Palisades Park (57 page)

“You mean—right this moment?”

“Why not? Wind’s calm and neither of us are getting any younger.”

Inside the trailer, Ella rummaged through her closet and pulled out a pair of gray woolen tights and a wool shirt. “Here, try these on. You’re a few inches taller’n me, but these tights have stretched some over the years.”

“Can I leave on my underwear?”

“Sure, protect the dainty bits if you want. Your hair’s longer than mine, I’d put on this cap too.”

Toni stripped to her undies, pulled on the wool tights—a little snug, but they did the job of covering her exposed skin—then the shirt, then stuffed her hair under the wool cap. She looked into the nearest mirror.

“I look like the world’s most pathetic cat burglar.”

Ella smiled. “Here, put this on.”

Toni slipped into one of Ella’s canvas jackets. “I always keep two or three of these handy. The canvas gives you an added layer of protection, but they do occasionally get a bit scorched. This is all deductible, y’know.”

“Along with my hospital bills?”

“Quit bellyaching. I’ve been doing this fifty years and all I’ve gotten is a few burns on my hands. C’mon, I keep the gasoline packs out back.”

Holy shit, Toni thought, I guess I’m really
doing
this.

Outside, Ella opened a metal case containing two gasoline packs. She strapped them onto Toni’s back and showed her how to ignite them.

“You’ve got to gauge the wind—you can’t have a stiff breeze blowing the flames every which way. When the packs ignite, it’s going to feel like there’s a fireball on your back, ’cause there
is.
Don’t let the sudden heat panic you. Don’t seize up. Just look down at the tank and jump.”

“What happens if the flames set my clothes on fire?”

“They won’t. They’re too busy consuming the oxygen around you, and you’re protected, for a little while, by that canvas jacket. The trip takes only three seconds and the water extinguishes the flames.”

Toni took a deep breath and began climbing up Ella’s tower.

This is crazy, she thought. I’d rather have Cliff Bowles shoot himself out of a cannon over my head! But she kept climbing, listening to the slosh of the gasoline even as she accustomed herself to its extra weight and how it altered her center of gravity—she’d have to adjust her posture accordingly when she was preparing to jump.

Once on the top platform, she looked down into the tank and saw Ella standing on the side. “Gauge the wind, honey,” she called up.

Toni focused on the wind direction and speed—the fronds of palm trees below her were barely moving. “Light wind, two knots at the most.”

“Then light the fuse and jump.”

Toni took several deep breaths, then ignited the packs.

There was a WHOOOSH of air that rocked her on her heels—she struggled to keep her footing firm—as her back was enveloped in hot flame,
tremendously
hot. She felt it more than she saw it—a few angry orange flickers at the corners of her vision—and, with a quick assessment of distance, she immediately jumped off the platform.

She plummeted straight down, trailing fire, the air around her rippling with heat. The fall felt longer than it ever had, then she dropped like a hot coal into the water. The flames sizzled as the water quenched them and turned to steam, raising the water temperature by thirty degrees.

Once the shock of it had worn off, she was ecstatic: she
did
it—a fire dive! She’d been a genuine human torch. Jack would have been so impressed! She swam excitedly over to the ladder, climbed up and out of the tank, and found Ella waiting for her as she descended the other side.

“How’d I do?” Toni asked.

“Not bad, for a first-timer,” Ella said. “By the end of the week we’ll have you jumping into a tank full of flames.”

Toni felt as if her stomach had just plummeted another ninety feet.

*   *   *

“Okay, let me get this straight,” Jimmy said, an obvious strain in his voice. “You strap a couple of gasoline packs on your back, set them on
fire,
then jump into a tank filled with gasoline that’s
also
on fire. That about cover it?”

They were sitting in their living room, it was past ten in the evening, and the kids were in bed—the first chance they’d had to discuss this since Toni had driven her truck and trailer into the driveway late that afternoon.

“The flames are in a ring around the rim of the tank,” Toni explained. “There’s plenty of open water for me to jump into.”

“Define plenty.”

“At least six feet. And the waterspout extinguishes all the flames.”

“You better hope.”

“Honey, I’ve done this now about fifty times down at Ella’s place,” Toni said. “Sure, it sounds dangerous, and it is, but not if you practice the same kind of precautions I do when I’m making a regular dive.”

Jimmy, looking equal parts frustrated, annoyed, and scared, said, “Goddamn it, I think I’ve been pretty open-minded about these stunts of yours, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying that you’ll miss the tank, or break your back, every time you climb that damn ladder. Now you want me to worry about you burning to death, too?”

“You knew what I did for a living before you married me, Jimmy,” she said, adding with a smile, “You even invested money in me.”

His tone softened. “I’ve got a lot more invested now.”

“Honey, I swear, I never take any risk that might take me from you and the kids. I’ve performed this stunt safely dozens of times, and I was taught by someone who’s done it
thousands
of times.”

He sighed. “All right, all right. You’ll do it eventually no matter what I say, you might as well do it at Palisades where I can be there if anything—”

His voice caught. He touched a hand to her face. “I love you. Promise me this is safe.”

“I promise. I love you too—and I have no intention of leaving you.”

*   *   *

Toni was surprised to find the temperature in Jersey actually higher than it had been in Florida. According to the U.S. Weather Service, there was a “persistent continental anticyclone” producing higher temperatures across most of the Mid-Atlantic states. You could certainly feel it in Cliffside Park, where it reached ninety-one degrees on June 21, the day Toni decided to go to Palisades and tell Irving Rosenthal about her new act. The idea of bursting into flames in weather this warm wasn’t exactly appealing, but at least fire dives were usually done at night, when temperatures were cooler.

The park was definitely benefiting from the heat—Palisade Avenue was jammed with traffic all the way back to the George Washington Bridge. It took Toni twenty minutes just to turn right off Route 5 onto Palisade. No wonder there was so much squawking from the cities of Cliffside and Fort Lee about traffic congestion. It took another ten minutes just to get into the parking lot, partly due to traffic having to detour around a police car inside the lot, where an officer was taking information from a distressed woman whose car had been broken into while she had been in the park. This, too, unfortunately, was becoming more common.

Before seeking out Irving Rosenthal, Toni took a detour to one of the park’s most popular attractions—the sideshow building, crowned with its brightly colored sunburst marquee, which hosted the Freak Animal Show and the Palace of Illusions. Maie McAskill was managing it while her husband, Arch, handled their other attractions touring the country. “Hey, Toni,” she said from the ticket window, “welcome back. How was Florida?”

“Went great. Okay if I pop in for a second?”

Maie waved her inside. The Palace of Illusions featured standard illusion-show fare like the Headless Woman—the living body of a woman who appeared to be sitting there
sans
head, with tubes and wires arching out of the stump of her neck—and its opposite, the Decapitated Head of a woman sitting on a pedestal, chattering away as if nothing were amiss.

But what Toni had come to see was the Blade Box Illusion, the same trick that had so thrilled her and her brother back in the ’40s. As Toni drew closer she heard the voice of a magician doing the standard patter:

“—hate to think of what might happen if anything goes wrong. Let’s have a hand for this brave young woman.”

Toni stood at the back of the audience and looked up at the figure standing beside the blade box.

The Magical Adele was dressed in a white tuxedo shirt, black tie and jacket with tails, black silk stockings—her legs still shapely as a dancer’s, even in her mid-fifties—and three-inch-high heels, which helped give her a commanding presence onstage. She took the first of the razor-sharp blades and plunged it casually into the lid of the box and out through the bottom, which brought a small gasp from the audience. “Good, no blood,” she said. “Let’s see if her luck holds up.” She lifted an even bigger, heavier blade and plunged it straight into the middle of the box and out the bottom—where the tip of the blade seemed to have picked something up along the way.

“What’s this?” Adele wondered, bending down to pick off the sharp tip of the blade what appeared to be a scrap of white clothing. “Oh, dear. Part of an undergarment. That
was
close,” Adele said with a grin.

Toni had never let on to her mother that she’d seen her waitressing in Atlantic City, but when she returned to Palisades she asked the McAskills whether they needed a magician for their sideshow. As it happened one of their traveling illusion shows needed someone to do a Blade Box, so at Toni’s suggestion they called Adele’s agent directly, auditioned her, and soon had her on the road. She played state fairs in Milwaukee, Detroit, Memphis, and Dallas; then, when the ’63 summer season began, she performed with one of the McAskills’ Palace of Wonders units at Riverside Park in Agawam, Massachusetts. Postcards from the road barely contained her happiness at being back on the circuit again, and for the next two years, when she wasn’t playing Riverside Park, she was sending Jeffrey and Dawn little presents from Sulphur, Louisiana; Amarillo, Texas; and the Pike amusement pier at Long Beach, California.

But this was her first season at the Palisades unit—perhaps she had asked the McAskills whether she could spend a season closer to home—and Toni found it strange and uncomfortable having her here, and performing this particular illusion, no less. No matter how much she admired her mother’s skill and dexterity in doing the Blade Box, it couldn’t help but dredge up unhappy memories. Already she saw Lorenzo’s smirking face again, saw the two of them in bed, felt the old anger bubble to the surface.

Quickly she slipped out of the sideshow before Adele spotted her.

*   *   *

Crossing the main midway on her way to the administration building, Toni noted another familiar figure: a seven-year-old boy with a tight blond crewcut who was scrambling up one of the hills on the miniature golf course and, while no one was looking, snapping up golf balls that had gone astray in the water hazard. Eagerly he dipped his arms in up to the elbows, scooping out a clutch of slime-covered golf balls. Now, as he sneaked back down the hill, Toni walked up to him, blocking his path, and smiled. “Morning, John-John,” she said. “Whatcha got there?”

John Rinaldi, Jr., arms dripping wet, caught red-handed, smiled a hundred-watt smile. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Russo,” he said cheerily. “You mean these? Nobody’ll miss ’em, and I need ’em for my ball collection at home.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you sneaking around the batting cages too. What does your dad think about you doing this?” Upon the unexpected death of Joe Rinaldi after only one year as superintendent of Palisades, Irving Rosenthal had promoted Joe’s son, John Sr., to the position—making him, at twenty-nine, the youngest amusement park superintendent in the country.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind,” John Jr. maintained.

“You mean he doesn’t know.”

“That too.”

“Didn’t I see you a while back sneaking a teddy bear out of Sadie Harris’s stockroom?”

“Oh, but that wasn’t for me,” John protested. “A little kid was crying and crying ’cause he couldn’t win a prize, so I went and got one for him, and boy was he happy!”

Toni had to smile. This kid regularly got away with murder because his dad ran the park and no one wanted to get on his bad side—but you couldn’t say his heart wasn’t in the right place. Like the time he had released all of Curly Clifford’s parakeets from their cages so they could have a better quality of life, but which only resulted in them dive-bombing hapless customers in the Penny Arcade. It took hours for Curly to round them up, and almost as long for the Mazzocchis to clean up all the bird shit.

“Okay, I never saw any of this,” Toni told him. “Just stay away from my water tank once it’s up, okay?”

“What’s in your water tank?”

“Seventy thousand gallons of water. And I’d like to keep it there.”

“Deal. Thanks, Mrs. Russo. Hey, you wanna come down to the free-act stage with me? I’m gonna hang out with Cousin Brucie, he told me Bozo the Clown and Soupy Sales were coming today.”

“Can’t, I’m looking for Uncle Irving.”

“He’s on patrol. I just saw him down at the Antique Car ride.”

“Thanks.” As John Jr. started off down the midway she added, “Enjoy the show and stay out of trouble!”

“Sure thing,” he assured her, but somehow Toni was not convinced.

The Antique Cars were a short walk up the midway, and Toni indeed found Irving there, looking it over. When she called out a hello, he turned, face brightening. “Ah, the Amazing Antoinette. Back to amaze us again?”

“Maybe more so than usual,” Toni said. “I have a new routine.”

Now she noticed that the Antique Car ride was shut down, with workmen repairing several of the old-timey, Model T–like roadsters, which had had their tires slashed and seats defaced. “What happened here?”

“Petty vandalism. Some riffraff’s idea of a good time. A while back we even caught two young punks stealing a pair of human skulls from the sideshow—go figure. The price of success, I suppose.” He greeted her with a warm hug. “Walk with me, would you like something cold to drink?”

“I’d love it. It’s hotter here than it was down in Tampa.”