He watched the second trapeze being drawn up out of the way. Later—he had heard this discussed—he would make a cross in this empty space in the show. But not this first time. Papa Tony joined them on the platform. Mario pulled down the slightly narrower single bar. “Okay,” he whispered, “you’re through. Just keep clear.”
Tommy stood at one end of the pedestal, alert, watching the tricks that had become so familiar he could see them in his sleep: Mario’s back double, Papa Tony’s forward two-and-a-half, the midair pass.
Mario, nervously rubbing his wrists, whispered, “Give me plenty of room.”
Papa Tony passed the bar to Mario and said something under his breath. Tommy could not hear the words, but they had the lift of a question. Mario nodded. Papa Tony raised his hand, signaling Lambeth. Usually this last trick, which closed the act, was the two-and-a-twist—the difficult double somersault with a half twist in between. Papa Tony usually finished the act, although once in a while, lately, Mario had done so instead. Tonight, it was Mario’s name that Big Jim called out.
“And now . . . ladies and gentlemen . . . direct your attention to the high trapeze . . . . The most difficult of all aerial feats . . . Mario Santelli will attempt a triple somersault to his catcher’s hands . . . . Mario Santelli!”
Tommy gasped aloud. I didn’t know he was going to try that tonight . . . .
Mario swung out, with a high, flexed, driving swing. He made an extra backswing for momentum, then drove his trapeze forward again, upward and upward to an almost unbelievable height. At the last moment before the ropes buckled, he flipped off the bar, snapping back into a closely tucked somersault at incredible velocity; then a second, unbelievably higher than the first; a third, in falling momentum . . . . Tommy had forgotten how to breathe . . . . At the last split second Mario straightened, and Tommy felt, with a jolt that hurt him, deep inside, the wrists slamming into Angelo’s hands, the grip that slid, locked just at the moment when it seemed that another instant’s swing must throw him backward into the darkness beyond the catcher.
Tommy felt that his own harsh breath was louder than the sudden screams and applause from the seats. Mario and Angelo swung together, locked wrist-to-hand and hand-to-wrist, and Angelo was beaming.
Then Mario swung back to the pedestal, dropping off lightly. Turning to the audience, he flung up his hand in a stylish gesture and waited for the resurgence of applause.
It came, storming higher and higher—louder, it seemed to Tommy, than any applause he had ever heard. Then, one by one, they were diving into the net, somersaulting over the edge and out of the ring, and the clowns were running in for the finale.
Tommy had almost forgotten that tonight he had fulfilled his own years-long daydream. So, even facing his own ordeal by fire, Mario had been willing to spare time and energy to come and shake some sense into him! Tommy felt numb and ashamed.
Just beyond the canvas flap of the performers’ entrance, Angelo whirled and grabbed Mario in an exuberant bear hug. Papa Tony was beaming at them with an inner glow, radiating pride and happiness. Mario looked white and shaken; he had begun to shiver, and Tommy, reaching for the pile of capes on a prop box, flung one of them around Mario’s shoulders. Mario managed a grin.
“Some show, hey, kid?”
Hardly realizing what he did, Tommy threw his arms around Mario’s waist and hugged him. Mario held him hard for a moment, and Tommy gasped, “You did it! You did the triple! But why didn’t you tell me—why didn’t you even tell me you were going to try it tonight . . .?”
Mario sounded almost like himself again when he laughed. “I figured you had enough on your mind for one night. C’mon, c’mon, let’s quit blocking the entrance here!”
Neither Angelo nor Papa Tony had said a word to Tommy about what he had done. Tommy felt that was quite proper, that all their attention and excitement should go to Mario. They walked back toward the rigging truck to change, Mario’s hand on Tommy’s shoulder. After a minute he lifted it, asking, “What’s this, Tom?”
Startled, a little confused, Tommy put up his hand to the little medal, which was pinned inside the singlet top. Quite automatically, completely without conscious thought, he had transferred it from his shirt to his costume, pinning it into the neckline without being aware of doing so. This was the first time he had noticed it. He felt himself blushing.
“Oh,” he said, “it’s that thing. That medal. Heck, you gave it to me!”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mario said softly. “I guess he’s looking after us both, then. I guess I was right; I figured you’d be—lucky for me.”
His eyes, dark and glowing, were intent on Tommy’s. They stood like that for a minute. Mario’s hand on his shoulder. Then the older boy sighed and laughed.
“Run along, Lucky. Your family will be wanting to know you didn’t break your neck, too.”
“Mario, you’re a wonder,” someone boomed out, and Tommy saw Jim Lambeth standing in front of the rigging truck. Behind him was a crowd of performers still in costume. They swarmed in to congratulate Mario, and Tommy, not wanting to infringe even for an instant on Mario’s moment of triumph, slipped silently away into the darkness.
As he ran across the backyard to his parents’ trailer, Tommy heard someone call his name. He stopped. Little Ann, a coat pulled over the costume she wore with her mother in the tumbling act, hurried toward him.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going on with the Santellis? Listen, I think that was a mean trick!”
“What was a mean trick? I don’t get it. What did I do?”
“Not you, Mario,” she said vehemently. “Didn’t he even tell you he was going to do a triple tonight and spoil everything?”
“What are you talking about?” Tommy demanded, confused. “I don’t think he told anybody except Angelo, but he’s been trying to do it all season. Heck, the whole show knows he’s been working on it! What’s the matter?”
“Everybody’s so crazy excited about it, they’ve clean forgotten about it being your first performance,” Little Ann said crossly. “A new flyer in an act is worth making a little fuss about, darn it! I bet he did it on purpose. He’s got such a swelled head, he can’t stand thinking of anybody else getting any special attention!”
Tommy scowled at her, baffled, bewildered, and just a little angry. “Good grief, don’t you have the faintest idea of what Mario’s just done? The triple somersault, Little Ann! Don’t you know what that means? Only two or three other flyers in the whole world ever did it, and nobody’s done it lately except Barney Parrish, and he got smashed up doing it! And Jim Fortunati, with the Big Show—he’s center ring at Starr’s! And you think they ought to make a fuss over me? Little Ann, I think you must be nuts or something!”
She stepped back as if he had hit her. “Well, excuse me for living!” she said angrily, then turned and ran away toward her own trailer. Tommy took a step to follow her—she was his best friend, and he hadn’t meant to make her mad—then shrugged and let it go. What did it matter, anyway? He wondered, suddenly, if his father had seen him in the ring.
A week later, the Lambeth Circus broke up for the winter. Tommy had appeared every night with the Santellis, and in one matinee performance. Mario had attempted the triple only once more. On the last day, after the matinee, Tommy was helping his mother clear the trailer for the long haul to winter quarters when he looked up and saw Mario standing in the door of the trailer. He ran out to him.
“Tommy, we’re pulling out right after the night show. I probably won’t see you to speak to, just in the act. I thought I’d say good-bye now.” He hesitated, put a hand on the boy’s shoulders. “Where you spending the winter?”
“Lambeth winter quarters, somewhere in Texas. I forget what town. Why?”
“Oh, you never know, I might send you a Christmas card or something. Actually, Papa Tony asked me to find out.” He hesitated, seemed about to say something more, then said, “Okay, see you next season, I guess.”
“Unless they draft you in the Army,” Tommy said. “How come you stayed out this long anyway? You got flat feet or something?”
Mario’s face shut tight, like a steel trap. “Or something. You ask too goddamn many nosy questions.”
“Hey, don’t get mad,” Tommy pleaded.
Mario sighed and shrugged. “Okay, okay. Look, I got to get back. Angelo’s prowling around like a bear with a sore tail, worrying about whether we’re going to make it to California on those tires.” His hand still rested on Tommy’s shoulder. He touched, briefly, the lump the little metal tag made inside the neckline of Tommy’s shirt and murmured something in Italian, of which Tommy knew only a few words. Then Mario turned his back, lifted his hand briefly in farewell, and walked away.
Beth Zane was packing pots and pans into a crate when Tommy returned to the trailer. “Come here and help me with this. Did Mario want something?”
“Just saying good-bye till next year.”
She glanced sideways at him. “I suppose—” she began, then stopped.
“Mother, you speak Italian, don’t you?”
“I used to, a little. You pick it up when you study music. Not a whole lot. Why?”
Tommy stumbled to remember unfamiliar words.
“Tu sei—I didn’t get all of it. Fortuna. And sventura—”
“You’re sure? Fortuna—that’s luck, good fortune. And sventura—you’re sure about that? That’s bad luck, trouble. Something about good or bad luck, I guess. Did he say that? Maybe it’s some kind of proverb or old saying, but it’s funny he wouldn’t tell you.”
“I guess he was wishing me good luck instead of bad,” Tommy said, and quickly went to finish his work, but he had put the phrase together by now. Mario had called him “Lucky” a few times. But now what he had said was, You are my luck . . .good luck or bad. Tommy carried the words inside himself just as he carried the little medal pinned inside the collar of his shirt, as a talisman, without quite knowing why.
CHAPTER 4
A high November wind was blowing late-falling leaves from the trees as Tommy walked slowly home from school. The sun had already dropped over the edge of the world, and the leafless trees wavered, like a limp net, above him.
The small house where he and his mother were spending the winter was lighted up inside, for he was late. His father lived fifteen miles away, on the grounds of the circus winter quarters. Tommy had never quite understood his mother’s refusal to live there. None of them ever put it into words.
He did not really see less of his father, for Tom Zane came home almost every day, but the distance created an odd, disjointed sense that the world was split into two parts. And that fifteen miles made some sort of indefinable difference to his mother. What, he couldn’t understand, but it was there, and he had found out before he was ten that he couldn’t discuss the topic with his mother.
The living room was empty; a smell of cooking came from the kitchen. Tommy put his books in his bedroom and sat down on his bed, kicking aimlessly with one sneaker.
It was a bare and characterless room, the furniture cheap and showing the marks of many past tenants. The floor was swept and bare; the dresser was painted white, strewn with his toilet articles. He had added nothing to the room except a few photographs tacked up on the poison-green walls. One was a large autographed glossy photograph of the Flying Fortunatis—center-ring attraction with the Starr Circus—which Margot Clane had given him two years ago. She had known the Fortunatis years ago, and the photo was autographed across the bottom: “With love to Margot from Cleo, Lionel, Jim.” The second picture, cut from a magazine years ago, was a blurred halftone of a man in tights, just seizing a trapeze bar in a pirouette. It was the only picture Tommy had ever been able to find of the great Barney Parrish, who had invented the triple thirty years before. The third was a snapshot Little Ann had taken with her birthday camera; she had had an extra print made for him. Snapped at rehearsal, it showed Mario, Angelo, and himself at the foot of the aerial ladder, all in practice clothes.
Tommy propped his chin in his hands and stared at the wall. He had stayed late every evening at school for a month to practice with the group trying out for the basketball team. He had thought it was an oversensitive imagination when he felt persistent unfriendliness around him. He was too small for a guard, of course, but he was fast on his feet and quick at the game, and he never missed a basket shot. He felt he had a good right to hope. That afternoon, getting back into his street clothes, he had looked up to see the coach watching him.
“Come into my office a minute when you’re finished, Zane.”
“Yes, sir.” Hastily Tommy tied up his shoelaces, then slammed his sneakers and gym suit into the locker and went down the hall to the coach’s office.
Coach Seymour was a small man, wiry and muscular. He looked up at Tommy with level, unrevealing eyes. “You’re a fine player, Zane,” he said at last. “No reason I shouldn’t tell you, you’re probably the best player down there. But then, I’m sure you know that.”
The emphasis puzzled Tommy. “Thanks, sir. I know I’m too short, but I’ve tried hard.”
“Sit down, Zane. What’s your name—Tom? Well, Tom, I was making up the team lists, and I was all ready to put you on the squad, and then I found out there was a few things I didn’t know about you.” Suddenly the coach’s voice became hostile. “For instance . . . you are a professional acrobat, aren’t you?”
“Who told you?” Tommy demanded.
“Never mind that. Your parents are circus people, aren’t they? And you yourself have appeared professionally in the ring as a gymnast?”
“Why—not much—”
“Tell me about it, won’t you? Doing what?”
Tommy sat on the hard chair, baffled by the mixture of curiosity and hostility in the man’s stare, as if Tommy had done something dishonest. “Well, when you spend all your summers with the circus, it sort of soaks in. Tumbling, horizontal bars, that sort of stuff. And I got interested in flying-trapeze, you know—and one of the flyers taught me. But I wasn’t really in an act—only a few times, to fill in if somebody was hurt or something.”
“But you have appeared in the ring professionally as part of the show?”
“Sure, sometimes,” he said, more baffled than ever.
“Well, then, Zane. You know, of course, that schoolboy athletics are all amateur events. There’s been some—talk—about choosing you, a professional gymnast, to go into competition with schoolboys who haven’t had your special advantages. Under the circumstances, it seems a bit fairer to the other boys not to put you on the team.”
For a minute Tommy felt as if he had dived from the rigging to suddenly discover the net was not where it belonged. Then the dignity he had learned, painfully, in the ring came to his aid. He sat up very straight.
“Whatever you say, sir. It’s up to you.”
“We wouldn’t want to take unfair advantage of the other boys.”
“No, sir,” Tommy said stiffly. What advantage? I don’t play basketball with the circus!
“Nothing personal, you know. It could happen to anyone. Why, the Olympic star Jim Thorpe—you know who he was?—was disqualified from the Olympics because he spent one year as a professional when he wasn’t much older than you.”
Coach Seymour kept him a few more minutes, asking foolish questions about the circus, as if to prove there were no hard feelings. But Tommy answered his questions noncommittally and escaped as soon as he could.
Now, in his room, he thought about the hostility, and the distance, and about something else. He could keep himself in condition, physically. But all the precise details of timing, precision, and balance demanded practice as well as skill. Next summer it would take him weeks, if not months, to get back to where he’d been in September. Performers all took a vacation at the end of the season, but not such a long layoff. He ought to be working, training, rehearsing. It had been different when he was just an amateur, working haphazardly when someone had time
to teach him. But if he wanted to perform on tour next year—and he knew he did want to, knew it was the only thing he wanted—he ought to be rehearsing. With somebody.
He kicked off his shoes and went into the kitchen for a glass of milk, but as he was opening the icebox he heard his father’s voice in the other bedroom. Startled, he opened his mouth to call out, then quickly shut it. for he heard something he had never heard before: his father’s voice raised in anger. Like all the men who work with the big cats, Tom Zane moved quickly but never unexpectedly, and he had a remarkably even, low voice. But now he was shouting, and he was in a rage.
“God damn it, yes, and among other things it would mean you could square it with your conscience to stop this nonsense and come live in winter quarters with me! Don’t be so damnably difficult, Beth!”
“Tom, he’s only fourteen. He ought to have a normal life. School parties, and dates with girls, and basketball games, and baseball, and fishing—”
“It’s already too late for that, sweetheart. Look, maybe it’s my fault—I wanted you and the kid on the road with me every summer. But Tommy—where he’s concerned, you’ve got to admit—”
Very quietly Tommy tiptoed into his bedroom. He put on his shoes and came walking noisily into the kitchen again. “Hey, Mother, I’m home.”
His parents came out into the kitchen and Tommy pretended surprise. “Hey, Dad, what you doing home on Wednesday?”
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