Could it be only coincidence that Angelo had delayed his attack on them until Mario, sure in the knowledge of Tommy as his catcher, had recovered the triple, and his old confidence? Angelo’s suspicions had been there long enough; the knowledge that Angelo did have a suspicious eye on them had given them, in the first season, a furtiveness which had almost destroyed them both. Was there, after all, an element of real jealousy in the scene he had made?
Tommy put the question, and Mario said, “I don’t know how it could be that. I begged him to come back with the act, often enough. Hell, I love—I loved the guy, he brought me up. And I begged him to stick with me. Why in hell should he be jealous now?”
But did Angelo dare to accept that kind of love? Was his jealousy entirely unconscious, then, never to be admitted even to himself? So much the worse, then. If Angelo knew his rage was based on jealousy, he might be ashamed to make trouble—but if he had firmly convinced himself that the distress he felt was righteous moral indignation, there was no end to the trouble he could make.
Finally Tommy said, “Why borrow trouble? I don’t see what Angelo can do. Short of having us arrested as sex offenders, or something. And I don’t think he’d do that to Lucia.”
“Anyway,” Mario said, “we’re likely to find out.”
~o0o~
The worst moment for Tommy was early the next morning, when he came down to find Angelo at breakfast with Lucia and Tessa. Lucia said a friendly good-morning; so, after a moment, did Angelo. Tommy resented this more than anything else, the need to preserve, for Lucia’s sake, an unbroken facade. He wondered why he did it—Lucia wasn’t his mother, he didn’t owe her that. Then he realized that ever since Papa Tony had first defined his place here, Lucia had never varied for an instant in welcoming him into it. By his commitment to Mario, he had taken on, as well, certain family responsibilities, and this was one of them. He muttered, “Good morning, Lu, Angelo,” and went into the kitchen to get his coffee.
Stella came in with Suzy. She unfolded the little girl’s napkin, tucking it into the neck of her frock, and demanded, “Where were you two last night? Johnny and I waited up till after two. We needed to talk to you when you came in!”
“We went into the city for drinks,” Tommy said. He spread butter on his toast, frowning. Angelo had said he would not tell Lucia, but would he feel himself morally bound to inform Johnny and Stella, and would it make a difference? But Stella, firmly removing the sugar bowl before Suzy could put a second spoonful on her cornflakes, smiled with her usual friendliness.
“We finally figured you two had decided to make a night of it, and went to bed. But he absolutely has to talk to both of you this morning before ten. Say good morning to Grandma, Suzy.”
“Good morning, Nonna Lulu. Good morning, Uncle Angelo. Good morning, Uncle Tommy. Good morning—”
“That will do, Suzy,” Stella said firmly.
“But I haven’t said good morning to Tessa—”
“Just eat your cereal, Suzy—we get the idea. Lucia, there is a producer in Texas—”
“Good morning, Babbo,” Suzy chirped, and even before he raised his face from his plate, Lucia’s shocked gasp told Tommy that Mario had come in, and that his bruised eye and cheekbone had ripened into Technicolor.
“Madre di—Matt, how did you do that?”
“Hit the net wrong, Lu. Don’t worry about it.”
“Babbo, did somebody hit you? Did you run into a door? That’s what Mommy said people always said when they had a black eye. But she said it usually meant they ran into a fist. How could anybody run into a fist? A fist is down here, not up where your eye is.”
“When they say you ran into a fist, Suzy, it means somebody hit you, but no, nobody hit me. I fell into the net wrong and I hit my face on my own knee.”
“That was goddamn silly,” Suzy chirped, instantly diverting Lucia’s shock from her son’s face to her granddaughter’s language.
“Susan Elissa Gardner! Now you see what happens when you men do not watch your language! Don’t you dare laugh at her, Tessa! If she knows you think it is cute—”
“Well, Mommy says it,” Suzy argued. “She said it when Babbo—”
“Never mind, Suzy,” Stella said.
Angelo remarked, “If she never says anything worse than that, Lucia, we’ll all be lucky. Tessa, you’d better get your book bag and your school beret. You might have to take the bus home today—I could be late at the studio.”
“I hate to have her riding that bus,” Lucia fretted. “You can never tell what might happen. Can’t Stella pick her up, or Matt? That part of town isn’t what it was when Liss went to school there.”
“I’ll pick her up,” Mario said.
“Then you wait inside the school gate for Matt, Tessa—don’t hang around on the corner. Aren’t you ready yet?”
“In a minute, Papa. One of my braids is undone. Can you fix it, Lulu?”
Lucia frowned at the end of the tidy plait. “The rubber band is undone—no, it’s broken, Tessa. Run up to my room—there are some in a tray on my dresser.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Angelo exploded, “can’t you go without it?”
“I get demerits for being untidy,” Tessa said sulkily, “and Sister Mary Veronica gets mad at us.” She ran out of the room, shouting, “I’ll only be a minute,” and collided with Johnny, hard, in the door. He edged around her as she ran on.
“It’s good to hear Tess making some noise around here for a change,” he remarked with a good-natured grin. “She usually creeps around this house like a postulant nun! Suzy’s doing her good, I guess. Hey, what the hell happened to your face, Matt? Listen, I was looking for you last night. Now I have to drag myself out of bed at this ungodly hour, because I have to wire this guy, without fail, by ten this morning. There’s this big producer in Dallas; he’s staging a big circus-type show for crippled children, and he saw Flight Dreams on television. He wants us to come and do a television show, live, for them, and to talk about it on television. Is that okay with you, Matt?”
“Heck, I can’t talk on television!”
“I’ll do most of the talking,” Johnny said. “You just sit there and look handsome.”
“With my face like this? And I’m not crazy about spending eighteen hours on a train to Dallas, either!”
“I forgot to tell you,” Johnny said, “but we get expenses, including plane fare. There’s not that much money in it, aside from expenses—a couple of hundred apiece. But we can use the publicity and the exposure.”
Mario glanced at Tommy. “How do you feel about it?”
“I always did want to fly on one of those big transcontinental planes. Let’s.”
“Okay, Jock, we’re with you. I hope my face is back to one color in time for it, though,” Mario said.
“It ought to be,” Johnny said, waving away the coffee Lucia poured. “No, no, Lu, I’ll eat at a civilized hour. I’ve got to go and phone that guy. He’ll arrange for our hotel reservation. What shall I tell him, Stel? One room for us, and they can put in a cot for Punkin here,” he added, tousling Suzy’s hair. “And you two can share a room, can’t you, Matt? You always do.”
Tommy caught a glimpse of Angelo’s face as he shoved back his chair. For a moment he thought Angelo was going to say something, and resolved, if he did, that he’d break his neck. But Lucia broke in before Angelo could speak.
“You’re not going to take Suzy with you, are you, at her age? Why should she be dragged around—”
“I wouldn’t think of leaving her,” Stella said. “You want to ride on a plane, don’t you, Suzy?”
“I’ve got to get going,” said Angelo, heading for the doorway. He shouted up the stairs, “Tessa! Teresa Santelli, get yourself down here!”
“I’m coming, Papa, but let Lucia fix my braid first, won’t you?” Tessa sidled into the room, bending down for Lucia to slip the band on her braid.
“If you’re not in the car by the time I get it started, I’ll go withou
t you, and you can take the bus,” Angelo said, and slammed out the door.
Tessa pulled her braid loose and ran after him with the rubber band in her fingers, and Lucia murmured, “What in the world has gotten into him?”
Tommy didn’t say anything. But he thought he could make a fairly good guess.
~o0o~
Johnny was on the phone much of the morning, and toward noon he went out to pick up the advance money that was being wired for their plane fares. Shortly afterward, Lucia called Mario to the phone.
“It’s Jim Fortunati. He said he’d been trying to reach you all morning.”
Mario went to the telephone. He came back in a few minutes, saying, “Tommy, this is it. Jim wants us to come down and sign a contract for the season with Starr’s. We have to make up our minds.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “isn’t it that or nothing? There’s Starr’s, and there’s half a dozen small shows racketing around under canvas. I don’t see what else we can do.” He grinned. “Not to mention that it’s where you belong anyway, with the Big Show.”
Mario glanced at the hallway clock. “We’ve got just about enough time before we have to pick up Tessa; we can do that on the way back.”
The drive took a little over an hour. When they turned in at the gate to winter quarters, they stared, for the clutter of small rehearsal tops was now overshadowed by an enormous tent, the old-fashioned Big Top never seen now with circuses of any size.
“What the hell . . .” Mario said as they parked the car in the visitors’ lot. “Are they going back under canvas, after all these years?”
But when they arrived in the circus office, the small silver wagon where Randy Starr conducted the business of the show—it was a very old wagon, one Mario said he remembered seeing when Lucia had been on the road with Starr’s in his childhood—Jim Fortunati, waiting for them there with Randy Starr, said, “Oh, the Big Top? That’s for the Parrish movie; they’re going to film a lot of it right here in winter quarters. I thought you knew, thought you were going to be doubling the aerial scenes.”
“We haven’t signed anything yet,” Mario said.
“No? Well, I’m working as flying consultant on the circus,” Fortunati said, “and they told me they were getting you for it; in fact, I said there wasn’t anybody else worth a damn. You can still do the triple, I imagine?”
“Oh, yes. No problem.”
“You found a catcher, then? Who is he?”
“You remember Tommy,” Mario said, and Randy Starr broke in:
“Oh, sure. The kid—I remember him. You weren’t old enough last time I saw you, but I said to myself, ‘That kid’s got good timing. He’s going to make a catcher someday; that’s where timing really counts.’ You’re over twenty-one now?”
Tommy dug in his pocket for his discharge papers. The circus manager studied them for a moment, then handed them back. “Okay. I’ve got your contract here—flyer and catcher, one or two others in the act, however you want to fix it up. You want me to find you a girl for your act? Your ex-wife is still with us. She married again, but she’s a pretty fair flyer,” Randy Starr said. “Nice looking, too. No, huh?”
“No,” Mario said firmly.
Randy Starr shrugged. “Up to you, then. I like at least one woman in the act, though; the crowds like to look at pretty girls in a flying act. But you got a sister, don’t you? And one of your family doubled for Lillian Whitney in some circus movie—was that Angelo’s girl?”
“Joe’s,” Mario said. “Angelo’s daughter is only thirteen.”
“I don’t think I ever met either of them,” Starr said, and Tommy remembered that he had a freak memory, never forgetting a face or a performance. “And there was that woman who was with you in Flight Dreams. She was damn good, if you can get her. Only that wasn’t the sister you had with you before, though. She was one of the family—reminded me a lot of Lucia, the way she moved. Elissa. But the Flight Dreams one was a blonde . . . .”
“My brother Johnny’s wife. Stella Gardner.”
Starr shoved the contract form across the table. “You sign for the Santellis,” he said. “That was the way I always set it up with Tony. The senior man in the family makes the arrangements for everybody; you get the other people in it under private contract to you.”
Mario signed. As he was folding up his copy of the contract to put it away, Jim Fortunati said, “Speaking of contracts, Matt, tell your brother John to get off his rear end and make up his mind. I have to make living arrangements for the year for him and his wife—do they have any kids? And we have to have him by the time we open in the Garden, and that’s just about a month away now. If he can’t make it, I have to know so we can get somebody else.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
“I hope he’ll take the job. I know the show will be in good hands with him, and there isn’t anybody else I really feel right about. There was some talk about hiring Coe Wayland, only I don’t like that guy—he’s a born troublemaker.” He looked straight at Mario. “Didn’t you have some trouble once, with that guy? But no Santelli was ever a troublemaker. I’m counting on that, Matt.”
Mario said, “You can count on it all right, Jim,” and gave Randy Starr his hand. Tommy, shaking hands in farewell with Jim Fortunati, realized that somehow, Jim Fortunati knew—and was willing to take a chance.
And for the first time since Angelo had come into their room, on the warpath, he felt, Maybe it’s not so bad, after all.
No Santelli was ever a troublemaker. Well, I just hope Angelo remembers that, too!
~o0o~
That afternoon, changed and ready for practice, they met Clay coming in from school. Mario said, “Hurry up and get changed, Clay. We’re starting a little early today. If you want to, you can come up to the board and handle the ropes for Stella and me for a while, before Phil and Bobby and Carl get here.”
Tommy expected Clay to react with enthusiasm; instead, the boy hesitated for several seconds before saying, “Well, okay, I guess that’s all right. I’ll be along after a while.”
Mario opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. As they hurried down the stairs, Tommy demanded incredulously, “Why the hell do you let him get away with talking to you that way?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Mario said, controlling himself with an effort. “Angelo’s dropped a hint to him to be careful around his big bad wicked cousin. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, and Angelo knows it.”
His shoulders dropped in dejection, as they went into the practice room. He cheered up a little, however, when Stella came down and he had the pleasure of telling her he had just signed the Flying Santellis for the season with Starr’s.
“Oh, Matt, that’s wonderful! That’s absolutely wonderful for you! Are you getting top billing?”
“The Santellis are. Center ring,” he said, and she drew a deep breath of delight.
“Oh, that’s marvelous! When I was a kid, I never dared to dream - center ring with Starr’s!”
“You’re going to stay with us this season, then?”
“Why, I thought you said, the Flying Santellis—Matt, don’t you want me?”
Tommy said, taking her small hard hands in his, “Stel, there aren’t any words for how much we want you. But what about Johnny? He keeps saying the circus is dead, and he still hasn’t given Jim Fortunati any answer about this aerial manager job they offered him.”
“Well, maybe this will help him make up his mind,” Stella said firmly, “and he never said he’s not going to take it.” She turned away and began climbing the rope ladder, effectively closing the subject for the moment.
We need Stella, Tommy thought as he went toward the catcher’s end of the rig. Except for Matt, she’s the best flyer we’ve got in the family. Liss was never in her class at all. But how in hell can we take her with us, if Johnny doesn’t take this job with Starr’s?
She’s too damn good for Johnny . . . .
And then he put it all out of his mind
again, as always when he was working. But it came back, willy-nilly, when Stella came across to his hands.
He marveled at the way she came into his hands—precise, sure, and steady, needing no extra care on his part, her weight so light, so perfectly balanced, her hands locked so lightly around his wrists—and the way in which she almost, but not quite, anticipated the toss with which he threw her back. This is what catching ought to be like. Perfect, with that extra something he couldn’t quite define . . . . Later, swinging upright, mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief, he realized something else. Mario never yelled at Stella, never shouted directions or made sarcastic comments. He didn’t need to. They were matched. Perfectly matched.
Bart had said something like that after watching Flight Dreams. If I hadn’t known better, he had said to Mario, I’d have sworn you were lovers.
We can’t lose Stella! We can’t!
And yet. And yet. Her primary loyalty was to Johnny—and Johnny wanted to leave them and leave the circus.
Mario called, “I want to work on Parrish’s big trick—the double pirouette return after the triple. Okay?” Tommy lowered himself to catching position again.
The vertical pirouette was considered by many flyers to be the most difficult of trapeze maneuvers. The flyer spun around in a vertical position, thus making it imperative to create his own momentum, in a different direction from the horizontal momentum of the swinging trapeze. Tommy himself had never mastered even a single pirouette; the double one was about as difficult a maneuver as possible, and apart from its difficulty, it held its own serious danger. Because of the uneven stress in returning to the bar, the slightest deviation in angle could tear out a flyer’s shoulder muscles. But what could he do? The triple regained, Mario had to go on to new challenges. Tommy couldn’t stop him—and he faced the fact that he didn’t want to.
The triple went off perfectly, but on the pirouette return, Mario spun upright once, half around again, miscalculated, and the returning trapeze caught him above the bridge of his nose. He let out a stifled cry of pain and fell, rolling over by sheer automatic reflex, and Tommy saw in dismay that his nose had begun bleeding again. He came down beside Mario, but when he put out a hand to help him, Mario shook his head.
The Catch Trap Page 74
