Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  “Toni?”

  She turned to find her mother, winded from chasing her down.

  Adele put a hand on Toni’s shoulder. “Are you all right, honey?”

  Toni grabbed her in a bear hug and clung to Adele as if she were a tree in a hurricane.

  “Don’t let Daddy die,” Toni said as she burst into sobs. “Please, Mommy, I don’t want him to die, I want him to come home!”

  Tears welled in Adele’s eyes as she held tight to her daughter. “Daddy won’t die, sweetie,” she assured her. “He’ll come back to us.”

  Toni collapsed into helpless tears, terrified that what had happened to Laurent might happen to her father—knowing for the first time that it could happen to her father—as she wept into her mother’s chest.

  * * *

  Espíritu Santo was a big island compared to the many tiny atolls, barely more substantial than a mirage, scattered like freckles across the face of the South Pacific: fifteen hundred square miles of volcanic rock and coral terraces, fringed by tall coconut palms and white horseshoe beaches. The climate was hot and humid, but the air was sweet, scented by frangipani. Eddie’s barracks was one of dozens of Quonset huts clustered like mushrooms along the shore, amid palm trees bent by gentle trade winds.

  Not so gentle was the clangor that awakened Eddie on his first night on Santo, around midnight—along with the cry of the watch officer, calling, “Condition Red! Air raid, everybody out!”

  Eddie slipped on his britches and jumped to his feet, but the men around him just groaned their dismay and slowly, almost lackadaisically, rose from their cots. The guy next to Eddie’s didn’t even bother to get up, so Eddie poked him. “Hey! Fella. Air raid, get up!”

  “Aw, hell,” the man said, opening his eyes reluctantly, “it’s just Piss Call Charlie, that’s all.”

  “Who?”

  “I was havin’ such a nice blonde dream, too,” he said in a soft Southern drawl. “Goddamn Japs.”

  Eddie and his bunkmates straggled out of the Quonset hut, where the watch officer was sounding the alarm by banging a length of pipe against an empty acetylene tank. From above came the drone of a plane circling overhead, its engine audibly different from the engines of American fighters.

  In pitch darkness they stumbled to the ditches in which they were told to take shelter. “What is it up there,” Eddie asked, “a Japanese Zero?”

  Stifling a yawn, the Southerner nodded. “Ol’ Charlie swings by ’bout once a week, drops a couple bombs in the bush—unless there’s a full moon he can’t see for shit, it’s darker out here than the inside of a turd.”

  The men lay down, as ordered, in the ditches, as Eddie wondered aloud, “Shouldn’t somebody be shooting back at him?”

  “Waste of ammo. Charlie kills a cow from time to time, but that’s all. By now he’s probably got a whole herd of cattle stenciled onto his fuselage.”

  Sure enough, after half an hour of listening to the Japanese plane buzzing overhead—occasionally disgorging a bomb that scored a direct hit on a palm tree—the watch officer announced an all clear. Some men went grumbling back to the barracks as others headed for the latrines: hence the name “Piss Call Charlie.” Eddie, somewhat disappointed in his first glimpse of combat, joined the men opting for the latrines.

  The next morning, Eddie reported to the metal shop, part of the naval base’s huge aviation repair facility. Carriers like the USS Saratoga, lacking the resources to repair planes damaged in sorties with the Japanese, off-loaded the aircraft here on Santo. Eddie was put to work cleaning out one of the torpedo bombers—shot up pretty good by Japanese pilots with far better aim than Piss Call Charlie—that had just come back aboard the Saratoga.

  A Grumman TBF Avenger, its fore and aft had taken a lot of flak. Eddie and a machinist’s mate named Wilkowski were told to “hose out” the cockpit cabin. Eddie wasn’t fazed by the blood on the Plexiglas canopy, laced with bullet holes from the Zero’s 7.7-millimeter machine guns; but he was puzzled by the gray lumpy substance, looking vaguely like dry cement, on the inside of the tailgunner’s compartment. “Jesus,” he said, “what the hell is this stuff?”

  “What the hell do you think it is?” Wilkowski said. “Chopped liver?”

  A light dawned, and Eddie realized that what he was hosing off the canopy was what remained of the tailgunner’s brain matter.

  He felt a wave of nausea, could taste bile rising in his throat.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said softly. All at once he was back in the foundry in Newark, the sight of his father’s seared, mangled flesh causing him to vomit—as he feared he was going to do now.

  “Hey. Stopka. You gonna be okay?”

  Eddie fought back his gag reflex, nodded. “Yeah. Shit. Poor bastard.”

  “Get used to it. God hates tailgunners.”

  Eddie held it together for the next hour, purging the compartment of all human traces, making note of the equipment that had been shot up and the degree of repair necessary, then casually took a bathroom break.

  Inside the latrine he threw up, thinking of his father, feeling tears welling up for him as well as for the dead gunner. He took a few deep breaths—not the smartest thing to do in a latrine, he quickly realized—then wiped his mouth off even as he wiped all trace of fear and revulsion from his face. He walked casually back into the repair hangar, wondering whether he could keep this up for the rest of the day—much less the rest of the war.

  * * *

  In November, Franklin Worth died of congestive heart failure, surrendering in his sleep to the armies of night and regret. He had been admitted to Holy Name Hospital a week before in critical condition and Marie had been dreading the phone call that finally came on a Monday morning. Adele found herself sleepwalking through those first few hours after Franklin’s death, feeling—from the moment she saw her father’s lifeless body in the hospital, swollen to three times its natural size—as if she were little more than a radio relaying messages from her conscious mind, which had sunk to the bottom of a deep well. Every comforting word she uttered to her mother, every careful question she asked the funeral director, seemed to come via wireless, or maybe ventriloquism, from a deep pit of conscious thought that animated her body as Edgar Bergen did Charlie McCarthy. She felt about as real as Charlie, and didn’t begin to climb out of that pit until she went to pick up the children at school and had to tell them that their grandpa, the only one they had ever known, was dead.

  “Him, too?” Toni said, voice breaking. Adele did her best to console her and Jack before they all shambled to bed, eager for the release of sleep.

  But Adele couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of the afternoon Franklin had come to Palisades, the raw, aching regret in his voice as he confronted, clear and sober, what he had made of his life, and what might have been. Could she really blame him for quailing at it, for choosing to face it the only way he could—through the sweetly distorted prism of a glass bottle?

  Tell me you don’t.

  “Mom, where’s Grandpa being buried?” Jack asked the next morning.

  “Hackensack Cemetery, honey. It’s a very nice place where a lot of important people are buried.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell Daddy what’s happened?”

  Adele agreed they should, sat down and wrote a short V-mail to him, and brought it to the post office after dropping the kids off at school.

  The day before the funeral, Adele was pleased to find that Franklin’s passing was noted in a single paragraph in Variety, which referred to him in flattering terms as one of the “pioneer filmmakers” of the one-time motion picture capital of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Adele bought three copies of that week’s Variety. She sleepwalked through the service at the church, during the short funeral procession to Hackensack, and as she listened to James’s and Ralph’s graveside eulogies to their father. When her time came, she simply walked up to the temporary grave marker on Franklin’s grave and taped a clipping of the Variety obituary onto the marker.

  “Your last
notice, Daddy,” she said softly, “and it’s a good one.”

  And then she finally wept, the emotions she had been bottling up spilling out in a torrent.

  That night she yearned for Eddie’s arms around her, the consoling warmth of his body enfolding hers as she was wracked with sobs. This was too much to bear alone. And where was Eddie? First in Hawai‘i, where, according to his letters, he’d had a grand old time—sightseeing, frolicking in the surf, buying trinkets like those grotesque little shrunken heads he’d sent her. She wouldn’t have wasted a dime trying to win those things if they’d been a prize in Jackie Bloom’s cat game! And now he was on some tropical island with swaying palm trees, working on engines just like he could’ve been doing in Edgewater. But no, the stupid, big-hearted Polack, he had to enlist—had to leave his family, leave her, to face this alone. She cried into her pillow, wishing Eddie were here so she could hug him—and then slug him. And God help her, she didn’t know which she wanted more.

  * * *

  On his first drive around Espíritu Santo, Eddie ran into a few old friends: stone and wooden idols guarding the entrance to shops or scowling at him from street corners. Here they were called tiki, not ki‘i, and apparently represented different gods, but they looked similar to those he had seen in Hawai‘i. He took a shine to one that resembled an anteater with a pig’s nose, out of which sprouted two long dried palm leaves—either like a mustache or nostril hair gotten badly out of hand. Eddie bought it for five bucks and installed the tiki—dubbed Colonna after the mustachioed comedian Jerry Colonna—on the wall of the metal shop.

  Life on Santo—notwithstanding Piss Call Charlie’s weekly visits—was dull enough that to amuse himself, Eddie salvaged a piece of driftwood, sawed off the ragged ends, and took a socket chisel to it, trying to carve a likeness of Colonna. Today, sitting on the beach after his shift, he was trying to duplicate the ridges that fringed the shop’s tiki mascot. Using a mallet to drive the chisel resulted in a choppy cut, so he switched to using his hand only, which worked slightly better.

  He was interrupted by mail call, and was pleased—at first—to receive a V-mail from Adele. But after he opened it his mood quickly sobered:

  Dear Eddie,

  I’m sorry to have to tell you that my father passed away two days ago, of congestive heart failure …

  She related it all, he thought, in a curiously calm, detached tone. She spoke of the funeral arrangements, selecting a casket as if she were inspecting the bumpers of a new car, comforting the children—but nothing of the loss she must have been feeling, as if she couldn’t bear to express it. Her words were carefully chosen, emotionally weightless, except for a P.S.:

  God how I wish you were here.

  The words twisted like a knife inside him and tears sprang to his eyes. He would have given anything to be back home, helping to comfort the kids, trying to comfort his wife, instead of here on the other side of the world.

  But there was another piece of news in the letter that shocked him even more, related almost off handedly:

  It wasn’t entirely unexpected—he had been ill for some months—but it still came as a shock, especially to Toni, coming so soon after Laurent Schwarz’s death (he was killed in an accident in American Samoa).

  Eddie put the letter down, gazed into the blue vastness of the ocean, and said a prayer for Laurent Schwarz and his family. Only now did he truly understand the selfishness of what he had done by enlisting—and only now could he imagine the grief his own family would endure, should the war find him as it had found poor Laurent.

  11

  Palisades, New Jersey, 1944

  DETERMINED TO AVOID a repeat of her difficulties with Jim Lubbock, Adele hired a longtime carny woman in her fifties named Goldie, who had experience at grab stands and fell comfortably into the routine of grease and grind at a fry joint. Adele also made it clear to Toni, now thirteen, that once school ended in June she was also expected to help out at the stand, working eight hours a day with only an hour off for swimming and diving at the pool, and the usual half hours for lunch and supper. When Toni balked, Adele stated flatly, “If those Mazzocchi girls can start at the Penny Arcade when they’re twelve, you can start now.” But at least the Mazzocchi girls got to wear those snazzy coin aprons that jangled with change for the arcade games—Toni’s cooking apron was heavy, grease-stained, and made her feel like the neighborhood butcher.

  Jack also helped out, but since he had a paper route too, he spent less time at Palisades than Toni. Marie no longer came as regularly as she once had. Adele’s mother had surprised her by selling their old house—which without Franklin seemed vast and empty—and accepting an invitation to live with Ralph and Daisy in their home on Knickerbocker Road in Tenafly. Surrounded by her son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren, Marie was happy in her new situation, but Adele saw less of her these days and felt sometimes as if she had lost her husband, father, and now her mother’s comforting presence, though she never let on to Marie that she felt that way.

  The 1944 season saw Joe McKee taking over as park superintendent, with Joe Rinaldi as assistant superintendent. Palisades opened on April 29, the gates admitting some sixty thousand visitors. The pool opened on May 27, also to capacity crowds. The weather helped—the summer of ’44 was the hottest on record since 1896, with every state east of the Mississippi roasting under a merciless sun.

  The following week, on June 6, the long-awaited “second front” was opened up in Europe when Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy. But for Toni, the most eagerly anticipated event of June was the return to Palisades of “The Super Man,” as he now billed himself—Peejay Ringens.

  * * *

  It was basically the same act as last year, but Toni never tired of it and took her supper breaks during Ringens’s evening performance. She was in the audience night after night, eating hot dogs as the daredevil diver rode his bicycle down the slope, abandoned it in midair, and dove into the tank. Sometimes she was there long after the rest of the audience had left, watching Peejay dry off as his pretty wife recovered what was left of the bicycle and secured the gear for the next day’s performance.

  The temperature soared into the nineties, but if Ringens broke a sweat as he ascended the ladder, Toni couldn’t tell: he always seemed cool and collected. The night of his final performance, Toni felt a pang of regret as she began to leave … then heard a familiar voice behind her:

  “You there. Young lady.”

  She turned, surprised to see Mr. Ringens, still in his diving costume as he toweled his hair, looking right at her.

  “Me?” she said.

  “You’re the little dynamo who wants to be a high diver, aren’t you?”

  She hesitated, then admitted, “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve seen you here every night and I thought, ‘This girl is either serious about wanting to dive or desperate for entertainment.’” He smiled. “My wife and I were just going back to our trailer. Would you like to come along and ask me those questions you wanted to ask?”

  Toni’s supper break was almost over, she really had to get back to the stand—but she might never have this chance again. “Sure. Thanks!”

  Ringens’s lovely wife smiled at her and offered Toni her hand. “My name is Renie,” she said in a melodic French accent.

  Toni shook her hand. “I’m Toni.”

  “Short for Antoinette?” Renie gave her a wink. “Are you French too?”

  Toni walked with them to the dozen-odd trailers clustered at the edge of the cliff, where some visiting performers lived while playing Palisades. Ringens and his wife led her to a trailer hooked up to a Packard station wagon, opening the door into a comfortably large mobile home with a living area, bedroom, and kitchen. “Would you like some soda pop?” Renie asked.

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Renie took a Pepsi-Cola out of a small refrigerator and handed it to Toni. Peejay took one too, downing it quickly.

  “I owe you an apology,” he told Ton
i, sitting down opposite her. “I was rather brusque with you last year. Would you like to know why?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because you reminded me of somebody. My daughter, Anne—well, more an adopted daughter, she took my name while she worked with me.”

  “Do I look like her?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Oh,” Toni said, puzzled.

  “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.”