Palisades Park (24 page)

“Years ago, I worked with a troupe of divers: Swan Ringens and Her American Diving Girlies, as they were billed in Europe. Swan was my first wife. Anne was one of our Diving Girlies. Oh, she was a sensational diver,” Peejay said with a fond light in his eyes. “Entered her first amateur competition in Florida at seventeen—won breaststroke, backstroke, high diving. Swan and I hired her for our act. Anne never knew her real father, he died before she was born, and she took my name as her stage name. But I couldn’t have been more proud of her if she had been my real daughter. She wowed the audience with her double back-flips, jack-knives, and swan dives from a height of fifty feet.

“In the summer of ’31 we played all across Europe—Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Madrid, Barcelona. Anne was the most popular member of the troupe. In July we were performing in the Prater—the big amusement park in Vienna, Austria.” There was a catch in his voice, like a phonograph record skipping over an old scar. “She tested the board, judged the distance to the tank, then leapt. Perfect leap. But halfway down a sudden gust of wind hit her and her body twisted at an awkward angle. She hit the water clean, but then…” Renie clasped his hand as he flinched at the memory. “She floated to the surface like a broken twig. We dove in after her and pulled her out. She’d struck bottom with her back and shoulders. The impact snapped her spine in two.”

The color drained from Toni’s face. She felt cold as an ice cube and could almost hear the crack of the poor girl’s back being broken.

“The best surgeons in Europe worked on her but there was no hope she would ever walk—move—again. Finally we were able to raise enough money to get her back home to Miami, and her mother. She lived there for five months before dying of her injuries.” He shook his head. “Later that year, in Paris, I nearly did the same thing—hit the water wrong, struck the bottom of the tank hard. Luckily it just shook me up a bit. I can’t begin to explain why I should have survived and poor Anne didn’t.”

He saw the upset in Toni’s face and leaned forward. “This is a dangerous line of work, Toni. Disaster can strike any one of us. Look at what just happened to Bee Kyle, and she’s one of the best in the business.”

“What about her?” Toni asked, alarmed.

“You haven’t heard? She was doing her act down in Alabama, same act she’s done all her life. Hit the tank coming down. She’s in the hospital in Birmingham. She’ll live, but they say her diving career may be over.”

“I—I met her. Bee Kyle. She played here. I…”

Tears welled up in Toni’s eyes. Renie put a consoling arm around her.

Ringens said, “Toni, I love doing what I do. It can be thrilling, exciting—especially when the music’s playing and you’re making your way up that ladder. But once you get to the top, your eyes have to be wide open. If this is your dream, then by God, pursue it, it can be a great life. And I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. But you can’t go into it oblivious to the fact that you could get hurt—or die—doing it. Are you willing to face that?”

“I—I don’t know,” she said honestly.

“Then you’re not ready yet,” Peejay said gently. “Maybe someday you will be. Talk to me then.” He handed her a business card with his name, address, and phone number in Florida. “And if not—you’ll find another dream. At your age they’re never in short supply.”

She thanked him, not knowing what else to say, surprised by her own uncertainty—she had cherished the dream of flying, of diving, for as long as she could remember, but how easily its foundations had been rattled! She thought of Bee, of Anne, their courage in pursuing their dream, and she wondered whether she had that kind of courage. She didn’t know, and it bothered her that she didn’t know.

When she finally got back to the stand she found her mother furiously trying to keep pace in the kitchen, and mad as a hornet to see her: “Where have you
been
all this time? You’ve been gone almost an hour!”

“I—I was talking with Mr. Ringens.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, will you stop bothering that man?”

“He didn’t mind, he’s a nice—”

Adele steamrollered over her: “You have a
job,
Antoinette, and a responsibility to show up when you’re supposed to and come back when you’re told to. I wish you’d pay as much attention to that as you do some crazy old coot who jumps off a bicycle into a sponge.”

“He’s not crazy!” Toni snapped.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Adele warned.

“You think everything I do is crazy, but you don’t know a thing about it! You don’t know
anything
!”

But neither, anymore, did Toni. In something of a hissy fit, she stalked over to the side door of the stand, lifted it up, and stormed out.

“Antoinette! Toni! Get back here!” Adele shouted. But Toni was already being swallowed up in the crowd thronging the midway. Goldie tossed Adele a sympathetic look.

“This is why I never had kids,” she said.

Adele sighed. “Where were you when I got pregnant?”

“You want to go after her, I can cover for you.”

Adele shook her head. “She can walk home. I don’t need the aggravation.”

*   *   *

The heat wave turned tragic in July, when a fire broke out in the main tent of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as it was playing Hartford, Connecticut. One hundred and sixty-eight people died that day under the big top. Closer to home, on the evening of Friday, August 11, a series of resounding explosions split the hot stifling air at Palisades. It took a few minutes for Adele and others to realize that the sound came not from anywhere in the park, but from below the cliffs. People rushed to the edge of the Palisades, where fingers of thick black smoke groped the air above the Hoboken waterfront. It turned out the heat had violently ignited drums of highly flammable liquids that were among war supplies being loaded onto a ship at Pier 4. It took fire companies from Hoboken, Union City, Jersey City, and even New York to finally quench the blaze—but not before the smoke blotted out the view of Manhattan from Jersey.

That weekend the heat also sparked a record turnout for the Palisades pool: on Sunday, August 13, the turnstile would clock some four thousand bathers by midafternoon. Trying to smooth over the recent friction between them, Adele gave Toni the day off and told her to enjoy herself at the pool with Jack. It wasn’t until Adele walked across the midway to her stand that she heard the other big news of the weekend.

“Luna Park,” Goldie announced, “is
kaput
.”

She handed Adele a newspaper story telling of how, the day before, a short circuit in the Dragon’s Gorge ride at Coney Island touched off a blaze that quickly consumed the dry tinder of the railway as well as the rest of Luna Park. There were no serious injuries, but the 125-foot Coca-Cola tower in the center of the park was turned into a fiery torch and Luna Park was gutted—now just a charred shadow of its former glory.

“My God,” Adele said, “it’s a miracle everybody got out alive.”

Coney Island was the grand dame of amusement parks and the destruction of Luna Park was pretty much all anyone at Palisades could talk about that morning. But by midafternoon the park was packed with visitors seeking relief and distraction from the torrid weather. It was all concessionaires like Adele could do to take care of business—and to turn up whatever fans they had in their stands, as the temperature neared a hundred degrees outside and considerably more than that inside.

A little after two
P.M.
, Adele took a short break to buy a cone of vanilla custard from the vendor next to the Carousel. She was relishing its welcome chill when she happened to glance down the midway at the Scenic Railway.

What she saw chilled her far more than the ice cream: John Winkler, hurrying away from the Scenic, pushing a big fire extinguisher on wheels toward the main midway.

Only moments later, Adele could smell the smoke for herself.

She tossed away the cone and followed Winkler past the Carousel and the Bingo game. As he turned the corner, the big extinguisher tipped a little on its wheels, but he righted it, turning left up the midway. Adele followed in his wake, turning the corner—then stopped short, aghast at what she saw.

Less than fifty feet away, black smoke was pouring out of the Virginia Reel, a ride with a circular, concave base that today looked like a smoldering crater—amid screams from somewhere inside the ride.

Concession agents had rolled out a fire hose and were pouring water on the fire, and now Winkler raced up and began spraying it with fire retardant. Heat rippled the air around the ride like a shimmering corona.

The Virginia Reel carried passengers in spinning tubs along curved, twisting tracks and into dark tunnels—tunnels now hellishly transformed, with riders trapped inside flaming tubes. Several good Samaritans—two Merchant Marines, a priest, and John Albanese, operator of a nearby waffle stand—ventured into the smoking carnage, trying to pull out victims, most of them children whose terrified pleas for help were heartbreaking to hear.

Several teenage girls had managed to escape and were now running, in a panic, down the midway. At first glance, Adele thought they were Negroes—then realized in horror that the girls were charred black from the waist up, their hair burned off, their skin seared to a crisp. Tears streamed down their blistered faces. As they passed, Adele was assaulted by an acrid odor that she realized queasily could only be the smell of burning flesh.

“My God,” Adele said to John Winkler, futilely spraying retardant onto the blaze, “all those
children
—”

“I might as well be pissing on it for all the good this is doing,” he said. “And the water hose isn’t doing much more.”

They watched hot sparks flying off the Reel like dying fireworks, carried by a strong southerly wind onto the Skyrocket coaster next door.

“This isn’t going to stop at the Reel,” Winkler said. “I’m going back to try and save the Scenic. Is your daughter here today?”

“She and Jack are in the pool.”

“Get them the hell out of here. This is only going to get worse.”

*   *   *

Toni was just coming up from a dive when, as she broke surface, she noticed that her first taste of air was tinged with smoke. At first she thought it was a grease fire from the hot-dog stand or the Casino Bar; but then she saw the roiling clouds of white and black smoke rising up above the concessions across the midway, including her mother’s, and she realized it was much more than that. But she didn’t see her mother at the fry stand, and worse—she didn’t know where her brother was, either.

When the call to evacuate came over the park’s PA system, Bunty and his fellow lifeguards began calmly directing swimmers away from the pool, toward the nearby Hudson gate. “But what about my clothes?” one swimsuited woman asked. “They’re in the bathhouse. I can’t leave like this!”

“You ain’t naked, lady,” Bunty said. “You can get your clothes later.”

“But my wallet is in there!” her husband objected. “With money in it!”

“Paper money?” Bunty said in that soft voice of his. “Hey, you know what they make paper from? Wood. See the coaster over there? See all these food stands around us? Ninety percent wood, plus maybe thirty or forty coats of paint. Get my drift?”

The man paled and wordlessly led his wife out of the pool area.

There were thirty thousand people at the park at the moment—four thousand at the pool alone—and the Hudson gate quickly became overwhelmed by the exodus of men, women, and children in bathing suits. Those forced to wait by the pool grew increasingly restless as columns of smoke loomed ever higher above the Carousel building, sirens keening in the distance—with the exception of one enterprising young woman who was standing atop the ten-foot diving board, snapping photos of the blaze.

“Hey,” Toni called up to her, “are you nuts? Get down from there!”

“Are you kidding?” the girl said. “These are going to be great shots! And if the fire gets anywhere near, I’ll just jump in the pool.”

Burning cinders were drifting like clouds of deadly faerie dust across the park. Toni felt one alight on her shoulder with a pinprick of heat. She was getting more and more anxious when she finally heard, “Antoinette!”

Toni was never so happy to hear that clunky name in her life.

Adele ran up breathlessly and said, “Thank God! Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Where’s Jack?”

Unable to keep the fear from her voice, Toni said, “He’s not here.”

“What do you mean? I thought he was with you!”

“He got dressed. He said he wanted to go on some rides.”

Adele lost her breath. “Oh my God—not the Virginia Reel?”

“I don’t know which one.”

“Was it the Skyrocket?”

“I don’t
know
!”

“All right,” Adele said, struggling to stay calm. “You get out onto the street and I’ll go look for your brother.”

“I’m coming with you,” Toni declared.

Adele snapped, “No! This is no place for a little girl to—”

“I’m thirteen years old! And it’s
my fault
I let Jack go!
Please.
”

Adele heard the tremor of guilt and fear in her daughter’s voice and decided not to fight her on this. “All right, but—stay
right
with me, you understand? I don’t want to lose you too!”

The midway was jammed with panicky people trying to exit. Adele took Toni in hand and pushed their way through the crowd to their French fry stand. “Take out the money and get the hell out of here,” Adele told Goldie, who replied, “Already done,” handed Adele a wad of cash, then vaulted the counter with surprising ease for a fifty-year-old woman. “Good luck!”

Adele and Toni ran across to the Scenic Railway, where motormen were evacuating riders even as John Winkler was trying to sweep the sparks off the tracks with a broom. But Jack was nowhere to be seen.

The narrow artery connecting the two main midways was too congested to pass through, so Adele and Toni took the long way around the Scenic, alongside thousands of frightened visitors escaping through the main gate on Palisade Avenue. Frantically, Adele and Toni checked out the Lindy Loop, the Flying Scooter, the Whip, and the U-Drive Boats, but there wasn’t a glimpse of Jack anywhere.