Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  Eddie’s kids made a beeline for the comics rack and began paging through the latest issues of Sub-Mariner and Blackhawk. Eddie warned, “This isn’t a library, you two, it’s Mr. Pitkof’s livelihood. Pick out your favorites and I’ll buy them for you.”

  “Eh, it’s okay,” Jack Pitkof said with a shrug, “all the kids do it. As long as they buy something, I don’t care how much they read.”

  “You’re too generous, Jack.”

  “No such thing” was his only response.

  “So what happened to the front window?” Eddie asked.

  “Eh, some hooligans broke it. It’ll be fixed by tomorrow.”

  “This isn’t the first time, is it? You have any idea who’s doing it?”

  “They didn’t leave a calling card. Unless you count the words ‘dirty kike’ scrawled on the window,” Pitkof said mildly.

  He promptly changed the subject to baseball, the upcoming Yankees game, but Eddie wasn’t listening. He was too shocked and angry.

  Bunty was wrong. It wasn’t that it could happen here. It already was happening here.

  “All Poles will disappear from the world.”

  His sister was a Pole. His children were Poles. And he’d be damned if he’d let them disappear from the face of the earth.

  * * *

  Palisades Park finished the season well into the black: now that people had money to spend, they were happy to lavish it on a few hours of amusement, something to distract them from the otherwise omnipresent war. The Stopkas cleared a nice profit on their stand, a portion of which they invested in war bonds, the remainder going straight into the bank.

  By summer’s end the U-boat attacks along the East Coast dwindled as a combination of naval convoys and a more aggressive pursuit of Nazi subs began to pay off. There was also less talk of the possible bombing of cities like New York—perhaps because Hitler had his hands full in Russia and North Africa and couldn’t squander his resources on targets across the Atlantic.

  Adele continued to volunteer with the Red Cross, her dance lessons on hold for the duration—they felt frivolous now. It seemed as if everyone in the country had only one occupation—winning the war—and Adele fretted less over her career. Sure, she wished she could be like Minette, on a War Bond tour with her father, Frank, but for now she was content to roll bandages, help with blood drives, and be home in time to cook dinner for her family.

  But when she got home on that last Thursday of September, she was surprised and puzzled to find Eddie already there.

  “Hi,” she said, giving him a kiss. “Your shift end early?”

  “No.” His eyes met hers and she saw immediately that something was wrong. “I quit Ford,” he blurted out.

  “You what?”

  “I … took another job,” he said. “I enlisted in the Naval Reserves.”

  She just stared at him. What kind of stupid joke was this? “Yeah, sure,” she said, “and I just joined the WACs.”

  “I’m not kidding. Here.”

  He handed her a sheet of paper, which she took in with disbelief: a Certificate of Voluntary Induction into the United States Navy.

  She felt a cold shiver of betrayal and looked up at him. “Eddie, how … how could you do this?”

  “Honey, there’s nothing to worry about,” he said quickly. “Congress just passed a bill, the Servicemen’s Dependent Allowance Act of 1942—”

  He gave her another sheet of paper, some kind of government handout, but she didn’t even give it a glance, just hurled it angrily aside.

  “God damn it, Eddie!” she shouted, the chill of betrayal turning hot. “You promised we’d discuss this—”

  “I know, but look, everything we talked about has been taken care of,” he said with that big damn smile of his. “The government’s going to pay a monthly allowance to the wife and children of every serviceman. They take twenty-two bucks a month out of my base pay, then they kick in another twenty-eight for you, twelve for Toni, and ten for Jack. Uncle Sam will send you seventy-two dollars a month, I can send you even more of my pay … and there’s all the money we made at Palisades too. You won’t have to worry about where the kids’ food or clothing is going to come from, you see?”

  He was looking at her as if he expected her to break into a relieved laugh. Or maybe throw her arms around his neck and give him a kiss.

  “And what happens,” she said in a flat tone, “if you’re killed?”

  “Well, that’s covered too,” he said without missing a beat. “I can purchase life insurance worth up to ten thousand dollars. And you and the kids will get free health benefits, too. It’s a good deal.”

  His expectant eyes were still waiting for that laugh or kiss.

  Instead he got a stinging slap across the face, connecting so hard it actually staggered him, rocked him on his heels.

  “You son of a bitch!” she screamed at him. “Who gave you the right to decide whether your wife wants to be a widow, or your kids orphans? Did you give your children even one damn minute of consideration?”

  He bristled at that. “I’m doing it for them—so they don’t end up living in a country where they can be sent to a Nazi death camp.”

  “Oh, you’re going to stop that?” she said, her voice a mocking razor. “Eisenhower and Patton can’t swing that without your help?”

  “Adele, it’s my duty! I owe it to my country.”

  “You have a duty to us, too! You can serve your country by building tanks for Ford, why the hell do you want to die for your country?”

  “I won’t die,” he insisted.

  “Did Opal read your palm and tell you that?”

  “Jesus, Adele, I just want to make a difference—to help!”

  “Oh, you always want to help, don’t you?” she said with cold fury. “Good old Eddie, always there to lend a hand, or a sawbuck, to anybody who needs it. Except your family. You going to walk out on me and the kids like you walked out on your mother and sister?”

  He flinched at that, and Adele realized with a queasy regret that she had perhaps gone too far. Silence stretched painfully between them, until finally she said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. Or true.”

  “No, you’re right,” he said quietly. “I did walk out on them. And I can’t blame you for feeling like I’m doing the same to you.” He took her hands in his; at least she didn’t pull them back. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I should have told you. But if I had, you know you’d have talked me out of it. Honey, I love you and the kids more than anything on earth, but … I can’t just sit here while the whole world is going to hell on skates. There are six million other guys like me already out there, and if they’d all said, ‘Let somebody else do it,’ there’d be nobody to stop these bastards from burning down villages in China or gassing trains full of Jews. I’m nobody special, I know that—my mom once said I was ‘just an ordinary boy.’ Well, we’re all ordinary boys, and if takes six million, seven million, eight million of us to stop these murdering sons of bitches, then that’s what it takes. If we start thinking of ourselves as too important to serve—too important to die—then the Nazis will win, not because they’re the supermen they say they are, but because we’re no kind of men at all.”

  Adele wrapped her arms around him and cried, knowing there was nothing more she could say or do. There never had been.

  When Toni and Jack got home from school, Eddie broke the news to them as gently as he could. They had seen enough of their classmates’ fathers go away to understand what was happening, but now that it was their own father, they weren’t so sure. “When will you be back, Daddy?” Toni asked, a quaver of fear in her voice.

  Blinking back tears, Eddie said, “When the war’s over, sweetie.”

  “How long will that be?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know, honey,” Eddie admitted. “I wish I did.”

  Toni would remember for the rest of her life the uncertainty in his voice. Daddy had always known everything before—the fact that he didn’t know
this was the first frightening chip in her childhood invincibility.

  Two days later the family saw him off at Central Station in Newark, Eddie in his new white sailor’s uniform and hat, along with hundreds of others boarding the train for Norfolk, Virginia. Eddie hugged Toni and Jack, told them he loved them very much, and promised he’d be back. He and Adele shared a long kiss, a passionate reminder of their lovemaking the night before. Now, as Adele looked into his face, she wondered fearfully if this would be the last time she would ever see him again. She tried not to think about it and yet could think of nothing else as she watched him board the train, then wave at them from a window as the train rattled down the tracks. Toni began to cry, and then Jack, and Adele squatted down and wrapped her arms around both of them at once. “It’s all right, Daddy will be back,” she said, even as tears were streaming down her own face, and by the time they had all stopped crying, the train and Eddie were both long gone.

  8

  Honolulu, Territory of Hawai‘i, 1943

  EDDIE STOOD IN THE BOW of the S.S. Lurline, once the queen of the Matson Line’s “white fleet” of luxury ocean liners, now a troop carrier—its white hull grizzled to battleship gray, its ports smudged black, its luxurious staterooms stripped of amenities and triple-tiered with bunks for up to four thousand military personnel—as the ship cruised into gentle trade winds. Their destination heralded itself before it even came into view, the warm breezes balmy with the sweet smell of exotic flowers, harbinger of land to come. He took in the scented air and thought of Adele’s perfume. Now a few shoots of green sprouted on the horizon, which slowly grew into distant burls of brown and green. Soon there was no mistaking them for what they were: islands. The Hawaiian Islands.

  As more sailors gathered on deck, the bosun’s mate told Eddie that the ship was coming in on a due westerly heading and would be passing between the islands of Moloka‘i and O‘ahu. Eddie’s first close glimpse of Hawai‘i was dramatically different, yet more magnificent, than anything he had ever seen or heard in Hollywood movies or popular songs. Off the port side he saw what he assumed to be Moloka‘i, ringed with sea cliffs—green rugged monuments taller even than the Jersey Palisades—rising like sentinels thousands of feet above deserted beaches. Waterfalls spilled down notches in the lush foliage, and it seemed there was barely a dock or habitation visible anywhere along the shoreline.

  Off the starboard side floated O‘ahu, far less forbidding, its white beaches backed up by furrowed mountains bearded in soft greenery. The coastal waters were a brilliant turquoise, the island beatified by a halo of jade coral reefs. Within minutes Lurline was steaming past an instantly recognizable landmark: the caldera of the long-extinct volcano known the world over as Diamond Head. Its slopes were sere, drier and browner than Eddie had expected, but there was a stark beauty to them, like the granite face of the Palisades. As the ship rounded Diamond Head he saw the pale crescent moon of famous Waikīkī Beach, with several hotels situated at points along the crescent, one a white plantation-style building with a long pier jutting into the sea, another a coral-pink Moroccan-style palace.

  Eddie was enchanted by what he saw, even the low-rise buildings of modern Honolulu that nestled at the foot of luxuriant green peaks and valleys. The Lurline steamed past Waikīkī and made its way toward Pearl Harbor, where small tugs drew apart the antisubmarine nets to admit the ship through the entrance channel and into the harbor’s East Loch. Pearl was bustling with purpose and activity: destroyers, cruisers, battlewagons, and an aircraft carrier were in port; other ships were cradled in huge dry docks as their battle wounds were ministered to by Navy Yard personnel.

  As Lurline passed the eastern flank of Ford Island—known as “Battleship Row” since December 7—Eddie was surprised to see remnants of that dark day still visible. The battleship Oklahoma, victim of a barrage of Japanese torpedoes, lay a few hundred yards offshore, listing to port and kept upright only by dozens of steel cables stretching to Ford Island, where they connected to a battery of enormous winches that had slowly and laboriously pulled and righted the capsized ship to its present position.

  “Soon as she’s floated again,” the bosun’s mate told Eddie, “they’ll tow her to dry dock and try to repair her … or at least salvage whatever they can.”

  Farther along, that was exactly what was happening to the U.S.S. Arizona, her sunken hulk now a kind of steel cairn for eleven hundred sailors and Marines. Further recovery of bodies was impossible, and the decision had been made to let her rest where she had died, at the bottom of berth F-7. As Lurline passed, Eddie saw there was not much of Arizona left above the waterline—just gun tubs pointed helplessly into the air, from which workmen were now salvaging as much ammunition as they could. One of the turrets, emptied of its fourteen-inch shells, was in the process of being scrapped, amputated at the waterline so that eventually the sea would cover the remainder of Arizona and the souls who were entombed in her.

  There was utter silence among the men on deck, and then one of them raised his hand in a salute to the crew of the Arizona. Eddie raised his hand as well, his eyes filling with tears of grief and anger, as the men of the Lurline, about to enter the war, offered a solemn salute to those who had already left it, and given their last full measure in doing so.

  * * *

  The majority of the troops aboard the Lurline would continue on to the South Pacific after a brief stopover on O‘ahu, but Eddie and a handful of others were assigned temporary quarters in the naval barracks at Pearl until they received orders to their final destination in a week or two. Where that might be, he had no idea—ship schedules were not published and sailors were usually the last to know where they were headed. But Eddie had trained for sixteen weeks at aviation metalsmith school and assumed he was headed for the front lines as a mechanic aboard, perhaps, an aircraft carrier.

  Since there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the islands, all liberty took place during daylight hours—no bars and few restaurants were permitted to be open after dark. On his first day of liberty, Eddie and two swabbies he met in the barracks, Sal and Ernie, took the bus downtown to Hotel Street—or, as Sal described it, “the only action you’ll find on this rock.” They were not alone seeking action: the sidewalks were overflowing with servicemen, a swollen river of white and khaki uniforms jostling their way up the street or waiting in block-long queues to enter one of the many bars, tattoo parlors, arcades, and hotels that crowded each side of the street.

  To Eddie it had the familiar look, sound, and rhythm of a carnival midway. Sidewalk photographers sold pictures of fresh-faced GIs smiling beside dime-store hula girls, posing against a cardboard background of phony palm trees on an island where real ones were scarcely in short supply. Other entrepreneurs shilled postcards, watches, and Hawaiian curios. The air was fragrant with the smell of prawns sizzling in coconut oil being sold by sidewalk vendors. As Eddie and his friends joined the surging tide of men, the buzzing of tattoo needles competed with the rat-a-tat of pellet guns from shooting galleries offering, in the words of one concessionaire, “the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoot Hitler or Tojo right between the eyes! Here’s your chance, gents, to demonstrate how well Uncle Sam has trained you—grab a rifle, set your sights, and show the Austrian paper-hanger what he’s got to look forward to, eight shots for one thin dime!”

  Other ballies were less familiar, if not almost incomprehensible, such as the barefoot young Hawaiian boy promising, “Numbah One shine heah! ’Ey, GI, you like da kine? Only nickel, yeah?”

  But Eddie’s friends weren’t here for shoeshines. “C’mon, let’s get some drinks,” Sal said, joining a line to get into a tavern called the Just Step Inn. Belying its name, they waited for half an hour to belly up to the bar where a sign warned, “WE LIMIT our customers to 4 DRINKS PER PERSON.” Eddie wanted a beer but they were out, part of a general alcohol shortage. Only a few cases of the real stuff found its way to Honolulu, so bars offered a brand called Five Islands—locally brewed gin and rum, ferme
nted, it was rumored, for all of twenty-four hours and rushed to a thirsty, and necessarily undiscriminating, clientele. Sal and Ernie ordered gin, Eddie rum; the latter, as the barkeep poured it into one of four shot glasses he filled in advance, had roughly the same color as the real thing, but when Eddie chugged a shot he gagged at the bitter, medicinal taste.

  “Shit,” he said, wiping his mouth, “what’s in this, iodine?”

  The bartender showed him the bottle’s label: “Says here it’s brewed from ‘sugar cane products,’ and no, I don’t know what they mean by ‘products.’ But it’s all we got, and it does the job.”

  The label proudly announced, IT’S 100 PROOF!!—and that was about all Eddie could say for the contents. He pushed aside his remaining three shots; if he wanted to drink turpentine he could get it at the base.

  His friends downed their gins with a grimace, but they finished all four shots—the liquor, whatever it lacked in taste, did in fact “do the job,” and they were thus fortified to face their main objective in coming to Hotel Street. “Okay,” Sal said, “let’s go climb the stairs.”

  “What stairs?” Eddie asked blankly.

  In answer they led him half a block down to a nondescript building, The New Senator Hotel. As with everything here, there was a long line of servicemen coiled around the block, awaiting entry. Sal and Ernie joined their ranks, Eddie falling in line with them. “So what’s in here?” he asked.