Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

One of the regular players was “Slim” Welker, on whose team Toni and Jack used to play, years ago, in the Palisades parking lot. Toni was startled to see that over the summer Slim had gone through a growth spurt, gaining about two inches in height and—though he still lived up to his nickname—packing on a good twenty pounds of muscle. This was plainly evident through the undershirt he wore while playing, his newly toned biceps flexing as he swung at the ball. The bat connected with a loud crack, sending the ball arcing into space. He was a good runner, too, and made it to third before Toni caught the ball and threw it to the third baseman; by which time Slim was safe. Even from the outfield Toni could see the sweat glistening on Slim’s face—still a boyish face, nicely contrasting with the man’s body he was developing. She had never paid much attention to Slim Welker before, but now it was all she could do to tear her eyes away from his sandy hair and pug nose and force her attention to the next pitch.

  In the next inning, on her turn at bat, Toni hit the ball squarely and strongly, and its impressive trajectory got her all the way to second base. She glanced over at Slim, playing infield, but his attention wasn’t on her but on one of the pretty girls sitting in the bleachers watching the game.

  The next pickup game assembled in the parking lot of the Trinity Episcopal Church across from the high school. As the players formed teams Toni casually moseyed over to Slim and said, “Just like those games we used to play in the Palisades parking lot, huh?”

  His smile felt like a kind of victory to Toni. “Yeah, those were good. Just tell me your brother isn’t playing on my team today, okay?”

  Toni laughed. The laugh felt like a betrayal of Jack, but when Slim joined in, all she cared about was that Slim Welker had not only noticed her but was sharing a joke with her. The fact that the joke in question was her brother bothered her only a little.

  But after the last inning, it was the pretty bobby-soxer Maria DeCastro who Slim walked home. Toni was left feeling empty and guilty.

  * * *

  On a Sunday afternoon in late September, Eddie, in his Navy whites, stepped off the Champion, the Atlantic Coast Line’s passenger train from Florida to New York’s Pennsylvania Station, and into the arms of his children, who sped toward him like torpedoes cleaving through the water.

  “Dad Dad Dad!” they both were yelling simultaneously. He was startled to see how much they’d grown in not quite two years—Jack was at least five feet six though still gangly, and Toni was taller too, growing into a lovely young woman. Then the human torpedoes hit and he was hugging them both at once, tears streaming down all their faces, and it felt just as good as it had every time he had imagined this moment for the past two years.

  But when he looked up at Adele, standing about ten feet away and watching the scene with a tight smile, Eddie felt the autumn chill in the air.

  Despite this, he took her in his arms and kissed her. She returned it briefly—then gently pushed back from him as soon as she feasibly could. “Welcome back, Eddie,” she said, almost making it sound sad.

  “It’s great to be back. You look beautiful, Adele.”

  “You’ve been stuck on a desert island for two years,” she said lightly. “Your standards are low.”

  It was only a pale flicker of her usual wry wit, but Eddie smiled, happy to have it. “No, I mean it, you look great. Just great.”

  She looked uncomfortable, but all at once the kids were at their side, Jack helping Eddie with his duffel bag. “Wow, this is heavy, what’s in here?”

  “Open it up and see.”

  Jack’s eyes popped as he extracted a carved tiki head, the best of the lot Eddie had made: a fierce Kū, nostrils flaring, mouth a scowling gash of jagged teeth. “Wow! This is swell!” Jack said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I made it,” Eddie said proudly.

  “You did?”

  Toni said, “Dad, this is good. Whatever it is.”

  “It’s called a tiki. Like the little ones I sent you from Hawai‘i.”

  “So this is how you won the war for us,” Adele said caustically.

  The barb stung, but Eddie ignored it. To the kids he said, “C’mon, let’s go home,” and they followed in his wake out of Penn Station.

  Toni and Jack chattered nonstop all the way across the George Washington Bridge and back to Edgewater, but Adele—at the wheel of the ’39 Chrysler she’d bought with the fire insurance money—was unusually quiet. When they finally got home, Eddie breathed in the familiar smell of the house as if it were one of the exotic floral scents he had encountered in Hawai‘i. But none had ever smelled as good as this.

  As Adele cooked a pot roast for dinner, the hearty aroma of meat and spices only added to the sweet, rich flavor of home.

  After dinner they listened to Jack Benny on the radio, as if no time at all had passed since the last time they had gathered to laugh at Jack, Rochester, Mary Livingston, and Dennis Day. But there were no blackout curtains on the windows now; a warm light filled the room and spilled out onto the street. Afterward, Eddie played ball with the kids in the backyard while Adele did the dishes, then Eddie packed the kids off to bed.

  Finally alone together in their bedroom, Eddie went up to his wife, cupped her arms in his big hands, and said, “I’m sorry, honey. For not being here. For the fire, for—for all of it. I should never have left.”

  Adele’s voice trembled as she said, “But you did.”

  “I’ll make it up you, Adele, somehow. I promise.”

  He tried to draw her toward him but she pulled back. “I’m not in the mood to be made up to, Eddie. I’m tired. Let’s just go to sleep.”

  She slipped out of his grasp, kicked off her heels. As she unbuttoned her blouse she kept her eyes averted, avoiding Eddie’s hurt and hapless gaze.

  “I’m sorry about your dad. I should’ve been here for that too.”

  She turned to hide her tears. “I survived.”

  She wriggled out of her skirt and threw it in the laundry hamper, then got into bed. Eddie, seeing she wasn’t ready to give him an inch, sighed and began undressing. He tossed his Navy whites into the hamper and slid into bed beside Adele, who lay on her side facing the wall, her eyes shut.

  He reached out and touched her on the shoulder, felt her body go rigid at his caress, then drew back.

  “G’night, honey,” he said, surrendering, at least for the moment, to the situation as it was.

  “Good night, Eddie,” she said quietly.

  Eddie switched off the light and rolled onto his side, facing her back.

  Adele waited until his breathing became regular and shallow, then waited longer for the sound of his faint snore, so familiar to her and yet so strange to hear again after such a long time. After twenty minutes she finally slipped out of bed, went to the closet, pulled out a dress, picked up her high heels from the floor, then padded barefoot out of the bedroom.

  She dressed quickly in the hallway, all but her shoes, which she carried with her, then moved down the corridor to the children’s rooms. Peering through the open doorway into Jack’s room, she saw her son asleep in bed, the floor surrounding him piled high with comic books, magic manuals, and open drawing pads with colored sketches of top-hatted magicians and costumed heroes on their pages. She made her way through the four-color clutter to his bedside—then bent down and kissed him, lightly, on the forehead. Jack stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake. She smiled and blinked back tears. He was a good boy, a sweet boy—she could take some measure of pride in that.

  The window in Toni’s room was half-open, a billowing shade creating a ripple of moonlight in which Adele saw her daughter illuminated in flickering light and shadow. Her daughter, whose heart was an abiding mystery to her, and the signal failure of her life. Adele stood on the threshold of Toni’s world and peered into it without seeing, as always. But Toni, she knew, would not miss her. Toni had her father, her brother, and her dreams—as unfathomable as they may have been to Adele.

  She lingered only a moment at the door
to her own bedroom. Despite everything that had come between them, when she looked at Eddie she still could see the young man, hungry for a family, who had rescued her from her parents’ house, and a part of her would always love him for that.

  She put on her shoes and opened the hall closet. Behind the woolly camouflage of the family’s winter coats, her suitcase had been carefully hidden from view. She lifted it out, quietly closed the closet door, dropped an envelope addressed Eddie on the kitchen table, and left the house.

  She walked down the back steps, into the driveway, and past the new Chrysler, her heels clicking on the sidewalk like the tapping of impatient fingernails. Two houses down, a ’42 Chevy with a small Gulfstream trailer attached to it was parked at the curb, its engine idling.

  Lorenzo got out of the Chevy, took Adele’s suitcase, and swung it into the back as she slid onto the front passenger seat. When he settled behind the wheel again, she leaned in and kissed him gratefully.

  As Eddie had once done, he was rescuing her.

  * * *

  Toni woke the next morning to the knocking of the half-drawn shade against the window frame. When her eyes focused on the clock she saw it was almost 6:30—half an hour past when her mother usually woke her for school. But this morning all was quiet. Puzzled, she got up and went to her parents’ bedroom, where her father lay sleeping—alone. Her mother had to be up—why hadn’t she awakened Toni and Jack? “Mom?” she called down the hallway, getting no response. And weirdly, there were no sounds or cooking smells coming from the kitchen, either.

  This was because the kitchen was empty. “Mom!” she called again, moving into the living room: no one there either. Had her mother gone out, gone grocery shopping? But no—Toni looked out the window and saw their car still parked in the driveway. What the heck?

  Returning to the kitchen, she now noticed an envelope on the kitchen table—an envelope with her father’s name written on it.

  A shiver of intuition ran down her spine. She knew she should wake her father, give this to him to open—but she was the one with this terrible foreknowledge, and somehow she felt as if she should be the one to open it.

  Her hands trembled as she undid the flap and pulled out a single page of notepaper, the message written in her mother’s flowing cursive:

  Dear Eddie,

  I wish I had the courage to tell you this to your face, but I don’t.

  For fifteen years I’ve put family first and career second. But I’m thirty-four years old and running out of time. I have an opportunity on the stage and I’m going to take a chance I should’ve taken a long time ago.

  You followed your heart when you went to war and left me to pick up the pieces at home. Well, it’s your turn now.

  Tell Jack and Toni that I love them and that I’m sorry.

  Adele

  “Toni?”

  She jumped, as if she’d been caught stealing. She turned to find her father standing behind her in his bare feet, wearing only boxers and an undershirt, innocent of the words that would shortly make his heart bleed.

  “Where’s your mother? Why aren’t you getting ready for school?”

  Wordlessly Toni handed him the letter and the opened envelope. Unable to bear seeing his face as he read it, she ran past him, tears pooling in her eyes, to Jack’s room down the hall.

  “Get up!” she said, shaking her brother awake. “Now!”

  “What?” he said, shrugging off sleep. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Just get up!” she snapped. “It’s important!”

  She ran back to the kitchen, where her father was staring almost uncomprehendingly at the letter, as if it were written in Sanskrit, or Greek.

  He looked up at Toni. “She’s … gone?”

  Toni nodded. “But the car’s still in the driveway.”

  Eddie shook his head and, to Toni’s amazement, he laughed.

  “She’s just got some wild hair again about getting back into the movies,” he said. “She’ll be back home in a week, don’t worry.”

  “No. Dad. She won’t.” Toni hesitated to say more, but who else could? “You don’t know the whole story.”

  Jack padded bleary-eyed and pajama’d into the kitchen.

  “What do you mean?” Eddie said.

  “Mom hasn’t … I mean, she’s been … there’s this man—”

  Her father looked as if he’d been gut-punched. “What man?”

  “His name is Lorenzo.”

  “What about Lorenzo?” Jack asked sleepily.

  “He’s run off with Mom,” Toni told him.

  “What?” Jack yelped. “No! That’s not true!”

  Eddie sank into a kitchen chair. “Lorenzo who?”

  “His last name’s Marques,” Toni explained. “He’s a stage magician who played the park last month. I … saw them together. In his trailer.”

  “So? Big deal,” Jack countered. “So they were talking in his trailer, so what? Maybe they were talking about magic.”

  “Jack, they were in … in bed. Together.” He was dumbstruck.

  “Are you sure of what you saw, Toni?” her father asked quietly.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry, Dad. They were in the … altogether.” She saw the hope die in her father’s eyes. “I was waiting until you got back to tell you. I didn’t think she’d just…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Jack snapped. “Didn’t you trust me?”

  “Jack, I hardly trusted myself!”

  “What else do you know about this … Lorenzo?” Eddie asked.

  Toni recounted everything she could think of, up to and including the fact that he had left Palisades to play the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. She described his car and trailer. When she was done, Eddie stood and sighed.

  “Shit,” he said. “I should’ve seen this coming. But I always thought you got ‘Dear John’ letters while you were away, not after you got back.”

  “But how—” Jack broke into a sob. “How could she just leave us?”

  He started crying, and then Toni found herself weeping too. Eddie put his arms around them both and drew them close.

  “Ssh. Shh. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. It’s my fault she left, not yours. You understand that? Not your fault.”

  “We don’t need her,” Toni said, her grief transforming to anger. “She lied to us. She cheated on you. To hell with her, who needs her anyway?”

  Jack suddenly said, “Dad? Where’d that come from?”

  He was pointing at his father’s right bicep and the tattooed red heart with the name ADELE inside it.

  “Oh. This.” Eddie smiled sheepishly. “It, uh, seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Toni and Jack couldn’t help but crack rueful smiles.

  “I’ll find her,” Eddie promised. “I’ll try to convince her to come back. Meanwhile, you two need to get ready for school.”

  “We have to go to school?” Jack said incredulously. “Shouldn’t this be like a snow day?”

  “What are you gonna do, mope around here all day? Life goes on.”

  “Dad, are you okay?” Toni asked nervously.

  “Yeah, sure I’m okay,” Eddie said. Toni wasn’t sure she believed him. “We’ll all be okay. C’mon, let’s get you some breakfast.”

  He poured them bowls of cereal and glasses of orange juice, had them shower and dress, and by 7:25 they were on their way down Undercliff Avenue toward the bus stop.

  On the way, Toni turned to her brother and said, “Jack, whatever you do, don’t tell anybody about this! Nobody needs to know what’s going on. Who knows, she may come back tomorrow and it’ll all have blown over.”

  “You really think so? She might come back?”

  “Sure. Maybe Dad’ll talk her out of it. Just don’t tell anybody.”

  In truth, Toni wasn’t sure that her mother would be returning anytime soon. But she was embarrassed beyond words that Adele had skipped town like one of those cheap floozies you saw in the movies, and she knew that if the kids at scho
ol found out, she and Jack would know no end of shame. And so she carried the shame bottled up inside her all day, revealing it to no one, smiling blandly at classmates and teachers when what she really wanted was to shout and curse out her mother in front of the whole world. Jack was right—how the hell could she just leave them all?

  And then she heard again every unkind word—and they were considerable—she had ever said to her mother, every bit of childish scorn and cruelty she had heaped upon Adele.

  “I hate you! I hate you!”

  “I don’t want to be like you. Your life is boring!”

  In the middle of gym class she fought back tears, ran to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and wept.

  Dad was wrong. This was all her fault.

  * * *

  The minute the kids were safely off to school, Eddie jumped into action—any action he could think of—to keep the hurt at bay. He showered, shaved, dressed, and within twenty minutes was driving up the hill to Fort Lee and into Palisades’ employee parking lot. The park was closed but hardly empty: in the off-season there was always a steady staff of about twenty-eight workers who kept the park in shape during the winter months. And of course the office staff was at work too. Eddie hiked over to the new administration building, an impressive redbrick structure that any fire would think twice about attacking, where he greeted Margie Cadien, wife of the Bobsled manager, as he entered. “Eddie! You’re back!” she cried out, and soon he was being welcomed by other staff members. When she heard the commotion from her office, Anna Halpin came out to add her well wishes. “You just missed the season, Ten Foot,” Anna said. “It was a good one, too.”

  “So I hear from Adele.” He answered their questions about where he’d been stationed during the war, spent an appropriate amount of time catching up with park gossip, then casually mentioned, “Hey, I understand you had a magic act here last month—Lorenzo the Magnificent?”

  This brought a chorus of whistles from the women in the office. “He can plunge a sword into me any day of the week,” Margie said, to catcalls all around. “And if you tell Bill I said that I’ll deny it to my death.”

  Eddie laughed. “My son kinda took a shine to him, wants to write him a letter—can anybody dig up some contact information for this guy?”