The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Tommy said in a quick flash of insight, “You really wanted to dance, didn’t you? Not fly.”

  “I thought so, for a while,” Mario said. “I even got upset, one year, when I had to turn down an offer from a dance troupe in order to go on the road with the show. Angelo would have fought for my right to stay in college, if I’d wanted to, even after—well, I won’t get into that right now. But dancing, that was different. So I went back on the road, and I’m really not sorry; that was the year he started working with me on the triple. But in the winter, hanging around the ballet school, I still wonder if I did the right thing. And I’m really not any good as a dancer now. Maybe I could have been. I’ll never know, not now.”

  “You looked great to me, only I don’t know anything about it. I’d think you’d dance for the family, though.”

  “Hell, no. They say all the wrong things. And Angelo hates it. Oh, he doesn’t mind my doing it just to help Barbie show off, but he hates it when I really get into it. Liss and I used to dance a lot, and it gave him fits. I quit that a long time ago.”

  “Just the same, I’m glad I saw you once. Dancing, you’re”—Tommy hesitated, then said shyly—“you’re beautiful.”

  “Fighting words.” Mario chuckled and gave him a playful punch, but Tommy felt Mario understood. As always, when surrounded by the family and working hard, they had reverted to the old status of brothers, companions. With time and commonplace living together, inevitably some of the early intensity had worn off, and even their lovemaking had become almost taken for granted, habit, a brief embrace, silent, before they slept. But tonight, when Mario put his arms around Tommy, the boy felt all the old emotion surging up inside him. He said nothing—he had been taught to say nothing—but it left him shaken, near to tears again, as it had not for some time.

  ~o0o~

  Shortly after Easter, Tommy came home from school with Barbara to hear voices behind the closed door of the living room. While he was hanging up his sweater, Joe Santelli came out and beckoned them in.

  “We were waiting for you.”

  It was barely dusk, for the days were lengthening with the spring, but the curtains had been drawn and the fire lighted. They were all there, formally assembled, and Tommy wondered, What is going on? As Tommy and Barbara came in, Papa Tony, standing before the fire, said, “Good, now we are all here, I can tell you what you older ones must have guessed. We have been offered a season contract with Woods-Wayland Circus.”

  Will Mother and Dad let me stay with the Santellis if we’re not with Lambeth? It flashed through Tommy’s mind, and as if speaking directly to him, Papa Tony said, “Lambeth has an option on our services, but I can break it if I notify them before April first. James Woods has asked me to form my own troupe; he did not specify size. Barbara,” he said, “Lucia tells me that if you work hard, you are ready to go with us this year. Tommy was your age when he began.”

  The girl swallowed, folding a pleat in her skirt.

  “What did Daddy say, Papa Tony?” She looked up at Joe.

  “In this family,” Joe said gently, “if you are old enough to fly, you are old enough to decide it for yourself. The question is, do you want to go, Barbara?”

  Barbara bent her head and said, “Papa Tony, I—I don’t want to. I want to stay in school and—and finish with my class, and go on with my dancing.”

  The old man’s heavy eyebrows went up. Lucia looked away, into the fire. Finally Papa Tony said, “So, it is your right. I am not a tyrant. Tommy, what have you to say? We have not yet decided whether to stay with Lambeth or take this new contract. What is your opinion?”

  Tommy swallowed. Was he actually being consulted? “Well, I’m under contract to you, Papa Tony. Wherever you say I go, I go, and you always told me a performer does what he’s told without arguing about it.”

  The old man smiled. “In rehearsal and in performance, that is true. But the rule in this family has always been, before we make any big decision, everybody has to be heard, from the youngest to the oldest, so that we who make the decisions have heard everyone and we know.”

  Johnny whispered, “That means we all speak our piece and then he makes up his mind the way he meant to all along.”

  Papa Tony gave him a sharp glance, but only said, “Tommy?”

  “Well, I knew Mother and Dad expected us back with Lambeth.”

  “Yes, your parents must be considered and told. Gianni?”

  “Woods-Wayland is a rough outfit,” Johnny said. “They work hell out of everybody. It’s a step up for me and Stel, of course, but they sure aren’t going to give us star treatment like you got with Lambeth. We’ll all have a lot of extra jobs to do. On the other hand, they’re one of the biggest rail circuses still on the road. They’re about as good as we can do, short of Starr’s, and Matt especially has reached a point where he needs showing off and exploiting a little, or he’ll spend his life being a big frog in little puddles like Lambeth. I think, myself, he should have taken up Randy Starr’s offer, but that’s all water under the bridge. I say take it.”

  Papa Tony nodded noncommittally. “Stella?”

  “Oh, I don’t have anything to say about it, do I?”

  “If you travel with us, you do. Even if you do not fly with us, wives of performers are always given a place in the performance.”

  “She goes with us,” Johnny said, “or I don’t go.” Papa Tony beamed.

  Stella murmured, “Well, I can fill in almost anywhere; there aren’t many acts I haven’t tried. I’d like to fly, but I can do almost anything, and I’d sort of like being with a regular circus.”

  “Good girl,” Papa Tony said. “You are with us, then. Matt?”

  Mario shrugged. “Johnny seems to have spoken for me. All I’ve got to say is this: Jim Woods is a good guy, I know his rep. The Waylands are a pair of grafters, sharpies. That’s personal. Professionally, I guess Jock’s right; it’s time to move on up, see if we can be a big frog in the big puddles, too.”

  “Elissa?”

  She shut her eyes and turned abruptly away from Mario’s expectant face. Then she drew a deep breath and, said, “Count me out. I’m not going. The rest of you do what you think best.”

  Mario said, shocked, “Sweetie, you told me—” and Papa Tony’s eyes flamed with sudden wrath.

  “Che—? Ragazza—”

  “Here, here, kitten,” Angelo said, “what’s all this about?”

  Elissa got to her feet and stood there, twisting the end of her long braid. “I’m not going,” she said. “I can’t take Davey on the road: Lu took us on the road and look at us! Anyway, David wouldn’t let me go—he’d probably divorce me first. And you wouldn’t like that, would you, Lulu?” she said. turning on her mother. “There has never been a divorced woman in the family, has there? And anyway—anyway, I’m—I’m—I’m going to have another baby,” she said, and gulped, turning viciously on Lucia. “Now are you satisfied? Damn it, now are you satisfied, Lulu?”

  “Lisa—cara—Liss, that isn’t fair! I told you it was your free choice—” Lucia began, but Liss stopped her with a gesture.

  “You told me this, you told me that, you told me so many damn things I don’t know whether I’m coming or going! Now it’s settled. I don’t know if I wanted it this way or not, but anyway it’s settled, it’s out of my hands, and I’m glad—I’m glad that now I don’t have to worry about it anymore, or listen to you telling me all about it both ways anymore—” Her voice cracked. She burst into wild sobbing, flung up her two hands in front of her face, and ran out of the room, slamming the door.

  “Oh, my God—” Stella gasped, and got up to follow her. Lucia caught her arm.

  “No,” she said. “No, Stel, let her go—”

  Mario was on his feet, but Lucia stepped in front of him. “No. Sit down, Matt. Stella, you too. Sit down, I said!” Lucia’s face was deathly white.

  “Lucia, Lucia cara,” Joe said gently. “Elissa didn’t mean—she was only—”

  Lucia
cut off his words with an imperative gesture. She said something in Italian, then, “I know. I’ll go and talk to her.”

  “Talk to her!” Mario said savagely. “Gesu e Maria, you’ve done enough talking! Can’t you let her alone, even now? Haven’t you done enough?”

  Papa Tony snarled something at him in Italian. Mario’s face flamed, but he sat down, lowering his head, staring at his knees. Tommy saw his mouth move; he was swearing under his breath. But he did not move as Lucia went out of the room, quietly closing the door behind her. There was a long, shaky silence.

  At last Papa Tony said with a heavy shrug, “So. Elissa has chosen. She should have spoken to me in private, not like this. Let us continue. Angelo?”

  Angelo stood up, clasping his big hands behind his back. He looked shaken, and Tommy had the distinct impression that it was an effort for him to speak at all. But when he finally spoke, it was as if the interruption had never happened.

  “Touring with a rail show isn’t as comfortable as traveling in our own private trailer. The kids wouldn’t remember, but I remember all too well and I’m not sure I want to go back to it.”

  “I remember pretty well,” Mario said, raising his head, and Tommy had the feeling that he, too, wanted to pretend there had been no interruption, “and I’m all for it. No cooking, no housekeeping, no driving between towns at night.”

  “No privacy, no family life, no freedom,” Angelo said. “I’ve got used to living in the trailer. I had it in my head I might get married again. I’m not exactly crazy about the idea of going back to a lower berth in a car filled up with sixty men. However,”—he shrugged—“like Johnny said, Woods-Wayland is as good as we can do, outside of Starr’s, and I don’t see how we can possibly turn it down. So this whole discussion is boring as hell—excuse me, Stella—and I don’t see why we keep hashing it over.”

  “I would not go as far as that,” Papa Tony said, “but it would be difficult to turn down an offer as good as this. Has anyone else anything to say?”

  Mario got up and stood with his back to the fire. “Of course, Liss just threw us one hell of a curve—” he started.

  “Can you honestly say you didn’t know?” Johnny exploded. “We all know Liss tells you every damn thing—you probably knew it before she told Dave! You were sitting it out, waiting till the last minute, weren’t you, hoping Stel and I would get sick of hanging around and go off on our own, so you and Liss could have it all your own way—”

  “Johnny, don’t—” Stella begged, pulling on his arm, but he ignored her. Angelo cut in.

  “Shut your trap, Johnny. Matt didn’t know any more about it than you did! And I’ll bet my month’s pay that Liss wasn’t just keeping quiet about it on the off chance something would happen to her kid, either, or sneaking off and looking for a doctor on the sly—”

  “Listen, you bastard—” Johnny sprang up, clenching his fists.

  Stella begged, “Johnny, Johnny, please—”

  “Basta! Enough!” Papa Tony snarled. “Not another word, either of you! That is past! Past, you hear me? We are now discussing the season to come, not what has gone before. Sit down, both of you!”

  Johnny sank back on the hearth, and after a moment Tommy saw him groping for Stella’s hand. “Sorry, babe,” he muttered. “Sorry, Angelo. But that was kind of below the belt. Fact is, I guess Liss just threw us one hell of a big curve, too.”

  Papa Tony waited till they were all silent. “Anything more?”

  “I didn’t finish,” Mario said. “With a small show like Lambeth we could go on working, improving. With a big one, the way we start the season, that’s the way we finish it.”

  “Still,” Papa Tony said, “I think it is time for this step. Listen, children. This will be my last season.”

  “Why, Papa?” Joe said, speaking for the first time since Lucia had left them, “Pierre Regny was still doing doubles at seventy, and Gerard Might did a perch-pole act at eighty-two!”

  Papa Tony chuckled. “I have no ambition to be billed as the oldest aerialist in the world. Fifty-two years ago, my brother Rico and I, we had been doing a casting act with my papa—you remember the old casting act, two stationary catchers on fixed bars, a flyer between them? After we watched the Spanish team doing their first flying-return act in Vienna, we looked at each other and we said, ‘Well, well, we need some new rigging anyway.’ We made our own flying net by hand, that winter.” He rubbed his knuckles, reminiscently. “And that was the beginning of the Flying Santellis. Two years after, we came to America with Starr’s. Fifty years, it is enough. When the old knees get knobby, when every town looks just like every other town and you can tell what state you are in only by the color of the mud, then it is time to stay home by the fire. All I want now is to see you youngsters established, get what you deserve. This year, yes, I go along, I look after you, but you don’t need me. I look at you now, I see Matt is going to be the best there is, and Tommy and Stella right behind him, maybe not behind him at all. I see you, Angelo, so sober, so conscientious, all ready to look after the family when I’m not with you anymore. And you too, Johnny—we fight, we can’t get along, but you fight for what you want, and that’s good, too, when you learn to watch that temper of yours, when you learn to fight for the family and not just for yourself. Elissa, I don’t know—she’s got her life, I don’t want to interfere, not if it’s like that.” For a moment, he looked sad. Then he sighed and smiled. “So, I’ve done all one man can do. I’ve made the Flying Santellis again. If the Lord lets me live, I see you all in center ring someday, but after this I am only the old man by the fire. For one lifetime, I’ve had all one man can have before the devil gets jealous.” He stood in the firelight, his dark eyes glinting with his rare, beautiful smile. “How many men, I wonder, can say so much?”

  CHAPTER 23

  The Woods-Wayland three-ring Railroad Circus was a bewildering new world to Tommy. After the privacy and intimacy of the Lambeth Circus, he was as bewildered and lost as any performer in his first season.

  In the dormitory car of the unmarried male performers, Tommy and Mario shared a tiny compartment in a corridor of two dozen such compartments. Angelo and Papa Tony had one next door. Stella and Johnny shared another in the adjacent car reserved for married couples. The Santellis were not getting the star treatment of the three or four major headliners with the show, who had private cars or spacious staterooms. On the other hand, though, as important performers featured on the bill they were not herded into the three-deep bunk-bed cars of the miscellaneous clowns, riders, jugglers. and minor performers.

  Angelo said once that he was glad Liss and Barbara had not traveled with them this season. As unmarried female performers they would have had to share a tiny space in the “convent car” which held all the single girls with the show; he had heard that there were ninety girls crowded into it this year.

  It felt strange to eat in the enormous “cook top” crammed elbow-by-elbow with two hundred and twenty performers and three hundred work hands; the food was good and the service excellent, but it was not anything like home cooking. It was strange to fall asleep after the show with the train pulling out, the rails clicking off noisily under their heads and the motion of the swaying train beneath them, rather than going to bed quietly in the family trailer.

  However, he got used to it. He enjoyed waking on the gray morning sidings in strange towns; he got used to the close quarters of the aerialists’ dressing tent which he shared with two dozen other men, rather than each act dressing in the privacy of its own living quarters; he learned to sleep through the protest sounds of animals being loaded or unloaded in gray dawn or black night. Every able-bodied man with the show, even a featured performer, was expected to join the work hands in the business of setting up canvas and rigging. Tommy, working with the riggers, learned the fast split-second rhythm of the show: the drumbeat pounding of the stake men, the chant of the rope caller as the guying-out crew worked around the Big Top, taking up the slack in the canvas,
and the soft basso-profundo of the colored canvas-men, with the melancholy jazz rhythm of their chant, Take it, shake it, weave it, make it, mo-ove along!

  As Johnny had predicted, they were all handed plenty of additional duties. They were, of course, expected to ride in the spec, and because as acrobats they could presumably handle and balance themselves without difficulty, Tommy and Johnny found themselves in the highest rigging of a clipper-ship float, wearing loincloths and turbans and very little else. Angelo rode, caftaned and turbaned, in a group of janissaries on horseback; Papa Tony, in rajah costume, drove a chariot, surrounded by four lovely young girls from the aerial ballet. Stella had drawn the traditional task of a really experienced female acrobat, and perched on the neck of an elephant, while Mario, to his eloquent disgust—he protested, but it didn’t get him anywhere—had somehow drawn the most hated task in any circus: riding a camel.

  In addition, after a conference with Coe Wayland, the aerial manager, Tommy found himself performing in a tumbling act in one of the end rings, filling in while a famous troupe of Spanish acrobats held center ring. The tumbling act, comprised of Coe Wayland, Johnny, Tommy, Mario, and Stella, was billed as “The Gardners.” With all these changes and extra tasks, Tommy found every show a new race against dust, tangled tights, knotted shoelaces, and time. He was always breathless.

  And yet, for him, the early months of this season were one of those intervals of calm which come into every life, a plateau of rest and contentment. After the storms of his fifteenth summer he was naїvely amazed at the peace of it, and felt, at sixteen, that it was because he had grown up.

  Despite the crowding and the lack of privacy, he and Mario did not build up nearly so much tension or frustration. They went everywhere together, and it never occurred to anyone with the show that they were not, in simple fact, brothers. All evidence supported the assumption: the way Angelo ordered them both around at rehearsals and in the dressing tent; Tommy’s instant and childish obedience to Papa Tony’s lightest word; the very openness of their affection, which made it seem more artless than it was. He was named in the contract as Thomas LeRoy Zane, Jr., performing as Tommy Santelli, just as Mario and Johnny were named as Matthew Gardner and John B. Gardner, performing as Mario Santelli and Johnny Santelli. But even circus people who had known Papa Tony for decades believed Tommy was just another of the Santelli grandsons. The card tacked on their door read Mario and Tommy Santelli, The Flying Santellis, exactly as the one on the compartment next door read Tonio and Angelo Santelli, and Mario never spoke of Tommy anywhere around the show except as “my kid brother.” Closed away in their tiny compartment, they talked during the long night runs when they should have been sleeping. As often as not, they would fall asleep in each other’s arms in the lower berth, Mario’s head resting on Tommy’s shoulder and the clatter of the rails wiping away counties and whole states beneath them. Only now and then, when the old shadow slid across Mario’s face in the darkness, did Tommy feel any hint of the old alienation, and even then it was fleeting.