Palisades Park (26 page)

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T
HE
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OSENTHALS ESTIMATED DAMAGES
to Palisades at a million dollars and wasted no time in fulfilling Irving’s promise to rebuild. Within a week the U.S. government had granted them priority in acquiring the necessary building materials, strictly regulated due to the war, judging Palisades vital to morale by providing recreation to servicemen. Perhaps, too, the government could now begin to see an end to that war, since that same week Allied forces liberated Paris. Irving Rosenthal put the sunniest face on the disaster that he could, announcing that he would create “a bigger, better and safer playground than ever dreamed of by park owners before” and that the new Palisades would open on Easter Sunday, 1945.

The true tragedy of the fire was the loss of seven young lives and the injuries suffered by many more, but it also exacted an economic toll on the concessionaires whose livelihoods had been wiped out in the blaze. They lost everything—their stands, their stock, a full season’s income. Those who could quickly replace the tools of their trade jumped onto the carnival circuit. Hardest hit was Helen Cuny, who just that season had elected not to renew the insurance on her stands: “I thought, ‘I haven’t had anything happen in thirty-five years, I’m not going to worry about it,’” she told Adele. “In hindsight my timing might have been better.” She lost eighteen thousand dollars in merchandise, including stock purchased for the next season, yet never considered folding her tent, vowing to return in ’45.

Adele had insurance, but it would take months before she saw a dime of it. Of more immediate concern was the loss of income for that season: without it they had only Eddie’s servicemen’s allowance of seventy-two dollars a month. Fighting back panic, Adele decided the only thing to do was to get a job.

Jobs were plentiful these days, but not necessarily ones to her liking. She had done some waitressing before going to Palisades, but the pay was low—as little as twenty cents an hour, plus tips. The real money to be made was in the defense industry, factory jobs that had, with the advent of the war, been opened up to women in greater numbers than ever before. Women could earn between forty and sixty dollars a month on the assembly line, and in most cases required only minimal training. There was no shortage of defense factories in Edgewater, and Adele had no trouble securing employment at the Ford Motor Plant where Eddie had worked before gallivanting off to the South Pacific in pursuit of guts and glory. She was given a position on the line, assembling and installing light switches in Jeeps being made for our Russian allies.

She had thought the atmosphere inside the French fry stand was greasy, but inside the assembly building the air was thick with the smell of motor oil, and the ventilation system merely stirred the viscous grease in the air like chicken fat congealing in soup. The building was a high-ceilinged barn illuminated with dead white fluorescent light that would have done justice to a police interrogation cell. The ambient noise around her was loud and constant, a clanging racket of gears shifting inside conveyor belts, the triphammer stutter of rivets being driven into metal, the gunning of engines being tested, the hiss of blowtorches spitting fire.

But for Adele the worst part was being forced to wear slacks—dresses presented too much risk of getting your skirt caught in a gear or motor or wheel base—and, even worse, having to cover her long blonde hair with a snood, a ghastly fabric hairnet that covered the back of her head and made her feel like a frumpy, middle-aged fishwife from Vladivostok. Some women at the plant actually wore these things out on the street as a proud badge of service to their country, but Adele tore hers off the instant she went off-duty. She knew she should feel
some
kind of pride in what she was doing, but she didn’t. She hated this place. She hated looking like a man, doing a man’s job.
Eddie
should have been here doing this, goddamn it, not her.

The day after the fire, Adele had sent a postal telegram to Eddie, care of the Armed Forces APO in San Francisco:

PARK DESTROYED BY FIRE. STAND LOST. CHILDREN OK. WHERE WERE YOU. ADELE.

She knew it was needlessly cruel when she sent it—but found she no longer cared.

*   *   *

Toni stood atop the pool’s ten-foot diving platform, watching the flames across the midway consume her parents’ concession as if it were no more than an appetizer before a really good meal. WHOOSH, and it was gone! Sparks flew like spittle across the midway and ignited the Funhouse, the exterior walls gobbled up like a snack, exposing bones of dry tinder, which were then devoured in turn. The bathhouse behind her was next for the fire to feast upon, and Toni on her high perch found herself nearly surrounded by the hungry flames. Her body was covered in sweat, she shook with fear and called for help, but there was no one to come to her aid. Where was the Human Torch? Where was Bee Kyle? She could command these flames to retreat, couldn’t she? The skies above her glowed red and the air all around her was choked with acrid smoke, making her cough up black soot. There was only one safe place to go, and that was the water below her. She stood at the edge of the diving board, telling herself to jump, but fear paralyzed her—fear of falling, of hitting the water the wrong way, her body snapping like a twig. She looked up and saw the flames converging on the pool like a blazing army battalion, eating up what little air she was able to take into her lungs. Finally her fear of the fire won out, she pushed off from the diving platform and dove into the air, a perfect swan dive, her body arcing gracefully down toward the water …

But on her way down the water ignited and burst into flame, and she found herself diving headlong into a sea of fire.

She screamed, waking herself but not really—the flames were still all around her, licking at the walls of her bedroom. Her shrieks brought Adele racing in to comfort her: “Honey, it’s okay, you’re home, you’re safe—”

The flames were quenched more easily than Toni’s fears. She hugged her mother and collapsed into sobs.

Jack came running in from his room, joining them in bed. Adele cradled them both, stroking her daughter’s back and comforting her as best she could: “Everything’s okay, you’re safe. It won’t happen again…”

She was wrong. It happened again the next night. And the night after that. And every night for weeks to come.

*   *   *

Eddie opened the small envelope addressed to “Seaman First Class Edward Stopka, APO 708” to find a telegram from Adele, which alarmed him even before he’d read it: why would she send a telegram if not bad news? Her terse, carefully chosen words had the desired effect upon him: shock, confusion, fear, shame. Palisades burned down?
All
of it? Thank God the kids were okay, but were they there when it happened, were they
really
okay? Finally, there was no mistaking her intent in that mocking, angry last line:

WHERE WERE YOU.

Now he asked himself the same question.

I’m on an island in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean, he answered, instead of being with my family when they were in danger.

He balled the telegram up in his hand but couldn’t bring himself to toss it, even with that barb in its tail, and stuffed it in his trouser pocket.

Adele would surely have known that news was slow to reach the South Pacific and that the telegram would arrive well before any newspaper accounts—and that between the time he wired back and she responded, Eddie would spend several days agonizing over just how close to harm’s way his wife and children had come and what the full extent of damage to the park and their business had been. It was her punishment for his leaving them, and he understood that, understood the hurt and sense of abandonment that motivated it. If her feelings of anger and betrayal were as painful as the helpless disgrace he felt now, he could hardly blame her.

He wired back:

SO SORRY NOT THERE WISH ANYTHING I COULD HAVE BEEN. PLEASE CLARIFY WHETHER TONI AND JACK AT FIRE. HOW MUCH DAMAGE TO PARK. LOVE TO ALL WILL WIRE MORE MONEY. EDDIE.

He wired her all that remained of his Navy pay for that month.

In his quarters, Eddie sat down and wrote a long letter to Toni and Jack, telling them how much he missed them and how much he wished he were there, but that their mother was a strong woman and would take care of them until the day he came back. The only bright spot for him was that that day seemed to be getting closer. In addition to the good news out of Europe, the United States in June had begun bombing the Japanese home islands, starting with the island of Kyushu. A month later, the Americans wrested Saipan away from the enemy, and in August, Guam fell to U.S. forces. The slow tide of history was finally turning in the direction of the Allies.

To calm himself, he went back to working on another
tiki
, his fifth so far this year. This time Eddie was using his chisel to sculpt a wide-mouthed, jagged-eyed Kū out of a six-inch palm log, lopped off clean and straight at the bottom, which he would hollow out from the top. His idea was to create a
tiki
mug, in the vein of the ceramic glasses he had seen at Trader Vic’s. After he hollowed it out, he would burnish it with a fine sandpaper and varnish it with shellac from the paint shop. He tried to lose himself in his carving, telling himself there was nothing else he could do for Adele and the kids until he knew more about what had happened.

He turned the mug-to-be over in his hand, appraising the hollow eye sockets that seemed suddenly to be staring into his soul.

They were saying: WHERE WERE YOU?

*   *   *

With their mother working the day shift at Ford, Toni and Jack were left to their own devices—reading comic books, scaling the cliffs, roaming Edgewater on their bicycles, and longing for Palisades Park, especially the pool. One morning, as Jack was occupied elsewhere—swapping issues of
Blue Beetle
and
All-Winners Comics
with friends before they were given up to the paper drive—Toni biked up River Road, then turned right onto Henry Hudson Drive, which forked north toward the George Washington Bridge. She was looking up at the curved, yellow-and-blue facade of the famous Riviera nightclub—jutting like a ship’s prow beached atop the summit of the Palisades, though closed for the duration of the war—when she noticed a familiar figure making his way down through the bramble of the cliff’s slope, carrying a rucksack and holding a walking stick.

“Bunty!” Toni yelled joyously.

She pedaled furiously to meet her friend as he reached the road and waved to her. “Hey, toots, what’re you up to?”

She braked and jumped off the bike. “Not much. Summer’s pretty dull without the park.” She could see now that the walking stick he was holding had what looked like a can opener taped to its side. “What’s that for?”

“My shillelagh? I carry it in case I run into any copperheads as I come down the cliffs. I use it to chase ’em away. And this,” he said of the can opener, “comes in handy for tapping the occasional can of ale.”

He crossed the road to an old boat dock on this pebbled river frontage beneath the G.W. Bridge tower. “You been to Hazard’s before?” he asked.

“What’s that?” She abandoned her bike on the side of the road and followed him toward shore.

“Hazard’s Beach. I was a lifeguard here for six summers in the twenties—this was all white sand back then, though we had to have it shipped in by barge. It was a popular place—there was a ferry that came over from 157
th
Street and New Yorkers just swarmed over here. Three boats daily, five on Sunday, when there must’ve been five thousand people on this beach. They’d give the lifeguards box lunches and whenever we pulled somebody in trouble out of the water, we’d get a quarter tip. Man, those were the days.

“Up there”—he pointed north—“was Bloomers Beach, where I got my first lifeguard job when I was eighteen. Worked there three years. Today it’s an oil slick. There was a dance pavilion here too—lots of dancing, laughing, cold beer, wonderful music, and beautiful girls.” He smiled at old ghosts, adding quietly, “But the bridge put the ferry out of business, and eventually, all the beaches too.”

At water’s edge he took off his T-shirt with its tiny crucifix pinned on, kicked off his shoes, and shucked off his pants, revealing his red bathing trunks.

“You really swim here every day?” Toni asked.

“Weather permitting, yeah. I’ve been swimming in the Hudson since my brothers threw me in when I was five.” He laughed. “Swam across it for the first time when I was twelve. This river is my life—I was born within sight of it, grew up along its banks, worked here when I was young. And I still do, kind of, since this is where the Palisades pool’s water comes from.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of coming here?”

“Hell no. Who could get tired of this?” He gazed fondly into the distance. “See how calm it is now? In an hour, it could kick up and the big waves’ll roll in. Unpredictable—I like that. I follow the river. The river never has plans either. It’s cold one day, hot the next.

“See, the Hudson’s a tidal river—the tide rolls in from the sea, pushing all the way up to Albany. Before it even gets there we get an ebb tide here, going in the opposite direction. The Indians called it Mahicantuck—‘the river that flows both ways.’” He pointed to the mile-wide gulf between bridge towers. “See how it narrows here? As the waters squeeze through, the currents run faster. You gotta be damn careful.”

“Sounds like fun,” Toni said wistfully.

Bunty put on his little red diving cap. “So give it a try sometime. Not on your own, mind you—I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve had to pull out of these waters before they drowned. But I can show you the ropes, how to swim in the river and stay safe.”

Suddenly Toni wanted to do nothing else. “Okay!” she said brightly. “How about tomorrow?”

“I’ll be here. Same time.” He gave her a two-fingered salute, then dove off the dock and into the Hudson, his powerful breaststroke and kicks propelling him through the water like a motorboat.