The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Tommy, I can’t see. I can’t see at all! I’m scared!”

  “Easy. Easy, honey,” Tommy said, and came around the car, picking her up in his arms. “Here, put your arms around my neck.” He carried her up the steps. Over his shoulder, he said tersely to Mario, “Go call the doctor. Get him out here right away. Don’t take any crap about bringing her in to the office.”

  He knelt beside her, holding her hands firmly in his own. She was crying, frightened.

  “Tommy, I’m so scared! Am I going blind?”

  “No, no,” he soothed. “Just hold on. The doctor will be here in a little while.”

  Johnny, summoned from upstairs, asked a few quick, concerned questions. He gathered Stella in his arms, holding her close, soothing hermit’s okay, babe, you’ll be all right, it’s just the lights,” he reassured, and turned furiously on Mario.

  “Don’t you have brains enough to warn her about the lights? No, damn it, I guess you don’t—your own eyes are damn near as bad as hers!” he stormed. Mario’s eyes were, red, too, now, and beginning to swell.

  “Johnny, I didn’t know—”

  “It’s not all that serious,” Johnny said, kneeling at Stella’s side, holding her. “A couple days’ rest in bed and she’ll be all right. But you better have the doctor look at your eyes, too, Matt. And have him look at your nose.”

  “Yeah, feels like I cracked the bone this time. I’m not blaming Stel—she couldn’t see what she was doing—but I can feel something grating inside there.”

  The doctor confirmed Johnny’s diagnosis of overexposure to klieg lights. “They used to call it klieg eyes. You don’t see it much anymore; most people know enough about it now never to look at the lights,” he said. “Was this the first time you worked on a movie set, Mrs. Gardner? Somebody should have warned you.” He prescribed eye drops and a few days in bed with her eyes bandaged. He also confirmed that Mario’s nose had been fractured, though not seriously, and packed it with cotton, an unpleasant process. When he had gone, after cautioning them both to come in for a checkup in a day or two, Johnny said that they should call the studio at once, and file a claim for the doctor’s bill and for compensation for lost time.

  “Anyhow,” he added, looking down at Stella, who lay with her eyes bandaged on the couch, “this settles one thing. Settles it for good!”

  “What’s that, Johnny?”

  “From now on—” Johnny broke off. Suzy had come into the room and clambered up on the couch where Stella lay. She had to be reassured, tucked up beside her.

  Stella lay smiling, cuddling the frightened child, insisting, “I’m all right, Punkin, I just got the lights in my eyes too bright. Like when you look at the sun. Which you shouldn’t ever, ever do.”

  Johnny moved out into the hall, drawing Mario and Tommy with him, his mouth tight with determination. “From now on, Stella’s not going on that damned lot again unless I’m right there to make sure she’s okay! You know she won’t speak up for herself! I knew I should have come along today!”

  Mario laughed ruefully. His voice was thick and muffled through the layers of cotton packed into his nasal passages. “That’s fine with me, Johnny. I told you we needed a manager.”

  “What you need,” said Johnny angrily, “is a keeper! One of the little men in the white coats! Why anybody wants to fly is something I can’t figure out!”

  CHAPTER 16

  The rest of the flying scenes were filmed, without incident, a few days later. Their work for the movie was completed, except for the scenes to be shot after the circus opened in Madison Square Garden.

  Opening day was less than two weeks away. The first unit of the show was already traveling across country, to be there for final rehearsals in the Garden. One dress rehearsal would be held with the same audience of costumed extras of the Parrish period, with all the acts, for a few shows, authentically recostumed and recreated from the days when Barney Parrish had ruled the center ring.

  Randy Starr came to the Santelli house to call on Lucia, and managed to persuade her to travel to New York to see her son open as the center-ring “Star of Starr’s”—a position she herself had held for many years.

  “I wish I knew Randy’s secret,” Mario said. “Lu hasn’t been on the grounds of a circus for—good God—almost twenty years!”

  Mario, Tommy, and Stella were to fly to New York the day before the show opened, for the filming of the final sequences. This would include the triple, against the background of the Garden, a final filming of their “Barney Parrish” act, and the “missed trick” sequences. Mario had been practicing falls again, from all angles, as assiduously as he had practiced the triple when he was a boy.

  In his spare moments he worked with the boys, Clay’s friends. When Tommy remonstrated, telling him he should save his energy, he said seriously, “No, it relaxes me to work with the kids. Keeps me tuned up, makes me feel good.”

  But every night or two, he woke out of nightmare, thrashing around and crying out, and Tommy, knowing his nerves were at fever pitch, was desperately worried about him. Mario, fearless in ordinary flying, still held his almost superstitious terror of stunt work. Tommy had no such fear—he took it as calmly as Angelo—but he suffered with Mario over it. During the day Mario worked doggedly, never sparing himself, taking deliberate falls on the practice-room floor, which frightened even Tommy, but at night his strained nerves took their toll in the nightmares from which he waked screaming, clutching at Tommy.

  “Matt, why do you do it? Let them fake the damned thing or go without it!”

  Mario said, sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette, “Look, try to see it my way, Tommy. You reach a spot where you find you’re just doing the same thing over and over. Nobody can teach you anything then, because you’re already doing more than anybody else has done. I taught myself the triple because there wasn’t anybody else who could teach me one. But I’ve got that now. I have to—to lick this one, too.”

  Tommy felt cold fingers at his throat, remembering what Papa Tony had said. Was this indeed Mario’s salto mortale, the shape of his personal fate? He’s way out in a lonely place, and nobody can reach him. Except you, maybe. But even while he wanted to beg Mario not to do this, to be content with what he had done, Tommy realized that this was precisely why he could reach Mario: because he knew enough to let Mario do what he had to do. He could order him around, he could take the initiative, in almost anything—but their reversal of roles went only so far. He was the anchorman for Mario; he could never follow him all the way into the unknown, he could only be there for Mario to reach back, when he needed to.

  He said, “It kills me, to see you doing this to yourself,” and then realized this was the one argument he could never use. Mario had indeed gone far out into that lonely place Papa Tony had mentioned, where no one could follow. It was within Tommy’s power to call Mario back; he alone could do it. But at what cost, what unguessable cost to the thing Mario had become? That had been Mario from the beginning—always reaching one step further into the unknown, demanding and challenging the limits of the possible—and Tommy could reach him only because Mario trusted that Tommy would always say, as he said now, “Okay, fella, it’s your neck. I don’t like it, but you know what you got to do.”

  This was the price of flying; he had known that from the beginning, but it had never seemed like that to him. It had never been a matter of courage—only of discipline, mastery, perfect knowledge of what he was doing. Now he faced not only the price of flying, but the price he had been paying, all these years: an open mind not only about breaking his own neck, but about letting Mario break his, if he must.

  Angelo had been right, after all. He had been too young to fly. Not too young to learn the tricks, but too young to fully understand the price. And now it was too late. Tommy realized that for many years, his real life had been flying. Everything else was just the mechanics of living, going through the motions until once again he climbed the rigging. Everything else in
life was drab, colorless, but he no longer wondered what he would do if he chose not to fly. It was too late for that.

  The only thing that scares me now is that someday I won’t be able to fly. He was haunted, sometimes, by the memory of the little lame man watching Mario do the triple, and he knew now what had been in Barney Parrish’s eyes, that haunted look.

  Now, as when they were first working on the midair pass together, it seemed that all the tension between them built and culminated, not to the moment when they moved into one another’s arms at night, but to the moment when Mario flung himself from the trapeze into Tommy’s waiting hands . . . .

  The worst thing was that Angelo continued to watch them, obsessively, standing near the practice-room door. Tommy asked one day, “Does he still think he’s going to catch us making immoral advances to the kids or something?”

  “How the hell do I know what he thinks?” Mario asked. “He can watch till kingdom come, for all I care. Maybe, damn it, just maybe it’ll remind him of what he used to believe in.” He turned toward his own end of the rigging, but Tommy saw the sadness in his face.

  It all came to a head one day when Mario had finished with the youngsters in the afternoon lesson. Clay had come late; Mario had promised that he would work with him separately afterward, that Carl and Bobby and Phil were a separate group and should rehearse separately. Tommy knew from this that Mario had begun to think of Clay as at least a future Santelli. He allowed Clay the same privileges that Tommy had been allowed in the last few weeks before he had appeared in public with them.

  But this afternoon Clay came in late, and crossed the practice-room floor in his muddy sneakers, leaving tracks.

  Not the first set of tracks, either. The floor was not maintained now as it had been in Papa Tony’s day; it had probably not been sanded since the last year Papa Tony had been with them. Mario watched him, simmering, coming to a slow boil, but all he said when Clay joined them, wearing his gym shorts, was “What’s the matter? All your tights in the wash, or something?”

  “Lucia didn’t get them dried.”

  Mario said caustically, “And of course you don’t know how to take a pair of clothespins and hang anything on a line? It’s a complicated maneuver far beyond your feeble brain?”

  “Lay off, Matt,” Clay said sullenly. “Does it matter? Lucia tells that story about old whoever-it-was losing his costume and doing his act in his red flannel long Johns. Why raise hell about my gym clothes?”

  Mario swung around on Angelo and said, “And will you put out the damn cigarette?”

  Angelo frowned and ground it out. “What’s gotten into you today, Matt?”

  “What the hell are you doing in here, anyway?”

  Angelo shrugged. “Damned if I know,” he said. “You want to make a scene and put me out?”

  Mario turned away, raging. “Do what you damn please. Things sure are going to hell around here!” But by the time he reached the platform he was in his usual good humor again.

  No matter what shape he’s in, Tommy thought, climbing the ladder always does that to him.

  He looked at Clay’s sullen face. Mario must have looked much like this to Angelo when he was working on the triple—an intense, serious youngster, whiplash thin, dark hair hanging in loose curls over his forehead. Tommy arched his back, automatically pushing his own swing higher to compensate for the boy’s shortened swing. He caught Clay’s thin wrists, then flung him back to the bar. Later, sitting upright in his own trap, he listened to Mario, criticizing.

  “But you’re still not hanging on long enough, Clay. The trouble is, you don’t really leap at all—you let Tommy pull up and scoop you off the bar. Try it again, and this time try to get off the bar under your own steam. You’re supposed to leap off, not fall off.”

  “Yeah, but you’re all the time telling me not to grab at the catcher,” Clay argued, taking the taped bar from Mario’s hands.

  Why the hell does Mario let him talk back that way? If I’d given him that kind of back talk, he’d have run me off!

  “All right, wait a minute, wait—go!”

  Clay went off the board. “Pull up, pull up,” Mario called. “Point your feet—all right—now!” Clay tumbled toward Tommy. Again, judging the loom of the hurtling body, Tommy pushed forward slightly, and again his hands meshed around Clay’s wrists.

  “You’re still hanging on too long. Tommy had to pull up for you. Tom, next time he does that, don’t allow for him, just spill him,” Mario called. “Now shift around—easy, easy—all right, let go—grab it!” As Tommy released Clay’s wrists the boy reached for the bar, barely getting his fingertips on one edge of the trapeze, then dropped and sank toward the net. “Roll over,” Mario and Tommy shouted together, and Clay, turning catlike in midair, bounced easily into the net.

  Mario dived down beside him. On the floor, he said angrily, “Look, you hung on too long again—you did it coming and going!”

  Clay regarded Mario with his chin thrust out. He said, “You dropped the bar too fast, didn’t you, Matt?”

  Tommy, sliding down the rope, nearly fell off in amazement. Mario’s face darkened.

  “I dropped the bar too fast?”

  “What’s the matter,” Clay demanded, “you think you’re perfect or something? Sure, you dropped it too fast!”

  Mario advanced on him, his face drawn, so menacing that Tommy knew that if Mario had ever looked like that at him, he would have turned tail and run. He said, “Clay, you know what’s the matter with you? You’ve always got some alibi! If something goes wrong, it’s Tommy’s fault, or it’s my fault. Never yours. There’s no room in this family for that kind of stuff. You think you’re pretty darn good, don’t you?”

  “Johnny didn’t complain.”

  “You couldn’t even go over to the catcher if Tommy wasn’t correcting for all the damn stupid things you do!”

  “Sure,” said Clay with an insolent smile, “we all know Tommy can do no wrong around this place. Especially where you’re concerned.”

  “At least, at your age he knew enough not to talk back,” Mario said angrily. “If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be flying at all!”

  “Well,” Clay said, still with that insolent smile, the childish smile that made Tommy itch to slap him across the mouth, “is it up to you?”

  Mario opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked at Angelo, standing impassively beside the door, smoking. “Probably not. Go on, run along upstairs and get dressed.”

  “Mind if I get my shoes first?” Clay demanded.

  Mario stalked into the change room, caught up Clay’s muddy shoes, and, holding them at arm’s length, handed them to the boy. “Don’t wear them on the floor.”

  Clay said, “Oh, nuts! Fuss, fuss, fuss—you’re turning into a regular old woman!” and sauntered out of the room.

  Angelo went after him, and Tommy burst out, “Damn it, Matt, if I talked to you that way when I was Clay’s age, you’d have knocked my block off!”

  Mario stood hunched over, scowling. He said, looking bleakly around the littered change room, where the boys had tracked mud on the floor and left a heap of tangled tights and dirty towels, “Angelo’s got me so damn self-conscious about the kids now. I’m scared of what he might have said to Clay, to make him think he can get away with talking that way to me.”

  Tommy, biting his lip, picked up Mario’s sweater off the littered bench and draped it around Mario’s shoulders. “Put it on. You’re going to catch cold, standing around in your sweaty tights like this.”

  Mario exploded. “Now you start in ordering me around?”

  Tommy turned his back on Mario. “Suit yourself,” he said, and slammed the change-room door behind him. It didn’t take two to make a fight when Mario was like this.

  While he was in the shower, he heard Mario come up the stairs, pause at the door of the bathroom, and go on. There had been a time when he would have come in and joined Tommy in the shower. They hadn’t done that for a long time. Not
since Angelo had discovered them. He heard Mario go away, and when he returned to their room, Mario wasn’t there. Tommy supposed he had gone into the other wing to use Lucia’s bathroom.

  Tommy had finished getting into clean jeans and a knitted shirt when Mario came back, wearing his old black slacks and sweater. He stood before the mirror combing his hair, and Tommy noticed that the gray streaks had spread, were more noticeable.

  “Let’s go out for a walk, Lucky.”

  Tommy glanced at the window. “Isn’t it raining?”

  “Drizzling. I don’t care. I don’t guess we’ll melt. And I don’t feel like talking here.”

  Meeting his eyes, Tommy knew precisely how he felt. The house was stifling them. It was worse than that season with Lambeth, when they had had to sneak around, take idiotic risks, scheme to find twenty minutes free of interruption. Yet even the lies, the bitter brutal fights boiling up out of their tension and frustration, had been better than this. Even in their own room with the door locked, Tommy had that dreadful sense of being watched, spied on.

  I did it. It’s my fault. I could have conned Angelo into thinking he didn’t see anything to worry about. I just got so goddamn sick of lying to him. With one giant stride he himself had cut Angelo’s acceptance away, and he and Mario had to live with it, from now on.

  They went out of the house, into the light rain. Mario sniffed. “Spring. Smells good. And in a couple of weeks—no, only about a week now—we’ll be opening in the Garden.”

  “If we can hold out that long,” Tommy muttered.

  “Lucky—” He reached for Tommy’s hand in the dusk, but Tommy pulled away.

  “Matt, there was a time when you wouldn’t compromise. Not to avoid trouble with Angelo. Not even for me. Remember—remember Lawton, Oklahoma, and—and everything there?”

  Mario said softly, “You think I’m ever going to forget that?”