspirin, hell,” Mario said, grimacing. “I’m going up and ask Uncle Joe for a good big slug of whiskey and see if that helps.”
“It’ll probably put you out like a light,” Johnny said, “and that’s what you want, I guess.”
Bart Reeder had changed out of his tights. Tommy’s voice was more brusque than he had intended when he said, “Come on, Bart, I’ll drive you home. You’ll have to give me directions—I don’t know where you live.”
“Do you know how to get on the new freeway from here?”
The Catch Trap Page 63
