Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Catch Trap

To KERRY, without whom I would

probably never have begun this book

and

To WALTER, without whom I would

certainly never have finished it.

To all my friends who, knowing of my obsession with the art of the flying trapeze, have over the years

sent me newspaper clippings, photographs, circus programs, circus magazines, and postcards alerting me

to books, movies, or TV documentaries which I might otherwise have missed.

To the circus collection in San Antonio, Texas, for allowing me special access to the file on Alfredo

Codona—

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To the friends who have gone above and beyond the call of duty by accompanying me to the dozenth, or

two-dozenth, showing of a movie so that I might study, again and again, the fine details of body

movements in flying.

To Bob Tucker; to Vernell Coriell; to Jacqueline Lichtenberg; to my patient children; and to the dozens

of workhands, rigging men, and performers who—not knowing that I was doing research for a

book—put up with my questions and indulged my impertinent curiosity

My sincerest thanks.

USUAL DISCLAIMER—WITH A DIFFERENCE

The Catch Trap isa work of fiction. No character in these pages represents or is intended to represent

any actual human being, living or dead. Nor has any circus or carnival mentioned in these pages any

existence outside the imagination of the author.

Every novelist says this. It is usually true. However, because I was writing of events which were real,

even though my characters had no part in them, I must make a very special disclaimer.

It was no part of my intention to write a fictional history of the American circus. Although my characters

are preoccupied with the history and traditions of the flying trapeze, and especially of its great trick, the

"triple," I have not used the real history of the triple for this book.

Although nowadays it is not unusual to see the triple performed by any flyer with a claim to special

competence, it was not always so. For a great many years, the triple was believed to be a physical

impossibility; and even after it was known to be possible, it was actually known as thesalto mortale, or

fatal leap, because so many flyers had been killed or injured in attempting it. Like all aficionados of the

flying trapeze, I know that it was Ernie Clarke, shortly before World War I, who first accomplished it;

that it was the great Alfredo Codona who first managed to put it into his act on a regular basis; that

Antoinette Concello was the first woman to do a triple and the only one to perform it in the ring with

anything like regularity; and that the great tradition was carried on by such flyers as Fay Alexander and

Tito Gaona.

This put me in a curious position. I could, as some novelists have chosen to do, mingle the names of my

imaginary characters with real ones, the genuine historical aerialists of the period; but this was a liberty I

did not feel free to take. Or I could, alternatively, invent an entire imaginary history for the circus and the

art of the flying trapeze, thus of necessity borrowing the accomplishments of real people, and their known

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exploits, and attributing them to my imaginary performers. I have chosen to do this, as better suited to a

novelist's freedom, but this places me under the necessity of making this very special disclaimer.

The private lives of the characters in this book, of the Flying Santellis, the Fortunatis, and the other

performers in the imaginary circuses depicted here,do not represent and are not in any way intended

to represent the private lives of the well-known circus artistes who actually performed these tricks in the

circus rings of the real world. About the private lives of these real-world performers, I know nothing

except what, in the words of the immortal Will Rogers, I read in the papers—or what they have chosen

to make public in their memoirs. And while this may be as much fiction as my novel, it is a different

fiction, and another story.

Where I have borrowed a well-known episode in circus history and attributed it to one of my fictional

aerialists, I have done so merely for dramatic effect, and not with the intention of attempting to draw any

parallel between the character in my novel and any actual circus performer who ever lived. If some of

these episodes never had any existence outside newspaper publicity, or were invented by some

imaginative public-relations writer, my only excuse for borrowing them is the novelist's time-honored

excuse: "If it didn't happen that way, it should have." Or, to rephrase,Se non èvero, èben trovata

—which means in plain English, It may not be true, but it makes a good yarn.

This book is set in the forties and early fifties. Certain statements made by the characters portray social

and sexual attitudes that would be distasteful if not unthinkable today. The reader is earnestly exhorted

not to confuse the attitudes expressed by the various characters in the novel with any real-life attitude

held by the author.

—Marion Zimmer Bradley

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The full terror and the full reward of this fantastic game are given only to those who bring to it talent

honed by obsessive practice into great skill, a fiercely competitive will, and high intelligence, with the

flagellating sensitivity which so often accompanies it. In these men a terrible and profound change

sometimes takes place; the game becomes life. They understand what Karl Wallenda meant when he

said, going back to the high wire after the tragic fall that killed two of his troupe and left another a

paraplegic, "To be on the wire is life; all the rest is waiting."

STERLING MOSS/KEN PURDY

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In later life, when Tommy Zane was asked about his earliest memory, he never had any doubt. It was

the time when they burned the Big Top at the Lambeth Circus.

Lambeth wasn't the Greatest Show on Earth, not by a long shot. For all he knew it might have been the

smallest of the traveling circuses, playing mostly in villages and county seats through the Midwest. Tommy

had only the haziest memory of seeing the show under the Big Top, when he was so small that he was

never allowed into the ring at all, even at rehearsal, for fear someone would step on him.

He learned years later that it was halfway through the 1935 season when the main top had gotten so

ancient and threadbare that it couldn't even be fireproofed again, and Jim Lambeth had decided it was

too dangerous, and made a bonfire of it somewhere in Oklahoma. It was grand publicity for the show, in

those Depression days when admission was a quarter and it was hard enough for the poor farmers in that

area to scrape it up, but Tommy only remembered being hoisted on his father's shoulders while they

watched it burn, flames shooting up forty feet into the air. He remembered that when it died down he had

begun to cry, and when they asked him why he couldn't tell them. His father said, "Overexcited, that's

all," and carried him to bed in their family trailer. That had been early in the evening; later that night when

he woke up and heard the familiar band music and Big Jim Lambeth's voice booming out as usual over

the band, the tight knot in his chest had dissolved. He had fallen asleep happy, knowing the circus would

go on as usual. Seeing the Big Top burn, he had thought the show would be gone, too.

He had been five years old that summer. After that, they played under the open sky, on fairgrounds,

stadiums, parks, and vacant lots outside the towns. The winters never seemed quite real. All through

childhood he had a recurring fantasy, that when the show packed up in the fall they turned off the real

world and lived like the animals in the zoo, caged in one place till the time came to go out on the road and

live their real life again. He sometimes wondered if they turned off the audience, too, for the winter.

He never knew quite when he stopped thinking that way. It was late in the war, and he was fourteen

years old, when he began to understand that to the people outside, it was his world that was the illusion,

the fake, not quite genuine.

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Tommy stood in the dirt and sawdust of the ring, watching the glint of the sun on the high rigging, waiting

for the Santellis to finish their morning practice.

Forty feet above him, in the maze of guy wires and swinging trapezes, the three Santellis—Angelo, the

catcher, and Mario and Papa Tony, the flyers—were busy at their morning workout. Tommy waited until

Mario alighted on the platform at the near end.

"I went to town for the mail with Dad. Got a letter for you."

"What's the postmark?" Mario yelled down.

Tommy pulled the letter out of his pocket and studied the smudges. "San Francisco."

"Okay, bring it up, then."

Tommy kicked off his dusty tennis shoes and swarmed up the ladder like a monkey. That summer he

was a short, sturdy kid, lithe and compact, with shoulders surprisingly broad for his height. He

maneuvered around the bulge where the narrow rope ladder curved around the tight-strung safety net,

and came up to the firmly guyed piece of board, wide enough for two or three people to stand

abreast—the takeoff platform for the flyers.

Mario Santelli (Tommy always thought of him as Mario Santelli, though he had known for months that it

was not his real name), standing with one arm around a guy rope, mopped at his sweaty forehead with a

resin-soaked handkerchief. He took the letter and said, "Sit down. Maybe you can take it right down

with you when you go."

At the far end of the rigging, Angelo, the catcher—a short, thickset man in his mid-thirties with curly

dark hair—had pulled himself upright and was sitting in the trapeze with one arm loosely braced around

the rope, swinging gently to and fro.

"What's the holdup?"

"Letter from Liss," Mario called back, and tore the envelope open. While Mario read the letter, Tommy

looked down at the whole panorama of the circus lot spread out below him, the backyard which was the

same whether they set it up in Texas or Tennessee, Oklahoma or Ohio. In the dusty Texas sunlight, the

clusters of house trailers where the performers lived looked like a small town, isolated from the wider

roofs of the town beyond. In back of most of the trailers, wet wash was fluttering and flapping. Thick

power cables coiled like snakes everywhere around the lot, running toward the generator truck.

The concession stands were going up, forming an alley to funnel the crowds inside. Behind roped-off

barriers to keep away curious outsiders, the performing animals were staked in an enclosure formed by

the parked rigging trucks and equipment trailers. Down by the cages where the cats were kept between

shows, Tommy saw a foreshortened wedge of red shirt and broad-brimmed hat: his father, making sure

that none of the females were in heat, none of the males had a sore pad or swollen tooth.

Directly below them in the ring a group of acrobats were practicing; Tommy could hear Margot Clane

counting for them, "One-two, one-two,allez-hop !" Other riggings were going up—for the wirewalker,

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Shuffles Small, and for the aerial ballet called the Pink Ladies. Beyond them the town roofs were spread

out, hazy in the smoke from the cotton gin. An alien world, one Tommy knew nothing about.

Papa Tony—Antonio Santelli, small, wiry, gray-haired and gray-mustached—was resting with one leg

thrown over the platform. "Any news?" he asked.

Mario finished reading his letter, folded it, and tucked it into the waistband of his tights. "None worth

telling. I think she's lonely. But it won't be long—we'll be breaking up in another week."

"And time enough for that, I say," Papa Tony declared. "It is too cold for the night shows; does the

padrone want us to fly in our long red flannels?"

"And last night the wind was so bad I had all kinds of trouble controlling the ropes," Mario said. He was

a thin, tautly built young man in his early twenties, though he looked younger. His thick black curls were

combed back from a high forehead, and his dark eyes under slanting brows gave his face a faintly

foreign, faintly devilish air. You had to know him a long time before you found out that his eyebrows told

a whacking lie about his face. Some people never found it out at all. "Any other mail, Tom?"

"Not for you, no. But I got a card—I wanted to tell you about it. Remember I went to school in San

Angelo last year while Dad was working in the zoo there? A couple of kids I know there, Jeff Marlin and

his sister Nancy—Jeff and I shared a locker in school. He says he and Nancy will come to the show

Thursday and they're coming early to say hello."

"That will be nice for you, to see your friends," Papa Tony said, "but this is Thursday; will they be here?"

At Tommy's nod, Papa Tony turned to Mario. "Matt, did you tell him?"

"No, I clean forgot. Tommy, we asked Big Jim to come down some morning this week before we break

up for the winter. So keep your knees tucked in and don't get butterfingered."

Tommy gulped but tried to pretend the sun was in his eyes. "Hey, does that mean—"

"It doesn't mean a darn thing except he's getting curious to see if I've been wasting my time all summer,"

Mario cautioned. "Don't you get in a hurry. I told you that, often enough. When you get a little steadier,

we might let you fill in once in a while. But you hold on, don't try to go too fast. I said—"

"Hey, Mario! I'm waiting," Angelo shouted from the far end of the rigging. Mario rose to his feet in one

smooth, fluid motion. The platform swayed like the deck of a ship, but all three automatically shifted their

weight to compensate for it, not noticing. "Stick around, Tom—climb up out of the way. After we finish

the routine, I want to try something. Coming, Angelo!"

"About time," Angelo called back, then lowered himself to catching position, head down.

Tommy climbed up to the high bar fixed above the platform, to which the second trapeze was anchored

when not in use. Here he could sit and watch without getting in the way of the flyers; it was his favorite

vantage point, the spot he loved best. Only for a couple of months had he been privileged to sit up here

when the Santellis were rehearsing. It wasn't the view he cared about—though that was spectacular

enough. What meant more to him was the proof that they trusted him up here: trusted him not to get in

their way when they were rehearsing, not to distract one of them at a crucial moment, not to endanger

them by doing something foolish. For a while this had been enough—but now he had something new to

think about.

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We might let youfillin once in a while . . .

But don't you get in a hurry. He wondered how many times this year Mario had said those words to

him.

The Flying Santellis had joined the Lambeth Circus earlier that same year, halfway through June of 1944.

As he watched Mario swing out toward Angelo, Tommy found himself remembering the first time he had

watched them. Several months ago. They had arrived in the night; early in the morning they had set up

their rigging and gone up to test it.

They were good. After a lifetime with the circus Tommy knew the difference between good, average,

and incompetent performers, and the Santellis were good—good enough that he wondered, a little, what

they were doing with a show the size of Lambeth.

Tommy had known immediately how good they were by the precise deftness with which the catcher

waited to get the feel of the wind and the proper pacing before lowering himself to swing by his knees,

testing the swing of the bar and speeding it up slightly by arching his shoulders, then twisting his legs

around the side ropes of his trapeze, making himself an extension of the swing. Then the first of the flyers,

a neat thin little old man with gray hair, reached up for the flying bar, gripped it in his hands, and swung

out in a long, smooth arc. At the top of the swing he jackknifed his body upward, rolled over into a

double back somersault that looked effortless, and straightened out smoothly, outstretched hands

interlocking with the catcher's grip.

Meanwhile the second flyer, a long-legged youngster in tights, had caught the returning trapeze on the

backswing and swung out, throwing his body forward over the bar. Just as the first flyer let go of the

catcher's wrists, the boy let go of the trapeze and the two flyers somersaulted past one another, the boy

landing safely in the catcher's hands and the old man gripping the trapeze the boy had just released.

Tommy caught his breath at the perfection of the maneuver—he had never seen a flying pass this

close—but the old man, landing springily on the platform, had shouted, "Ragged, ragged! You break too

fast, Mario! Try it again!"

They had done it three times more before the old man was satisfied. The old man caught up a towel,

flung it about his shoulders, and sat down on the end of the platform to rest. Tommy, the spell broken,

had turned to move away, when the younger flyer called out, "Hold it, Angelo. Give me a good high

swing. I want to try again, okay?"

"On a brand-new rig? Okay, kid, it's your neck," the catcher called.

The moment Mario left the platform, Tommy knew what the younger flyer was trying to do: the difficult,

the legendary, the near-impossible triple midair somersault. He made the second turn and flipped over for

the third, but he had started a fraction too late; he turned in midair, rolled over, plunged down into the

net, bounced twice, and laughed in chagrin. He vaulted over the edge of the net. From a distance of forty

feet Tommy had thought him grown-up; now he saw that Mario was only a few years older than he was

himself.

"What you staring at, kid?"

"No law against watching, is there?" Tommy retorted. "I thought you were good, that's all. The last flyers

we had weren't worth watching."

"Yeah. I looked great just now, didn't I?"

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Tommy said, suddenly shy, "That was tough luck. Looked like you almost had it. You'll do it sometime,

though."

"Oh, sure. Someday. I've done it twice in a thousand tries. Maybe in the second thousand I'll do it four

or five. Who are you, anyhow? You're no town kid. You belong here?"

"I'm Tommy Zane, junior."

"Tom Zane's kid? I met your dad last night." The flyer put out his hand and shook Tommy's. "You going

to be a cat man too someday?"

"No, Mister Santelli."

The older boy laughed. "Hey, you make me feel old. Mister Santelli is my grandfather, up there."

"I heard him call you Mario."

"That's the way they bill me on the road. There's always been a Mario in the family. That's Papa Tony,

my grandfather. And the catcher is Angelo, my uncle—my mother's brother. He's a Santelli, too. But my

name is Matt Gardner—Matthew, junior, really. He was my mother's catcher when she was in the act,

but he died when I was a little kid. My sister, Elissa, left the show a year ago and got married. Are you in

the show?"

"I ride on the parade floats, and I help Ma Leighty with costumes for the spec," Tommy said, "and

sometimes I fill in with the aerial ballet if one of the girls wants a day off. In a wig, that is." Then he found

the nerve to say what he wanted to say: "But what I really want is to be a flyer."

He had expected Mario to laugh, or to say something patronizing, like most grown-ups. It had suddenly

seemed so important to get it said that he felt he could even take that—from a real flyer. But Mario only

quirked up one of the devilish eyebrows. "Is that so? How long you been in the aerial ballet?"

"I started learning web work when I was about nine. All the kids do it."

"I know. My sister did. Are you any good?"

"Nothing to be good at, in a web act," Tommy said, exasperated. "Ma Leighty could do it, if the ropes

would hold her up!"

Mario started to laugh and then didn't. He gave Tommy a sharp look, drawing down his eyebrows so

that they were almost level. Then he looked up at the empty rigging; Papa Tony and Angelo had come

down.

"Tell you what. Come on up, if you want to."

"Up there? On the rigging?"

"Scared?"

"No," Tommy said quickly, "only the one time I went up they chased me off. And I got a licking."

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"Well, I'll guarantee nobody will lick you for it," Mario said. "Come on up, then."

For the first time, then, he climbed the narrow, jiggling rope ladder to the high platform. Even this first

time he climbed it as he had seen other flyers do; not like an ordinary ladder, grasping the side ropes and

placing the feet on the rungs, but holding only one of the side ropes, keeping his body on the outside and

using the rungs only as toeholds for leverage upward. He had never done it before, but it seemed as

natural as breathing. The platform joggled and swayed as Mario stepped off beside him.

"Heights don't bother you, I see. How tall is your father?"

"About five feet seven, I guess. Maybe not quite."

"And your mother?"

"About my size. Why?"

"Because if you're going to grow up to be six feet tall, forget it. I'm supposed to be too tall for a flyer,

and I'm only about five feet eight. Chances are you won't be that tall, though. How old are you? About

ten?"

"I was fourteen in May," Tommy said coldly.

"Small for your age, then. No, I'm not insulting you, because that's good; it means you're old enough to

start. The only thing is, you have to be tall enough to reach the bar from the platform. Here." He reached

up and pulled down the trapeze from the hook where it was anchored. "Can you reach it?"

He could, and it was with a sort of held-breath wonder that he first closed his fingers around the rough

taped surface of the bar. Mario said, "You know how to fall in the net, don't you?"

"Sure," Tommy said, his voice only a thread. "You have to land on your back, is all."

"Well, how about it? Want to try a swing?"

Tommy had not been sure the flyer was serious. "Honest? Can I?"

"You'll never learn any younger. Go ahead."

It suddenly seemed a very long way down, and the net looked much too small and flimsy way down

there.

"Go ahead," Mario said. "The worst you can do is fall in the net. Now."

Tommy got a firm grip on the bar and jumped off the platform. Remembering what he had seen them do

when they started a swing, he kicked out with both feet, arching his body. He managed to get the trapeze

into a long forward swing, but at the end of the arc the ropes buckled and his hands began to slip—later

he learned how performers coated them with resin—and he twisted frantically, kicked out hard, and

managed to get up enough momentum to swing back. He missed the platform, and the returning trapeze

swung him out again.

"Don't panic," Mario shouted. "Can you change hands and face around this way? If you can't, wait till

the swing dies and drop into the net."

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Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Catch Trap

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