Palisades Park (8 page)

“There are still dozens of kids in there,” Adele told the fire captain.

The smoke had now enveloped much of the midway; when Eddie looked back he could barely make out the rides through the sooty clouds. Captain McDermott organized his squad and asked for volunteers from among the park employees to help find and retrieve the remaining children. Eddie and about a dozen other men volunteered, and he soon found himself heading back into the conflagration.

Adele said, “Eddie, be careful—”

“I will,” he promised. “Find a phone and call your mom, tell her you’re okay. She’s going to be worried when she hears about this.”

By the time the firemen and volunteers made their way back to the main midway it was totally blacked out by smoke. In the midst of this false night Eddie and the others could hear the sounds of children crying in the darkness. Captain McDermott had the men put wet handkerchiefs over their mouths, then form a human chain behind him, the last man standing just outside the clouds of smoke, Eddie somewhere in the middle. It was hotter than hell, and the handkerchief didn’t do much to filter the air. At the head of the chain the captain groped in the darkness until he found a child, passed him or her to the man behind him, then the next man, until finally reaching the end, where a fireman escorted the child out of the park.

Eddie coughed constantly, wondering if he was breathing in the incinerated remains of his own stand … or worse, some luckless person who had been trapped in the path of the flames.

Finally, after twenty minutes of shepherding children along the chain and assuring them everything would be all right, Eddie was relieved when McDermott called out, “That’s the last of ’em,” and gave the order to leave.

Once back outside the Hudson gate, Eddie coughed up black soot and drank down as much water as Adele could hand him, his throat coarse as sandpaper. They walked around to Palisade Avenue, where long fire hoses sprayed arcs of falling water onto the flames. As the Stopkas approached they saw Chief Borrell talking with the fire captain from Cliffside Park; when the Chief saw Eddie with his face smudged black from the smoke, he hurried up to him and asked, “Jeez, Ten Foot, you okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “but I got a feeling your stand’s seen better days.”

“It’s just wood and money, Eddie,” the Chief said with a shrug.

By six o’clock the fire was finally out. When the smoke cleared it could be seen that one-eighth of Palisades was in ruins: a charred forest of smoldering building frames was all that remained of the park’s northwest corner. Among the structures burned to the ground were the Old Mill, the Whip, the Spitfire, the Motor Parkway, the roller-skating rink, and fifteen concession stands and storerooms—including the Chief’s candy stand.

But though ten firemen suffered from smoke inhalation, there were no serious casualties, and no fatalities. All the children, thanks to the quick thinking and heroism of the fire department, were sent safely home.

Almost as remarkable, no sooner were employees and concessionaires okayed to enter the grounds than a squad of workmen roped off the burnt area and began cleaning the soot from the seven-eighths of the park that was undamaged. Despite the cataclysm, that evening at nine
P.M.
Palisades Amusement Park reopened for business. The indefatigable Arthur Holden performed his scheduled high dive, even though the tank he was diving into had been drained of a foot of its water in order to fight the blaze.

Since both their concessions had been wiped out, Eddie and Adele left and took the trolley to Marie and Frank’s to pick up their children. There Eddie shouldered a drowsing Jack, who woke up long enough to sniff his shirt and declare, “Daddy, you smell.” Eddie laughed: “Don’t I know it.” Marie, grateful that her daughter and son-in-law had escaped unscathed, drove them all home to Bergen Boulevard. It was only after Adele put the kids to bed and kissed them goodnight that she sat down at the kitchen table, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed into helpless tears—the stress and terror of the past five hours finally taking their toll. Eddie went to her and held her, feeling kind of shaky himself.

“Sssh, sshh,” he said soothingly, “it’s okay, we’re all okay…”

“We could’ve been
killed,
” Adele gasped out between sobs. “Antoinette and Jack could’ve been orphans!”

“But they’re not. Everybody got out safe.”

“Eddie, what if they’d been there? What if my mother had taken them to the pool today?”

“They still would’ve gotten out safely.”

“I’ll never let them set foot in that damned park again!”

“Fires can just as easily happen in apartment houses.”

“Oh, go to hell,” she snapped, but she only held him tighter.

When Eddie dropped by the park the next morning, he saw hundreds of workmen busily hosing down the midway, tearing down the gutted remains of rides, digging up the blackened stumps of trees, and rebuilding concession stands. Eddie helped out a little with the latter, cutting some corner posts and roof joists, until construction boss Joe McKee wandered by and told him, “If you think you’re getting paid for this, you’re nuts.” Eddie laughed but McKee was serious: “For Chrissake, Eddie, you ate enough smoke yesterday to fill a chimney. Take a break, will ya?”

The park opened as usual at noon, and for the first time since his trip here in 1922, Eddie found himself at Palisades without a job to do. So he did something he’d wanted to do for years: take a roller-coaster ride. The Big Scenic had suffered fire damage, the troublesome Cyclone had been demolished last year, so that left the Skyrocket. It was a great ride with steep climbs and stomach-churning hairpin curves—and at the summit of the first hill, Eddie looked down and saw again that enchanted island in the sky, no less magical than it had been thirteen years ago.

By July Fourth weekend, Eddie was working at a newly rebuilt stand with a brand-new cotton candy machine and popcorn popper, alongside the same old Lew (minus one appendix). Lew fancied himself a jaded carny who’d seen it all before, but even he was impressed: “Jumpin’ Jesus,” he said, chewing around his cigar. “These Rosenthal boys really mean
business.
”

*   *   *

After a brisk Fourth, life at the park proceeded as usual. In a publicity stunt, an American Indian wrestler named Chief Little Wolf began training for the world wrestling championship at Palisades and performed exhibitions in the ballroom. The ballroom manager, Clem White, also had a good instinct for musical acts, and “Whitey” belied his name with his interest in black jazz musicians. One of the first such bookings came in August, when the ballroom hosted an all-Negro band fronted by “Mrs. Louis Armstrong”—Lil Hardin Armstrong, Satchmo’s wife and the composer of some of his biggest hits. The music drifting out of the ballroom that evening reminded Eddie of the blues songs he had heard down South, and he longed to visit the ballroom on dinner break, if Lew could spare him. “Yeah, sure,” Lew said, “but God knows what you see in that nigger music.”

There was a time this word, spoken as off handedly as Lew used it, would not have drawn Eddie’s attention. He might’ve even used it himself in the Ironbound, when players were selected for sandlot softball teams:
Okay, you get the Polack, the wop, and the Mick, and I’ll take the nigger and the Jew.
It was, he thought then, more descriptive than derogatory.

Or so he thought until the day he was walking down a street in rural Alabama, and a young colored man walking ahead of him was suddenly set upon, like dogs on a crow, by three enraged white men. “Uppity coon,” one of them spat out, “where the
hell
you think you’re goin’?”

He punctuated the question with a fist into the man’s solar plexus.

Doubled over in pain, the colored man tried to speak between gasps of air: “I—I was just goin’—to the drugstore—”

Eddie came running up and cried out, “Hey! What’s going on?”

Cold, hateful eyes glared at him. “You takin’ this
nigger
’s side?”

The word no longer sounded descriptive. It sounded like a cocked gun, ready to go off.

“But—what’d he
do
?” Eddie asked.

“He knows what he done,” another man said. “Don’tcha?”

He kicked the colored man’s legs out from under him, toppling him. Eddie jumped in, pushing the attacker away from the Negro. “Stop it!”

“Yankee Doodle’s a nigger lover.” The first man slugged Eddie in the jaw, staggering him. Then all three dogs were on him at once, hammering at his face, his stomach, and the coup de grâce, a boot-kick to the balls.

Eddie collapsed and blacked out.

When he awoke he found himself lying next to the colored man—face bruised, battered, and bleeding, like Eddie’s—who was just coming around himself. Oddly, they were now on the opposite side of the street, as if dragged there. “You okay?” Eddie said, helping the man to his feet.

“Yeah. Thanks for tryin’ to help. But it was my own damn fault.”

“What was? What did you do?”

“I was in a hurry gettin’ to the drugstore, and I went walkin’ on the wrong side of the street. The white side.”

Eddie was dumbstruck. He couldn’t imagine this ever happening in the Ironbound.

He never used that word again, and couldn’t hear it now, even from affable Lew, without seeing that young colored man’s bloody, battered face.

*   *   *

When Eddie and Adele arrived in the Palisades ballroom they found the place packed with dancers—all white as the driven snow—stomping to a blend of swing, blues, and hot jazz tunes. Mrs. Armstrong was a handsome woman in her thirties wearing an elegant white gown and matching top hat, conducting the band with a baton when she wasn’t herself performing at the piano. She attacked the keys with gusto, no daintiness about it, whether it was in the swing-flavored number “Hotter Than That” or the more down-tempo “Lonesome Blues,” in which her forceful piano punctuated the mournful saxophone of George Clarke—the latter identified by Clem, who was standing at the back of the ballroom, beaming as he watched. “I just knew Palisades dancers would go for these colored bands in a big way,” he told the Stopkas. “Never could convince the Schencks of it.” Eddie and Adele even had time to do a little stomping of their own.

After half an hour they had to go back to work, and had been at it for less than an hour when Eddie, working the candy floss machine, heard a woman say, “I’ll have a cotton candy, please, Eddie.”

Something about the voice sent a jolt of adrenaline through him and he turned to find himself staring at a young woman in her early twenties, dark-haired, fair-skinned, with a nervous look on her pretty face.

Eddie said, “Viola?”

Whatever apprehension Eddie was feeling was quickly lost in the light of her smile. He jumped the counter and threw his arms around his sister.

“My God! Viola!” He took her in. “You’re so beautiful!”

She laughed. “You look good too, Eddie. It’s…” Her voice broke. “It’s so good to see you again.”

She began crying, and he embraced her again. “It’s okay, Vi,” he said. “I’ve missed you too.”

But even as he held her, he couldn’t help glancing up and around to see whether she was alone or not. From all appearances she was.

Adele, having seen all this from across the midway, wandered over to find out exactly who her husband was hugging, not once but twice.

“Honey,” Eddie said, “this is my sister, Viola. Viola, I’d like you to meet my wife, Adele.”

Adele, surprised, embraced her too. “It’s so nice to meet you, Viola.”

“Me too. You’re even prettier than your picture in the paper.”

“I like this girl, Eddie,” Adele said with a wry grin.

As the crowd of customers at Eddie’s stand grew larger he said, “Vi, I’ve got to work, but—can you stick around until the park closes, at midnight? Maybe we can go out and get some coffee … do you drink coffee?”

“I’d drink shoe polish if I could sit down and talk with you, Eddie,” she said, which made him laugh and feel a stab of guilt at the same time.

“In some joints around here,” Adele said, “shoe polish would be an improvement over the coffee.”

Eddie said, “That’s great, Vi, thanks. Let me get you that cotton candy too, all right? On the house.”

At midnight Adele went to pick up the kids, allowing Eddie time alone with Viola: “You two have a lot to talk about, I’m sure.”

Eddie and Viola walked over to Joe’s Restaurant, ordered some hot coffee and slices of Boston cream pie, and Eddie said, “Jeez, it’s good to see you again, Vi. I … I’m sorry it’s been so long.”

“Mama was glad to at least get those postcards you sent from the carnivals. At least she knew you were okay.”

“You mentioned the picture in the paper—you saw it?”

She nodded. “I tore it out, though, before Mama and Sergei could see. It took me all this time to find the courage to come here.… I figured you had your reasons for staying away.”

“It was never you, Vi. You saw how Sergei treated me. I was Jack Stopka’s son, a constant reminder of the man Mom used to love, and he couldn’t stand that.” He looked at her. “You still living at home?”

“Not for much longer. I’m engaged. His name is Harold—Hal.”

“That’s great, Vi, I’m happy for you. And Mom and Grandma Lil? How are they?”

“Grandma passed away two years ago,” Viola said.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it. She was a real character, wasn’t she?”

She nodded. “For what it’s worth she didn’t think much of Sergei either. When Mom told her you’d run away, Grandma just looked at her, looked at Sergei, and said, ‘What took him so long?’”

They both laughed heartily at that.

“Mama is fine but she misses you terribly. And I think she feels guilty, like she didn’t stick up for you enough.”

Eddie’s eyes flashed with anger. “You mean, like she didn’t lift a damn finger to stop Sergei from beating me.”

“I know it’s hard to forgive her that, I don’t blame you for being angry. But I know it would mean a lot to her to see you. And her grandchildren.”

Eddie considered that, then said quietly, “Vi … the day Sergei tore up my baseball cards, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. I heard him and Mom on the other side of the wall. I heard him say, ‘I’m not doing anything my father didn’t do to me, Rose. I’m doing him a favor.’