Palisades Park (40 page)

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 Savannah, 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?”

“Pure serendipity. When I was ten, a Wild West show passed through town—The Great Carver Wild West Show. It was run by ‘Doc’ Carver, a former buffalo hunter and sharpshooter. Six foot four, two hundred pounds, flaming red hair—my sister-in-law Sonora said he was like a giant redwood, nothing could knock him down. He was called Doc ’cause he’d studied to be a dentist in California, before he thought better of it.”

“Irving Rosenthal at Palisades used to be a dentist, too.”

“Something about the profession just sends men into the outdoor amusement business, I guess,” Ella mused. “Anyway, when he saw what a good climber and jumper I was, he asked my mother if he could adopt me, and train me for a diving act he was planning. She said sure.”

“She did?” Toni said in amazement.

“Of course she did. She was struggling to raise eleven kids on her own, and here was somebody offering to give one of them a better life than she ever could. And I was rarin’ to go and be a diver, just like you. So she signed some papers making Doc Carver my guardian.

“He taught me to swim, dive, and ride horses. That was the act he’d come up with—diving horses. You’d ride the horse up a long ramp to the top of a forty-foot tower, then dive headfirst together into a tank of water.”

Toni was amazed—her father hadn’t just made that up to scare her!

“Doc had another daughter named Lorena, and the two of us rode five different horses—Lightning and King Klatowah were my favorites—all over the world. We even made a tour of China. But eventually I knew I wanted to go out on my own as a swan diver,” Ella said, “and I made good at it.”

Nursing her cup of coffee, she added, “Doc was wonderful to me, but I had one thing against him. When Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel in 1926, I knew I could do it faster than her. He wouldn’t let me.”

“My friend Bunty helped train Amelia Gade Corson, the second woman to swim the Channel.”

“There you go. That could’ve been me. I may give it a try yet.” She looked impatient. “You about finished? We should get back on the road.”

They pulled into Savannah a little after sundown and slept the night in Ella’s comfortable house trailer with its two-bunk bedroom and kitchenette with a small gas range, on which Ella cooked breakfast the next morning before they began the “grunt work”—and Toni found herself doing a lot of grunting—of unloading Ella’s equipment from the truck. The water tank, twelve feet in diameter, came out first in eight pieces, and Ella put it together with the skill of a trained mechanic. The ninety-foot ladder followed, in nine ten-foot sections, each with its own platform. Toni marveled as she watched Ella wield a ten-pound sledgehammer to pound axle stakes into the hot asphalt pavement; Toni was young and strong but for every stake she drove into the ground, Ella managed to do two.

The stakes secured guy wires from the ground to the ladder sections; once the wires were tied off to the first ten-foot section, Ella climbed up and used a pulley called a gin pole to raise the next section of ladder, attach it, then tie off four more guy wires until that section was secure. Toni did most of the toting and Ella most of the rigging, but Ella had Toni tie off a few wires herself so she knew how to do it—and Toni watched Ella’s every move, sensing that at some point she could be called upon to do any or all of this.

By Friday morning tank and tower were ready, standing nine feet apart. Toni gazed up at the small diving platform jutting out a few rungs down from the top; from down here it looked as substantial as a postage stamp. But Ella, wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit for her practice dive, was hardly cowed, though she did take a precaution that puzzled Toni: she tore off a piece of duct tape. “What’s that for?” Toni asked.

“Honey,” Ella explained, “I take about three and a half feet of water when I hit—pressure’s equal to five hundred pounds per square inch. Once I reach the top, I tape my mouth and nose shut to withstand the shock.”

She began climbing up the ladder. When she reached the top she taped her mouth and nose. On that tiny platform, she looked about as big as a bird perched on the topmost branch of a bare, wintry, ninety-foot tree.

The little bird inched forward to the edge of the platform, pausing only a moment before she dove into space.

It was a perfect swan dive, Ella’s body arcing out and down as if sliding down a rainbow. Her head was nestled between her outstretched arms, to cushion the impact. When she hit the water, her body was rigid and she created a geyser that erupted over Toni as she stood on the catwalk surrounding the tank. Through the spray she was able to see that as soon as Ella entered the water, her rigid body went supple, curving like a smile, turning the steep dive into a shallow one; had she not, Toni knew, she would have slammed headfirst into the bottom of the five-foot tank. Instead her arched body sank only three or four feet, easily skirting the bottom, before surfacing on the other side of the tank.