The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Tommy, listening, was remembering a night when Lucia had fussed over him with sunburn cream, and remembering what Cleo had told him. It was not that Lucia Santelli was devoid of maternal instincts. Why had she been so unable to mother her own children?

  ~o0o~

  Mario and Tommy spent the morning working on the riggings, replacing wires, splicing one of the ropes on the net. Then it was time for the boys’ lesson. Mario was working with Bobby Meredith, explaining a new trick he wanted him to try, when Bart Reeder came down the stairs to the practice room. Tommy waved to him, motioning to Bart to take off his shoes and drop them into the box. Watching Bobby swing out, he was reminded of his own early days on the bar. Mario scowled, motioned Bobby down, and said, “Look, Bob, you’re beginning to get the idea. But you’re clumsy, you don’t look all that good. Flying’s not just a competition of strength. A flyer has to be graceful. Beautiful.”

  “Like a ballet dancer?” the biggest of the boys, Phil Lasky, asked.

  “Yeah,” Mario said, “just exactly like that.”

  Bobby Meredith scowled and said, “Ballet dancers are mostly sissies, aren’t they? I don’t know if I want to look like that.”

  Bart Reeder, standing behind them, laughed and said, “I used to think so, too. When I went to college—oh, yes, I did go to college, uncounted ages ago—the men’s gym class learned, to our absolute disgust, that the college had hired a famous male dancer to instruct us in calisthenics, gymnastics, and—horror of horrors—ballet. Some of the young would-be football players, among whom I numbered myself in those unenlightened days, had the same idea you have, young Bob. So we decided we would get together and show up this famous sissy who thought he was going to make all of us young he-men types do ballet dancing like little girls. Somehow or other, Mr. Teigh—you have heard of James Teigh? They used to call him an American Nijinsky—Teigh got word of this, and on the first meeting of the gym class, he invited all of the men in the class to come up, one by one, and shake hands with him. First guy to come up was one of these big, hulking line-backer types, shoulders like an ox. You could just see that he was all ready to crunch James Teigh’s fingers and make him yell uncle. So he went up, and he stuck out his hand, and the next thing you know, he yelled and went flipping over on the floor. And one by one, Teigh put the whole class on their backs on the gym floor, even the last few who were warned and tried to rush him four at a time. And when every one of us—including me, I ought to add—had been flipped ignominiously ass-over-teakettle and were rubbing our bruised butts, he dusted his hands together and said very politely, ‘Gentlemen, that concludes the lesson for today. Tomorrow, I expect all of you to be here in tights and proper shoes for your first lesson in the elementary arts of the dance.’”

  The boys stared, giggling uneasily. “And were you?” Carl finally asked.

  “Damn right,” Bart said. “In fact, after that I decided to go in for dance instead of football to keep in shape. It’s more strenuous and builds better muscles—and who in hell can play football once you’re out of college?”

  Phil Lasky’s eyes were wide. “You studied ballet, Mr. Reeder?”

  “Sure did. Anybody who needs to know about movement—and I was on the stage—needs to study dance.”

  Phil sounded really surprised. “But there’s nothing sissy about you!” He looked at Reeder’s muscular shoulders, then at Mario, slender in his flying tights, but with wrists and hands like steel wires.

  Carl Meredith remained hesitant. “My father would have kittens if Bob and I wanted to take ballet lessons. He says ballet is full of queers, and any decent kid who goes in for it— No offense, Mr. Reeder, that was what my dad said. Of course I know you guys are all right, but aren’t there a lot of queers in ballet, and don’t they bother you?”

  “No,” said Bart with an ironic smile, “they never bothered me at all.”

  Tommy wondered if they could see that Mario was holding himself with a tight effort when he said, “I’ve been taking ballet classes all my life, and I never met anybody there who’d bother a kid.”

  Bobby, serious and shy, said, “I’d still be kind of scared to take up ballet, because of what people would say about it. It does have that kind of—of reputation.”

  “I used to feel that way,” Tommy said. “I grew up with a circus, and I used to put on a wig and come out and perform in the web act. In a girl’s costume. When I was little, I never thought about it, but then some kids made fun of me for wearing girls’ clothes. I got upset and tried to chicken out. because I was scared people would think I was some kind of sissy.”

  “You, a sissy? Gosh,” Bobby said in wonder, “you were a sergeant in the Army, weren’t you? But you didn’t wear the girls’ costume after that, did you?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said. “Had to. There was a show to do. Matt finally got it through my head that you do your job and you don’t worry about what other people think about it, or you get some other job.” Over the boys’ heads, he smiled at Mario.

  “I guess I care too much what people think,” Bobby said. “I don’t think I could have done that.”

  Carl said, “But if people think you’re a sissy, doesn’t that matter, too? I mean, if people get the idea into their heads that you are, are they ever going to give you a chance to prove you’re not? In my school, they make a big thing out of saying you have to adjust to society. Being well adjusted, doesn’t that depend a lot on—on what people think of you? Don’t you have to—to conform?”

  Mario nodded slowly. “Yeah, there’s something to that, too,” he said. “What you are inside, and what people think of you and say about it. I haven’t any answers, Carl. Maybe there aren’t any answers; maybe everybody just has to figure that one out for himself, and do the best he can with it. I was lucky in a way, because I grew up with a circus family and we were different anyhow—people were going to think we were different no matter what we did.” He checked himself, bringing himself firmly back to the matter at hand.

  “I guess maybe it’s just something everybody has to figure out on his own, how different he can be and still get along. And we aren’t going to solve it standing here gabbing, either. Look, Bobby, I was talking about being graceful. Watch any good swimmer or tennis player. Notice how they keep everything all in line, no unnecessary motions, all tucked in, not spread out all over the place. Why do you think a duck is clumsy and a flamingo is so graceful? But you watch that duck flying, and he’s just as graceful as the flamingo. Go to the zoo and watch the animals, see how they move. Look—” He took Bobby’s hands, impersonally, and extended his arms to the sides. “It’s not a matter of trying to be oh-so-graceful—” He burlesqued the words in a high falsetto, and all the boys giggled. “A limp wrist is not graceful. What you want is an unbroken line of strength. It’s like that wild duck flying, or look at airplanes—the streamlining, aerodynamic line. You streamline your body. Break the line, and you get less efficiency, less strength out of the line, and that’s what makes it look bad.”

  Carl said, surprising them, “Like they said in a book I read on architecture and industrial design, form follows function?”

  “That’s it, that’s it exactly. Okay, watch how I keep my body in line at the waist, even when I have to bend in the middle around the bar.” Mario turned and climbed the rope ladder. Then he swung out, moving with steady pliancy over, around, and under the trapeze, with flowing smoothness, rock-hard economy of motion. After a few minutes he straightened his body over the trapeze bar and dived arrow-straight into the net, rolling up to land into a neat coil. The boys gasped. Tommy, watching in fascination—as often as he had seen this, he was still stunned with admiration and envy—heard Clay say jealously, “You make it look so easy, Matt!”

  Mario laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “Just takes practice, kid. If you work hard, you’ll be that good some day. Okay, kids, that’s it for this time. See you next week, okay?”

  Phil Lasky asked timidly, “If you and Mr. Reeder are goin
g to be flying, can we stay and watch?”

  Bart looked at the eager faces of the kids and shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  “You’ve all got to sit down and keep quiet, then,” Mario warned. “No noise and no horseplay, or out you go. Clay, don’t get undressed, okay? I want you to come up to the platform and handle the ropes for us this time.”

  Clay glowed with excitement. He went with his friends to talk with them while they were changing into street clothes, but already he seemed a little apart from them; he was a Santelli, a member of the family, a serious aerialist in training for the family business.

  Mario and Tommy stood at the foot of the rigging, watching the boys move off toward the change room. Bart murmured, “Nice batch of kids. Good-looking. I guess it’s the way they move.”

  Mario nodded. “I know. Pretty faces don’t mean a damn thing to me, either. It’s bodies I notice.”

  “I could have guessed that,” Bart said, teasing him, but Mario shook his head.

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean movement, bodily perfection.”

  “I know what you mean. I can even appreciate that kind of beauty in women,” Bart said.

  Mario nodded. “I know. Watch Stella sometime. She’s not even pretty, she’s kind of a scrawny nothing, but, my God, flying, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Bart said, “I noticed. In the Flight Dreams sequences. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn you were lovers. The way you move together.”

  Mario looked remote, faraway. He said, “I know. Even when I was a kid. Doing ballet with Liss. God, I haven’t thought of that in years!”

  Bart said, laughing, “Well, I must admit, watching those boys of yours does something to me.”

  Mario laughed, too, and the closed, frozen look slid off his face. He murmured, “They’re not my boys, Bart. They’re strictly off limits where I’m concerned. And you, too.”

  Bart lowered his voice. “Oh, I understand, believe me! These days, I’m so discreet it hurts. I never lay a finger on anybody under legal age, or even think about it. Come to think of it, I never did go for jailbait all that much. But there’s no harm in looking where there’s something beautiful to look at. Like those kids. Or Stella.”

  Carl, Phil, and Bobby returned and sat down to watch. Mario and Bart climbed behind Clay to the flyers’ platform. Tommy, climbing the rope at his own end of the rigging and sitting in the catch trap as if it were a swing, watched Clay standing beside Mario on the platform. How much alike they were! In the thin, long-legged boy, dark hair tousled, a pair of patched, worn practice tights, thin across the knees and mended at the feet, he could see a younger Mario, all stringy long arms and cocky insolence and a kind of childish, unconscious grace already merging into the deliberate gracefulness of the trained athlete. Tommy felt an almost painful tenderness. Mario had always been so much older. By the time they met, Mario was already a man, and Tommy, always racing to keep up with him, had put his boyhood away from him with both hands, as fast as he could. It made him ache to see what Mario had been as a boy, what Mario had been before they knew each other.

  I’m not surprised Reeder fell for him . . . .

  “How about it, Clay? Ready to go across without the mechanic? Bart ought to get some practice in handling the ropes, and you won’t get hurt, by now, if you fall.”

  Clay took the bar from Reeder’s hands. Suddenly the grin slid off his face and he looked shaken, scared. Tommy, lowering himself to catching position, saw Mario’s hand on Clay’s shoulder. He couldn’t hear what Mario was saying, but he could imagine; he had heard it so often himself.

  Finally Tommy saw Clay swing out, a blurred flying bundle of arms and legs. Tommy arched his back, pushing his own swing higher, and the boy’s thin wrists slapped hard into his outstretched hands, the hands interlocking around his wrists.

  “Easy does it,” Tommy said, smiling into the young face below his, feeling the tension in the arms and wrists. “Here you go!”

  Swinging upright again, he heard Mario criticizing. “Trouble is, Clay, you don’t really leap at all, you just let Tommy pull up and scoop you off the bar.”

  “Well, that’s the way Johnny said to do it,” Clay argued, and Tommy almost fell off his own trapeze in astonishment He could imagine what Angelo would have said to him for making excuses!

  Mario snapped, “I don’t remember asking Johnny—or you, either. Damn it, no back talk, Clay! Move over, take the bar for Bart. Okay, Bart, that’s good, but take the bar a little closer to the center, okay? I want to get you to where you can make at least a simple cross by yourself. I know most of it’s going to be doubled in, but you’ll understand what you’re doing better, this way. Now, when you start to swing, be careful to keep your elbows flexed . . . .”

  Bart was learning to fall gracefully now. Tommy supposed it was his long training in other athletic skills—fencing, dancing, driving—which had given him such splendid reflexes. He would never be a flyer, but he might make a very good imitation of one. He was already beginning to walk like Mario, to mimic his gestures, artlessly, without deliberation, an actor becoming the character of his part.

  “They’re signing people for the Parrish movie now,” he told them in the dressing room when the boys had gone. “Barry Cass wanted to play Reggie Parrish—Barney’s brother and his catcher. They even tested him for the part but no go.”

  Tommy remembered the handsome graying man who resembled Jim Fortunati. “Isn’t he about thirty years too old?”

  “That doesn’t mean a lot in this business,” Bart said. “It wasn’t his age; it was his height. He’s six foot two, so he and I looked like Mutt and Jeff. Of course, the catcher usually has to be a big guy. Tommy’s taller than you, isn’t he?”

  Mario stared and laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding, Bart. People are always telling me I’m too tall for a flyer. You and I are about the same size, and either of us could give Tom three inches.”

  Reeder looked from one to the other, confused. “I guess there’s something about it that makes him look bigger. I could have sworn—in the catch trap, he looked twice your size!”

  “Flyers all look big on the bars,” Mario confirmed. “It’s one of the main illusions of the business. Everybody thinks aerialists are big men until they see us in ordinary clothes.”

  “Anyway,” Bart said, “Mason is completely sold on using the Santellis for doubling in the flying scenes.”

  Mario was standing with his back to them, disentangling his foot from his tights. “I won’t be able to show him a triple. Not yet.”

  Bart shrugged. “No hurry. That can be the last thing you do,” he said, and Tommy winced at the double-entendre. Skinning out of his tights, Bart added, “Too bad there’s no shower down here.”

  Mario shrugged. “You can come up and have a shower upstairs, if you want to.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Bart said, and laughed. “With my reputation, someone might get the wrong idea.” Suddenly he sobered, standing naked and looking at the others. “God,” he said, “I know why you had to do it, but it just killed me to have to mushmouth around with those kids today. Not to be able to be honest with them. God damn it, if we had, somebody would probably have got the idea we were trying to convert them or something. All I wanted was to be able to—to talk straight. When they had that damn stupid idea that ballet’s all full of queers and your son’s not safe there!”

  Mario said, with an uneasy laugh, “Well, you can’t deny it does happen. As who’s got more reason to know than you.”

  “No, damn it, Matt,” Bart said vehemently, “that’s not what I mean, and you know it. Hell, kid, I knew about you. And if I’d been wrong—”

  “If you’d been wrong,” Mario said, “there’d be just one more dirty story about how ballet is full of queers who go around making passes at kids. And even so, there’s some people would say I might have grown up normal, if you hadn’t—”

  “Come on, kid,” Reeder said, gently,
“you know better than that. You might have gone along with it once because you liked me, or because you were curious and wanted to know what it was like. Maybe twice because we were friends and you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Only if it wasn’t what you really wanted, down inside, sooner or later you’d have told me to go peddle my papers, and found yourself a girl. God knows there’s enough pretty ones get into dancing.” He smoothed up his briefs and stepped into his trousers. “I get so goddamn sick of it. Those kids innocently piping up that their father says all dancers are fairies. Like that was a fate worse than death, or something. Even if it was true—which it isn’t.”

  Tommy said, “It’s the way people feel, and that’s all there is to it. You never know anything about things like that until you—until you start to feel them yourself. And then it’s too late. People who don’t feel that way, how you going to make them understand?”

  “Maybe,” Bart said, with suppressed savagery, “by doing what we just chickened out of doing with those kids today. Talking to them straight. Saying something like, ‘Look, kid, I’m queer, and it doesn’t make me some kind of frigging sissy, and I’m not going around trying to put the make on every kid I see, either!’”

  Mario said, with an uneasy smile, “And then we’d all be in mud up to the neck.”

  “Of course,” said Bart, suddenly despondent. In his agitation he had knotted his tie crooked; he took it apart and painstakingly retied it. “It’s like being a spy, a double agent or something. Going around pushing love and romance on the silver screen, and all the time—God, I get so sick of it. Women drooling over me, and I get love notes, and I feel like standing up and yelling, ‘That’s not what I am! That’s not what I’m like at all!’” His voice was not steady. He lighted a cigarette with shaking fingers.