Tommy said in a low voice, his eyes on the checkerboard, “I never thought about it.”
“Young people don’t.” Papa Tony scowled and moved one of his men. “I ought to teach you chess; it trains your brain to think ahead.”
“I can’t remember the moves. They’re too complicated. Anyhow, I’m not that smart. You have to be a brain to play chess, don’t you?”
“You don’t think you’re that smart, and you don’t know if you’re happy?”
After a minute, studying the pattern of the checkers and not looking up, Tommy said, “Yes, Papa Tony, I’m happy. I’m—I’m doin’ what I like best.”
Tonio Santelli bent to jump one of Tommy’s men and remove it from the board. “You see? Even in checkers, you got to think ahead. And Matt? You get along all right? I don’t know, maybe he’s too tough on you, maybe—you’re just a kid: maybe I ought—” He broke off and bent over the board again. Tommy, studying the trap Papa Tony had laid between two kings, and making the forced move which would lose him still another man, suddenly realized that the words had more than their face value. Somehow, some way or other, Papa Tony knew. His mind raced. How? We’ve been so careful. But Tommy realized that the old man knew; he would never say so, but here, over a checkerboard and casually, Tommy’s whole future hinged on how he answered now.
What can I say? He probably thinks it’s something terrible. Mario warned me . . . .
“You’re real good at setting traps,” he said disgustedly, watching as Papa Tony made his move and removed the man he had endangered. Then, carefully, slowly, he spoke.
“I like Mario, Papa Tony. We get along all right,” he said, and finally he found the words for his clumsy search, neither too obviously offhand, nor too openly worshipful. “That—that tough stuff is mostly an act, you know; he’s really swell to me.” Suddenly he crowed, pouncing on a handy jump, moving his man into the king row. “Crown him!”
“Um!” The old man’s hand hovered over the checkerboard, carefully avoiding Tommy’s king-baited trap. He raised inquisitive, noncommittal eyes.
Tommy, examining the board to see if the casual move had in reality laid some deeper trap for his man, suddenly risked everything. “Mario isn’t so tough, Papa Tony. You know, I—I really love the guy.” He added, almost probing, his hand hovering between the deceptive opening near the king, or the indifferent move which might lead him into an unforeseen trap, “If our scrapping bothers you, maybe we can tone it down a little. Like I say, it’s mostly an act.”
Pap Tony smiled and blandly jumped Tommy’s newly crowned king. “Good. I thought maybe so, only I want to hear it from you, that you were happy. You two, you know, you’ll make a good team. You’ll be together a long time, maybe all your lives, you work like that together. And maybe you can work with somebody you don’t like, don’t trust, don’t love. I wouldn’t know; I never tried. Angelo and me, we get along better than most fathers and sons; we have to, otherwise we couldn’t work together. Oh, we argue sometimes, like any father and any son, but not where it counts. Down where it counts we know we can trust each other all the way; we never even have to think about it. I trust him like that, so I don’t even have to think about loving him. I love Johnny, but I don’t trust him, not quite like that, not yet. Tradition. Something we have, Angelo and me, something we hold on to together. Self-confidence? No, that’s not it, either. Sympathy? I don’t know. You and Matt, I see that in you. Even when you’re scrapping like naughty kids, you have that something extra. You’re young, you’re not even brothers, but you have something—you belong to each other. I see it, I know it. I don’t know what to call it, but there it is.”
Tommy looked at the backs of his hands, afraid to raise his eyes, deeply moved but afraid of what he would betray if he looked up or spoke. One part of him wanted to tell Papa Tony what to call it, but he held himself silent by an effort. Papa Tony did not want to know. Somehow Tommy understood that. If he knew, if he was told in so many words, he would have to do the conventional thing, he would have to express the conventional shock and horror. But knowing without analyzing, knowing in a place that went deeper than words, he could see it, know it, accept it.
Papa Tony said, in that same brooding voice, “Matt—he’s way out in a lonely place, Tommy. You understand such a lot of things: do you understand that, too? How hard it is that he’s so much better than I am, so much better than the same people who taught him. He wants to respect them, to admire them, and instead he finds himself way out in front, looking back to where they are, and it makes him shake inside. You see that? You saw how Fortunati treated him, and how it got Matt all shook up and scared? If it was Johnny, I wouldn’t worry. Johnny, he’d strut, he’d get cocky and somebody would knock him back into place, but meanwhile he’d enjoy getting all the fuss and all the applause. Matt, he’s so different—I don’t know, Tommy, I just don’t know,” he repeated. “Way out in a lonely place. None of us can reach him anymore.”
Tommy blinked, swallowing hard, unwilling to let Papa Tony see that his eyes were filling with tears.
“Except you, maybe,” Papa Tony said. “I don’t know why, Tommy, but he lets you inside, he lets you get to him. It hurts me,” the old man said. “It hurts so bad, to see him so lost, so lonesome.” Tommy, his personal embarrassment forgotten, looked up to see the naked pain in the grandfathers eyes. “I’m so proud of him, so proud I could die of it. It was worth what I did to Lucia, what I did to all of them.” Tommy knew Tonio Santelli had forgotten he spoke to a child, that he spoke out of innermost heart, out of his love for his grandson. “I wanted him to get where he is, but now he’s there, I can’t follow him. I have to let him go—there’s nothing I can do for him anymore. Even when I know how bad he needs somebody. And maybe you’re the one he needs, because he lets you inside that—that wall he has around himself.”
Tommy couldn’t speak. At last Papa Tony came out of his silence to smile up at him. “Our family, it’s a funny one,” he said. “It eats people up alive, and you’re pretty young to be chewed up and swallowed.”
“I’m—I’m really happy about being a Santelli, Papa Tony. Honest. And about—about everything.”
Papa Tony’s rare, luminous smile lighted his face. He patted Tommy’s shoulder and said, “I thought maybe so. You know, I was always happy, doing the work I wanted to do. I talk too much—look where you got my man.” As Tommy bent and jumped his last man, he added, “You got too good for me at checkers, Tommy. I think maybe I better teach you to play chess. Train you to think ahead, and not to let people know what you’re doing.” He grinned, slid the checkers into his pocket, opened the compartment in the side of the board, and started setting up the chessmen.
“In chess, you never lose your king. This is the king,” he began, and Tommy frowned, turning his attention to the game knowing that the old man was saying something very important without saying it at all.
CHAPTER 24
The Woods-Wayland Circus moved into Cincinnati on a steamy, muggy afternoon halfway through August. The morning sun on the tight canvas made the top of the tent into a blistering inferno. Papa Tony, at the top of the rigging beside Tommy, checking the alignment of the bars with a spirit level, wiped his face with a handkerchief.
“Strange, is it not? Cold weather slows the body, but so does heat like this.” He thrust the handkerchief back through his belt. “Tommy, the tape on the fly bar is sticky; take it down and have it rewound.”
Tommy did as he was told, swarming down the ropes like a monkey. He delivered the tape to a rigger. When he climbed back up with the rewound bar, he noticed Papa Tony still seated motionless on the platform.
“Papa Tony, is something wrong?”
“No, the heat . . . come un forno.” The old man mopped his forehead again, and Tommy gauged his distress by the language; Papa Tony knew Tommy did not understand Italian well and was always careful to speak English to him.
“And it will be worse this afternoon. Once on a day like this
when we were with Starr’s, Rico took up a thermometer to the catch trap and hung it there, and at the end of the act it read a hundred and thirty-five degrees. I worry about crystallization in the metal when it is so hot like this. When Joe and Lucia had their fall, it was because a metal ring crystallized on their trapeze guy wire.”
Now Tommy was really scared. Papa Tony had an iron-bound taboo against talking about accidents anywhere near the rigging; it was his only superstition. “Papa Tony, I’m afraid you’re not well. Can I help you get down?”
“When I need help in descending a ladder, ragazzo, you can take me away and get me ready for the undertaker,” Papa Tony said with asperity, his mustache bristling. He wiped his forehead and hands again. “Never mind, I know you mean well, my boy. I will go down and get myself something cold to drink.” He raised himself, poised as for a swan dive, and went off neatly into the net.
But Tommy was not reassured. In the cookhouse at noon be hunted up Angelo, and said, “Listen, can you talk Papa Tony into staying down this afternoon? This morning up on the rigging, I thought he was going to faint.”
Angelo laughed “You had a fainting spell and we chased you right up again.”
“I know. But it’s awful hot.” Angelo hadn’t been up there, hadn’t seen the pinched look or heard the old man gasp for breath in the killing heat of the tent top. Angelo looked at Tommy, and must have seen how troubled he was.
“I’ll try, kid, but you know Papa.”
When Tommy joined them in the dressing tent, Angelo looked grim, and Papa Tony’s set face and bright, hard look kept him silent He turned away, went to scramble into his black tights for the tumbling act which opened the show.
The flying act opened the second half of the show. When they climbed the rigging after the intermission, the top of the tent, baking under the August sun for hours and heated further by the rising breath of the packed audience, was a blistering hell. It smote Tommy like an opened furnace door as they stepped off on the pedestal; even the music of the band seemed to surge and fade out again through the thick, muffling heat. Mario whispered, “Good God,” as he rubbed his hands with resin.
When Tommy swung for his first trick, he felt that the tape on the bar was sticky again with the heat. His hands were clammy and damp despite their thick coating of resin, and as they slid on Johnny’s wrists, he heard Johnny growl, “Hell of a business we’re in,” between his teeth, before letting go. Even the applause sounded a million miles away.
To give Mario an extra moment to ready himself for the triple, their next-to-last trick was Papa Tony’s forward double, which some experts still considered harder than the backward two-and-a-half. Tommy stepped nimbly around the guy to the outside of the board, passing Papa Tony the bar. Papa Tony muttered something in Italian, fingering the resin bag again, and Tommy whispered suddenly, “Papa Tony, you look awful. Please don’t, not today.” Since their talk over the checkerboard, he had begun to see Papa Tony not as a looming giant of authority and discipline, but as a real person, like himself, with feelings and even weaknesses. “Let me do a cross instead; that’ll give Mario time to get set.”
“No, no, ragazzo,” Papa Tony muttered, “graz’ tanto—” and Tommy was really scared.
“Mario—” Tommy said urgently, but Mario was already above them on the high platform, and Papa Tony already had the bar in his hands, and there was no way to stop him now without an unseemly struggle. The slim, knife-straight body, still moving like a young man’s, arched out with the bar, into two fast, whipping somersaults; then his hands were locked firmly around Angelo’s wrists.
Tommy, watching them swing together, catching the trapeze on the backswing and readying himself for Mario’s call to throw it out again for the return, heard Mario above him, whispering, “Thank God. It’s okay, Tom. One, two—”
Then slowly, slowly, dreadfully in slow motion, Tommy saw the gripped hands and wrists slide on each other, loosen, slip. Angelo’s face changed, turned to blank horror as Papa Tony let go and dropped from his hands. He dropped like dead weight, without turning or rolling, struck the net still upright with knees crumpling as he hit, flopped downward on his face, and lay without moving in the net.
Tommy heard the hushed, deep gasp from the stands. The announcer, already booming out the opening words of Mario’s introduction, suddenly broke into a fast patter about the other flyers in the end ring. The band music changed abruptly to the “March of the Toys”—the Woods-Wayland’s in-the-ring distress-signal alert—and the standby act, a group of rambling clowns, came flipping along the hippodrome track, clustering in front of the center ring.
Tommy acted almost without conscious thought; be dropped the trapeze, letting it swing loose from the center bar, and slid down the outside rope of the aerial ladder, then swung his legs over into the net. Mario slid down after him. He said in a quick, strained voice, “Can we get him down, or do we have to lower the net? Good thing you had the brains not to jump down into the net, if he’s lying there with his neck broken . . . .” Mario broke off as Johnny and Angelo came running over from the other end of the rigging.
Johnny said, “Here, hoist me up—” but already the trained nurse who traveled with the show was beside the net. She said, low and fast, “No, don’t drag him around—if his back or neck should be hurt, you could make it worse. Lift me up, Mr. Santelli.”
Angelo seemed to be in a daze. He ignored the nurse, saying, “He must have fainted. He just went dead weight and I couldn’t hold him, and he fell that way—”
Mario got behind the nurse, put his hands around her waist, and lifted her effortlessly to the net. She floundered for a moment, then got down beside Papa Tony, and Tommy heard her soft, shocked “Oh!” Then she beckoned, and Mario, his face white, put his hands up and scrambled up beside her.
“Get the prop men. Here, Tommy, help me lift him—”
Is he okay? Hey, Papa, Papa—” Angelo knelt beside his father as Mario and the prop man lowered him to the ground, but the prop man was already folding the small form in gold tights. looking very gray and shrunken, into a blanket.
The nurse said gently, “He’s dead, Mr. Santelli.”
“Oh, God, no—ah, Dio—”
For a moment Tommy thought Angelo would pitch forward on his face, and grabbed him by the arm. “Angelo, you okay?”
Johnny, on the other side, took Angelo in a firm grip. “C’mon, Uncle Angelo,” he said in a low voice. “Steady there. Let’s get out of here first, huh?”
Angelo ignored them, saying in a reasonable voice, “He can’t be dead, don’t be silly. A fall like that wouldn’t hurt him much. He’s had a lot of worse falls than that.”
“Yeah, I know,” Johnny said, shaking his head in dismay. “But come on, fella, let’s get out of here, huh?”
The grotesqueness of it struck Tommy, with shock, as they walked, tightly clustered, out of the performers’ entrance. Angelo still looked dazed, but he walked between them, docile, without protest, until they were outside; then he broke away from Tommy’s arm and ran after the nurse and the men who were carrying the limp body in its blanket. “He can’t be dead,” he said, his voice breaking. “A fall like that couldn’t kill him, could it? It couldn’t kill anybody!”
The woman laid a firm hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t the fall, Mr. Santelli. He must have been dead before he struck the net, probably before he let go of your hands. His heart simply stopped in midair.”
Angelo’s face went gray. “He died in my hands,” he said, stretching out his palms and staring at them in horror. “He died in my hands and I couldn’t hold him.”
The three hours that followed were terrible. Papa Tony’s body was instantly and quietly hurried off the lot to the morgue. Johnny, hustling a coat over his tights, accompanied the body. The callous but necessary law of the circus demanded that the ill, the injured, the dying, and the dead be carted off the lot without delay; there was simply no way to handle them there. Angelo sat in the men’s dressing t
ent, folded up on his trunk, shaken with heavy sobs. Men from other acts glanced furtively at him, then, with the only tact possible in those circumstances, gave him the courtesy of going on about their business and seeming not to see. Mario, weeping himself without shame, bent over him, an arm around his shoulders, imploring Angelo in whispers not to carry on so.
“He just let go,” Angelo repeated, almost hysterically. “He just let go and I couldn’t hold him. I couldn’t hold him. He just let go.”
“Angelo, don’t, don’t. He must have been dead already—he was dead before he hit the net. It wasn’t your fault, you couldn’t have done anything.”
“He died in my hands. In my hands.” Angelo spread his hands again and stared at them in dazed, dark-eyed horror, then began to cry again. He was shivering. He seemed not even to hear Mario’s voice.
Finally, embarrassed, Jake Davis came over and said, low-voiced, to Mario, “Look, I don’t want to butt in, but I don’t think he’s just carrying on, Matt. I think he’s in shock. You better get a drink into him, or something, or get the nurse back here.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea—”
“Coe Wayland always has a bottle of whiskey in his trunk.” Jake said, and after a moment he came back with it. Mario poured some of the whiskey into a paper cup and put his hands firmly on Angelo’s shoulders.
“Drink up. Come on, Uncle Angelo, orders.”
“I don’t want it.” Angelo pushed his hand away.
“You drink this, or I’ll hold your nose and pour it down your throat.” Mario commanded. “And then get yourself dressed. We got a hell of a lot to do before the night show!”
Angelo swallowed, choked painfully, and coughed. He still looked dazed, but now awareness was coming through. He took the glass in his own hand and swallowed the rest of it with a grimace. His hands were still shaking, but his voice steadied. “All right.” he said, coughing, “I’m all right. Thanks, Matt. I—” He swallowed, hard, but he said, “I’ll get dressed. There are arrangements; I better go make them.”
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