Palisades Park (25 page)

“Shit!” Adele snapped.

Toni was used to hearing her dad use this word, but coming from her mother it alarmed her.

As they made their way up the midway, Adele saw that the front of the Skyrocket was now engulfed in flames, dense smoke pouring across the midway as they approached. Adele handed a handkerchief to Toni—“Put this over your mouth and nose”—covering her own mouth with her hand.

Toni had never seen anything like this, had never felt anything as hot as the wall of shimmering heat surrounding the blaze, preventing them from getting within twenty feet of it. There were now firefighters trying to contain the flames, and one of them told Adele that no one had been injured on the Skyrocket, that everyone had gotten away safely.

Adele looked with dread at the furnace that used to be the Virginia Reel.
Oh God,
she prayed,
please, please don’t let him be in there!
She recognized one of the motormen on the Reel—she remembered that he’d just been discharged from the service after being wounded in action. He looked shell-shocked, as if he were still at war, staring into the hellish heart of what had been, just half an hour ago, a children’s ride.

“Have they gotten everybody out?” Adele asked him.

“Everyone they can,” he said, his voice flat. “Just before it started, I—I heard a boy say, ‘It’s smoking,’ as his car headed into the tunnels, and I told him”—his voice cracked—“‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong.’ I—I didn’t think there was.” He turned, and Adele saw the tears in his eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, forgive me—I didn’t think there was anything wrong!”

Adele didn’t know what to say to him. She took Toni by the hand and pulled her away. “C’mon, let’s try the Bobsleds.”

“But what if Jack’s in
there
?” Toni said, eyes fixated on the Reel.

“He’s not.”

“But what if he
is
?”

“He’s not!” Adele snapped. “Come on!”

They ran up the midway, past the Penny Arcade where “Fat George” Mazzocchi and his family were clearing out. From behind them they heard someone shout, “Look out!”—followed by a thunderous roar, like a wounded elephant trumpeting its pain. They spun round to see the wooden bones of the Skyrocket give way, fire dragging the tracks and timbers down to earth. Bystanders ran for their lives. As the coaster came crashing down, it sent up a cyclone of hot cinders that immediately jumped the midway, igniting the Penny Arcade.

Toni’s heart was pounding, and yet she stood frozen to the spot, hypnotized by the fiery spectacle of the Skyrocket disintegrating like paper.

Adele grabbed her by the arm, turned her around, and pushed her forward. “Keep going!” she yelled. They raced on up the midway. The Lake Placid Bobsled was just ahead, so far untouched by the flames. The motormen were evacuating the last of the riders, bringing the “bobsleds” down the twisting, looping tracks and the chute to the bottom. Terrified riders jumped off and started running toward the free-act stage and the Hudson gate.

“Mom! Toni!”

Jack jumped out of the second car and began running toward his mother and sister.

“Jack! Thank God!”

With tears in her eyes, Adele hugged him, and Toni was about to do the same when another thunderclap—smaller than the collapse of the Skyrocket—came from their right. They all jumped as the first blast was quickly followed by another, and another—a whole series of explosions, coming from the parking lot on the other side of the Bobsled.

Moments later, shards of hot metal began raining down on the midway. Toni screamed, her relief at finding Jack turning quickly to terror.

Adele hurried her and Jack across the midway and sought refuge under the mushroom-like Chair-o-Plane ride.

“What
is
all that!” Jack shouted over the continuing explosions.

“The fire must’ve reached the cars in the parking lot!” Adele shouted back. Their gas tanks were exploding like a string of firecrackers.

The shrapnel of exploded automobiles continued to fall around them. “Isn’t
our
car in that parking lot?” Toni asked nervously.

Adele looked up and saw that the fire was consuming most of the main midway. Columns of mottled gray smoke, like a line of thunderclouds, obscured passage to the main gate on Palisade Avenue. The only way out was now through the Hudson gate.

“Forget the car,” she said. “Let’s go!”

They ran across a short connecting midway, past the free-act stage.

A fire engine had been backed up to the edge of the pool so the salt water could be siphoned out to combat the flames; firemen, standing up to their chests in the pool, trained their hoses on the adjacent bathhouses, keeping them wet enough to dampen any sparks alighting on the roof. There were still dozens of people in the pool area waiting to get out, growing increasingly anxious as the fire consumed the Carousel building just across the midway. It would be a short jump from there to Adele’s stand, but that wasn’t what alarmed her. The Scenic Railway was also in flames, and the strong wind from the south was like a blowtorch spewing cinders across the midway to the Jigsaw and the Funhouse, next to the pool. The fire department was pouring as much water on the buildings as they could, but it was barely slowing the flames’ advance.

Bunty Hill was standing next to the bathhouse, talking intently with a fire captain and George Kellinger, the short, curly-haired young man who maintained the pool’s machinery. Not far away, the girl who had been taking photos from the diving board was back on the ground, still snapping pictures of the blaze. Toni ran up to her and asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” the girl, whose name was Agnes, said, her voice shaky. “You should’ve seen it. The Scenic Railway went up like a pile of straw.”

Adele walked past them to Bunty and the other men. “Bunty, what in God’s name are all these people still doing here?”

“We can’t risk taking them out through the Hudson gate,” the fire captain told her. “Any minute now those buildings are going to blow and there’ll be a solid wall of flame blocking that midway.”

“And it’s already started to spread to the Casino Bar,” Bunty added, “so we can’t get to the gate through there.”

“Unless you’ve got experience in fire dancing,” George added wryly.

Adele usually found George’s jokes funny, but not today. “And how in the
hell
am I supposed to get my children
out of this firetrap
?”

“We’ll get ’em out, dollface,” Bunty said reassuringly. “George, you sure it’s safe to bring ’em all down there?”

“Safer than staying here,” George said. “Just tell people to take it slow and easy and everybody’ll get out okay.” He turned to Adele. “Just follow me, Mrs. Stopka, and your kids will be fine.”

The blithe confidence with which he stated this startled Adele. She hoped to God he was right.

Bunty and the other lifeguards had the remaining beachgoers form an orderly line, and with Adele, Toni, and Jack in front, George Kellinger led them onto the wooden sundeck on the eastern edge of the pool. Between the lemonade stand and the pool’s waterfalls there was a narrow gangway. George cautioned everyone, “Okay, take it nice and easy going down,” and to Adele’s amazement he led them down the gangway and into a cellar with a wooden floor hidden behind the waterfalls. The roar of the falls grew muted, the cavernous space humming with machinery. “This is the filter room,” George explained. “Takes eight of ’em to keep the pool water clean.”

“Wow,” Jack said. He and Toni were entranced by this underground world they never knew existed, as George led them past eight coal-burning filtration machines the size of apartment house boilers. There was also a pair of huge valves—like something out of a Flash Gordon serial—that George said released the pool water when it had to be drained, and five-foot-high gauges almost as tall as George himself.

“Keep looking up, you don’t want to hit your head on one of these,” he said, rapping his knuckles on one of the big wooden ceiling beams.

“My God,” Adele said, “it’s like a catacomb down here.”

“Yeah, Lon Chaney lives here during the off-season,” George said with a smile. He motioned to the right and said, “This leads under the bathhouses, it lets out near the old trolley tracks. We’ll be out in no time.”

He led them past the enormous motors powering the artificial wave machine, the floor vibrating a little as they walked. Behind them Toni could see the rest of the pool patrons, all in their swimsuits and most of them barefoot, being shepherded along by Bunty and his fellow lifeguards. They were looking around them as if they had, indeed, wandered onto the set of
The Phantom of the Opera,
but Toni and Jack exchanged delighted grins.

“This place is the greatest,” Toni declared.

“Can we come back after the fire’s over?” Jack asked.

“Sure, but let’s get out first,” George replied. “We’re right below the bathhouse now. Just a little bit farther.”

He was right. Within a few minutes they were ascending another gangway and out into hazy sunlight tinted a Martian orange by the fire—finding themselves on the park’s northern border on Route 5, where a dozen fire engines were lined up along the park fence.

“Hallelujah, we have reached the promised land,” Adele whooped, giving their rescuer a big hug. “You’re a regular Moses, George, thanks!”

George blushed, then made sure all the remaining pool patrons were safely out of the park. Joining earlier escapees in a line that ran uphill to Palisade Avenue, most people wore only bathing suits, clutching no more than a towel. So they fell into line in varying states of undress, looking embarrassed but relieved that they had made it out.

Adele herded the kids past the line and onto Palisade Avenue, where twenty fire companies from all over Bergen and Hudson Counties were battling the blaze. Water from dozens of fire hoses fountained above the roped-off entrance to the park, cascading down onto the flames; other hoses snaked inside the park itself as firemen bravely fought the fire close up.

Ambulances were parked on both sides of the street as medics tended to the injured, treating civilians and firemen alike for heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation. One man sat on the ground breathing gratefully into an oxygen mask. Onlookers gaped at the sight of flames shooting a hundred feet into the air as smoke wreathed the collapsed Skyrocket in the distance.

Adele was puzzled to see Anna Halpin sitting on the curb, rubbing salve from a huge jar onto John Albanese’s hands.

“That should hold you until you get to the hospital,” she told him.

Adele and the kids came up to them. “John, that was very brave of you, going after those girls in the Virginia Reel. Are you okay?”

“Aw, hell, this is nothing,” he said, “compared to what those poor kids in the Reel went through.”

Anna nodded. “Some of them, their whole bodies were nearly burnt to a crisp. I covered them from head to toe with salve, then flagged down every passing car and told the drivers to take them to Englewood Hospital.”

Into the sober silence that followed, Jack said innocently, “That’s a
big
jar, where’d you get it?”

Anna had to smile. “Funny thing, Jack. I’d ordered a smaller jar for the first-aid station, but last week the medical supply company sent me a gallon jar by mistake. I was going to return it, but then the fire broke out and this salve turned out to be a godsend.”

The fire burned for two hours, at the end of which Palisades Park was a smoking ruin. This was not the 1935 fire, where only a small portion of the park had been destroyed and the rest reopened that evening. This time the fire had gutted the main midway, the very heart of the park—three-quarters of it lay in cinders. The Skyrocket was little more than a pile of burnt bones. The Scenic Railway had gone up, in John Winkler’s words, “in a single blast.” The grand old Dentzel Carousel on which Adele had taken her wedding vows had also been ravaged; all that remained of the painted ponies were charred stumps of wood clinging to brass poles. The administration building, the Funhouse, Penny Arcade, Casino Bar—all gone. The only attractions left untouched were the pool and bathhouse, Bobsled coaster, and free-act stage. It was speculated that the fire began when sparks off a hoisting cable ignited oily rags in a storage room below the Virginia Reel.

Worse, one hundred and fifty people had been injured, twenty-four requiring hospital care, seven critically—and all of these between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.

That could have been any of us, Adele thought numbly.

Irving Rosenthal went consolingly from person to person, reassuring them that he and his brother would rebuild Palisades. Adele almost snapped at him,
Who gives a shit, Irving?

When the embers had cooled, Adele and the children went into the parking lot and found what remained of their old Studebaker: a blackened chassis squatting in four pools of melted rubber. Two cars down, a woman stood weeping over the burnt-out shell of her sedan. “I don’t care about the car,” she explained tearfully to Adele. “But there was a photo in the glove compartment of my boy. He’s with the invasion in France. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, and now I’ve lost the only photo I have of him.”

Adele put her arms around the woman as she wept, and she shed no tears for the Studebaker. She used a telephone at Johnny Duke’s to call her brother James, asking if he could take her and the kids back to Edgewater.

There the children fell asleep quickly, exhausted, but Adele remained awake for hours, the heat outside still oppressive even late into the night. The courage she had mustered to get her through the cataclysm dissolved and she lay in bed sobbing and alone. The thought of how close to death she and her children had come made her sick. The thought of returning to Palisades, even in the distant future, made her even sicker.

Over the course of the next two weeks, all seven of the most severely burned youngsters would die at Englewood Hospital.

Even after writing its brutal signature on so many lives, the heat wave would not loosen its grip on the Northeast. Thunderstorms bellowed and raged, turning daytime skies as black as the soot and smoke that had shrouded Palisades Park. Driving rain, gusting wind, and lightning strikes raked the New York metropolitan area. Even so, it was gentle compared to the storm that was raging in Adele’s heart.