Palisades Park (28 page)

But the high point came when from behind a curtain a young woman—Toni recognized her as one of the “bally girls” out front—wheeled in a black wooden box on four legs that looked uncomfortably like a coffin.

“Ah, isn’t she lovely?” Lorenzo said. His accent was unfamiliar to Toni but had a pleasantly exotic ring to it. “Courageous, too, because she has agreed to be part of one of the most dangerous feats a magician can perform. Take a good look, ladies and gentlemen—you may never see her again as she is now, beautiful and vibrant with life!”

He removed the coffin’s lid, then held out a hand and helped the girl up onto a footstool and into the box. It barely accommodated her, as the crowd could plainly see. Then he closed the lid and said gravely, “Let’s hope this does not turn out to be her funeral casket.”

From off the floor he picked up a long metal blade that glinted menacingly under the sideshow lights.

“Now, should any of you be thinking these might be stage blades, made of rubber…” He invited audience members up to examine the blades. One middle-aged man couldn’t resist running his finger along the edge of the blade, then yelped as the steel drew blood.

“Thank you, sir,” Lorenzo said. “After the performance, management will present you with your Purple Heart.”

The audience laughed, but this quickly turned to gasps as Lorenzo vigorously plunged the first blade through a slot in the lid of the box. It sank clean through, the tip emerging out the bottom. He repeated it with another blade, this one close to where the girl’s head must have been; a woman in the audience cried out in alarm, which rattled the rest of the crowd, who thought the cry might have come from the girl in the box. Again and again Lorenzo plunged the blades in with gusto, until there were at least ten protruding from top and bottom. The crowd murmured its unease.

“That ought to do it, don’t you think?” Lorenzo asked rhetorically, whereupon he began withdrawing the blades one by one. When the last of them clattered into a pile of metal on the floor, Lorenzo gazed out at the expectant audience—slowly lifted the lid of the box—

The bally girl sat up, smiling, like a jack-in-the-box. Lorenzo helped her up and out, where everyone could see that she was completely unharmed.

Amid enthusiastic applause from the crowd, Lorenzo took his bows.

Toni and Jack clapped as loudly as anyone else. “C’mon!” Jack told his sister. “Let’s go try and meet him!”

Often, between performances, the sideshow headliners would go outside for a break, to smoke a cigarette or quench their thirst with potables. Toni and Jack ran behind the sideshow and waited. Within a minute Lorenzo exited, lighting up a Lucky Strike.

“Mr. Lorenzo, you were great!” Jack told him.

“Yeah, that was tops,” Toni agreed.

Lorenzo looked at them, blew out a plume of smoke, and smiled warmly. “Well, thank you. I am honored you enjoyed the show.”

“I want to be a magician,” Jack said, “can you give me any hints?”

“Well, I’m going off to have some supper now,” Lorenzo said, “but if you come back when the show closes, at midnight, I will be happy to give you some advice.” He smiled, and Toni knew he was thinking that these two kids would be long gone by the time the park closed at midnight.

“Thanks!” Jack told him. Lorenzo turned and walked away as Jack and Toni hurried back to their mother’s French fry stand.

“I thought you wanted to be a comic strip artist,” Toni said along the way. “Now you want to be a magician?”

“Who says I can’t be both? I can draw about them too, like Zatara the Magician in
Action
and Ibis the Invincible in
Whiz.
”

Bursting into the French fry stand, Jack announced, “Mom, Lorenzo the Magnificent says he’ll tell me how to be a magician if I come back when the park closes!”

Adele rolled her eyes. “Oh God, not you too. Are you going to make your sister disappear before she dives into a teacup?”

“Please, Mom, can I stay?” His eyes were limpid with longing.

She sighed. “Okay. I’ll take you over to see him, but after five minutes we’ve got to go home, all right?”

When they got to the sideshow at midnight, the magician was just leaving and Jack called out, “Mr. Lorenzo!” He turned, clearly surprised to see them here so late; but he smiled charmingly and said, “Ah, the aspiring prestidigitator! Just the boy I wanted to see,” as if he actually meant it.

“This is my mom, Mr. Lorenzo,” Jack said. “She runs the French fry stand by the pool.”

Lorenzo looked at the boy’s willowy blonde mother and his smile became more genuine.

“Hi. Adele Stopka.” She held out a hand for him to shake, but instead, to her surprise, he bowed low and kissed it.

“Lorenzo Marques. A pleasure, Mrs. Stopka.” He straightened.

Adele said, “Marques? Are you from Spain?”

“Cuba. I got my start playing nightclubs in Havana.” He ruffled Jack’s hair. “Say, young man … I’m on my way to a party with some of the other performers. Why don’t you and your family join me? And I’ll be happy to answer all of your questions.”

Adele hadn’t been to an after-hours party in years—not since Toni was born. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“Excellent. Come, it’s over here by the cliffs, where my trailer is parked.” As they walked, Lorenzo fell into step beside Jack and asked, “And how long have you wanted to be a magician, my boy?”

“At least a month,” Jack replied enthusiastically.

“So, a lifelong dream,” Lorenzo said wryly, and Adele had to smile.

At the cliff’s edge, behind the towering
PALISADES AMUSEMENT PARK—SURF BATHING
sign, several sideshow performers—many of whom were also living in the trailers perched atop the bluff—were gathered around a portable barbecue, steaks and hamburgers sizzling on the grill. Against the glittering cyclorama of the Manhattan skyline, a midget was standing on a stepstool grilling the steaks, a tattooed lady was mixing drinks in a tumbler, and the show’s fire-eater was plucking foil-wrapped potatoes out of a roaring fire with his bare bands. Adele smiled, feeling as though she had stepped back in time to that night she and Eddie had sat and chatted with Jolly Irene—who, according to her obituary in
Billboard,
had died in 1940 at the age of sixty—and Susi the Elephant Skin Girl. The last Adele had heard of Susi—Charlotte—she was in New York working for the Gorman Brothers Circus, where her act now included a real elephant as a partner.

The performers warmly welcomed Adele and her family and soon they were all sitting in beach chairs, the kids wolfing down hamburgers as their mother cut into a perfect medium-rare steak. Chewing around his own steak, Lorenzo asked the children, “So what was your favorite part of the act?”

“The lady in the box!” Jack replied immediately. “How’d you
do
that?”

“Very carefully,”
Lorenzo said soberly, and all three Stopkas laughed.

“I’m quite serious,” he said, smiling. “You see, the blades really do go through the box and out the bottom. The girl really is inside the box. She has to contort her body every which way to avoid the blades, which of course we have rehearsed well beforehand. I must admit, though, that today she came perilously close to being—what do they say?—
shish-ka-bobbed
.” More laughter. “The girl was a bit nervous and had a few drinks at the Casino Bar to shore up her courage. When she showed up for the first show, she was so gloriously drunk that she could barely squirm into the box. I was terrified I might turn her into a pincushion—and I did nick her ankle once. After the first performance I poured hot coffee into her until she was sober enough to do the next show.” He shook his head. “This is the danger in relying on local talent instead of having a traveling assistant.”

“So why don’t you get one?” Toni asked.

Lorenzo admitted, “My last assistant was my wife, Inez, and since our divorce, I have not been able to bear the thought of another partner. That’s what a properly trained assistant is, you see—a partner. She does much more than look pretty or curl up in a blade box—she is part of the illusion, she misdirects the audience and knows how to improvise if something goes awry.” He seemed to look past his listeners. “Inez was irreplaceable.”

Into the sad silence that followed this, Adele sought to change the subject: “How long will you be performing at Palisades, Mr. Marques?”

“Two weeks, Mrs. Stopka. Then I’m off to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. A nightclub manager there has agreed to come see my show … this might be my ticket back into the sort of larger venues I played in Cuba.”

Finally, after an hour of good food and congenial conversation—far longer than the five minutes Jack had originally been promised—Adele thanked the performers and Mr. Marques for their hospitality, invited them all to her stand for free French fries whenever they liked, then gathered up her children and drove them home to Edgewater.

Jack could not talk about anything but Lorenzo for the next several days and must have gone to see his show a half-dozen more times. Sometimes, if Lorenzo had a few minutes between shows, he would show how to do a simple card trick, and Jack was thrilled when he mastered it.

About a week later, Toni was working her mother’s shift in the kitchen while Adele took her dinner break with Minette Dobson at the Grandview. But as Toni lifted a frying vat off the burner, her wrist twisted, the vat tilted, and a hot teardrop of grease spilled onto the open flame.

The flame promptly flared into a gout of fire two feet high, the heat nearly singeing off Toni’s eyebrows. Startled, she dropped the vat onto the stove, and now more hot oil flew up and out, feeding the grease fire. She froze as the flame flared larger, nearly reaching the ceiling.

“Goldie!” Toni shouted. “Fire!”

Toni turned off the burner, but the grease on the stove was still feeding the flames. Within seconds Goldie ran into the back wielding a fire extinguisher. In one smooth unbroken movement she pulled the pin, aimed the hose, and sprayed fire retardant onto the fire, damping the flames.

“Wow,” Toni said with a sigh of relief, “thanks.”

“Better get your mom. Don’t know if we should use that burner yet.”

Toni ran over to the Grandview Restaurant, but her mother was nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, she went up to the manager, Flo Lyons, and asked, “Has my mom been in here? With Minette Dobson?”

“She was here, but not with Minette,” Flo replied. “She ordered some food for takeout. I saw her head off that way.”

She nodded off to the left, toward the giant
PALISADES
sign—or, seen from this side, —on the brow of the cliffs.

PALISADES

“Thanks,” Toni said. Maybe the sideshow was having their dinner break there too, and Mom had gone to join them—she did seem more interested in the performers these days. But when she got to the brink of the Palisades, there was no portable barbecue, no party, no one around at all except for the fire-eater, smoking a cigarette on the stoop of his trailer.

“’Scuse me,” she said, “have you seen my mom? Adele Stopka?”

He looked up and drawled, “Blonde gal? Kinda weird eyes?”

“Yeah, that’s her. Where is she?”

He hesitated a moment, then pointed to a trailer three doors down. “She’s in there. But I’d knock first if I were you.”

Toni hurried over to a modest Gulfstream trailer. But she didn’t knock on the door. She heard a woman’s laugh from inside and recognized it instantly as her mother’s. Ignoring her own better judgment, she went to the side window, raised herself up on tiptoes, and peeked inside.

Her eyes popped wider than Barney Google’s. Her mother was inside, all right—and so was Lorenzo. They were lying side by side on a foldout bed, they were naked, and Lorenzo, as even Toni could see,
was
magnificent.

13

T
ONI JERKED BACK
from the window, traced the sign of the cross across her chest, then fled like holy hell, certain she was about to be struck blind by what she had seen. As she barreled past the fire-eater he said, “Toldja you shoulda knocked,” but aside from a couple of fast glances behind her to see if her snooping had been detected (it hadn’t) she didn’t slow until she was safely back on the main midway. There she collapsed onto a bench barely shaded by a newly planted poplar tree, and once safely behind a veil of hundreds of park visitors, tears rolled down her face. She felt sick to her stomach, sad, and angry, all at the same time. How could her mother have
done
that to her dad? And how could Toni ever look her in the eye again? The question was not rhetorical—she had to find an answer pretty fast, since it wouldn’t be long before her mother was back at the stand.

Taking a last deep breath, Toni hurried back to their concession, where Goldie asked, “What did your mom say about the burner?”

“Couldn’t find her,” Toni lied, brushing past her to the kitchen. “I’ll clean it up but we won’t use it till she’s fin— until she gets back.”

Toni scrubbed the burner, still faintly warm from the fire, then deep-fried another batch of fries on the second burner. Fifteen minutes later, Adele strolled breezily into the stand, hair and makeup impeccable as usual.

Toni refused to meet her gaze as she entered.

“What happened here?” Adele asked, spotting flecks of foam on the side of the stove.

“Grease fire,” Toni said tersely, eyes still downcast.

“Are you okay?”

Yeah, I’m just swell, Toni thought. “Goldie put it out. I cleaned the burner—is it okay to use it again?”

Adele walked up to Toni’s side and gave the burner a once-over. “Looks fine to me. You did a good job cleaning it up.”

Standing this close, Toni could smell Lorenzo’s cologne on her mother’s skin. Her stomach began to turn cartwheels.

“I—I gotta go pee.” She jumped the counter, racing up the midway to the nearest ladies’ room. She locked herself into a stall and vomited into the toilet as if she had eaten a month-old hot dog with a side of rancid butter.

When she was finished she flushed the toilet, then closed the lid and sat there for several minutes, her body trembling with rage and disgust.