Palisades Park (17 page)

Reports like these made Eddie’s blood boil, and for the first time in his life he started having trouble sleeping, haunted by the stories coming out of Europe and the Pacific. A safe stateside job on an assembly line, no matter how vital to defense, couldn’t erase his nagging guilt at not being overseas, in the thick of it, doing his part for his country.

So in March, when Eddie’s draft number finally came up and he was ordered to report to his local draft board, he was secretly happy to go. But if he was expecting a rousing, patriotic call to arms with an underscore of George M. Cohan songs, he was grotesquely disappointed. At the draft board he and a hundred other draftees were ordered to strip to their shorts, and even less, for a series of tests. Eddie found himself in one of many long lines of naked men doing their best to ignore their own sagging testicles—to say nothing of the fat ass cheeks and ripe body odor of the guys in line ahead of them. Eddie was fingerprinted, had blood and urine taken, underwent physical and psychiatric exams. There was nothing rousing about a proctologist’s glove, though the mere suggestion otherwise would have been enough to keep a man out of the Army.

When Eddie was told to put his clothes on again, his hopes were dashed as his draft card was stamped 3-A: “Married, with dependent children.” Neither the Army nor the Navy was yet drafting fathers—at least not fathers of children born before Pearl Harbor—and he was automatically given a deferment. Eddie felt a little sick to look at the paperwork he had been handed. He could’ve handed it back—demanded to enlist. But he told himself this was the way it had to be: he had a family to support. Nobody could fault him for that. Even so, as he walked out of the draft board, still a civilian, an increasingly large part of him couldn’t help feeling like a coward.

*   *   *

Palisades Amusement Park, as it prepared to open in late April, had firmly committed itself to the war effort. No new rides were constructed in order to save building materials for the defense industry. Jack and Irving Rosenthal refitted all of the park’s lighting to comply with the Federal dim-out regulations: all exterior lighting on rides and stands was to be extinguished, the neon spokes of the Ferris wheel going dark, and only interior lighting allowed to illuminate concessions. The huge scrolling electrical sign on the cliff would also go dark and the incandescent Palisades name would not be visible from New York City for the first time in decades.

The Rosenthals held War Bond rallies at the park and instructed head gardener Mike Corrado to plant a huge Victory Garden to help inspire visitors to grow their own produce at home. On Wednesdays ten percent of gate receipts were donated to the Army and Navy Relief Funds, and servicemen were admitted free of charge to the park. As Irving Rosenthal told the press, “We in the amusement business have a definite and important part to play in our country’s war effort, and that is to provide wholesome outdoor recreation to bolster the morale of the people.”

The park opened on April 25, accompanied by newspaper ads proclaiming
MORE PLAY MAKES BETTER WORK
. Despite the gas shortage, Palisades opened to big gate receipts and stayed there all summer.

Eddie took a leave of absence from Ford to honor his lease with the Rosenthals. Meat shortages limited hot dog vendors to one per customer, but fortunately potatoes weren’t rationed and the stand’s Saratoga fries were cooked in corn oil, not butter. (The leftover cooking grease, collected dutifully by Adele, was surely enough to blow up a Panzer division.) Eddie told himself that the more money he made, the more his family would have in the bank against the day when the Army began drafting fathers.

But he found it hard as hell to put on a jolly face when he knew men were fighting and dying outside the festive bubble of Palisades. He was reminded of this every day, with every soldier or sailor on leave—Hoboken was a major hub for servicemen shipping out to Europe and the Pacific—who came to the park for one last good time, an innocent taste of home and happiness before both became in very short supply.

Keeping a cheery tone was mandatory for the park’s fortune-tellers, who each day had to read the palms of departing servicemen and reassure them, “All is not certain, but I believe things will turn out all right for you.”

But after the park closed at midnight some of them, along with Adele and Eddie, went across the street to Joe’s for a few stiff drinks. One “palmist,” Opal, broke down crying: “Things
won’t
turn out all right for some of them. I feel like a lying louse. But what else am I going to say?”

Adele said, “It’s what they want to hear, hon. Just tell them what they want to hear and they’ll go away happy.”

“I know, I know,” Opal said, drying her eyes with a napkin. “But I wouldn’t blame them a bit if—God forbid—as they get hit by a Japanese mortar, they think, ‘That bitch of a fortune-teller sure steered me wrong!’”

The departing servicemen weren’t always strangers but familiar faces from Palisades. Jackie Morris, the son of Charlie “Doc” Morris—who with his father had booked group excursions for the park—had actually been inducted into the Army a month before Pearl Harbor. Hugh McKenna, chief lifeguard at the pool, was next to enter the service, followed by Jimmy Hannan of the Lake Placid Bobsled and Bill Gomez of the Casino Bar. Dr. Frank Vita soon said his goodbyes, too, as did Roscoe Schwartz’s two sons, Roscoe Jr. and Laurent. Laurent was only nineteen when he joined the Marines.

It shamed Eddie to think that while nineteen-year-olds were putting their lives in harm’s way, an old man of thirty-one like him was spending the summer risking nothing more than a hot splash of corn oil.

Nor was Eddie alone in feeling left behind—Bunty Hill had been turned down for military service due to his age. “I’m only forty years old, for Chrissake,” he griped to Eddie on their lunch break. “I swim the goddamn Hudson every day. Do I look like I’ve got one foot in the grave?”

“Maybe you’ve got too many dependents, Bunty,” Eddie said.

“What? I’m single! Never been married. And I haven’t planted any seedlings along the way, either.”

“I’m talking about all the lovely gals here at the pool who
depend
on you to take them out and show ’em a good time. Helen and Muriel and Edith and Rosalie—you’re a one-man morale industry, Bunty.”

“Aw, shaddup,” Bunty said, but couldn’t help laughing as he said it. He tossed a copy of
The New York Times
to Eddie. “And by the way, while we’re cooling our heels on the homefront, here’s the latest shit the land of my forefathers is visiting upon the land of
your
forefathers.”

Eddie took the paper—yesterday’s, dated June 27, 1942. He had read about the recent massacres in Poland—Jewish Poles slaughtered and stacked in mass graves in towns like Bydogszcz and Bialystok. He’d heard of the remark made by that pig Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS: “All Poles will disappear from the world.” But he was still shocked by what he saw on the bottom of page five, two small paragraphs that read:

According to an announcement of the Polish Government in London, 700,000 Jews were slain by the Nazis in Poland. The report was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was recorded by the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York yesterday.

“To accomplish this, probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed—machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation,” the Polish announcement said.

Eddie was stunned. Seven hundred
thousand
people? “Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “Gas chambers? You think this is true?”

“I don’t doubt it for a second. The sons of bitches are doing the same thing in Paris. Paris fucking
France,
for Chrissake! Rounding up French Jews and sending them to a ‘labor camp’ called Auschwitz.”

Eddie reminded himself that these were the same monsters who had gone into mental hospitals in Bydogszcz and shot to death more than three thousand mental patients so their inferior genes could not contaminate the pure Aryan gene pool. Why should he be surprised that the Nazis would embrace the greatest horror of the First World War—poison gas—and “improve” upon it, turn it into a mass assembly line of death?

“God help us all,” Bunty said, “if these bastards actually win. How many of us do you think’ll be left once they start ‘purifying’ America? After they get rid of all the Jews, the Negroes, the queers…” He broke into a mordant laugh. “Christ, who’ll be left in show business?”

Eddie laughed, but it was no joke.

Toni and Jack, of course, followed war news of their own—the Axis-smashing adventures of Captain America, the Human Torch, and others—and that meant a weekly trip to Pitkof’s Candy Store on Palisade Avenue in Cliffside Park. Eddie drove them there in the morning before work. Pitkof’s was a small store with a soda fountain, confectionary, and most important, a magazine rack which contained all the month’s comic books. As Eddie pulled up to the curb he noted that one of the store windows was boarded up with plywood, but there was an
OPEN
sign on the front door. Inside, Jack Pitkof, wearing a gray service jacket, sat behind the counter reading a Yiddish newspaper. He was a quiet, mild-mannered man in his late forties who also served as a local Air Raid Warden. Eddie remembered him once telling him how he and his brothers had escaped Tsarist Russia “under cover of night, hidden under straw in wagons, and arrived in America with exactly nothing.”

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.”