Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  “We were hunting dinosaurs,” her daughter announced proudly.

  “Are these moss stains? Were you by the river?”

  “My teacher says that’s where they find dinosaurs.”

  Adele sighed. “Both of you are too young to be playing by the river, until you learn to swim.”

  “We weren’t playing, we were exploring. And Mama, my name isn’t Antoinette anymore, it’s Toni.”

  “What!” Adele was horrorstruck at the thought. “It most definitely is not. Tony is a boy’s name, not a girl’s.”

  “Guy’s aunt is a girl and she spells it with an i and that makes it a girl’s name,” the newly christened Toni insisted.

  “Well your name is Antoinette,” Adele insisted right back. “Now go change your clothes and wash up for dinner.”

  “I need the potty first, Toni,” Jack told his sister.

  “Don’t call her that!” Adele admonished him in a tone of voice usually reserved for warnings like, “Don’t touch that plate, it’s hot!” or “Didn’t I tell you not to touch that plate?”

  There the subject lay, better left alone, for the evening; but the next day at school, when Miss Kaplan called on her and asked, “Antoinette, can you spell ‘horse’?” the teacher was promptly corrected: “H-O-R-S-E. And Miss Kaplan, everybody calls me Toni now.”

  “Do they? Well, that is something of a time-saver, I suppose.” And she merely shrugged and corrected her seating chart.

  The first report card bearing the name TONI STOPKA triggered a small earthquake on Undercliff Avenue, but though Adele was able to have this corrected on future report cards, it was not so easy to undo popular opinion. Whenever one of Toni’s friends would visit they would invariably greet her, “Hi, Toni!” or “’Lo, Toni!” Adele was quick to correct them, but it was, Eddie pointed out, like trying to get Babe Ruth’s fans to call him “George.”

  Adele was decrying this one Saturday morning as Eddie sat in his easy chair, vainly attempting to read the sports section of the paper. “We give her a pretty, distinctive, feminine name, and what does she do? She takes a boy’s name, an ordinary one at that! Toni,” she finished with a shudder.

  “She’s just a tomboy, she’ll grow out of it,” Eddie said.

  “I’d rather she didn’t grow into it at all.”

  Their daughter trotted out of her bedroom with her friend Doris, announcing, “We’re going to Doris’s house, bye Mama, bye Daddy!”

  “Bye, Toni,” Eddie said reflexively.

  The moment Toni was gone, Adele snatched the paper out of Eddie’s hands and swatted him on the back of his head with the sports section.

  “You’re a big help,” she snapped.

  Eddie, displaying commendable patience, snatched back his paper. “And you’re going overboard on this name business. She’s a kid, kids have nicknames. Enough already, before they move you into a nice padded cell at Greystone.”

  She cracked a smile. “Somebody’d have to have me committed first.”

  “I’ve got the papers all filled out,” Eddie said without looking up from the headlines.

  * * *

  Eddie’s sister, Viola, and her new husband, Hal, became frequent visitors to the Edgewater house. On weekends Eddie would pick them up at the ferry terminal in the secondhand 1931 Studebaker he’d purchased when word spread that the public trolley lines would soon be eliminated. Adele would make a nice Sunday dinner. Both Toni and Jack loved their newfound Aunt Vi, who was always happy to play a game of checkers or Monopoly with them. On her second visit, Jack—who had been busily playing with crayons as the adults chatted—presented her with a drawing, a crayon portrait of her he had just made. “Why, thank you, Jack,” she said, holding the picture up for Eddie to see: aside from the purple crayon he’d used for her hair, it was a fairly creditable, if cartoony, likeness of her.

  “Looks like we have another artist in the family, Eddie,” Viola said. “Just like Mom and—” She caught herself before Sergei’s name escaped her.

  “Hey, that’s great, Jack,” Eddie told his son with a smile—but in his heart, he wasn’t really sure how he felt about this.

  By the time Toni turned seven the following March, she had grown another inch in height—and feeling herself now more than a match for the Palisades, she began scaling it in the company of neighborhood friends. Along with Guy, Johnny Lamarr, and her next-door neighbor Davy, she made her way up the sloping hill, through patches of wild grapevines that smelled like purple Popsicles, as the ground became increasingly studded with impressively large boulders. One of the biggest was free-standing and about the size and shape of a large gray bear, a hump of stone just begging to be jumped on, which of course they all did. After that the rocks were joined together in more elaborate formations. Toni and her friends scurried up—and slid down—them as if they were playground rides.

  One big stone had a donut hole in it, less than three feet in diameter; Toni narrowly squeezed into the tube and was disgorged like a pea from a pea-shooter. But on the way out, Toni felt a sharp tug on her dress, heard a loud, dismaying rip, and saw that her skirt had snagged on an outcropping of rock. She worked it free, knowing she would catch it from her mother when she got home, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  Eventually they found themselves facing a straight vertical cliff with no way up. They realized with disappointment that they’d reached a dead end and began to descend the way they came.

  As they slid off the last rock and onto the hill slope, they were startled by a hissing sound behind them—and turned to see a copper-colored snake slithering out of a crevice in the rock they had just slid down. It stuck out its tongue and hissed again before retreating into another crevice.

  “Holy Toledo,” Guy said, “that’s a copperhead!”

  “Are they dangerous?” Toni asked.

  “Heck yes. Their bite can kill you.”

  “Kill you dead?” Toni said.

  “Holy cow,” Johnny noted.

  “I’ll say,” Davy agreed.

  They all contemplated that for a moment, then Toni said, “So how ’bout tomorrow we start a little ways down the street—behind the Looms? Maybe there’s a better way up the cliff there.”

  They all agreed without a moment’s hesitation. Intrepid explorers did not let little things like copperheads get in the way of expanding mankind’s knowledge of the terra incognita men called Edgewater, New Jersey.

  But when Toni returned home she was welcomed not with the huzzahs that greeted Admiral Peary or Charles Lindbergh but a cry of horror from her mother: “Antoinette, what in God’s name happened to you?” Toni remembered now the torn dress, noticing for the first time that those parts of her dress that weren’t torn were caked with dirt and moss.

  “Oh. This? I tore it on a rock,” Toni said.

  “Oh, your beautiful dress,” Adele said forlornly. “I spent so much time making that. Where were you? Down at the river again?”

  “Oh, no, Mama. I was in Davy’s backyard.”

  “Is that all?” Adele said. “Are you lying to me?”

  “Mama, I swear, I never left his backyard!”

  Technically this was true. Eddie, listening from his easy chair, said, “Are you hurt, hon?”

  “No, Daddy, I’m fine.”

  “Well,” Adele said with a sigh, “I may be able to fix the tear. But first I’ve got to wash all that dirt out of it. All right, young lady, off with it.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Off.”

  Toni raised her dress over her head and her mother lifted it off as if she were shucking an ear of corn. Adele sighed again and headed for the downstairs laundry room. When his wife was out of earshot, Eddie glanced over at his daughter and said, “Toni?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Next time wear old clothes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And I want you to promise me something else.”

  “Sure.”

  “Never go higher than y
ou think is safe. Never let anyone else goad you into going higher than you think is safe. Can you promise me that?”

  Toni was surprised her father knew what she had been doing, but pleased that he was not forbidding her from doing it again. “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Good.” Eddie smiled. “Was it fun?”

  Toni grinned. “It was the mostest fun I’ve ever had in my whole life,” she said, and ran gleefully, still in her knickers, into her bedroom.

  * * *

  In late April Eddie and Adele returned to Palisades Park to prepare their new stand for the May 14 opening. It was in an excellent location directly opposite the pool, where the enticing aroma of French fries would waft across to hungry bathers—as they had to Eddie on that long-ago day at the park. Since the stand had once been a roast beef joint, there was already a gas stove in the back; all Eddie needed to do was to test the gas, check out the electrical connections, and hook up the large cooking vats which would soon be filled with bubbling corn oil. Then he and Adele set about scrubbing the grease off the stove, mopping the floors, cleaning and repainting the walls, and constructing a new sign for the marquee that read:

  10¢ Saratoga 10¢

  French Fries

  No one seemed to know why they were called “Saratoga” fries, but far be it for Eddie and Adele to mess with a good thing.

  Adele always enjoyed these first few weeks before the opening, when she could renew old friendships and meet new neighbors—among which, it turned out, there was at least one familiar face.

  She was returning from the ladies’ room when she passed a new concession going up—a cigarette wheel. Similar in principle to ones used in roulette except hung vertically on a side wall, the wheel was already in place and someone was painting numbers and letters on the “layout,” the betting counter. But the shelves that should have been on their way to being filled with prizes—in this case, cartons of cigarettes—were still bare. Out in front of the stand was a tall young woman—at least five foot eight and wearing heels, no less—with her blonde hair pulled back in a chignon. She was holding a carton of cigarettes from one of the many boxes around her, a steely tone in her voice—a familiar voice, that caught Adele’s attention at once:

  “Barking Dog Cigarettes?” the woman was saying to a sullen-looking fellow with a mustache, at least five years her senior. “Are you kidding me? Who smokes these things, cocker spaniels?”

  “Lotsa people smoke ’em,” the man protested.

  Rummaging through another box, she read off the labels, “Smiles—Bright Star—Sensation—these are all discount brands! Is that it, you got some kind of deal on these cheap brands?”

  “Ten-centers sell like hotcakes,” the man said. “You got some Paul Jones in there too, that’s a popular brand—”

  “People buy discount brands because they can’t afford the fifteen-centers. They don’t want to win them as prizes at an amusement park.” The woman dismissively dropped the cartons into the box. “Return ’em. All of them. If you can’t return them, put one or two on the shelves as filler, but get me Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Old Golds—something that people want to smoke, not what they can afford to smoke.”

  She turned brusquely; the man grudgingly began picking up the cartons of rejected cigarettes. Now Adele put the face and voice together:

  “Minette?” she said. “Minette Dobson?”

  “Yes?” The woman turned. Even with her hair pulled back and only the barest amount of makeup adorning her face, she was absolutely beautiful, with high cheekbones and cupid’s-bow lips. She eyed Adele with a flicker of recognition: “I know you. Where do I know you from?”

  “Cumbermeade Road. I’m Adele Worth—well I was, now I’m Adele Stopka—Frank Worth’s daughter?”

  Minette smiled radiantly, seeming genuinely pleased to see her. “Oh my gosh—the movie star down the block!”

  Adele laughed. “You were a much bigger star on that block. Even if you were hardly ever there.”

  “Are you kidding? I saw one of your old pictures in a movie house in Wichita, Kansas, when my dad and I were playing the Orpheum circuit. Oh, I was so envious—I wished I was back home in Fort Lee, making pictures, instead of dancing my fanny off in Wichita. It’s been years, how have you been? Are you working at Palisades too?”

  Adele nodded. “My husband and I have a French fry stand across from the pool. Is this your wheel?”

  “I’m managing it for a friend,” Minette said. “This is my first season.”

  “You must’ve got in just under the wire, the Rosenthals locked up half the concessions.”

  “They made room for my boss, he’s a hotshot businessman around here. Your stand’s by the pool? My little sister is applying for a job there as a locker girl, I was about to go over to see her … you want to walk with me?”

  “Sure.”

  The two women struck up the midway together. “I really did envy you,” Minette said frankly. “When I wasn’t on the road with the Thirteen Sirens, my parents sent me to convent school in Massachusetts. I don’t regret either one, but once in a while I did wish that I lived in one place, in a normal house, living a normal life.”

  Oh, sister, if you only knew. Adele kept the thought to herself. “Have you been in vaudeville with your dad all this time?”

  “Oh no, I went out on my own a few years back. Started out as a cigarette girl, then a showgirl in a New York nightclub. After that I was a stand-up vocalist with a dance band—we toured all over the country.”

  “Wow,” Adele said softly. “And you’re, what, about twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Minette was four years younger than Adele, yet had already done things Adele could only daydream about. She forced a smile. “So, you’re finally back home in Fort Lee. You got your wish.”

  “Well, there’s a fella I’m seeing who lives here, and I thought, why not stick close to home for a while? See how it goes. And I’ve never worked an amusement park before, it sounded like fun. You like working at Palisades?”

  “It’s all right,” Adele said, though a minute ago she would have responded more enthusiastically.

  Adele introduced Minette to Eddie, then they walked the short distance across the midway to the pool, presently being repainted in preparation for its opening on Decoration Day. After a few minutes Minette’s sister, Georgiana Frances—Frannie—appeared with a big grin on her face. “Sis!” she called out excitedly, hurrying toward them.

  “I got the job!” Frannie announced. “It’s all pretty simple. I keep the ladies’ locker rooms tidy, I hand them towels and bathing suits when they need them, take the used ones to the laundry…”

  At sixteen years old, Frances was Minette’s opposite in many ways: petite and dark-haired where Minette was tall and blonde, polite and sweetly timid where Minette was blunt and no-nonsense. But in one way they were similar: they were both absolutely gorgeous with apparently a minimum of effort, which depressed Adele more than she could say.

  “Congratulations, hon,” Minette said, giving her a hug. “You’ll be the best locker girl Palisades has ever seen. Frannie, you remember Adele, Frank Worth’s daughter—they lived on Cumbermeade too?”

  “Oh, sure,” Frannie said, “your dad directed movies. Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you too, Frannie.”

  “I’ll take you home, sis,” Minette offered. “Adele—see you on the midway. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Sure,” Adele called after, more than a bit wistfully. “See you.”

  * * *

  Once their concession stand was clean and shiny enough to pass muster with the Rosenthals, Eddie and Adele turned their attention to their product. Following instructions given them by their predecessor, they used an automatic peeler to peel enough potatoes for a test batch, then a stainless steel cutter that cut one or two potatoes at a time into large size pieces (so they retained more moisture). The cut fries were then stored in large containers filled with water and five o
unces of Heinz malt vinegar. Eddie filled the cooking vats with Mazola corn oil, heated one to medium temperature and one to high, and lowered a basket of fries into the medium-hot oil for two minutes—“blanching” them, cooking them most of the way through. After draining, the fries were immersed in the high-temperature vat—“flash-frying” them for a minute and ten seconds until they turned golden brown. Eddie sprinkled them with salt, scooped them into one of the white paper cones, and topped them off with malt vinegar.

  His first bite took him back to 1922. But he felt even more transported on opening day, when the smell of the fries mingled with the smell of waffles and the nearby Carousel fired up its lilting calliope music. Crowds began making their way up the midways, the air filled with ballies from concessionaires—and two of the best were located near the Stopkas. Curly Clifford—Italian, handsome, black wavy hair—was a magnet for the ladies, who flocked to his canary stand as he strummed his ukulele and sang:

  Canary Isle where birds are singing

  A little while, and I’ll be bringing

  A song of love, to my lady fair (music will fill the air)

  You’ll hear my song, I’ll see your smile

  Then I’ll belong in Canary Isle …

  Few were the women visitors who, having heard this sung as if only to them, could resist spinning the wheel to win one of Curly’s warblers.

  His fiercest competition came from the stand next door: Helen’s Radio Shop, run by longtime concessionaire Helen Cuny—as always dressed impeccably, with only a slight accent betraying her Viennese origins. With an amused glance at Curly she addressed the tip:

  “Oh, ladies, don’t listen to this one’s promises of a fairyland romance! He’s a charmer, but how many charming men have you met that you can trust? Fill your own air with music with one of these fine, dependable radios by Emerson—yes, that’s right, Emerson—available here exclusively at Helen’s Radio Shop! Step up, take a chance, win a brand-new radio!”