Lucia fingered her temple thoughtfully. “Look, I’ve still got the scar.” She turned her head so that the children could see a narrow white line running up into her hair. “Yes, tell them, Joe.”
Even Stella looked up from her sewing, and Tommy stared with curiosity at the queenly Lucia, bent like a blushing girl over the satin in her lap, but smiling a little, too.
Joe said, “Well, it happened in Denver . . . was it before or after Liss was born?”
“After,” said Papa Tony. “Lucia had been working again for almost three months.”
“Well, that year we ended our act with a trick we called a triple flyaway. Me on the board, and Matthew in the catch trap—big Matt, that is—and then Lulu would go into a long swing, and spin on the bar—and she could really get up a beautiful spin when she put her mind to it. Then, just as she’d go so high everybody was gasping, she’d whirl the trapeze right up over the supports and swan-dive down, just as Matt and I dived down, and we’d all three hit the net together. There was something about the sight of the three falling bodies that always made the stands scream, even with the net right there in plain sight.”
“I remember that trick. You had the kids do it, back when Matt—young Matt, that is—was still catching, just about the time Johnny learned to fly,” Angelo said.
Liss made a face. “That routine . . . that was murder! Matt and Johnny and me. We always managed to get all tangled up. We kept getting black eyes and bloody noses from falling on top of one another, and finally I broke Johnny’s finger and Lulu took the routine out of the act for good.”
“It’s not a trick for amateurs,” Joe admitted complacently. “Well, that day in Denver, a prop man got in a hurry about fixing one of the spreader ropes, and when Lulu hit the net, the damn thing broke, snapped up, and whacked her across the face. It laid her cheek open to the bone, and collapsed that whole end of the net. She rolled right out on the ground. Matt and I managed to grab the ropes, but Lu went right out.”
“She couldn’t land bad if she wanted to,” Angelo put in. “She was groggy, out on her feet, but she rolled over, did four ground somersaults, came right up on her feet, and bowed. The crowd thought it was part of the trick and went wild over her.”
Lucia put her face in her hands, laughter escaping between spread fingers, as Joe went on: “And then she saw the prop man standing there. Our nice ladylike Lucia, the girl they used to say was the only aerialist in the world with no temperament at all, our Lulu—she lost her temper. She called him—”
“Joey,” Lucia said faintly, “if you repeat what I called him it will cost you five cents, and anyway, the kids don’t know that much Italian—I hope!”
“Well, she called him, uh, a dirty name at the top of her voice and then socked him square across the face. And in those days, believe me, our girl had the muscles for a real roundhouse punch! She laid him right out in the sawdust, and then she stood there with the blood running down her face—and she kicked him!”
Davey, on Joe’s lap, sat up and said sleepily, “Lulu?”
Lucia hastily put her embroidery aside and picked up her grandson. “Yes, Lulu,” she said in a voice thick with laughter. “Yes, for once the act had a real dramatic climax. I can only think of one time it had a better one, Joey. That time we were both in on it.”
Abruptly, and with tense, total silence in the room, they realized that Lucia’s bright eyes were shining with tears and her voice breaking. Hastily she turned, holding Davey up against her. “Liss, sweetie, you’re almost as rotten a mother as I was. What in the world are you thinking of, keeping Davey up this late? Go on with your game, kids—I’ll take Davey upstairs.”
CHAPTER 9
The mild California winter moved on without incident, until early February, when there was a break in the routine.
Another branch of the Santelli family, the sons of Papa Tony’s brother Rico, had moved up to Santa Barbara and left the circus permanently. A daughter of this family was a postulant nun in a convent there and was about to take her final vows. Papa Tony and his children were invited to the ceremony, the cousins in that family had not seen Johnny in four years, and in the end, when they all drove away, only Tommy and Stella were left alone in the big house. They had both been separately invited to come—Stella by Liss and Johnny, and Tommy by both Lucia and Angelo—and had separately declined.
They both felt a little awkward, alone in the huge house. Stella spent the morning tediously cleaning up the big kitchen, and Tommy loafed aimlessly around the practice room, trying to find something to do with himself. In mid-afternoon, Stella joined him on the porch and asked, “Want to go for a drive?”
“You got the keys to Johnny’s car?”
She laughed. “It was my father’s car. It’s mine now. Come on, we’ll go out for a while. If nothing else, we can stop and get an ice cream cone.”
He got his denim jacket from the hall and joined her. He had been curious about what he had supposed was Johnny’s car; it would be the first time he had ridden in an MG. Stella walked toward the car, loosely wrapping a scarf around her blowing hair. She was wearing faded white dungarees and a boy’s sweater.
“When did you learn to drive?” Tommy asked her.
“Oh, Lord. My dad taught me to drive when I was a little tad—nine, ten years old. Just as soon as I could get my foot down on the brakes. Lots of men don’t like to see a woman drive, but even when I was little he wasn’t like that. He said if Amelia Earhart could fly a plane, I could sure learn to drive a car.” She got in and started the motor. “It happened like this: after I got fired from the show and Johnny stuck his neck out to get my rigging back for me, we were both in sort of a spot. We had no place to go—that is, I didn’t. He had a place to go, he said, but no way to get there. I had the car, so we decided to stay together, and came on here.” She put her foot down on the accelerator and swung the wheel hard, backing out of the curved driveway.
She drove fast and expertly, shattering Tommy’s male illusions about women drivers within five minutes. Quickly they were out of town and on the highway, and she turned onto a deserted road. Tommy had never been in such a powerful car; old and battered though it was, the racing motor purred, not with the quiet of an ordinary car but with the controlled snarl of one of his father’s cats. Stella pushed the speed higher and higher, flying along as the indicator nosed gently up: 65, 70, 75, 80, 85—Tommy drew his breath against the rush of wind past his face, tensed to the tremble of it. The desert highway rushed past, blurred to streaks of brown and gray and green, scenery leaping out and falling away; for a few minutes he was not aware of time at all. His father had never driven their sedate old Hudson over the legal speed limit. He saw Stella’s lips move as she spoke to him, but he did not hear what she said and didn’t care. The world was rushing by and he was conscious of a strange, taut telescoping, as if he were being whirled into a vortex. Stella was an irrelevance; nothing existed but this strange, tumbling sense of himself in space and time. He finally realized that the wind was softening on his forehead and that they had slowed to a moderate fifty miles an hour and that Stella was speaking to him, a trifle impatiently this time.
“Sorry, Stel, I didn’t hear you.” Why couldn’t she be quiet? What could she have to say that could possibly match his mood? Perhaps no one except maybe Mario could have matched that mood. He remembered something random Mario had once said: Angelo says I drive like a homicidal maniac . . . . Now Tommy knew why—the violence, the deliberate ravishment of speed . . . .
“I said I don’t want to get a fine for speeding. I can’t afford to pay any fines, and Johnny and I got caught in a speed trap along here one time. We’ll get off on the other road. Would you like to drive for a while?”
She said it so casually that he was stunned. Would he? Would he like to drive this beauty?
“You do know how to drive, don’t you?”
“Sure, my father showed me how last year.” Then with scrupulous truthfulness he confessed: “I
’ve only driven a few times, though. Maybe four times.”
“Well, there’s no traffic out here, so you can’t possibly hit anything. Slide over.” Matter-of-factly she jumped out and walked around the car. Tommy slid into the driver’s seat and listened, in a curious sort of disbelieving daze, while she showed him, meticulously, the different controls. She laughed a little at him.
“You’re a funny kid. Liss’s husband, Clay, even Angelo—they knew it from fender to fender before it had been in the drive three days. I got the notion you didn’t care much about cars.”
Tommy only laughed a little helplessly. The gear lever felt unfamiliar and the wheel was smaller than usual; for a time he over-controlled and the car swerved on the road with every touch of his fingers. But his reflexes were the perfect reflexes of an athlete, and before long he felt confident enough to ease the speed up to sixty. He held the wheel hard, feeling tense and cautious, keyed up to concert pitch.
He cast a little sidewise look at Stella. She was leaning forward, alert and smiling, but she wasn’t watching every move he made; she trusted him. A curious warmth filled him. He leaned back in the seat, steadying the wheel, and for a long few minutes he tasted the strange sweetness of jumping, without responsibility, into a full dream of manhood. He was hardly aware of anything except the wheel, the road under the car. Under oath he could not have said, afterward, where they drove.
It was growing dark when they turned back toward town and Stella took the wheel again. He surrendered it reluctantly, but once back in the passenger’s seat he realized he was exhausted with the strain and was grateful to her. Neither of them was quite sure of the way home. They took a wrong turning on one of the roads, quarreled briefly about it, and finally crossed the L. A. city limits well after the houses on the road were glowing with lights. They stopped at a roadside stand and bought bowls of hot chili, neither of them talking much. When they came out of the diner, it was cold; a bitter wind was blowing, and fog was beginning to sweep across the lighted streets. Tommy was cold and emptily exhausted, and Stella looked pale in the recurrent arc-light glare. Suddenly a hard splatter of rain splashed the windshield, and abruptly, before they had time to know what was happening, they were both soaked to the skin in the violent pouring rain. Stella cursed under her breath, words that shocked Tommy, even knowing he was not supposed to have heard, but when she turned to him she was laughing through chattering teeth.
“Stop and put the top up?” she yelled. “Or make a dash for it?”
“We sure can’t get any wetter,” Tommy yelled back. “I don’t guess we’re going to melt!” Somehow the pouring rain and their drenched clothes were funny.
Lights sprang at them and melted away on the slick black streets, but Stella handled the car perfectly; then they were rushing up their own street and under the shelter of the carport. They ran up the steps together, Stella laughing wildly, her bedraggled hair falling out of the scarf and clinging wetly to her neck. The house, dark and enormous, wrapped around them, warm, as they slammed the heavy door. Tommy fumbled for the light switch, touched Stella’s hand as she reached for it, and suddenly, as he had done in the change room, caught her against him and kissed her. Her face was icy cold from the wind, her hair cold and wet against his cheek, but her mouth was warm and her body, sharp and narrow, fitted clumsily against his through their thick jeans and sweaters.
In a voice shaken with giggles she said, “Oh, Tommy, we’re so wet—don’t.”
“Like I said, we can’t be any wetter.” He tipped up her face between his hands and kissed her again. As his mouth touched hers they were both wild with mirth, but she quickly grew still in his embrace, standing there awkwardly with her body pressed against his.
“Don’t, Tom,” she said in a whisper. “Come on, we’re both all wet—we’d better both go up and get dried off.”
Meekly he let his arms fall and stepped back. Her hair, dark with rain, straggled against her collar; she looked untidy and thin and endearingly pretty. They went silently up the huge quiet stairs and Stella turned away toward her own room, then suddenly turned back. “Tommy—”
“Go an’ get on some dry clothes,” he said quickly. “You don’t want to catch cold.”
“I’ll turn on the heater in my room.” She vanished behind her door.
Tommy, with a curious letdown sensation, went into the little room with the striped wallpaper. He heard the rain smashing hard on the window; a car roared by on the canyon road. He wondered if the Santellis had started back yet and if so when they would be here. He pulled off his wet pants and shirt, found his underwear was wet, too, and stripped to the skin. He put on a dry pair, pulled on clean pants, and rummaged in the bottom drawer. Mario had left a jumble of clothes here: pajamas, a couple of faded pairs of tights, socks, shorts, T-shirts. Tommy hesitated, feeling guilty about it all over again, but finally, unable to resist the compulsion, he took out one of Mario’s T-shirts and put it on. He always had the excuse ready that he had taken it by mistake for one of his own, but so far no one had even noticed, let alone challenged him, and since Mario brought his clothes to the house to be washed anyway, Lucia never noticed them in the laundry.
He went along the hall to the room Stella shared with Barbara. The door stood just a crack ajar; he started to walk in, then rapped on the frame. “Stel? You decent?”
“Sure, come on in.”
She was sitting in front of Barbara’s dressing table, wrapped to the neck in a shabby, faded pink chenille bathrobe. It was a pretty room, done in white paint and flowered chintz. Tommy had an odd thought that Stella looked out of place in the done-up prettiness of the room, and as if she had caught the thought from him, Stella turned away from the mirror.
“I love this room. I never had a pretty room like this. In winter quarters we lived in rooming houses, each one worse than the last. Dirty and sometimes bedbugs. And on the road, any old place that would take show people in.” She bent to slide her feet into old scuffed slippers. “Maybe we ought to go downstairs. Lucia doesn’t like it when the boys come in here, and she bawled Barbara out for going into Angelo’s room even to take his laundry in when he wasn’t there.”
“I’m so used to living in a trailer I never think about it,” Tommy said, not truthfully.
Stella came and sat down on the bed, moving Barbara’s brown stuffed teddy bear out of the way. They held hands gently for a minute without talking. After a time Tommy leaned over and kissed her again. She felt warm now in the soft robe. They sat there awkwardly turned toward each other, then Tommy gently pulled her back on the bed. She rolled a little away from him, embarrassed, then laughed and let him put his arms around her. He rolled over, supporting himself on his elbows, and leaned over her. She looked lovely, fair and childish, her hair spread out on the pillow, still damp with rain and curling in small golden rings. She pulled him down to her. When they broke apart to breathe, Tommy was breathless. Her ribs were hard and bony against him, her chest almost as flat as his own, but when he drew his hand against her breasts he felt her draw a gasp that shook her whole body. The touch of her hands on the nape of his neck made him shiver. He wondered if she was wearing anything at all under the robe. Suddenly he was frightened and anxious without knowing why. He lay there hugging her, his face buried in her hard shoulder. It wasn’t anything like the vague dreams he had had, kissing faceless girls . . . . He tried to pull the robe apart, but she held his hand. Her wrists, which looked frail and brittle enough to break, had the steel-wire strength of every flyer’s.
“No, Tommy. Don’t, now. Be nice.”
He didn’t insist. This was almost enough. They kissed again softly and the thought flashed through his head that he would like to sleep here. Just to sleep—he meant no more; he would have liked to fall asleep here with his head on her shoulder, just like this, her soft body holding him close, like this and no more. He felt inexpressibly lonely without quite knowing why. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be homesick, and said fiercely to him
self, Of all the damn dumb things, here you are making out with a girl and you start that . . . .
She rolled a little away from him. “Tommy, we shouldn’t be doing this.”
“We’re not doing much.” Suddenly the image flashed across his mind of Johnny’s arm protectively, possessively around her, and he asked abruptly, “Are you and Johnny sleeping together?”
She pulled the robe over her breasts again and sat up swiftly, pushing her fingers through her tumbled hair.
“Under his own mother’s roof?” she asked, with a brief flash of irony. “Lucia wouldn’t like that. She had a nice little talk with me.”
“You don’t like Lucia, do you Stel?”
“She’s been very kind to me,” Stella said, nervously pleating the edge of her robe. “She’s taught me a lot. And I’m under her roof, as a guest. I guess she didn’t expect me to have any kind of notions of how to behave in a—well, a decent place. Well, I guess maybe—she knew my folks were carny people, too. And really, she’s been just as nice as she could possibly be—they all have. Lucia—she made me two dresses when she made my costumes for the act, and she made over one of Liss’s coats for me. I guess mine was awfully raggedy. She told me once that she hoped Johnny’d marry me. I don’t know why—I’m sure I’m not the kind of girl she’d pick for her daughter-in-law. I’m not—oh, not so respectable and nice, I don’t know how to talk—I forget and talk dirty sometimes . . . I’m just not like the rest of them—” She swallowed and was silent.
“Because she knows you’re going to be a flyer, Stel. A good one. A real one, I mean, like Mario—not a fake like Johnny.”
“Johnny isn’t—” she flared, then fell silent and stood up.
“Tom, you’d better let me finish getting dressed. Then well go down and fix some supper, okay?”
Tommy put out a hand, trying to reestablish the intimacy of a moment ago, but the mood and the moment had veered away. An odd, deep-cut melancholy settled on Tommy for the minute that had somehow slipped out of his arms with Stella’s gentle gesture, for Stella giggling and tousled as she had been a few minutes ago. He could still feel the warmth of her body, but she was well across the room by now. Briskly, not even waiting for him to go, Stella slid out of her robe, bare and thin and innocent in ragged cotton panties, and pulled her dress on over her head; and that somehow broke the mood more violently than if she had chased him out of the room with screams of outraged modesty. You dope, he berated himself. Why did you ask her that dumb question about Johnny? That’s what did it.
The Catch Trap Page 15