Palisades Park (21 page)

*   *   *

Letters from Eddie to Adele, Toni, and Jack arrived at least once a week, and Adele made the reading of them an event to keep his voice alive in the household. In February, word came that another member of the Palisades Park family—Jackie Morris, son of Charles “Doc” Morris—had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Toni and Jack were properly awed that they knew a genuine, real-life war hero, and were certain that their dad would distinguish himself in the same way.

As the park’s opening day in April approached, Adele had to face the fact that she couldn’t operate the concession by herself and reluctantly began looking for someone to help out. She asked for recommendations from friends and also placed an ad in the classified pages of
The Billboard
:

WANTED—Concession Agent and Cook, French Fry Stand. Experience Preferred. Salary plus Percentage. Contact A. Stopka, Palisades Amusement Park, NJ. Cliffside 6-1341.

The ad brought a dozen applicants, three of whom Adele invited to interview. They were all men, and all seemed startled upon learning that “A. Stopka” was a woman, but she bulldozed past their surprise and briskly inquired about their background and experience, even as she tried to draw some measure of their character. One was a grizzled old carny whose breath smelled of bourbon at ten
A.M.
, which immediately eliminated him from consideration. The second was a middle-aged agent who had managed a pretzel concession at Rye Playland and who seemed to start every sentence with, “Listen, honey,” which Adele decided might become quickly tiresome. The third was an experienced talker in his late thirties who had a slick bally and who seemed neither condescending nor crooked, though there was no way to be sure of the latter. His name was Jim Lubbock.

“And why did you leave your last job, Mr. Lubbock?” she asked.

“I came down with a bad case of hoof in mouth disease,” he replied.

“Hoof in mouth?”

“I found out our meat supplier was stuffing ground horse meat into the hot-dog casings. The owner told me to keep my mouth shut. That night a lady asks me, ‘Are these really Twelve-Inch Footlong Hot Dogs?’ and I answer, ‘Absolutely. That was the distance between the fetlock and the knee.’”

Adele laughed and hired him on the spot.

*   *   *

In the first warm weeks of spring, a number of local kids, taking advantage of the fact that Palisades didn’t open until the end of April, commandeered its parking lot and converted it to a softball lot, even as the concessionaires did on rainy days. After school two teams of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders squared off on the asphalt, bases marked in chalk, for the championship of nothing in particular. The teams had a rotating lineup but Toni was always among them: at twelve years old she already stood five feet four and had inherited her father’s batting prowess—she often sent the softball soaring off the edge of the Palisades, to fall like a canvas-covered meteor in somebody’s backyard in Edgewater. She was also a pretty good outfielder, adept at catching pop flies.

Eleven-year-old Jack was on the same team, but his commitment to the game was questionable. Early on he had the bad luck to be sitting in the makeshift dugout just as a batter, connecting solidly with the pitch, tossed his bat aside and made for first base. The errant bat went flying into the dugout, where it connected with Jack’s forehead, sending him toppling backward and, ultimately, into the Holy Name medical clinic in Cliffside Park. Jack suffered no concussion nor any ill effects other than a lump on his head, but it didn’t exactly instill a love of the game in him.

Today he was playing third base when the batter on the other team hit a line drive toward right field. The ball bounced once, Toni snapped it up, and with a runner heading into third, she threw the ball to Jack.

Jack, however, seemed oblivious, the ball whizzing like a mortar round over his right shoulder, and the runner made it easily to third.

The team captain, a towheaded, pug-nosed twelve-year-old named Slim, stalked over. “Christ on a crutch, Stopka! How’d you
miss
that?”

“Oh,” Jack said innocently, “sorry. I was thinking about a comic book I read yesterday.”

Slim slapped the heel of his hand into his forehead.

“That’s it!” he yelled. “I’ve had it. You’re off the team, Stopka—go home and read your comic books!”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Toni came running up. “You can’t kick my brother off the team!”

“He’s lucky I don’t kick him into the Hudson River!”

“Yeah? Well, if
he’s
off the team,” Toni told him, “then
I’m
off it too.”

“What? Don’t be nutty! You’re our best batter.”

“Is my brother on the team?”

“No!” Slim insisted.

“C’mon, Jack,” Toni told Jack. “Let’s go.”

As Toni walked indignantly away from the playing field, Jack said to her, “Sis, you didn’t have to do that.”

“’Course I did. You’re my brother.”

“Yeah, but he’s right,” Jack admitted. “I
am
a rotten softball player.”

“So what?” Toni said. “Are we playing for the National League pennant? Is it going to kill him to let you play?”

“Sis, it’s no big deal. I don’t even like the game all that much. I just like playing it with you.”

Toni smiled and told her little brother, “Yeah, I like playing it with you too. But on our next team, let me cover third base, okay?”

*   *   *

Palisades opened on April 24 with a big War Bond rally headlined by “Uncle Don” Carney, an aerialist called The Sensational Marion, and a bevy of beautiful magazine cover girls from the Walter Thornton Modeling Agency. The bond drive exceeded all expectations with $82,000 in bonds sold. A new ride, MacArthur’s Bombers—named after General Douglas MacArthur’s air defense corps in the South Pacific—was proving popular, and even Jackie Bloom’s ball game got a wartime renovation, with Jackie replacing old targets with new ones that he’d watercolored himself, featuring the likenesses of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini.

Business was brisk and Adele and the new man, Jim, were kept busy cooking and serving Saratoga fries for the crowds. On weekends, before the end of the school year, Adele had Toni help out with the stand—peeling potatoes, wiping the counter, making change for customers—which pleased Toni and made her feel very grown-up, like she was pulling her weight in Dad’s absence. When school let out and the pool opened, she worked half a day at the stand and the rest she practiced swimming and diving with Bunty.

Bunty had finally okayed her to ascend to the ten-foot diving board: “Keep your head in line with your spine, remember to arch your back, keep your legs closely aligned and your toes pointed.”

After a little work on her “approach,” she was soon taking running jumps off the board, her momentum and the spring in the board launching her a good three feet up in the air. It was this moment, at the pinnacle of her flight, that thrilled Toni the most: for those few seconds of ascendancy and that split second before she began her downward plunge, she felt as though she were defying gravity, like a bird or a plane or—she could only admit this to one person—a strange visitor from another planet, with abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women). In that moment of midair suspension, she felt free of the bonds of earth, capable of doing anything, going anywhere. And when her arched body, arms outstretched, began its descent to the water, she sometimes fantasized that she was on her way to rescue someone trapped in a raging river (no need to change the course of it with her bare hands, just pluck the poor devil out and fly him away) or diving into the ocean to foil some dastardly plan of Luthor’s.

Headfirst she plunged in, and down here, too, her near-weightlessness in water felt like flying.

Sometimes Jack was at the pool too, though he didn’t dive himself; he would sit in a beach chair on the sand, his sketch pad in his lap, scribbling away with his colored pencils as Toni dove. One day she got out of the water and joined him to find that he had drawn a very flattering likeness of his sister in her blue bathing suit, back arched, head up, arms outstretched, floating in midair. It was very naturalistic, except for one detail: he had added a red cape, at the nape of her neck, to her blue bathing suit.

She laughed when she saw it, but he said, “Am I wrong, Sis?”

She shook her head. “No. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

“Like the start of an adventure?”

She sat next to him and nodded. “You should try it. See for yourself.”

“I don’t need to,” Jack said. “That’s what drawing’s like for me too—an adventure. Most of the time I don’t even know where it’s going or how it’ll turn out. It just comes out of my fingers and onto the paper.”

“Now
that’s
super,” Toni said, impressed.

“Naw,” Jack said modestly. “I’m more like Jimmy Olsen. Somebody’s gotta get pictures of you mystery men.”

They grinned at their shared adventure, their secret identities known only to each other.

*   *   *

The Sensational Marion had a good high-wire act, but Toni was flat-out astounded by the performer who followed her on the free-act stage. His name was Peejay Ringens, and word got around fast that he was booked at Palisades for an entire month—the longest deal the Rosenthals had made with one performer since they took over the park. Toni was baffled at first by the equipment and rigging that was being set up for him. There was a water tank, six feet in diameter and three feet deep, not unlike others she had seen; but instead of a single tall ladder there went up a series of ladders, the highest being a hundred feet tall and the lowest about forty feet, all of which supported a long sloping ramp. Between the tank and the ramp, workmen were stringing up a safety net, like the one used by trapeze artists. Was this an acrobatic act or a high dive? Toni couldn’t figure it out.

She got her answer at his first performance. The audience was standing, not sitting, the benches having been moved to make way for all the equipment. The park announcer proclaimed,
“Ladies and gentlemen, Palisades Park is proud to bring you the most stupendous and thrilling act of all time by the premier high diver of the world today, Mr. Peejay Ringens!”
As the crowd applauded, a tall man—about six feet two, in his mid-fifties, wearing satin tights, diving cap, and a jacket with a red, white, and blue American shield on the chest—strode with a smile onto the stage and began climbing the hundred-foot tower to the recorded accompaniment of a brass band playing a stirring march. At the top of the ladder, Ringens walked onto a small platform. To Toni’s amazement, he picked up a bicycle that was waiting for him there, and as the music swelled, he straddled the bike and pushed it to the lip of the platform. He looked down the long slope of the ramp, which at the forty-foot end had a little upturn, like a ski chute.

He pushed himself and the bicycle forward, drew up his feet and placed them on the pedals, and the bicycle began racing down the incline.

The crowd held a collective breath as the bike raced down the slope in what seemed like two heartbeats. Then it hit the upturn and was fired upward like a skeet shot—for a few moments bicycle and rider both soaring through space as though riding on air.

Until Ringens let go of the bike.

Toni gasped along with the rest of the crowd.

The bicycle fell away from him and into the safety net, but Ringens flew past the net, straightening his body and extending his arms like Superman in flight. He hurtled through the air another seventy-five feet until reaching the tank, where he made a perfect swan dive into the water, briefly disappearing from sight—then surfaced and climbed out to thunderous applause from the audience.

Toni applauded as loudly as anybody. She had never seen such a feat before—each part of it would have made a remarkable act by itself, but the two together were spectacular. How did he do it? How did he time it so that he knew just when to let go of the bike and allow his momentum to carry him into the tank? It seemed that a moment too soon would bring him crashing into the side of the tank, while a moment too late would have him sailing over the water and into a horrified audience.

She wanted to run up to him right now and ask him these things, but decided to come back for Ringens’s evening performance, illuminated by spotlights. It was just as amazing the second time, though the bicycle overshot the net and came crashing to earth (Ringens later joked to the audience that he went through at least three Schwinns a week).

She watched his act another three times before she got up the nerve to approach him after an afternoon performance.

“Mr. Ringens, sir?” she said, coming up to him. “My name is Toni Stopka and I thought your act was really swell.”

“Why, thank you, young lady,” Ringens said, doffing his diving cap, revealing a receding fringe of graying hair.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll let go of the bicycle too soon? Or too late?”

He smiled at that. “Oh, I was afraid of that for a long time,” he said, “and it nearly destroyed my career. The first time I ever tried to do this stunt, I set up the ramp on the edge of a pond in Kansas City, Missouri. But I let go too soon, I fell short of the deep water I’d intended to land in, and crashed into the shallows. Nearly broke my back.”

“But you went right back and tried again?”

“Nope. I had the ramp set up beside a lake near my home in Florida, but I couldn’t bring myself to make another attempt. Worse, I was so gun-shy I couldn’t even make a regular dive. I thought my career was over.”

“What did you do?” Toni asked breathlessly.

“I’ll tell you what I did: every day I would climb to the top of the tower, and take an imaginary ride down. I did that every day for a month until the memory of that first terrible ride started to fade. Finally one day I called all my friends to come over to the lake, and I announced that they were here to either have the pleasure of seeing me perform a perfect dive or of attending my funeral.” He laughed. “I’ve never missed a dive since. Fear has no place in this business—it’ll kill you if you let it.”