Palisades Park (15 page)

Minette sat in the audience with the show’s producer as Adele, nearly dizzy with fear and exhilaration, went on. Somehow she managed to get through her tap routine without incident, though not without discomfort: dancing in high heels was murder on your feet. She was no Ginger Rogers, she knew, but she didn’t miss a beat either, and if her movements weren’t quite as fluid and assured as some of the other dancers, at the end she was pleased that she’d managed to acquit herself honorably and not embarrass Minette—whose parting smile at her seemed warm and genuine.

After the auditions, she and Minette met for coffee at the Horn & Hardart Automat, where Minette told her, “I’m sorry, honey. They liked you, but they went with some other girl instead.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Adele said, unsurprised. “Honestly, I was just happy to be up there on the stage. I know how young and beautiful those girls are, and here I am, an old married woman.”

At that, Minette inexplicably burst into tears.

“Minette, I— It’s okay, really, I appreciate the chance you gave—”

Minette shook her head, tried to compose herself. “It’s not that. It … it’s Jay. He finally divorced his wife.”

“Well, that’s wonderful!”

“For somebody else it’s wonderful. He married another girl.” Minette dissolved again into tears.

“What? You mean he was two-timing you?”

Minette could only nod.

“That son of a bitch!” Adele cupped a hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry, hon. But you’re young and gorgeous—there are plenty of fish in the sea, and you’re better off without a barracuda like him.”

“Yeah, I keep telling myself that,” Minette said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But when the hell do I stop loving the bastard?”

Adele had no answer for that, just put a consoling hand on Minette’s.

*   *   *

Minette seemed to get over her heartbreak within a few months, but surprisingly, as the park season approached, she told Adele she was returning to manage Jay’s stands for him: “No hanky-panky, strictly professional. I’m just doing it for the money.”

Adele wasn’t sure how wise a move that was, but she smiled and said, “Well, good. I’d miss you,” and let it go at that.

Adele went back to the Swift Sisters to perfect her craft. At least it made her feel like she was a part of show business again, and not just a mother and maidservant to two precocious, often exhausting, children. And as Adele felt more fulfilled, she was less bothered by Toni’s—God help her, she had actually begun calling her that—whims and occasional willfulness.

So when, one morning in mid-August—as she and Marie brought the kids to the pool while Eddie got the stand ready for opening—Toni cried out, “Oh my gosh, look at
that
!” Adele didn’t especially mind.

Toni was electrified to see—rising high above the kiddie pool—a tall tower crowned by a tiny platform, braced by guy wires running diagonally on either side. She knew there was only one possible use for such a tower.

“It’s for a high diver!” she announced, beside herself. “Mama, can I go take a look at it? Can I, please?”

It was 10:30
A.M.
and only the Palisades pool was open; the rest of the park was populated solely by staff, all of whom knew Toni.

“Promise me,” Adele said, “that you will
not
try to jump off it.” Toni giggled at that. “I’m not kidding.”

“I promise.”

“Okay. And get back in ten minutes, tops.”

“Thanks, Mama!”—and Toni took off like a rocket up the midway, toward the free-act stage. The Eiffel Tower could not have been a more thrilling sight to Toni than this narrow ladder standing more than a hundred feet tall. At the tower’s foot was a tank about fifteen feet across—currently being fed water from a hose draped over the side—with the words
BEE KYLE
on it, though what bees had to do with a diving act Toni couldn’t imagine. A woman was tightening one of the guy wires to the axle stakes that had been driven into the ground. Toni raced up to her and asked breathlessly, though she already knew the answer, “Is this for a high diver?”

The woman—about forty years old but with an ageless, pixyish face and tousled brown hair—stood up. She wasn’t much taller than Toni—a little over five feet. “That’s right,” she said. “First show this afternoon.”

“Where is he?”

The woman smiled impishly. “You’re looking at her.”

Toni was stunned. The woman laughed heartily, and Toni could see she had a charming little gap between two of her front teeth. “I’m Bee Kyle.”

“But…” Toni’s heart pumped with excitement and disbelief. “My mother says girls can’t be high divers.”

“Well,” Bee said tactfully, “tell her to come around at four o’clock today and I’ll clear up that little misconception for her.”

A huge grin spread across Toni’s face. “Boy, will I! How long have you been a diver?”

“Oh, I was jumping off sea cliffs as soon as I learned to swim. In Maine there’s no shortage of big rocks along the coast to dive off. But professionally, I made my first real high dive when I was fourteen years old.”

Had she heard right? Fourteen?

“I’m ten!” Toni declared. “I can dive off the five-foot boards at the pool. My friend Bunty says maybe next year I can try the ten-foot one!”

“That’s the way to do it. My first dive was from thirty-five feet. I worked my way up, ten feet a year, until I got to a hundred and ten—any higher, I figure, is a job for a steeplejack.” Plainly seeing Toni’s excitement, Bee offered, “I was about to do a practice dive—would you like to watch?”

“Yeah, sure!”

“Okay, sit tight and let me finish checking my equipment. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Toni. Toni Stopka.”

“Nice to meet you, Toni.” She gave her a wink. “I’ll be right down.”

Bee made sure the tank was full—all six feet of water—then she and a man Toni would learn was her husband checked the bracing of the guy wires supporting the tower. It was a little windy today and the tower trembled nervously at the wind’s touch, but Bee Kyle showed no concern as she stripped down to her bathing suit, then began climbing the ladder. She ascended more rapidly than Toni expected, walked to the edge of the tiny platform, looked down—then, to Toni’s surprise, she
turned around,
standing with her back to the empty bleachers facing the stage.

She gave herself a slight push off the platform, then fell backward into space.

In barely the time it took Toni to gasp, Bee’s plummeting body began to somersault—tumbling end over end, not once but
twice
—ending upright just in time for her to plunge, feetfirst, into the water. Upon impact, a tidal wave of water lapped over the side of the tank and Bee was lost to sight. But in moments, a hand popped out of the water, and soon Bee was clambering down the tank’s side ladder, a big smile on her face.

Toni had never seen anyone looking happier in her life.

“That’s my girl,” Bee’s husband, Will, said proudly. “She’s something, ain’t she?”

“I’ll say!” Toni replied.

“So how’d you like it?” Bee asked as she approached.

“That was great!” Toni was filled with a thousand questions. “But how could you see the tank if you were jumping backwards?”

Will handed Bee a towel; she began drying off her hair. “Before I turn around, I look down and gauge the distance,” she told Toni. “There was a little wind, so I had to take that into account too. The trick is in straightening up so you’re perpendicular to the water when you hit. That soft water can be a mighty hard landing field if you hit it wrong.”

“But there’s six feet of water and only five feet of
you,
” Toni noted, not inaccurately, which made Bee laugh. “Do you hit the bottom?”

“Not if I can help it,” Bee said cheerfully. “I wait till I’m waist deep in the water, then I pull up my legs to my chest to break my fall. It has to be done just so—too soon and my neck would snap back and break, too late and my back would be broken.”

“Boy,” Toni said, “I think you’re the greatest diver in the whole world!”

“Well, thank you. Come see me tomorrow—at night I do a fire dive.”

“What’s that?”

“We spread gasoline on the surface of the water and ignite it, and I do the same to myself before jumping.”

Toni was incredulous. “G’wan!”

“It’s true. I wear a special asbestos suit, soak it in gasoline, then turn myself into a human torch.”

Now
this
sounded scary to Toni, but also thrilling. Toni promised she would come, thanked Bee for letting her watch, and went racing to her parents’ French fry stand, where she barely paused to catch her breath:

“Mama there’s a lady high diver and she does a fire dive and she invited me to come tomorrow night and can I go see her, can I go?”

“Lady high diver?” Adele said. Oh, this didn’t sound good.

Eddie told Toni, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, honey, we’ve got to open the stand. Go join your grandma at the pool.”

Toni went skipping excitedly across the midway to the pool. Adele turned to Eddie: “Fire dive? What the hell is that?”

Eddie said, “You’re not gonna like the answer.”

Indeed, neither Adele nor Eddie were overjoyed at the prospect of their adventurous daughter watching a woman douse herself in gasoline, light a match, then fall flaming into a burning tank of gas and water. The unwelcome image of Toni standing on the roof of the house, clothes soaked in gasoline, a matchbook in one hand, came all too easily to both of them, and they were prepared to tell her, at breakfast the next morning, no fire dive.

But of course Toni told Jack all about Bee Kyle and her act, and by morning Jack’s imagination was equally captivated, though for different reasons: “I want to see the Human Torch! I thought it was just a comic character, I didn’t know it was real,
please,
can’t we go see the Human Torch?”

He proudly presented his parents with the latest issue of
Marvel Mystery Comics,
whose cover depicted a flaming man—accompanied by what appeared to be a flaming
child,
no less—throwing fireballs at monsters. On the cover of another issue, the Torch—who could also fly—was dive-bombing oil tanks apparently marked for his convenience with swastikas on their roofs, his fireballs causing them to explode.

Eddie thumbed through the comic and told Adele, “If this is what they’ve been reading, it’s a wonder they haven’t already set the house on fire. Maybe the lady diver isn’t such a big deal.”

Adele examined the magazine—though she barely thought it deserving of the name—and winced, the acrid memory of the ’35 fire still fresh. But Eddie had a point. And both kids seemed so excited. She hated always being the bad guy, the one to provoke that pall of disappointment in her daughter’s eyes. She glanced at Eddie and shrugged.

As Eddie flipped through the magazines, his eye caught something that sparked an idea. He turned to the kids. “
If
we agree to let you come see this tonight, you have to promise me that neither one of you will
ever
—not until you’re at least
eighteen
years old—so much as touch a matchbook,” he said, then, adding the coup de grâce: “And you have to give your solemn pledge as members of Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty.”

He held up the pertinent page, which depicted the good captain swearing in a group of youngsters to his club.

Sobered, the kids sat up a little straighter. Jack immediately raised his hand, as the children in the ad with Captain America were doing. “I pledge!”

Toni’s hand shot up next. “I pledge too!”

“Good. It’s one thing letting your mother and me down—it’s another thing to let down Captain America.”

Adele just rolled her eyes.

That evening, she manned the stand on her own as Eddie took the kids to the free-act stage, where Bee’s husband introduced his famous wife:
“Voted the number-one favorite performer in outdoor show business by
Billboard
magazine, she’s thrilled audiences across the country and around
the world—in far-off China, in mysterious Japan, and just back from a ten-week engagement in the beautiful Hawaiian Islands! You will not see a more sensational act in your lifetime than the one presented here tonight! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the incomparable
Bee Kyle
!”

When Bee appeared, she was wearing a padded, fireproof costume—not as colorful, perhaps, as the ones Jack’s comic book heroes wore, but it still excited his youthful imagination. Toni and Jack watched as the lady daredevil doused herself in gasoline—you could feel the sting of it in your nostrils even back in the tenth row—and then began climbing the ladder. After she’d reached the top, her husband announced to the crowd, “
And now, the ring of fire!
” He struck a match, tossing it into the gasoline-laced tank—which burst into a ring of flames, leaving only a donut hole of open water, no more than five feet across, in the middle of the fiery corona.

On the diving platform, Bee now did the same—igniting her gas-soaked costume and setting herself ablaze, indeed a veritable human torch.

Jack and Toni gasped along with the rest of the audience.

She turned her back on the crowd, the flames writhing around her body as if she commanded them to do so. She milked the suspense for all it was worth, the spectators squirming in their seats, wondering if they were bearing witness to a woman being burned alive.

And then she pushed herself backward off the platform, as Toni had seen her do yesterday. But this was even more remarkable, as Bee’s flaming body tumbled end over end in a somersault—her fiery tail looking like pinwheeling fireworks as she fell like a burning meteor to the earth.

She righted herself seconds before plunging into the tank. A geyser of water and steam erupted inside the ring of flames, extinguishing the fire.

Toni held her breath. Then a padded hand broke the surface and Bee Kyle clambered out and down the side ladder, to the thunderous approval of the audience. The ovation thrilled Toni as much as the performance, the applause resonating deep inside her. She knew now why Bee did what she did for a living—and knew that someday, she was going to do it too.