“What about it, Lucia, shall we let her study ballet?”
Lucia said tartly, “If I had been consulted, she would have begun at seven. It cannot do her harm, and it might be useful.”
“In my gym class I learned a lot about tumbling,” Tessa said, “and Sister Mary Veronica said I was a natural dancer.”
“Well, of course!” Lucia said. “You are a Santelli.”
Angelo chuckled and said, “Tradition wins out again. You call the ballet school, kitten, and find out about hours and classes.”
Lucia looked down severely at Tessa and took the blue serge from her hand. “And speaking of traditions, don’t they teach you to sew properly in the convent anymore? If I had sewed a hem like that, even when I was seven years old, I would have had it ripped out, and had it to do over.”
From outside in the hall, they could hear Johnny saying angrily, “For God’s sake, Stel, won’t you listen to me? This isn’t a family matter; this is private. Can’t we settle it between us?”
“No,” Stella said, pushing the door open, “we can’t. Johnny, we’ve tried and tried—we’ve been fighting over it for a month now. It’s got to be a family thing.” She moved away from him and went to the fireplace. She turned to face them all, and her voice was trembling. “I want to talk about—about this summer. The—the Flying Santellis have signed a contract with Starr’s. And Starr’s wants Johnny, too, to manage the aerial wing, whether or not he wants to fly with us—”
“I don’t,” Johnny said. “I told you and told you. I want to get out of flying. That’s the past, and I’m looking at the future. When I was in Dallas, I got this offer from one of the big network people—he flew down just to see me. He wants me to produce a television show, steady. A series. The money’s good, but we could settle down, raise our kid, forget about the circus—”
“And that’s not what I want,” Stella said, her voice shaking. “I want to fly! It’s center ring at Starr’s—”
“Stella—babe,” he said. “I told you. The circus is dead. This is where the future is.”
Lucia said, “I do not believe that, Johnny. If you do not want to fly, what is wrong with going into management?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It sounds like a great job. I had a lot of good ideas for it. I was thinking maybe we could even reform the old-style hayseed circus, make it a real modern show, bring it into the twentieth century. But I’ve got to think about myself, too. Ten years from now, people who get in on the ground floor of television, they’re going to be on top of the world.”
Joe asked, “What kind of show do they want you to produce, Johnny?”
“Some kind of game show,” he said, “where people win lots of money, big prizes, and the audience gets into the act. That kind of thing goes over real big.”
Joe laughed scornfully. “You know what that reminds me of? A carny pitch. We got a hundred of them out at the park. Small-time ones. That’s your ambition for the future—to be a big-time carny pitchman instead of a small-time one? Telling all the suckers on the midway to walk up, walk up, get rich quick?”
Johnny was so fair that he looked sunburned when he turned color. “Look, it’s only a beginning. Sure, it’s a crummy show, but I could go on to a better one.”
“I’m not so sure,” Angelo said. “You make your reputation in television doing that kind of carny-pitch crap, and I bet you’ll get stuck doing it.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Stella said vehemently. “We are the Flying Santellis! I don’t want him to be anything less than that! And now he’s got a chance to be more. He could manage the whole show someday!”
“Stel, Stel, I just want to move into a different field—”
“And what am I supposed to be doing when you are doing this?” she flared at him. “I am one of the Flying Santellis, center ring—”
“Babe, you don’t have to do anything! We’re not in the old country now—I don’t have to put my wife to work to bring home the bacon! Don’t you think Suzy deserves a full-time mother? Matt can get other flyers for the act—they don’t need you!”
“Now, wait a minute,” Mario said. “We open in the Garden in center ring. We’ve got a contract! What the hell do you mean, we don’t need her? Sure, there’s other flyers, but they’re not Stella, they’re not Santellis! It’s going to be years before Clay—”
“Look, I know you have to finish the movie work. But afterward—”
“Afterward, I’m going right on and finish the season with the Flying Santellis!” she insisted. “All my life I’ve worked for this, dreamed about it! Don’t I have a right to success, too? And we could both have it, with me in center ring and you managing the entire show. I know you want to get out of flying, I know you want to get into management. After all, you never were that much of a flyer—”
“My God, Stella!” He stared at her, betrayed, ashen. “How can you talk to me this way? You never did before!”
“No,” she said, her voice shaking. “Maybe I should have. A long time ago.”
He swung around to face Mario. “This is your doing! You’ve got her so hopped up on flying, so obsessed— My God,” he said again, “my own brother, and you could do this to me!”
Mario’s voice was muted. “Stella’s got the right to make up her own mind what she wants to do.”
“But she’s my wife! It’s up to me to decide for us, isn’t it? Or do you want me to hand her over to you?”
“Johnny, oh, Johnny, please—” Stella was crying now, noiselessly, the tears running down her face, but Johnny ignored her, turning fiercely to Lucia.
“Damn it, you had to do this, too, didn’t you? Flying has destroyed every marriage in this family, hasn’t it, starting with yours? You and my father, Angelo and Teresa, Liss and David came close to breaking up over it, Matt and Susan—you won’t be content until this one is on the rocks, either, will you, you meddling old—” His broke off, but it seemed as if the unspoken word would choke him. There was a moment of shocked silence in the room, and then it seemed to Tommy that everyone was talking at once. Mario’s voice emerged first from the clamor.
“No, Johnny. It wasn’t flying broke us up. That was the one thing Susan and I did have going for us. I never should have married her. Or anybody. And you know it as well as I do.”
Angelo sighed and looked down at Tessa. “If I’d listened,” he said, “really listened, when Terry told me how much flying meant to her, she could have been alive today. Johnny, you are going to do to Stella what David did to Liss—what we all did?”
“I just want my wife to stay with me, with my career,” Johnny said angrily. “I want loyalty! Is that too much to ask? At least you had the decency, when you saw it was breaking up Liss and David, to tell her what the right thing was to do, that her first loyalty was to him! Have that much decency, at least—tell Stella that her duty is to me!”
“It’s too late for Liss,” Lucia said, and she, too, was deathly white. “I should have stood by her. I should have known. Oh, Stella—” She made a strange, stifled little movement. “Stay with it, make up your own mind. Don’t let him talk you out of doing what you know you have to do. Leave him if you have to, but make up your own mind. Don’t let anybody else make it up for you. Not me. Not Johnny. Do what you want to, Stel. What you want to. Not what somebody else thinks you ought to do. I couldn’t say it to Liss. But before it’s too late, I’m saying it to you, Stel. It’s not too late for you!”
She put her hands over her face and shrank into her chair. For the first time in her life, she looked old, old and broken. Tessa, frightened, put her arm around her, and Lucia bent, burying her face in Tessa’s dark hair, her shoulders shaking.
Betrayed, Johnny stared from Lucia’s hidden face to Mario.
“So that’s all loyalty means to you,” he said in a whisper. “Loyalty to the goddamned act! Signor Mario . . . he’s the star, so now it has to be what Matt wants, all the way, huh? But I couldn’t believe you’d do this to me, M
att,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, just to get a partner for the goddamn act! It isn’t enough that you got the star spot, that you got my mother turned against me, you had to have—” He broke off, clenching his fists. “You had to have my wife, too, didn’t you? You even gave her the one thing I couldn’t—you gave her a kid.”
“Johnny, that’s not fair,” Stella said. Her face was swamped with tears, but she made no effort to check them or wipe them away. “You could have given me yours, Johnny. That was what I wanted, then.”
“Stella. Stella, baby,” he said, and his face crumpled. But she stood like a stone.
“What else have we got, Johnny? Only the family, only—only being a Santelli. You wanted me to fly. That meant more than anything else to you then, more than—more than our baby. So I made myself want that, too. To be a Santelli, to be one of the Flying Santellis. And now I am, and that means more to me than anything else in the world!”
It was as if they were alone in the room.
“Why do you think I stayed with you? The family, it was all I had, all we had! And now you want to walk out on all that, for some cheap, crummy television show? Well, go right ahead,” she flung at him, “but go without me! Lucia said you were an outsider, that you didn’t belong! Well, I do, Johnny! The family, that’s what means more to me than anything, and now even you can’t take me out of it! I’m a flyer, Johnny! I’m a Santelli! You can be anything you want to! But that’s what I am, and what I want to be—a Flying Santelli!”
She covered her face with her hands then, and sobbed.
Johnny said, “Stella, Stella.” He turned her around so that her face was against his shoulder. “Stella. Babe.” He had to stop. His voice would not carry. Finally he said, “Okay, Stel. Anything you want, baby. What I wanted—it was for you, believe it or not, only I guess I didn’t know how to get it across. But what I want, more than any of that, is for you, and me—and the kid—to stick together.”
He raised his eyes and stared at them all over Stella’s bent head. Her arms went around him, without another word, and they clung together. He said, and Tommy heard the desperate bravado in his voice, “Hell, I’m a Santelli, too!”
CHAPTER 17
As always, it seemed that there was not nearly enough time for everything that had to be done. And also, as usual, they learned, at the edge of departure, that everything had been done, and that they even had time on their hands to become restless.
This time there was no final family performance in the practice room. Johnny had to leave with the first section of the Starr Circus, traveling across country with the circus train. Stella and Suzy elected to travel with him. Mario and Tommy would fly to New York two days before opening night.
“He says nothing ever changes,” Mario said to Tommy as they were packing their costumes, “but he’s changed plenty.”
“He hasn’t changed this,” Tommy said, folding away one of the green-and-gold satin flying cloaks. They would open at the Garden wearing the movie costumes, the silver-and-white costumes identical with those Barney Parrish and his act had worn, and continue to wear them for the remainder of the Madison Square Garden engagement, but on the road with the circus they would return to the Santelli green and gold.
“You know,” he said, “I never liked green and gold all that much, either.”
Mario laughed. “As a matter of fact, neither did I,” he said, “but it was just part of the Santelli tradition. Trust Johnny to change it if it can be changed any way at all, though! If he can’t change it, it can’t be changed!”
Lucia and Angelo drove them to the airport. She gave Mario a hearty hug and kiss, and after a moment stood on tiptoe and kissed Tommy, too. She said softly, “I wish—oh, how I wish Papa had lived to see the two of you. He would have been so proud, so happy!”
Angelo said generously, “You said it, Lucia. We haven’t had anything like them in the family for twenty years. I was never in that class, or any of us.”
Mario, exuberant, flung his arms around Angelo in the old careless way. Angelo smiled a little stiffly, but he didn’t return the gesture, and after an awkward moment Mario let his arms drop. Tommy realized that as flyers, he could accept them. But that was all. Well, that ought to be enough.
Only it wasn’t enough for Mario. Settled in their seats on the plane, he said, despondent, “Damn it, Tommy, Angelo brought me up! Can you blame me?”
“Who’s blaming anybody?” Tommy leaned back in his seat. After a moment he said quietly, “I can’t take your falls for you, Matt. There’s just one way you could have Angelo back on the old terms. You said we can’t break up. But if we did, Angelo would be just like always to you, within a week—until you got yourself another boy. He ain’t low enough to say, ‘choose between Tommy and the family,’ and anyhow, he knows Lucia wouldn’t listen if he did. And he’d go away like Judas and hang himself before he’d say, ‘choose between Tommy and me.’ Now that he knows what it was . . .”
Angelo’s jealous. But he can’t ever admit it, not even to himself, or it would wreck him inside. Everything he is. And now I’ve got what Angelo used to have, and didn’t know he wanted, till he lost it. Angelo had had that, and could have had it for always . . . .
Mario looked around the aisle of the plane. People were noisily coming and going, and no one was paying the slightest attention to them. “You don’t mean that Angelo—”
“No, no. I don’t mean that. You said it yourself—with Angelo it’s all unconscious, and if you ever brought it up to the surface you’d wreck him. I don’t meant that. I just mean, Angelo’s saying, you can be queer, or you can be our good boy and we’ll all love you. Not both.”
Mario suddenly laughed, fastening his seat belt. “What you’re saying is, we made our bed and we’ll have to lie in it.”
“Well,” Tommy said softly, “I can remember a time when we’d have been glad to settle for that.”
~o0o~
Three days later, a cab dropped Tommy and Mario in front of Madison Square Garden, which was plastered with circus posters. From a little distance they looked like the ones Tommy had seen when he was a child, but on closer inspection, Tommy could see that they were only a clever imitation. The colors were brighter, the drawing better, more sophisticated. Johnny had said that the old circus was dead, and in a sense he had been right. If its modern incarnation was to survive in a world of cold war, atom bombs, and television, they would have to change.
But some things would never change . . . . Tommy knew that in a special sense, their whole lives would be a compromise between what could not be changed and what must be changed. And some changes—such as a change in society, which would let them be, openly, what they both were—would come too late. In a sense, for them, it was already too late; their lives had been shaped by the need for secrecy, the struggle against compromise. Twenty years later, Tommy would look at young men who had been able to grow up in an atmosphere of permissiveness, able to accept what they were from childhood, and feel only scorn for how easy life had been made for them, without the need for the discipline of strength and secrecy.
Inside, girls from the aerial ballet were clustered together, drinking coffee out of paper cups from a machine and talking in high-pitched voices. Fragments of conversation reached their ears, conversation which would have told them immediately where they were.
“. . . so he told me there were going to be six talent scouts from Broadway shows here the first night looking for chorus girls . . .”
“. . . fell straight off and hit the wire sideways and cut a slash an inch deep on her ribs . . .”
“. . . shot out of a cannon? I told him, ‘What do you think I am, anyhow?’ So he said, ‘Honey, as long as you’re in my act . . .’”
“. . . exploded a flashbulb in Dino’s eyes just as he let go the knife, and the next thing I knew there was blood all down the front of my blouse, and the whole audience was goggling, and I just said, cool as you please, ‘Finish your act, ragazzo . . .’”
“. . . I don’t care, I won’t ride an elephant in the spec. It gives me asthma, and I’ve got a doctor’s certificate to prove it . . .”
A couple of the women turned their heads to watch them cross the lobby, and Tommy heard it among the murmured conversations: “Santellis . . . the new Parrish movie.” There was even a whispered “Isn’t the redhead handsome?” but he was used to that, too, and knew that sooner or later among the rumors there would be another whisper: “Don’t waste your time on that one.” The girls in the aerial ballet and the show girls always knew everything.
A man in overalls crossed the lobby in a rush, with a rabbit under one arm and a bucket of paint under the other. In the very middle of the lobby, a man on a folding chair was checking a seemingly endless list on a sheet of paper three feet long. A very fat man was screwing the mouthpiece into some kind of horn.
Beyond three sets of wide swinging doors, a confusion of noises came: repeated blasts on a whistle, random toots as if an orchestra were tuning, someone with a marked French accent counting in a monotonous voice, “Wan, du, wan, du, allez-hop!” And from somewhere the shrill sound, like no other on earth, of an elephant trumpeting.
The rings had been laid out, and in what would be center ring, a flying rig was being set up. Johnny, identifiable even at this distance with his fair hair and dark glasses, was standing at the foot of the rig, hands in his pockets, head tilted back, and shouting, “Not like that, you jerk! Damn it, you want me to come up and do it myself? Don’t think I couldn’t, either!”
Tommy laughed, and Mario said, “Yeah, some things don’t change. You want to find the Santellis, just listen for somebody yelling.”
“And there was a time when he sneered at the notion that you were going to be a new edition of Papa Tony right off the old plates,” Tommy said, and they went toward the foot of the rig.
Johnny turned around before they got there, giving them a brief nod of acknowledgment.
The Catch Trap Page 81