Lucia looked puzzled. “The biggest what?”
Angelo said something in Italian, under his breath, and Lucia blushed.
“Even so,” Johnny said, “everything in skirts in Hollywood is screaming over him, from little girls to grandmothers. Next to that, my faking triples hardly seems dishonest at all.”
Lucia demanded, her face wrinkling in dismay, “Matt, how did you come to know a man like that?”
Mario said, carefully offhand, “I’m not even sure it’s the same guy. He used to come down and work out at the ballet school, took some of the classes in acrobatics. He used to race a sports car, and I went down once to the races with him. Then he got a couple of big parts in the movies and I kind of lost track of him.”
But Tommy was remembering a long-ago, half-forgotten conversation he had heard without understanding. You can have my share of Bart Reeder and welcome. And, telling Tommy about the youthful episode where he had landed in jail, Mario had said, I was scared to call Joe or Angelo, and I couldn’t get hold of Bart.
“Anyway,” Johnny said, “how’d we get off on him? That just goes to show you what a good press agent can do. And I want to get into television production—that’s where the money is these days, not in acting or performing. Catchers are a dime a dozen.”
Mario shook his head. “Not the kind I need, they’re not.”
“Just the same, I’m going to build this new special around you. You were on the way to being the best there ever was, big brother, and by the time I get through with you, everybody’s going to know it!”
It was impossible not to catch fire from his enthusiasm. He raised his glass.
“How about it, Matt? We’re still the Flying Santellis—aren’t we? We’re not through yet!”
Tommy felt doubtful. It seemed too good to be true, another of Johnny’s grandiose plans and exaggerations. Yet the idea roused memories, old dreams, ambitions he thought he had forgotten, and he could see them coming to life in Mario, too, as he watched.
Tommy said cautiously, “Is there any money in this?”
Johnny laughed, with an expansive gesture. “Is there any money in it? I’ll have contracts as soon as I get on the phone with my backers. You just wait till you see what kind of money there is in it! Come on!” He set the glass to his lips, drank, then waited, laughing, for them to follow suit.
“To the Flying Santellis—ancor!”
Watching the gesture, raising his own glass slowly and tasting the familiar wine he had never liked and still did not really like, Tommy thought, It’s weird. For all Johnny’s talk about getting away from the family tradition, he’s Papa Tony all over again. Forty years from now he’s even going to look like him! Looking around the table as the family drank the toast, he wondered if anyone else could see it.
~o0o~
Johnny talked nonstop till midnight, ideas still pouring from him.
“Remember the big act we used to talk about when we were kids, Matt? Keynote streamlining: have the rigs painted silver and anything that doesn’t have to be handled, have it glittered till it shines. Play colored lights on them. Even the fly bar—get old what’s-his-name to figure out some kind of coating that will shine without slipping. Skip the old tights and leotards and try bizarre, futurist costumes, metallic—suggest jets, space flight.”
“And Buck Rogers flying belts?” Tommy asked with gentle irony.
“Why not? Man, we’re halfway through a new century!”
Mario demurred gently: “I thought I was the only one in the family cared anything about science fiction.”
“Matt, the flying trapeze almost is science fiction!” Johnny perched with one leg folded beneath him, graceful, reckless, laughing. “It goes to the outer edge of the humanly possible. All the laws of motion, dynamics, fluid patterns of flight—man’s urge for the unattainable.”
“Like that old picture of Lucia’s,” Stella murmured. “Flight dreams.”
“That’s right,” Johnny said excitedly. “That’s it exactly! Call it Flight Dreams—a kind of dreamlike fantasy, almost a dream-ballet, levitation and slow motion—”
Mario narrowed his lids, thinking, his eyes distant. “Flight dreams. Angelo said something like that once . . . ‘the oldest, most universal dream of mankind.’ Dream psychology.”
“I don’t know anything about psychology,” Johnny said, “but it’s going to make a damn good show. Hit people in their guts. Because, down deep, I think everybody wants to fly, and that’s what we’re going to give them.” He turned gleaming eyes on Stella. “I knew you’d be the one to come up with the right thing at the right time! She always does!”
“It was really Lucia’s idea, the scrapbook,” Stella said, laughing. But Tommy noticed that behind the bright, brittle facade she was really still the old Stella, as quiet and intense as ever. She had learned the trick of masking her silences in animation and vivid interest, that was all.
“I’m glad I have something to do with it,” said Lucia, edging jealously close. “All this talk about science fiction and futuristic design, you make me feel like a back number!”
“You’ve got everything to do with it,” Johnny said with a grin.
“Hush,” Stella said, listening. “Midnight.” Somewhere a clock struck twelve. Johnny took Stella in his arms and kissed her, a long and tender kiss. Joe laughed and gave Lucia a brotherly hug, and after a moment Angelo, chuckling, pulled Tessa to him and kissed her. Mario gallantly put his arm around Barbara, and Johnny and Stella held out a hand apiece to Mario, then drew Tommy into the circle.
“Let’s hope it will be a good year for all of us.” Mario toasted.
Mario’s fingers tightened on Tommy’s, but the very secrecy of the gesture made Tommy feel depressed, alienated. Again he was having his nose rubbed in the knowledge that whatever his commitment to this family, to Mario, the very nature of this relationship filled it with subterfuge. Stella gave him a sympathetic smile, trying to include him, but for once he avoided her eyes. Stella had made her own way into the family, accepted in a way he could never be. He turned away from Mario, knowing that even if he managed to communicate how he felt to Mario, his friend would have no comfort to offer.
I can’t take your falls for you, Lucky.
Soon after midnight Joe kissed his daughter goodnight and went upstairs. Tessa was half asleep, and Lucia took her to her room. One by one the family withdrew, but Tommy and Barbara sat on in the big living room.
Barbara was twenty now, a big sturdy girl, her chestnut hair pulled back into the smooth dancer’s bun. She curled up on the rug before the fire.
“God, the family is just the same as ever, isn’t it?” she said, grinning at him. “Especially at New Year. I can stand it once a year or so, but I’d go nuts if I had to live with it all the time. Which is why I don’t.”
“You used to be so crazy to fly,” Tommy said.
“I still miss flying sometimes,” she said, leaning her round chin on her hands. “I wanted to fly, but I didn’t want to be a Santelli. You know the difference?”
Tommy did. He couldn’t understand it, but he knew.
“I haven’t told anybody outside the family yet,” she said. “I suppose, if I ever get a good part in a movie, it will come out. I’m registered with Central Casting as Barbara Clayton. That was my mother’s name—you never knew her. Clay uses that name, but he’s really Joe Junior, you know.”
Tommy hadn’t, but he wasn’t surprised.
“I wouldn’t have dared to do it while Papa Tony was still alive,” Barbara said, “and I know that Daddy will have a fit, and so will Aunt Lu. But I don’t look Italian, and I don’t want to get typecast, doing bad girls in dance halls and that kind of thing. They tend to put Italian actresses into that kind of part. Sombreros and ruffled skirts in Western movies. You know, I was christened Lucia Barbara Santelli, but when I started school I raised Cain until they started calling me Barbara. Liss was baptized Lucia, too, but they said it would be too confusing having two L
ucias in the act, so they started right away calling her Elissa. Her birth certificate still reads ‘Lucia Cleo.’”
All this seemed wholly incomprehensible to Tommy. He said, “I never wanted to do anything but fly.”
“I know. I got my first break in movies, flying, doubling for Lillian Whitney—I did half a dozen catches and a back double. I’ve done stunt work, too—Uncle Angelo knows everybody in that business. Anyhow, that’s why I won’t live in the house, because I get calls from my answering service for Barbara Clayton, and I can just hear Lucia saying there isn’t anybody here by that name.”
“I think Angelo would understand,” Tommy said. “He was the one made them let Mario go to college.”
Barbara gave a skeptical shrug. “Uncle Angelo? The family is God, and Uncle Angelo is Its prophet.” She stared into the dying fire. “Funny. I always thought it would be Mario I could talk to about this. He was really a good dancer, you know. And he was always so detached about the family, living outside, and with an outside job, and everything. And yet here he is, right back in the middle of it all again.”
“I guess the family means a lot to him.”
“I can’t figure it out,” Barbara said. “Johnny, too. He wouldn’t even use the Santelli name when he was younger, acted like all he wanted was to get loose and be on his own. And here he is, tonight, talking like there was nothing he wanted more than to start it up all over again. ‘To the Flying Santellis—ancor!’ and all that stuff. Maybe I could have understood it from Mario. From Johnny it sounds real weird.”
Tommy, not understanding it completely himself, suddenly remembered a morning when Johnny’s mask of hard indifference to the family had slipped. “Maybe it’s because he knows he and Stella won’t ever have any family of their own.”
“Maybe. But I should think that would make it easier,” Barbara said. “It was Liss’s kids that kept her tied down like she is.”
Tommy shook his head. “It doesn’t always work that way. Lucia had four, and she went on working till she got crippled.”
Barbara’s mind was running on its own track. “When we were kids, and used to go to the movies on Saturdays—remember?—Aunt Lu said I ought to plan on marrying you when we grew up. Keep you in the family act.” She gave him a quick sidewise look beneath her slanted eyebrows. “Only you found another way, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tommy said, but he did, and she knew it.
“Look, I’ve known about Mario all my life. He’s always been my favorite cousin. Of course, as far as he was concerned, I was just a baby like Tess—he never gave a damn for anybody except Liss, and she never understood him at all. I love Liss,” Barbara said, “but she’s an awful dumb bunny. The first time Mario brought you to the house I knew how he felt about you. You see a lot of that stuff around the ballet school.”
Tommy was uncomfortable. “Come on, Barbie, you know he’s been married.”
“I met his wife, too. And I know how long that lasted. Susan never had her heart broken over anything or anybody, so I’m not losing any sleep over her. A lot of guys try to make it both ways. It kept Aunt Lucia off his neck. Which is why I say”—she squeezed her long, slender fingers around his hand—”if you ever need to get married—like for the same reason, to quiet down a scandal or anything—it would keep it in the family.”
Tommy was embarrassed before Barbara’s knowing eyes. “That wouldn’t be awful fair to you, would it?”
Barbara laughed, a soft small sound at the back of her throat. “Don’t be scared. We could always stage a big fight and live separately. Only if I was married, if I’d been married, Daddy and Aunt Lu would have to admit I was grown up and had a right to my own life. I’d get more out of it than you would.”
Tommy laughed, too, uneasily. “This is a heck of a way to start the new year! Suppose you really wanted to get married someday, and you’d already married me? Suppose you fell in love?”
She sat looking at him. “I’d be scared to marry anybody I loved. I guess it works better the other way. Daddy married my mother for the act, and when she died he never would marry anybody again. And Papa Tony told me once he never even spoke to Grandma Carla alone before they were married, but it worked out fine. That was in the old country, and she was a Fortunati. And Johnny and Stella, and did you ever see such a pair of lovebirds? But Liss married outside the show because she thought she was in love, and she and Dave can hardly stand the sight of each other! But she can’t even divorce him, because Catholics can’t.”
“Mario did,” Tommy said. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
“And he’s excommunicated. But you and I could get married and then get an—an annulment, because if I did want to get married someday we could always swear we hadn’t—” She looked at the floor. “A marriage of convenience, they call it. It might be convenient for both of us.”
Tommy did not know what to say or where to look. He tried to make a nervous joke of it. “My, this is so sudden!”
She pulled his head close to her. “You were the only one didn’t get a kiss for New Year,” she said, and put up her lips. Tommy, reacting with detached amusement, realized that her body was pressed to his, her lips opening under his own. He felt halfway between embarrassment and outrage. Women had made passes at him, but Barbara was family! In angry reaction he pulled her close and kissed her very thoroughly, probing her open mouth with his tongue. When he let her go, she was bruised and breathless, flushing crimson, but her anger faded quickly.
“I guess I asked for that. Are you mad at me, Tommy?”
“Mad? No. But I can’t figure what you were trying to prove.” This episode, strange and abortive as it had been, had clarified something he had never really understood about Mario. This kind of thing was not what he wanted, but it could be easier, simpler; he knew now why so many homosexuals wound up married. It was so easy to do, so hard to criticize, and so many marriages failed anyhow. But Barbara deserved better than that.
“Let’s go back and start over, Barbie,” he said. “I think this is the kiss you really meant to give me, okay?” He kissed her gently, on her closed lips, like a child. “Happy New Year, Barbie. And thank you.”
CHAPTER 6
Johnny was as good as his word. Lucia grumbled about the number of long-distance calls he made in the next four days, but before the week was out he had contracts, and Mario and Tommy had signed them, for the television special he would produce that spring. The special riggings were ordered, Lucia began work on the costumes, and they began rehearsing downstairs.
Johnny agreed to act as catcher for the flying sequences, and he was good, his old brilliance undimmed but the carelessness gone. The real surprise, however, was Stella. Tommy realized that she was the finest woman flyer he had seen since Cleo Fortunati. He was not surprised when, after a week’s work, Mario said, “Let’s let Stella do the midair pass; she’s showier.” Tommy ceded the position without arguing, but, watching Mario and Stella fly together, he felt a sudden sick resentment which, after a moment, he recognized as jealousy.
They’re so damn perfect together! Stella was not really a pretty girl, but watching her on the platform, swinging to Johnny’s waiting hands, he began to understand what it had been in Mario that had made him, once, the star of Woods-Wayland: not just a fine performer, but a star. Maybe it was the poise and vitality of every movement, maybe it was just high spirits that called forth an equal excitement in anyone watching.
Whatever it was, Tommy realized soberly, Mario didn’t have it now. He went through his routines with perfect style and polish, but Tommy was troubled to realize that it was Stella, not Mario, who lent flair and perfection to the act.
Maybe, as Mario recovered confidence and strength, he would recover whatever that special quality had been. Yet Tommy didn’t know how to criticize Mario, or what to say to him. He couldn’t put his finger on whatever it was that Mario wasn’t doing that he ought to be doing, or was doing that he s
houldn’t do. But, remembering the days when Mario had done the triple to Angelo’s hands, Tommy’s heart ached.
Johnny thinks it’s fine, because it means Stella’s going to be the star. Yet in fairness he realized that the way Mario was now, nobody would look twice at anyone but Stella.
Johnny, too, knew that something was wrong, and didn’t quite know what. But he seemed troubled. At one point he said, “What you need is showmanship, Matt. You’re good, you’re one of the best. But you do everything so simply that nobody notices. With the right kind of showmanship, you can make a crowd gasp at a kid doing a somersault down into the net.”
Mario grinned. “That kind of crowd, I don’t give a damn what they think.”
“Hell, circus is showmanship and hoke, Matt. It always has been. Did you ever study—really study—Lucia’s scrap-books?”
“Hell, no. I got better things than that to read.”
“Then you don’t know what I’m talking about. Lu never was so great; she never did anything enormous or unusual. But she was showcased just right, and she spent fifteen years as a super kind of star. Cleo never got that kind of publicity and she’s three times the flyer Lucia was.”
“Oh, come on—” Mario protested, but halfheartedly.
“Cleo’s like you, Matt. She makes everything look so damn simple and perfect.”
“That’s artistry—” Mario began. It was the old argument, and again Johnny brushed it aside:
“Artistry is fine, sure, but you have to spotlight it just right, so people will appreciate it.”
Mario shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said, and even this pliancy troubled Tommy. There had been a time when he would have argued Johnny to a standstill on this.
They did reach one direct confrontation, over the use of the mechanic. Mario had brought it out for the teenage boys he was teaching, an additional safety factor, but when he saw Johnny rigging it for Stella, he laughed in wry amusement.
“Have we come down to that, Johnny?”
The Catch Trap Page 60