Palisades Park (13 page)

Bunty Hill was turning in his seat at the lifeguard’s station when he suddenly saw the figure of a little girl standing atop the ten-foot board. “Holy shit!” he cried, jumping to his feet, starting to run toward the ladder.

Toni saw Bunty below, tried to remember everything he had taught her—she wanted to make him proud—and dove off the board.

But the plunge down was a million times worse than her moment of vertigo and she panicked. She forgot her form, her arms akimbo, her body arching as if recoiling from the water that was hurtling up to meet her.

Her belly hit the water with such force that every bit of air in her lungs was squeezed out of her, along with a cry of shock and pain—and then, as they said in the movies, there was a brief intermission.

*   *   *

When she came to, she was being carried in Bunty’s arms onto the sand, and as she glanced up she saw her father and mother running through the pool gate toward her, wearing their white aprons. Bunty turned and Toni’s grandmother floated into her awareness, looking pale and stricken:

“Is she all right?” Marie asked, afraid.

“Don’t die, Toni,” Jack said tearfully, not helping matters.

“Nobody’s dying, pal,” Bunty said. “She’s breathing okay.”

He laid Toni down on a beach blanket as Eddie ran up and crouched down at her side: “Baby, are you okay? How do you feel?”

“My tummy hurts,” she said plaintively.

“She took a real belly flop,” Bunty explained, “from ten feet up. That’s like getting whacked in the solar plexus by Max Schmeling. We’d better get her to the first-aid station so Doc Vita can take a look at her.”

“Oh God, Toni, why did you
do
it?” Adele said in a small voice, and Toni was surprised to see she had tears in her eyes.

“I’ll bring her over,” Eddie said, then, to Adele: “Honey, you lock up the stand. Marie, maybe you should take Jack home.”

Eddie tenderly took his daughter in his arms and carried her off. Adele ran across the midway to shutter and lock the stand, after which she went to join Eddie and Toni at the park’s small but well-equipped first-aid station.

Dr. Frank Vita was a young physician who worked at a Cliffside Park medical clinic affiliated with Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck. In summer he was also the Palisades Park medic. When Eddie entered with Toni, Nurse Cooper prepared an exam table for her as Vita asked, “What happened?”

“She jumped off a ten-foot diving board and landed on her stomach.”

“Did she lose consciousness?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Toni, honey, did you black out when you hit the water?”

“Uh.… just a little,” she said sheepishly.

“Take a deep breath, Toni, okay?” Vita put his stethoscope to her chest, then her back. “Now cough.” She complied. “I don’t hear any fluid in her lungs. Look at me, Toni, and keep your eyes open.” He shined a light in her eyes. “Normal dilation, that’s good. What’s your name again, honey?”

“Toni Stopka.”

“Can you tell me your father’s name?”

“Daddy.”

Vita laughed. “What does your mother call him?”

“Eddie.”

“Know what day it is today?”

“Thursday.”

“Who’s the favorite in the third race at Monmouth?”

“Huh?”

“Nurse,” Vita said with a smile, “make a note: patient seems alert, awake, but useless at picking horses.”

Eddie laughed, and that made Toni relax a little. Adele entered the aid station and hurried to her daughter’s side as Vita said, “I’m going to feel your stomach now, Toni.” He palpated her abdomen; she winced slightly. “Does that hurt? Do you feel sick, like you’re going to throw up?”

“No, it’s just sore.”

“Okay, Toni, that’s all.” He turned to Eddie. “She’ll be fine. She may have lost consciousness for a few seconds, but there are no other signs of concussion. None of her internal organs seem bruised—she’s just going to wake up tomorrow with some very sore muscles. Apply liniment, give aspirin as needed for pain, and keep her out of the water for a while.”

“Oh, I can guarantee you
that,
” Adele assured him.

Toni found out what this meant when they got home, when after an ominous private consultation between her parents, her father told her, “We’re glad you’re all right, honey, but what you did was both wrong and dangerous. Dangerous because if Bunty hadn’t rescued you, you could’ve drowned while you were out cold. And wrong because Bunty told you
not
to dive off those platforms and you did it anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” Toni said quietly. “I thought I could do it.”

“We’ve decided,” her mother said, “that as punishment you won’t be allowed back in the pool for a month. Maybe that way you’ll think before you do anything as foolish as this again.”

Toni nodded, accepting her fate, but in truth, the average seven-year-old has at best an uncertain grasp on the notion of time—and it was only after she was denied a visit to Palisades for a whole week, and then another, that Toni began to understand that a month was
really
a long time.

What’s more, Adele was taking no chances that her daughter would substitute rock climbing for swimming: Marie brought both children to her home in Fort Lee, where the most excitement to be had was a game of marbles with the neighborhood kids. Worse, Toni had to watch as several local boys returned from Palisades Park with their swimsuits still dripping—they, like most kids in Fort Lee and Cliffside Park, knew that there was a hole in the park fence behind the free-act stage, and behind the pool’s waterfall was an opening through which you could swim into the pool without paying admission. What they didn’t know was that Irving Rosenthal was well aware of this gap in security and made no attempt to fix it—on the theory that even if the kids sneaked into the park for free, they’d still part with some of their money on rides, games, and food, and everybody went away happy.

Everyone, that is, but Toni, who at the three-week mark began to chafe, asking her mother one morning, “Is it a month yet?”

“Nope,” she was told, “not yet.”

“How long before it’s a month?”

“Try another week on for size.”

“
Another
week?” Toni said in disbelief. “Mama, can’t I
please
go to the pool? I won’t try to dive, I’ll just swim, I promise!”

“The deal wasn’t three weeks with time off for good behavior, it was a month. Don’t worry, you’ll have about a week’s worth of swimming left before the season ends.”

“Only one week?” Toni was horrified. “That’s not fair!”

“Neither was ignoring what Bunty told you not to do.”

“You don’t want me to have any fun at all,” Toni insisted.

“You can have fun at Grandma’s house. She still has my old dolls and dollhouse in the attic, you can play with those…”

“Who cares!” Toni yelled. “Dolls are stupid!”

“Lower your voice, Antoinette.”

The name only stoked Toni’s anger all the more.

“I hate dolls! I hate
you
!” she blurted.

Adele flinched, as if physically struck. Reflexively, her hand lashed out and slapped Toni across her left cheek. Not hard, but enough to sting.

“Don’t you
ever
speak to me like that again, young lady,” Adele said, though her voice nearly broke halfway through.

This was the first time either of her parents had ever struck her, and Toni sat there a moment, less hurt than shocked—then burst into tears. She jumped off the kitchen chair and ran into her room, wailing.

Adele looked down at her hand. It was trembling.

She stood, feeling wobbly and nauseous. Thank God Eddie had gotten up early to go to their wholesaler. Somehow she managed to propel herself into the bathroom, Toni’s cries still ringing behind her.

Every awful memory of life with Franklin paled beside that of hearing your child tell you that she hated you. Adele turned on the faucet to drown out her sobs, then sat on the edge of the bathtub and cried her heart out.

She was a terrible mother; all this had been a terrible, terrible mistake. She’d thought having a daughter would be so joyous, being able to share with her all the things she had loved as a child—but at every turn Antoinette demonstrated her disdain for everything Adele loved, everything Adele
was.
Her own daughter’s heart was a mystery to her. She sat and cried for five minutes—cried for letting her anger get the better of her, for being a bad mother, and most of all, for wanting more out of life than this.

*   *   *

Toni’s hurt was forgotten almost as soon as she returned to the pool the next week—or most of it, anyway. She was still bothered by something her mother had said—not on the day she’d slapped Toni’s face, but on the afternoon they had watched Captain Solomon’s death-defying leap.

Now, as Bunty gave her some pointers on improving her form, Toni said hesitantly, “Bunty? Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, kiddo, what is it?”

“My mom says girls can’t dive like boys. She says we’re not strong enough. Is that true?”

Bunty snorted. “Aw, that business about women’s bodies not holding up to the rigors of diving, that’s just an old wives’ tale—not that I’m calling your momma an old wife,” he added with a wink. “Just ’cause you’re too little now to dive off a ten-foot board, doesn’t mean you won’t be able to do it hands down in a couple of years.”

“So could I”—she hesitated to even speak the words aloud—“could I dive like Captain Solomon when I grow up? Even if Mama says I can’t?”

Bunty sighed.

“Listen, kid, at some point everybody gets told that they can’t do something in life. Like this girl I knew at the Women’s Swimming Association in New York. Her name was Trudy—Trudy Ederle. She had measles as a kid, so her hearing wasn’t so good. But man, she was a torpedo in the water. She was fourteen, fifteen years old, and her dream was to swim the English Channel.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s thirty-one miles of damn cold water between England and France,” he said, “with strong tides and a helluva chop. The first time Trudy tried it, her trainer thought she was in trouble and pulled her out of the water only six and a half miles from shore—even though Trudy was sure she could have made it. On her second try, a year later, she wouldn’t let anyone pull her out—and became the first woman to swim the English Channel.”

“Wow,” Toni said. “Really?”

“Yep. And there was another gal in New York—Millie Gade Corson—who I helped train, and she became the second woman and the first
mother
to swim the Channel.

“So look, honey—you’re seven years old. When you grow up you may decide what you really want to be is a crocodile hunter, or an opera singer. You may
not
have what it takes to be a high diver. But don’t take somebody else’s word for that—give yourself the chance to find out for yourself.”

*   *   *

Due to spotty weather, the ’38 season didn’t entirely live up to expectations, but Eddie and Adele, like most concessionaires, still made a profit, and that was nothing to sneeze at these days. On September 7, the last day of the season, the Rosenthals threw a big blowout, starting at midnight, in the park’s Midway Restaurant. Staff and concessionaires toasted to each other’s success, dined on roast chicken, listened to entertainers brought in—courtesy of “Lightning” Bennett—from local nightclubs like Ben Marden’s Riviera, and a few even got up and serenaded the crowd themselves. (Frank Vita was a surprisingly good singer, for a doctor.) Bunty attended with a knockout blonde who could have been a model. Afterward, tables were moved aside as Palisadians joined in the dance craze that was sweeping the nation: the jitterbug.

This farewell party had become something of an annual tradition over the past four years, and Adele always looked forward to it; but tonight it just made her sad. She was going to miss these people, this place, for the next seven months. Increasingly it began to feel to her like these five months at Palisades were the only truly exciting part of her life. Toni and Jack were fast asleep at their grandparents’ house so their parents could stay as long as they liked, but after jitterbugging to Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” Adele said she was tired and wanted to go home. They made their goodbyes to everyone, and were long gone by the time the party broke up in the wee hours of the morning, when the rumba contest finally ended in a draw, Minette Dobson among the winners.

In the parking lot, Adele blurted, “Eddie—can I take dance lessons?”

He looked at her in mild surprise. “You were doing just fine on the dance floor tonight.”

“I mean professional dancing. You remember the Swift Sisters, from vaudeville? They’ve got a dance studio here in Cliffside Park. I thought I might take a few lessons—they say it helps an actor achieve grace and poise. Our bodies are our instruments, we need to keep them in tune.”

Eddie had to smile at that. “How much do these lessons cost?”

“Five dollars a week.”

“Well, I think we can swing that,” he said. “Sure, why not?”

Adele smiled and gave him a kiss. She was careful not to let it show, but there was a big brass band in her soul, striking up a show tune.

*   *   *

Toni and Jack returned to school the following week, and one of the subjects that would be greatly discussed in the coming school year was the upcoming World’s Fair in New York. There were already articles trumpeting its April opening in newspapers and magazines, and one of Miss Kaplan’s assignments for Jack’s first-grade class was to draw a picture of the fair’s “theme center,” the Trylon and Perisphere. The Perisphere was a white globe sitting next to a tall white obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument. This was, Miss Kaplan reasoned, a good opportunity for the first graders to learn the use of the compass (to draw the Perisphere) and the ruler (for the Trylon). Jack took the assignment very seriously, studying the newspaper pictures carefully, practicing with the compass to make a perfect circle.

When he came home that day, Jack proudly showed his artwork to his father. “Daddy, Miss Kaplan says we’re gonna make a booklet about the fair and she’ll use my picture for the
cover
!” he told him breathlessly.