--and you'll wind up in a reform school somewhere, instead of up on the flying trapeze.")

Yet even the lies, the guilt, the bitter brutal fights, were better than the present. He found himself remembering the year he had been seventeen. They'd finished their act with the difficult and dangerous passing leap, they'd shared one of the staterooms allotted to star acts on the circus train, and Tommy had heard Angelo say to a colleague in the men's dressing tent, "Oh, sure, heck, Tommy worships the ground Mario walks on." He'd actually sounded approving. To Tommy's mother, that year, he had been reassuring; kindly. "Don't you worry about young Tom, Mrs. Zane. Mario will look out for him. They're great pals."

In one great stride, he himself had cut Angelo's casual acceptance away. They went out of the house and down the walk. Light thin folds of mist hung along the street; overhead a damp rainy sky hung low. Mario sniffed: "Spring. Smells good. With any luck, we'll be on the road in another month."

"If we can hold out that long."

"Lucky" He reached for Tommy's hand, but Tommy pulled away. "Mario, there was a time when you didn't compromise with your standards. Not to avoid trouble. Not even for me., Remember that-that week we played Denver, and--and everything there? Just the same, you bawled me out in front of every roughneck on the lot, just for turning out for practice ten minutes late. No matter what there was between us, you never went soft when it was a question of flying. Bur you let Clay sass you back because you're scared of what he might say or think, A punk, an amateur.”

"I suppose you're right. I shouldn't be easier on the kid than I was on you."

"That's not it, Mario. It's that you'll compromise at all. We've got to get loose, find some place where we won't be on the defensive all the time. I-" Tommy heard his voice catch and stopped till he could steady it. "I can't take much more. It's not me. It's what it's doing to you."

Mario strode along in silence for a few minutes. Then he stopped and turned. "Look, Lucky. The whole idea now seems to be that we've got to be so good together that nobody will give a damn whether we're homo or hetero or no-sexuals if there is such an animal. You had more nerve than I. You told Angelo-"

"I knew you'd throw that up to me-"

"Easy, easy. I'm not blaming-I just said, I never would have had the nerve. Like I don't walk into the Big Cage, either. But I went along with it, and now we've got two choices—"

"Sure. Stay together or let 'em break us up."

mattachine REVIEW

"No, Lucky. We don't have that choice any more. If we break up again, we're through. Together we're a team, we're the best. Apart we're nowhere, we're a couple of nothing men. The choice we've got is this. We hide what we are, even from the people who matter to us—or we come out and fight and say, this is us. We've got to prove we're a better team because we're together-not in spite of it. We say, take us or leave us on what we are as a team, and the hell with all of you."

And for the first time in months, Tommy felt the old sureness. This was the real Mario; not the taut, embittered stranger he had found, shabby and alone, working under an assumed name in a carnival. Briefly, in the fog, their hands touched; fell apart, but they walked on, shoulder to shoulder, no longer needing to speak at all. Finally, as they turned back through the iron gates that shut the house away from the street, Mario said “Lucky, I know how rough it is. But if we run away from Angelo-and he's fond of us in spite of everything-we're going to be running for the rest of our lives, and we'll end up running away from each other. Who can we face, if we can't face Angelo?"And, as Tommy nodded, Mario added "and Clay. I'm through running away from that cocky little punk." He gave Tommy a brief tap on the shoulder as they went up the porch steps. "You wait."

three

After supper, in the big room richly shabby with four generations of living, the Santellis gathered around the fireplace. Angelo had lighted a driftwood fire, for the nights were still cold when the fog blew in from the ocean. They were all there; from Joe, who had been a famous acrobatic clown in his day, down to Angelo's nine-year-old daughter Tessa, who would begin her first season in a balancing act this June. Joe's daughter Barbara, (Clay's sister), who at nineteen had four seasons as an aerialist and two as a bal let dancer in movie musicals behind her. Mario's brother Johnny, with his pretty fair-haired young wife, Stella, a team who had made a hit on tele; vision, last spring, with their double-trapeze routine. Lucia, their mother, who had been the world's greatest woman flyer until a near-crippling fall, and a ruptured shoulder muscle, had left her still pretty, still graceful as a ballerina; but unable to swing from a bar without falling. As Tommy looked around the room, it occurred to him that this was the only settled home he had ever known. It was Mario's by right of blood; but Mario was willing to fight for his right to it, as well.

Barbara was strumming her guitar, singing in her sweet, reedy voice: "One night she came and knelt by my side.

When I was fast asleep,

She threw her arms, about my neck

And she began to weep-"