The next morning, Toni woke early, refreshed in a way she hadn’t felt in a long while. She wolfed down some milk and cereal, then, on a sudden impulse, slipped on her bathing suit beneath a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed her bike, and started pedaling toward Henry Hudson Drive.
When she got to Hazard’s Dock she waited, and at precisely nine A.M., Bunty Hill came ambling down the cliff’s side with his walking stick, breaking into a wide smile when he saw her. “Hey, Joe Palooka,” he said, “I hear you broke some goon’s balls. Sorry I missed it.”
“Thanks,” she said proudly. “Mind some company on your swim?”
“Be my guest.”
“I was—thinking of going over to the New York side,” she said casually.
“Yeah?” Bunty seemed pleased. “Looks like a good day for it.”
Toni shucked off her shirt and shorts as Bunty stripped down to his bathing suit, then snapped on his red bathing cap. He walked to the water’s edge, scooped up a handful of water and gargled it, then spit it out and gave her a thumbs-up. Then he walked onto the dock and smiled back at her: “Ready, kiddo?”
“Ready.”
Bunty dove off Hazard’s Dock and into the steel-blue Hudson. Without hesitation, Toni dove in behind him, cleaving the waters with renewed joy and confidence. Above them roared hundreds of automobiles rolling across the span of the George Washington Bridge, but here in the water the only sounds Toni was mindful of were the slap of the salty waves and the excited pulse of her own heart—and the only thing that mattered, in the distance, was that little red lighthouse at Jeffrey’s Hook.
17
St. Petersburg, Florida, 1949
TONI GAZED OUT EAGERLY from her window seat as the Atlantic Coast Line’s Florida Special rolled into St. Petersburg, past a colonnade of tall palm trees lined up behind a chalk-white depot building with a red gabled roof. As the brakes screeched and sighed, the train’s vibrations sent a shiver of excitement through her. At the age of eighteen she was away from home, alone, for the first time in her life, arriving in a place as different from what she was used to as—well, as different as she felt in her blue rayon-gabardine suit dress and jacket from the people at the station, all of them dressed in summer whites and short sleeves even though it was well past Labor Day.
Summer apparently never ended here, a point driven home by the bright sunlight and a sticky wave of heat that assaulted her as she got off the train, waiting for her baggage to be unloaded. The air was so humid she found herself sweating like a bricklayer as she picked up her suitcase. She had packed lighter clothes, of course, but had wanted to make a good impression with a more formal outfit. What kind of impression was she going to make now, with her dress shields working overtime?
She enjoyed a brief respite from the heat as she passed through the air-conditioned depot, only to hit another wall of hot, moist air as she exited. She scanned the row of cars parked outside and had little trouble picking out the one belonging to the person she was meeting. Dwarfing all the sedate sedans was a one-and-a-half-ton panel truck hooked up to a twenty-two-foot house trailer. On the side of the truck was a brightly colored illustration of a woman wearing a cape of orange fire, diving from a ninety-foot ladder (it said so right on the side) toward a tank of writhing flame. Alongside this were the words:
ELLA CARVER
Internationally Known
As the Only High Swan Diver in the World
On Fire Into Fire
The Greatest Diving Act
“THE ONE THAT NEVER FAILS THE PUBLIC”
Standing beside the truck was a woman in her late fifties, a square-jawed face framed by a curly wreath of brown hair slowly being silvered by time. She stood about five feet four, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, and looked just like the photograph Toni had seen in The Billboard. Toni approached the woman, said, “Hi, I’m Toni Stopka,” and held out her hand.
Ella Carver’s grip was the firmest Toni had ever felt from a woman; a broad smile softened the square face. “Hello, Toni Stopka, I’m Ella Carver. Welcome to Florida. Hot enough for you?”
“Oh yeah. I feel like an idiot in this suit.”
“Feel free to eighty-six the jacket. We’ve got a little ride ahead of us and there’s no point in being uncomfortable.” She spoke with a faint trace of an accent from her native West Virginia.
“Thanks.” Toni gratefully stripped off her jacket as Ella lifted her suitcase as if it were a paperweight and hoisted it into the truck. “Climb in.”
Toni did just that. Ella slid into the driver’s seat, keyed the ignition, and shifted gear into reverse. Backing up a truck and a trailer seemed like a dicey proposition to Toni, but Ella effortlessly angled the whole rig out of the parking space and up Central Avenue, past City Hall, the police station, and the other civic pillars of downtown St. Petersburg.
“Peejay thinks you’re a very bright, talented girl.” Ella rolled down the side window and a warm breeze carried the scent of jasmine into the car. “But he didn’t say why he wasn’t training you himself.”
“Peejay told me, ‘If anybody’s going to teach you to be a world-class lady high diver, it ought to be a world-class lady high diver, and Ella’s the best in the world.’”
Ella laughed. “Best ‘lady’ diver—old Peejay sure knows how to parse a phrase. We haggled for years over which one of us could be billed the world’s highest swan diver. He starts from a height of a hundred feet and me from ninety, but I pointed out he rides a bicycle down to fifty feet and only then goes into a swan dive. He was forced to concede the point.”
Toni was only half listening, fascinated by the stands of palm trees adorning almost every street, the quality of the sunlight, the homes and storefronts with facades white as coral. Was this the glorious tropics her father was always raving about?
“So is Peejay right? Do you want to be a world-class lady high diver?”
Toni shook off her reverie and said, “I just want to be a high diver, as good as you and Bee Kyle. If that’s world-class, then I guess I want that.”
“Ah, poor Bee,” Ella said sadly. “Last I heard, she and her husband were selling popcorn and souvenirs at a railroad circus in Mississippi.”
“My dad owns a food concession at Palisades Park,” Toni said, a bit defensively.
“No offense meant, honey. At least she’s still in the business. It gets in your blood—been in mine for fifty years, ever since my mama took me to the circus and I saw a woman dive off a high tower. As soon as I saw her flying through the air, I knew that was what I was going to be.”
“That’s how I felt when I saw Bee Kyle and Arthur Holden.”
“You have any prior training, Toni?”
“My friend Bunty coached me in diving at the Y. He had me practicing off their ten-foot springboard: backward and forward somersaults, both piked and tucked, jack-knives, half gainers…”
“You want to learn the high swan dive or come down feet first, like most high divers?”
“If a full gainer was good enough for Bee Kyle, it’s good enough for me.”
“Fine by me,” Ella said. “I can do without the competition.” She laughed warmly and Toni joined in. “All right, you want to apprentice with me, we start right now. I’ve got a short gig at a county fair in Savannah, Georgia, last one for a couple of months. You can help me set up my rigging, check the equipment, fill the tank—the grunt work behind the glamour. We spend days doing grunt work, including driving—all so we can have those three seconds in which we launch ourselves into space and fly.”
She looked at Toni and said with absolute conviction, “But I promise you this—they’re the best damn three seconds you’ll ever have in your life.”
* * *
Four months earlier, toward the end of her freshman year at Fairleigh Dickinson College, Toni had worked up her nerve and knocked on the door of her father’s workshop. “Come on in,” he called. Entering, Toni glanced up at the dozens of tikis—carved from driftwood, pine, oak, a
nd a special wood he ordered from Hawai‘i called koa—that crowded the shelving on the walls. They looked down at her with jeweled eyes, bared teeth, shaggy headdresses, and scowling mouths. Her father had assured her there was a purpose to these, but so far he hadn’t shared it and right now she had a purpose of her own.
“Dad? Can I talk to you about something?”
He barely glanced up from the tiki he was carving. “Sure, what’s up?”
Toni blurted out, “I’m leaving college after this year.”
That got his attention. His head snapped up. “What? Why?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you all year, this isn’t for me. I’ve just been … going through the motions, to please you. What I want is to be a high diver.”
He winced. “I thought you’d grown out of that. Honey, it’s a dangerous way of making a living.”
“As dangerous as riding on top of moving trains?”
“I knew I should never have told you about that,” Eddie muttered.
“Bunty’s been coaching me. He says I’m pretty slick. And I wrote to Peejay Ringens, he wants to put me in touch with a lady named Ella Carver.”
That sounded familiar to Eddie. “She related to the Carvers who high dive on horseback in Atlantic City? I read where one of them lost her sight when she hit the water with her eyes open.”
“I’m not planning on diving on the backs of any horses.”
Eddie tried to avoid his daughter’s gaze by looking around his workshop at the carved wooden idols squatting on their shelves like a parliament of household gods weighing these too-human concerns.
“Have you written your mother about this?” Eddie said finally.
“Yeah, and she sent me a letter begging me to give up diving before I got myself killed. What else is new?”
“She and the Great Lozenge are playing the Steel Pier and she’d really like to see you and Jack. He’s agreed to have lunch with her.”
“Great. He can eat my lunch too,” Toni said dismissively.
“Well,” Eddie said with a sigh, “I can’t say I’d be overjoyed to see her myself. Either my heart would break or Lorenzo’s nose would … again.”
“Dad,” Toni said gently, “you’ve really got to start seeing—”
“I suppose you’ve been wondering why I’ve been making all these tikis,” he said suddenly, deflecting the imminent advice on his social life.
“It has crossed my mind.”
“I spent only a couple of weeks in Hawai‘i, but I can still see it, smell it: the warm trade winds, the scent of plumeria and jasmine in the air, the sweet ukulele music … and Espíritu Santo had its own beauty, too.”
“So why don’t you go back to Hawai‘i for a vacation?”
“I will, someday. But for now I was thinking more along the lines of”—his eyes twinkled with amusement—“bringing the islands here. To New Jersey.”
Off her look of bafflement he explained, “In Honolulu there’s a place called Trader Vic’s. South Seas decor, waitresses dressed in sarongs, a whole menu of tropical drinks in the damnedest colors. Some of ’em even bubbled and smoked. There’s a Trader Vic’s in California, too, but I read where the granddaddy of ’em all was a place in Beverly Hills started by a guy who calls himself Don the Beachcomber. But now—what with all the GIs who passed through the Pacific during the war—these South Seas restaurants are popping up all over. There’s even one in Paterson. It’s called Martin’s Hawaiian Paradise, and get this—their ad says, ‘Italian Food Our Specialty.’”
They both laughed. “I want to open a place like that, only better,” Eddie said. “Outside there’d be a tiki idol guarding the door, and inside, palm trees, coconut shells, bamboo wallpaper. I’d have Hawaiian music piped in, Harry Owen and his band playing ‘Sweet Leilani.’ There’d be no windows, see, so after you came in, there’d be nothing to say you weren’t really there, in Rarotonga or Tahiti or Honolulu. Outside it may be freezing, the middle of winter, but inside it’s always warm. Inside it’s always paradise.
“That’s what Palisades used to be for me—a place where you could forget the mess that’s going on in the world, or the heartaches you’ve got in your life. Come in, sip a mai tai, listen to some ukulele music, and be transported to a faraway isle that knows no trouble.”
There was something so wistfully poignant in this that Toni found herself wanting the same thing for him.
“I’m thinking maybe I can start small—rent an old tavern, refurbish it, do all of the woodworking myself…”
“It sounds absolutely magnif, Dad,” Toni said. “I’d go to that place.”
“The hell you would, you’re not old enough.” They laughed together, and then Eddie said, “Look, you love diving, you’re good at it—I understand that. Why don’t you start training and competing nationally? I’ll pay Bunty or any other trainer you want—maybe you’ll even qualify for the ’52 Olympics. You could bring home a gold or silver medal, like Vicki Draves or Zoe Ann Olsen. Whatever it takes, however much it costs, I’ll pay for it.”
Toni was touched—and a little bit tempted—by his offer, but she countered, “It’s not the same thing, Dad. All I need is enough money for a train ticket, training, and room and board for four months in Florida.”
Eddie considered a long moment, then reluctantly shook his head.
“Honey—even your friend Peejay admitted, people die doing this. Or they can be crippled for life. If I gave you the money to do this and something went wrong, I … I’d never forgive myself. I love you too much to risk your life like that. Can you understand that?”
Toni saw the tears he was trying to hold back and she couldn’t bring herself to be angry at him.
“Yeah,” she said, “I can. But I’m still gonna do it—you know that?”
“Since you were two years old,” Eddie said with a sigh.
All right, Toni told herself as she left the workshop, she could still manage this—she just had to be a little more creative about it. She had just over eight hundred dollars in savings from her salary at the French fry stand and her aborted lifeguard position. Ella Carver had said she would train Toni and provide room and board for two hundred dollars a month. She had that covered—but no money for a train ticket.
But then, neither did her dad when he was her age … did he?
She spent a day or two planning things out, then one morning after her father had gone to work she packed as many clothes as she could fit into one suitcase, including her nice new blue gabardine suit, along with a couple of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and a thermos of water. She put on an old shirt and pair of dungarees, sneakers, and one of Jack’s old corduroy jackets. She wrote Jack an IOU for the jacket and her father a note telling him she loved him and not to worry, she’d see him in a few months. She caught a bus to Jersey City and the Jersey Central Railroad Station, where she consulted the posted schedules—finding a Baltimore & Ohio train leaving in fifteen minutes for Washington, D.C., on Track Five.
She left the terminal through the front entrance, then sneaked around back to the railyards. She put on a cap, stuffing as much of her hair under it as she could. Recalling her father’s tales of riding the rails, she kept an eye peeled for railroad cops and hurried over to Track Five, where a long line of freight cars was idling. Most were fully loaded, but she spied one of what her dad called “one-eyed Pullmans”—an empty boxcar, one door open—and after checking twice to make sure no one was around to see, she ran to the car, threw her suitcase up and into the compartment, then put her hands up onto the floor of the car and hoisted first her leg, then her whole body, into the car, exactly as her father had recounted to her a zillion times.
Thanks, Dad. She smiled and hid herself in a corner of the empty car.
Fifteen minutes later she was “catching out” of Jersey for points south.
* * *
In Washington she caught a freight that took her to Richmond, Virginia, then she picked up the Atlantic Coast Line bound for Savan
nah, Georgia. It took a while to get used to the rattle and roar of the train, much less to get any sleep, but she was too excited to sleep anyway. She wished she’d packed a third peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich—she was starving by the time the train slowed for its approach into Savannah. She jumped off before it reached the station and caught a bus to the nearest YWCA, where she rented a room, took a hot shower, and enjoyed a cheap meal and a good night’s sleep. The next morning she put on her blue gabardine suit, went back to the train station, and purchased a passenger ticket for the Florida Special—which a few hours later pulled into St. Petersburg.
Now, ironically, she found herself headed back to Savannah—a six-hour drive, straight up U.S. Route 301 to Highway 17 and into Georgia—and Ella seemed determined to do it in one jump. Finally, in the fifth hour, Toni asked meekly, “Can we stop to get something to eat?”
“Oh, heck, honey, I’m sorry, of course. Sometimes I go all day long without a meal—I believe in lettin’ the stomach rest.”
“Mine’s gotten plenty of rest since breakfast. I could use a sandwich.”
Ella pulled over at the next truck stop, a diner called Molly’s Place.
En route, Toni had learned from Ella that she was born on a farm in Bluefield, West Virginia, into a family of seven boys and four girls. Their father left early in Ella’s life, leaving her mother alone to rear the children. It sounded like a hardscrabble life, and Toni wondered how much practice in “letting the stomach rest” Ella had had, growing up as a child.
“After seeing that lady high diver at the circus, I must’ve climbed every tree in the county … I even remember climbing a windmill. My mother’s never stopped worrying about me. She used to say, after I left, that I’d be the first of her children to die. Every time a wire came, she’d say, ‘Ella’s gone.’ But it’s starting to look like I might be the last to go!”
Now, between bites of her roast beef sandwich, Toni asked, “How did you become a professional diver?”
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