“And you’re up to your old tricks,” she retorted, “preaching at me! Here endeth the Gospel According to Saint Matthew!”
Mario sat up, circling the ropes loosely with his arms as he swung. “Seriously, Liss, six weeks and you’d be as good as ever.”
“Hah, when I get six weeks!”
“I didn’t realize how well you’d kept in shape.”
“Oh, I teach all the neighborhood kids to do flips and somersaults and things. And I dance a lot.”
“Come on, Liss.” Mario swung down into the catch position again. “Try a half twist. And this time let me do the catching, huh? It’s what I’m up here for.”
“Okay.” She turned to Tommy and said anxiously, “I always push the darned thing sidewise. Throw the bar just a little to the left this time, will you?”
“My left or your left when you’re coming back?”
“Like this.” She demonstrated. “Your left, I guess.”
“Sure. Ready? All right—go!”
Liss was gone, soaring toward the oncoming catcher. Below them, Tommy heard the door open, but he had his eyes fixed on the returning trapeze. He caught it, watching the girl swing in Mario’s hands; then he dropped it. As she broke free, someone yelled, “Elissa! What in God’s name—”
Tommy gasped as the girl’s smooth flight broke. For a second he thought she would miss the bar, but she got her hands on it raggedly and managed to kick up momentum again, arching her body backward; she swung up and dropped off on the platform. Angrily she whispered, “Damn!”
“What’s the matter, Liss?”
She didn’t answer. Tommy didn’t think she heard. Mario shouted, “David, you infernal fool, never yell at anyone when they’re flying!”
Liss muttered, “It’s my husband. I could have bet—” She broke off and called down, “It’s all right, David, I’m just playing.”
“Some game. Come on down, for heaven’s sake—it makes me dizzy to look at you!” The young man in the doorway came across the floor, and Tommy looked down at him. He was a thickset young man, dark-skinned and curly-haired, who looked as if, under most circumstances, he might be good-natured. But now he looked angry, and frightened.
“I mean it, Liss. You come down off that thing, right now.”
“Oh, Dave! I’m enjoying myself! I haven’t had a chance to try this in years! Watch.” She picked up the bar, flipped off the pedestal, and went into a dizzying spin at the end of her swing.
“Liss! Please!”
She made a fast half twist, reversed her hold on the bar, swung up, and sprang off on the pedestal again. Mario dived down into the net and somersaulted to the floor. As he went across the floor toward David, Tommy could hear the tremble of rage in his voice. “Listen, you stupid jerk, if you ever, ever, ever yell at anybody when they’re on the fly bar again, I will personally break your goddamn neck. We don’t do that in this family. I thought even you had brains enough to know that. That’s how people get killed! My God, didn’t you know you could have startled her just enough to give her a bad spill?”
“I want her down off there. Right now,” David said sharply, ignoring Mario, and called again, “Elissa! Sweetheart, please!”
Liss suddenly plunged downward. David cried out sharply in fright, but she tucked her head under, bounded springily to her feet in the net, and vaulted to the floor.
Mario called, “You’d better come down too, Tom.”
Tommy paused to fasten the bar to its hook; by the time he climbed out of the net, Liss was saying soothingly, “But, Dave, I’m as safe up there as you are behind the wheel of the car. Safer, really, because everybody up there knows exactly what he’s doing, and you can never be sure of that on the road. Why don’t you calm down, take off your shoes, and sit down and watch, and Matt and I will show you something to make you really sit up and take notice!”
David Renzo put a hand on his wife’s arm. “Liss, you are not going up there again. I forbid it.” His voice was still shaking.
“If you’d only stop worrying! I won’t get hurt—I never do. Matt only lets me do easy things, anyhow. Things any little kid could do. Half of them you could do yourself.”
“Dave,” Mario said, “don’t be a damn spoilsport. Liss doesn’t fuss if you want to go sailing or surfboarding, does she? She and I—all of us—grew up on a trapeze just the way you’d ride a bike.”
“Damn it, Elissa, I thought you came down here to watch!”
Liss’s hair was slipping out of the bandeau that held it, and her leotard was dark with sweat. Tommy handed her his sweater, and she put it around her shoulders without looking at it. She said, trying to control the temper that sparked from her glowing eyes. “I didn’t promise anything. This is the house I grew up in, and Matt’s my own brother. Where do you get off, trying to tell me what I can do and what I can’t?”
“Before I ever agreed to come down here this time, you promised me there wouldn’t be any more—”
“I didn’t promise you any such thing, and you know it!”
“You know perfectly well I would never have brought you down here if I’d any idea you were going to start all this flying business all over again! Oh, no, you wanted to see your mother, you wanted to see your family—not one word about this flying stuff. You knew perfectly well how I felt; we had that all out before Davey was born!”
Mario took his sister’s hand. “Liss, just say the word and I’ll pitch him out of here ass over teakettle!”
“Listen, you muscle-bound moron,” Dave said, “this just happens to be a private fight between me and my wife, and nobody asked you to stick in your big nose! If you’re the one who put her up to this, I’ll break your neck.”
“Suppose you try it,” said Mario, very quietly. He was smaller than David Renzo, but the other man looked at Mario’s bare torso, the heavy arm and shoulder muscles, and stepped back half a step. He swung around to Liss. “Damn it, you put on your skirt—you’re half naked—and take off that filthy sweater!”
Liss seemed aware of the sweater for the first time. “Whose is this? Tommy’s? Oh, thanks, Tom. David, he put it on me because I was all sweaty—you wouldn’t want me to stand around and get pneumonia, would you?” She turned to Tommy with a nervous little grin, trying to simulate an ordinary social manner. “It’s silly to stand here and argue. Tom, this is my husband. David Renzo. Dave, this is Tommy Zane; my brother’s been teaching him to fly.”
“Hello,” Dave grunted, turning back at once to Liss. “Your brother can teach the whole damn state of California to fly, provided he lets you alone.”
“Please—Dave, can’t you understand? I was just having fun. Come on, I’ll take you up to the platform. Once you’re up there, you can see for yourself that there’s nothing to be scared of, if you know what you’re doing.”
“Not on your life, thanks.” Dave looked up at the high rigging and paled. “Liss. I’m going to make an issue of this. I want you out of here and dressed in ten minutes, or I’ll take the baby and get in the car and start for San Francisco. When you get ready to come home, Davey and I will be at my mother’s—and don’t come back until you’re good and ready to forget all this circus business once and for all.”
He stalked out of the practice room, not looking back. Liss, tears running down her face, knelt and rummaged in the box for her shoes. Mario bent over her, and she turned her face into his shoulder and sobbed aloud.
“Matt, it isn’t that he’s mean. I just can’t make him understand!”
“Liss,” Mario begged, “don’t let him make you jump like a marionette. This is your home, sweetie. You have a perfect right to do anything you want to. Just you say the word, and I’ll tear him into cornflakes for you!”
Her swollen mouth trembled. “That wouldn’t help. He already thinks circus people are a gang of hooligans.” She blinked away her tears and looked at Tommy. “I’m so sorry you had to be in on that, Tom. I had no idea— He isn’t really always like that—”
Mar
io spun his sister around so she faced him. “Liss. Why do you stay with that fatheaded ape? Come back on the road with us this year. You know Papa Tony would love to have you back in the act. In three months you’d be as good as ever. In three years—who knows?”
“Oh, if I only could,” she whispered, and for a moment she hid her face against his chest. Then, slowly, she pushed him away. “There’s Davey—”
“Bring him along. Lucia trouped with all four of us.”
“And look at us. Anyway, the Renzos would take him away from me. David might let me go without a fight, but not the baby. And anyway”—she hung down her head, helpless— “I love him, Matt. And he loves me, or he wouldn’t be so scared.”
“Fine kind of love, if he wants to tear you out by the roots!” Mario held his sister’s arms. “Liss—sweetie—please, please, be you! Don’t crawl up those stairs like a whipped puppy! Don’t let him make you do that. Fight, Liss! If he really loves you, he’ll realize how much it means to you.”
“No,” she said unhappily, the tears making gleaming stripes down her chin, “I’ve got to go up to him, Matt. He’s really miserable, because he’s afraid for me. Maybe someday I can show him it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“And by that time it might be too late for you, piccina.”
“I’ll have to take that chance.”
Mario said, in a vicious undertone, “And they still wonder why I don’t get married,” as Liss blindly tied the laces of her shoes and, flinging her skirt over her arm, fled up the stairs.
CHAPTER 8
In the next weeks Tommy slipped effortlessly into his place in the Santelli house and in the family. They treated him exactly like one of themselves, and he quickly lost his early diffidence. It was impossible to feel like an outsider when he found Lucia matter-of-factly sewing a loose button on his coat, when Barbara demanded help with her homework, or when Angelo came out of the living room and yelled at whoever was making that damn racket on the stairs to shut the hell up before he got his rear end tanned. (That time it happened to be Tommy, racing Clay upstairs.) He learned to answer the old lady whether she called him Rico, Angelo, or Matthew, and after a while, seeing that it really confused and distressed her every time he said “Mrs. di Santalis” or “ma’am,” he began shyly to call her Nonna, as Clay and Barbara did, and no one seemed surprised, or even to notice,
He went regularly to school, and was punctual and attentive, but he made no friends there, or outside the family at all. The Santellis were a clannish family, and seemed to need no one outside. Barbara had one or two friends at the ballet school, but she rarely brought them to the house. Even Clay, young as he was, seemed to prefer the company of his family to that of his schoolmates. Saturday afternoons, he went to the movies with Barbara and sometimes Clay, or to swim in a nearby pool. Occasionally Johnny and Stella, and sometimes even the older ones—Liss and David, though rarely Mario—would join them, to make a close-knit family group of young people. Tommy was proud of the way they accepted him; he realized how little they needed or would tolerate outsiders.
They had not quite accepted Stella the same way, not yet. It was partly her own fault, of course. It was not that she was unfriendly or standoffish, but simply very quiet, very reserved. She rarely spoke unless spoken to directly. Tommy didn’t think he’d ever heard her offer an opinion on anything. She helped Lucia with cooking and cleaning and housework, and took upon herself, without any fuss, the detested chore of patching the faded, shabby practice tights. Two or three times when Lucia was out, she volunteered to stay with Davey so that Liss and David could go out together. Tommy thought she talked more to Davey than she did to anyone else in the house.
Tommy paid little attention to her until the day he made his first catches. Mario had made Stella put on a mechanic—the leather belt, strung on two ropes running through pulleys in the ceiling and held from below, used to break the flyer’s fall in case of a missed trick. While she snapped it around her waist, Tommy watched with surprise; Mario had never used a mechanic, even when working on the most difficult new tricks, and he had trained Tommy without one.
“Why is this?”
Mario explained coldly that a flyer who knew how to fall could miss a trick without hurting himself, but if the catcher fumbled and missed, the flyer couldn’t fall into the net properly; he was more apt to go shooting out over the edge of the net, to strike the wall, or drop to the hard floor. “So I’m going to be down here holding her on the ropes. I don’t give a damn if you break your own neck, but I don’t want you smashing up anyone else’s!”
That seemed reasonable enough to Tommy; but after one or two misses, he found that he could catch Stella smoothly and unspectacularly, without strain or fuss. It was simple enough, it was just a question of being there at the right point in space when the flyer was; it was just timing. When Mario called them down, and he went up with Angelo to work on his own more difficult tricks, Tommy sat on the floor with Stella and they talked. She looked pretty even in Barbara’s old gym suit, which she had put on for practice, a threadbare men’s sweater wrapped loosely around her shoulders, her hair damp with sweat around the thin blue-veined temples.
She had been born under canvas and literally cradled in the top tray of her mother’s wardrobe trunk. Her mother had been a bareback rider; her father, a “joey,” or acrobatic clown. Her mother had taught Stella to ride almost as soon as she could stand. When she was only four years old, her father had used the little girl for a top-mounter, balancing her on his shoulders as he went through his comic routines. At nine she had been a veteran in the ring, appearing in a Risley act in which one of her uncles, an acrobat, lay on his back on the ground and, on his upstretched feet, spun and juggled Stella and one of her small cousins like two bouncing balls. Sooner or later she had tried virtually every acrobatic act in the circus. They had been traveling in Australia, the first year of the war, when her mother was killed in a train crash. Stella’s father had remarried almost at once. It was Stella’s stepmother who had taught her trapeze work, and for a while, under the name of “The Swallows,” the two of them had appeared in a double-trapeze act. Stella grew evasive about her teens, or what had brought her to the carnival where Johnny had found her, but she talked freely about the work she had done.
“These days they won’t let you do anything unless you’re almost old enough to vote. I worked in New York one winter at a Shriner circus. I was eleven and I’d been doing swing-overs for three years, but Daddy had to tell the police I was sixteen or they’d have turned me over to the Gerry Society—some of the kids in the show did get taken away.”
“How old are you now, Stella?”
She said quickly, “Twenty-one,” but Tommy did not believe her. She looked no older than he was himself. He was never to know her exact age, even years later when it became a point of dispute, and he sometimes wondered if she knew it precisely herself.
One afternoon they had come down earlier than usual. Johnny was catching, and Tommy and Stella were on the board together, Mario coaching them from the floor, when Papa Tony came in. The old man climbed the ladder briskly, stepping out beside them. As he rubbed his hands briefly on the resin bag, he cast a contemptuous glance at Stella’s faded gym suit.
“Have you no tights?” he demanded.
“No. Mrs. Gardner said this would be all right,” Stella murmured, shrinking slightly, and Papa Tony scowled:
“This is something new, for Stella and Johnny to join us here.”
“I asked them to,” said Mario from the floor.
Liss was perched on Barbara’s low trapeze, swinging gently back and forth less than six feet off the floor. She said, “Stel’s the only one light enough for Tommy to catch, Papa. Except me, and you know I promised David.”
“I see.” Papa Tony flashed a disquieting glare at Stella. Then he called, “You are working with us, Johnny?” As always, he pronounced it Gianni.
‘That’s up to you, Papa. I’ll go down if you like.”<
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“No, stay where you are. Angelo is not yet here, and I have not yet had the opportunity to watch you working. Tommy”—he turned his head—“go down. We will let the young lady handle the bar for me, I believe. Well, Miss Stella?”
Stella gave him a nervous little smile. Tommy started to step off on the ladder, but Papa Tony said sharply, “Let me see you throw a somersault into the net. Do you think you can do it without landing on your face?”
Tommy drew a deep breath. He could drop or fall from the bar at any point in his swing, but so far Mario had not allowed him to attempt a forward somersault from the board to the net. He held his arms, bent at the elbows, before his head, then dived off the board, spun, clasping his arms around his tucked-up knees, and struck heavily on his back, bounding up to his feet.
“It will serve, but you are not a jumping jack,” Papa Tony called down harshly. “You will black your eye or break your nose on your own kneecap, that way. Keep your head tucked under and roll with the sway of the net, hear me?”
Tommy picked up his sweater, tied the arms around his neck, and dropped to the floor to watch. Above them Papa Tony swung out and back, then made a neat perfect pass over the bar, cleaving the air like a gull; he twisted in mid-flight so that Johnny’s extended hands took not his wrists but his ankles. They swung together; then Papa Tony passed his hands behind his arched back, bringing up his body through their loop, and then he was swinging by his wrists from Johnny’s hands. On their second swing together, Johnny released him and he flew back to the trapeze.
“Gorgeous!” Liss called, clapping her hands, and added to Tommy, “I used to do that—it was one of the first tricks Lulu taught me.”
“It is a woman’s trick, really,” said Papa Tony scornfully, “and very simple if you have the strength. The thing is to make it look pretty.”
Johnny called, “Think you can do it, Stella?”
“We shall see,” Papa Tony said. With a seigneurial little nod, he passed the bar to Stella, and said sharply, “Go!”
The Catch Trap Page 13