The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Just the same, that same week, you bawled hell out of me, in front of every work hand on the lot, just for turning out ten minutes late for practice, and with my tights not mended. No matter what there was between us, you never went soft on me when it was a question of flying. But you let Clay sass you back because you’re scared of what he might have heard from Angelo.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Lucky. I shouldn’t be easier on the kid than I was on you.”

  “That’s not the point. It’s that you’ll compromise at all. We’ve got to get loose, find someplace where you’re not going to be on the defensive all the time. I—” Tommy heard his voice catch, stopped till he could steady it “It’s not me. It’s what it’s doing to you.”

  Mario strode along in silence for a few minutes. Then he stopped and turned. The dampness made his hair cling in tight curls to his forehead.

  “Look, Lucky. Remember when we decided we’d—we’d try to build it into our work, make ourselves so good together that they wouldn’t want to split us up because they wouldn’t want to spoil the thing we were together?”

  Tommy said bitterly, “God, were we young and naїve then! We actually thought we could do that!”

  “No, damn it, we’ve done it. You had more nerve than me. You told Angelo—”

  “I knew you’d throw that up to me someday!”

  “Easy, easy. I’m not blaming—I just said, I never would have had the nerve. I knew all along you had more guts than I do. But I went along with it, and now we have two choices.”

  “Sure. Stay together, or let them break us up.”

  “No, Lucky,” Mario said gently. “We haven’t got that choice anymore. We tried it once. Apart, we’re nowhere, nothing, we’re a couple of nothing men. The choice we’ve got now is we keep hiding even from the people who love us—we pretend to be something we’re not so they’ll let us stay together—or else we stop running. We say, ‘This is what we are, this is why we’re the kind of team we are. Take it or leave it, and the hell with all of you!’ “

  Briefly, their hands touched, then fell apart. They walked on, shoulder to shoulder.

  This is what he meant. We’re part of the same thing. And it all comes from the same place inside us. Not sex, but it comes from the same thing that makes sex work. What we are to each other.

  Finally, as they turned into the iron gates that shut the house away from the street, Mario said, “I know how rough it is. But if we run away from Angelo—and he’s a Santelli; he knows what we are and what we can do together—we’re going to be running way for the rest of our lives. And we’ll wind up running away from each other. Who can we face if we can’t face Angelo?” And as Tommy nodded, Mario added, “And Clay. I’m through running way from that little punk.”

  Inside the hall, the good smell of cooking reminded Tommy of his first day here, of Papa Tony welcoming him.

  You cannot be a stranger here or a guest. You must be part of us, a good obedient son and a younger brother . . . . Only now he was not a younger brother anymore, but an older brother, not to be disciplined, but to discipline.

  Mario said, “Wait here,” and ran up the stairs. After a moment he came down again, something in his hands. “Come on down to the change room, Tommy.”

  Inside the change room, on the empty, dusty bulletin board, Mario fished out some thumbtacks from his pocket.

  “What you got there, Mario?”

  “Old Mario di Santalis made these rules,” Mario said, tacking the faded page up on the bulletin board. Beneath it he tacked up the typewritten translation. “Lucia had them put away in her room.”

  Tommy read aloud, slowly, “The observance of discipline is the mark of the artiste . . . .”

  “Yeah,” said Mario slowly, looking around the dirty, littered room that smelled of sweat and dirty tights, “things have been going to hell around here, and I’ve been afraid to stop them.”

  When dinner was over, Tommy headed for the stairs leading down to the old ballroom, intending to clean up the change room. But Mario came after him. “Come into the living room, Tom. We’ve all got things to talk over.”

  When Tommy followed him into the big room, he realized they were all there. Angelo, kneeling at the fireplace, was lighting a driftwood fire. Lucia called from the doorway, “Don’t go upstairs yet, Clay. We want you in here.”

  “I got homework to do, Lucia.”

  “It can wait. This won’t,” Lucia said in that cheerful, brisk tone of command no one ever disobeyed. “In here, Clay.”

  There was a brief illusion, again, of the past, of Tommy’s first day in this room. They had all been so young then! Stella was hemming a dress for Suzy, while Suzy herself had climbed into Mario’s lap. Tommy took a seat on the stone hearth, near Stella’s chair. Johnny sat across the room from them. Lucia came and sat in her hard straight chair, and for the first time Tommy wondered if its apparent upright austerity was simply necessary support for her bad back. She took some needlework out of a carpetbag. Costumes for the season? No, it was pale pink. Something for Suzy, then, or Tessa.

  Joe was sitting in the old armchair once reserved for Papa Tony. Sure. He’s the head of the family now. Even looks like him. When Clay came in, Joe said, “Come here, young man,” and pointed to the carpet in front of him. “Sit down.”

  Clay folded himself up at his father’s feet. Peripherally, Tommy noticed that he had changed the muddy sneakers for house shoes. He might defy Mario’s rules about the floor in the practice room, but Lucia’s carpets were another thing.

  Joe asked, “Son, what’s your name?”

  “Huh?” Clay stared up at his father. He had, Tommy noticed, Mario’s slanted, rakish eyebrows. “What do you mean, Dad?”

  “I just asked. Do you happen to remember your full baptismal name?”

  “Joseph,” Clay said, frowning a little in surprise. “Joseph Antonio Santelli.” He gulped and after a minute said, “Sir.”

  “Something else. Did you forget?”

  “Junior,” he said, after a minute.

  “Junior,” Joe repeated. “Now look, Clay, there’s one thing we’ve always done in this family. We learn where our place in it is. You’ve been learning to fly, huh?”

  “You know that. Look, Dad, I—”

  “I’m doing the talking, this time,” Joe rapped, and the genial voice was suddenly formidable. “You’ve done yours already. I hear you’ve been giving Matt some back talk, some kind of argument about how to do some catch or other. Out of your great wisdom and experience, no doubt?”

  Clay swung around angrily to Mario. “So you went and tattled on me, like Tessa would!”

  Angelo straightened up from the fireplace, turned around, and said, “That’ll be enough of that, Clay. Flying isn’t a kids’ game with kids’ rules. You broke discipline, and got reported. You have to listen—”

  “And you’re not my father! I don’t have to—”

  Joe Santelli said curtly, “None of that, either, Clay. You flyers make the rules for each other, and you stick to them, or you stay on the ground. Understand?”

  “I didn’t—” Clay looked uneasily from his father to Mario. At last he said to his cousin, thrusting out his lip in childish defiance, “Heck, can’t you take a joke?”

  Mario shook his head. “Not about flying. Clay, you want to fly?”

  The boy lowered his head and stood twisting his hands. Finally he said, gulping, “Yes. I do. Honest, I do, Matt. I’m sorry. I’ll do what you tell me. I promise.”

  “You’d better,” Mario said harshly, “because the next time you give me any back talk, you’re out. Understand? Out. Tomorrow, you go downstairs, before school, and you clean up that ungodly mess you and your friends made in the change room. There’s no reason Tom and Stella and I should have to work in that kind of clutter and junk. And something else. Before you go to bed tonight, you go down there and read the rules I put up on the bulletin board. Read them good. Because from now on, nobody goes in there unless t
hey’re going to stick to them, and if I catch anybody breaking them—wearing shoes on the floor, smoking in the practice room, going on the rigging without somebody there to watch—I am going to raise Cain. Understand me?”

  Lucia said clearly, “Hear, hear.”

  Mario said, “That goes for you, too, Tessa. From now on, if you want to come in and watch, you ask first. Understand? And if you disturb anybody who’s on the rigging, next time I’ll spank you first and tell Lucia afterward.” He set his jaw and added, “And that goes for you, too, Angelo. You’re welcome to come in and watch any time you want to. But you kept the rules all your life. No reason you should get away with breaking them now, is there?”

  “Good God,” Johnny said, laughing, “what set you off all of a sudden, Matt? You trying to put the old Flying and Reform School back in session again?”

  Lucia said, “He could do a lot worse.”

  Unexpectedly, Stella said, “I think he’s right.”

  “You would!” Johnny said sarcastically.

  Joe said, “Johnny, you started all this, didn’t you, by letting Clay talk back and argue with you, by letting him break all the family training rules?”

  Johnny set his mouth. “I run my act like a team. Always have. If Matt wants to play dictator on his, that’s fine. He broke Tommy in like a tame cat—snap the whip and he jumps. But I don’t train my boys by kicking them around. I don’t maul ’em and manhandle ’em. I don’t work that way.”

  “You don’t train them, period,” Angelo broke in. “You like to play with the kids—I saw the way you messed up Matt when he was starting to teach that bunch of youngsters. You haven’t got the patience or discipline to work with them, you never have, and you never will! So from now on, you keep out of it! Clay”—he turned on the boy—“you take orders from Matt, not Johnny, or you stay on the floor. The minute you step on the aerial ladder, you lose all your privileges as the spoiled brat of the family, and you take orders. No arguments.”

  Johnny said, “I still don’t see why this is necessary.”

  “No,” said Angelo heatedly, “You wouldn’t. You were the spoiled brat of the family in your day, and you walked out because you couldn’t take orders.”

  Johnny turned on him angrily. “Damn right! I got fed up with that stuff before I was sixteen years old! You’re living in the past, all of you! Is it any wonder I want to get out of it all, get into some line of work where I won’t have to take all that crap? You’re all like fossils in a museum, and you don’t even know it! You’re all set to do it to Clay just the way you’d have done it to me if I’d let you! You never change!”

  Lucia said, “You know nothing about it. Papa told me that when he was a little boy six years old, in the old country, Grandfather di Santalis balanced him on a wire and told him that if he fell off, he would be beaten. And, of course, he did, and he was. Papa never treated any of us like that.”

  Joe chuckled. “Papa never laid a finger on you, did he, Lucia? Sending you to bed without supper was the worst you ever got, you spoiled little prima donna, and then only for crying when you took a fall! But when I started ground training as an acrobat, I made my first back somersault with the teeth of a garden rake six inches behind where he told me to land. Man, was I careful!”

  Johnny snapped, “That kind of brutality doesn’t get you anywhere!”

  Joe said, honestly puzzled, “Brutality?”

  Almost at the same moment, Angelo said, “It got the Santellis star billing, Johnny. Including you.” He looked at Clay and said, “Some kindness is just softness. Johnny isn’t any good as a trainer because he forgets he wouldn’t be any good without the rough training he got, and he thinks he can get the same results without it. Our family’s business is danger. You live with it, and sometimes you die with it.”

  “Or worse,” Lucia said, but under her breath, and Tommy wondered if anyone had heard her.

  “There’s no room for softness,” Angelo said. “Papa was a tyrant to us, yes. Because he had to be.”

  Lucia said, “Johnny—you too, Clay—there is a kind of discipline that demands real love.” She glanced around the big, crowded room. “It is so easy to be kind and soft, Clay. So easy to kid an amateur along and let him fool himself. But the closer we are to each other, the more we insist on honesty. That’s why we almost never work with anyone outside the family. And why everyone in a family act has always had to be family. Like Stella,” she said, with a loving glance at the girl, “and”—she hesitated—“and Tommy.” Looking across the firelight at Tommy, she smiled, and suddenly she blinked. Tommy could see knowledge dawning in her eyes as she bracketed their names like that, for the first time. Stella. And Tommy. She turned over the flutter of pink in her lap, and for the first time in all the years he had known her, Tommy sensed that Lucia was faintly disconcerted. Then she took up a needle and said, “My eyes aren’t up to this kind of thing anymore. Tommy, you’ve got good eyes—will you thread this for me?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said. Feeling his breath catch in his throat, he came and knelt at her feet, taking the needle and the length of pink thread from her.

  Lucia continued quietly and without emphasis, “We don’t give that kind of thing to outsiders, Clay. You get it because you’re ours and we love you. And it’s that, the willingness to accept that kind of discipline, that sometimes makes an outsider one of us. And you know it, Johnny,” she added, turning to her favorite son. “That’s why Stella—or even Tommy—is more a member of the family than you are. You’re an outsider, because you wanted to be!”

  Johnny said, lowering his head, “Lu, that’s a hell of a thing to say to me!”

  “It’s true, just the same,” Angelo said. “Papa taught me, and Joe, and Lu, just the way he’d been taught. Not quite the same, maybe; maybe every father is a little easier on his kids than his father was on him. I know I’m not going to be as tough on Tessa as Lucia was on Liss. Times do change, but some things don’t. I tried to teach Matt, when we were working on the triple, the same way Papa taught me. And I saw Matt teaching Tommy, just the same way. And now”—he laid his hand on Clay’s shoulder—“he’s giving you the same kind of opportunity, the same kind of training. And you ought to get down on your knees and thank God for it.”

  Clay stood up and looked into Angelo’s face. He said, still with that note of defiance in his voice, “You told me all about how Matt trained Tommy, Uncle Angelo. Remember?”

  Tommy, kneeling on the rug before Lucia, handed the threaded needle back to her. He did not dare to move. That rotten spoiled brat, he thought. I could kill him. He’s going to give Angelo a chance to bring it all out here, right in front of the whole family. Stella leaned forward, her mouth open. Tommy did not dare to turn in Mario’s direction, but after a moment he felt Lucia’s hand on his shoulder, firm and unyielding, lending him strength and reassurance. She just said I was family, and she meant it.

  The silence seemed to stretch, endless, so that it seemed everyone in the room had had time to react to Clay’s words.

  Then Angelo drew a deep breath. He said, “Have you watched Matt and Tommy flying, Clay? Really watched them? That will tell you what that kind of discipline can do for you. Yeah, yeah, sure, I told you a couple of other things, too. I’m not taking back what I said, but that’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about, not a thing to do with it. Sometimes you have to judge things by results. Matt and Tommy make one hell of a team, flying. About the rest, I don’t know, Clay; I’m not saying anything about that.” He turned back to the fire, poking at the sticks of burning wood. “I’m saying, they’re the Flying Santellis; they’re better than they were when I was in the act. That’s what a family tradition is, each generation being better than the one before, and if you stick with it, maybe you’ll be even better than that, because you can build on it. Who knows? You have to judge things by results, Clay.”

  Tommy heard his breath go out. Papa Tony’s words, repeated by Mario: I can’t say I like it, I can’t sa
y I understand it, but . . . That all-important but. He had understood that it did not change what Mario was. Angelo, too, was willing to judge them by what they meant to the family, and the family tradition. He did not, he could not, approve of them personally. But he could accept that they were no less Santellis.

  Lucia, breaking the tension, laughed and turned over the pink ruffles, thrusting in the needle and thread. “Joe,” she said, “do you remember the time I stuck out my tongue at the audience behind Papa’s back, and he turned around and saw me? You said he never laid a finger on me? That time, he shook me till my teeth rattled!”

  For an hour or two after that it was like old times, with Joe and Lucia telling stories of the old days under canvas. Angelo contributed anecdotes of the Mexican circus he had managed for a while, and even Johnny told stories of his years knocking around in the strange, highly colorful, and disreputable world of the carnival midways. Later Suzy fell asleep on Stella’s lap. Stella got up to carry her to bed; then she turned back for a moment.

  “Please, everybody, don’t go up yet,” she said. “I’ve got something to say to you, once I put Suzy down.”

  After a moment Johnny sprang to his feet and hurried after her. “The kid’s too heavy for Stel—I’d better carry her.”

  “Tessa,” Lucia said, “you should be in bed, too. School tomorrow.”

  “Stella asked everybody to stay,” Tessa said mutinously. “I’m a Santelli, too, aren’t I, Aunt Lucia?”

  Lucia rummaged in her sewing basket. “If you must stay, there is no reason to sit idle. Here—hem the skirt of your uniform, then.”

  Tessa thrust out her lip, sulking as she began pinning up the blue serge of her school uniform. “I hate this old uniform! Papa, can I take ballet lessons next summer? All the girls in the family have always studied ballet—Lucia, and Liss, and Barbara.”

  Angelo said, “You don’t have to do things just because everybody in the family has always done them, kitten.”

  “It’s a tradition,” Tessa said, making a large clumsy stitch. “You just got through saying tradition is a good thing, Papa.”