Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  Eddie’s grind was more simple: “Saratoga French fries, best in the world, only one thin dime!” His bally didn’t need to be complex—the mouth-watering smell of the fries traveling down the midway did most of the selling. Very quickly there were long lines at the stand and within an hour they had sold out of their first batch of fries, sending Adele to the kitchen, peeling and chopping as fast as she could. She and Eddie alternated working the kitchen and working the bally, but even when she was at the front counter she was working harder than she ever had before—she did the grind, scooped up a cone full of fries for the customer, rang up the sale and made change, with barely a moment to catch a breath before the next customer had to be served.

  At the end of the day the profits could almost make her forget all the hot, sweaty work that went into it. But as cool, rainy days at the start of the season grew hotter, so did the atmosphere inside the stand—the steam and the sizzling oil raising the temperature by a good ten to twenty degrees. On a day when the mercury outside topped ninety, in the back of the stand it climbed into triple digits and the oily steam made it feel like two hundred percent humidity. The first investment they made with their profits was the purchase of a large floor fan, which offered some relief.

  At the end of the day they each also smelled like a giant walking French fry, a fact that was regularly noted by their children.

  By this time Adele had gotten wise to the fact that her daughter was climbing like a monkey up the Palisades, and after yet another torn dress, Adele decided Antoinette needed some distraction. Ever since the “dinosaur hunt” at the Edgewater shoreline, she knew the children needed to learn how to swim—what better place to do it than in the Palisades pool? Marie would bring them to the park and watch over them, but Adele could keep half an eye on their progress from across the midway and visit them on her breaks.

  The pool opened an hour and a half earlier than the rest of the park, so one morning Adele went over in search of someone to give her children swimming lessons. A breeze off the river carried a salt spray from the waterfalls, the memory of which still brought a small smile to Adele’s face. She was looking for the manager, Phil Smith, but the first person she encountered was Fran Dobson, who was standing near the bathing pavilion where she worked, staring dreamily into the distance.

  Adele came up beside her and saw that Frannie was watching one of the lifeguards as he walked away from his station and toward a ten-foot-high diving board, one of several on that side of the pool. He was in his mid-twenties and heart-stoppingly handsome, with wavy dark-blond hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, muscular arms and legs; Frannie was eyeing him as if he were a Porterhouse steak. Before he started climbing the ladder he stripped off his white tank top emblazoned with the word LIFEGUARD, revealing an expansive chest that almost made Adele’s knees buckle.

  “Oh my Lord in Heaven,” she said softly.

  “Amen to that, sister,” Fran agreed.

  The lifeguard started climbing the ladder to the diving board.

  “Who is he?” Adele asked.

  Fran sighed. “Gus Lesnevich. He’s a prizefighter. From Cliffside.”

  “Well he nearly floored me,” Adele said.

  “You’re a married woman.”

  “I can dream, can’t I?”

  “Don’t waste your time,” Fran said airily. “I plan on marrying him someday.”

  Adele had to smile. “You may be a little young for him.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Yes, but can he?”

  Fran gave her a sweet-sour look and said, “Party pooper.”

  Gus Lesnevich, standing at the rear of the diving board, took several quick steps forward, sprang off the tip of the board, then executed a flawless backward somersault, cleaving the water like a knife.

  Fran said, “He’s not just a boxer, he’s a really good diver too.”

  Lesnevich’s gorgeous blond head broke the surface and Adele said, “I imagine he’s good at quite a lot of things.”

  “Zip your lip or I’m telling Eddie.”

  With a backward glance at the soaking-wet Lesnevich returning to his lifeguard station, Adele strolled over to the Casino Bar, where Phil Smith was chatting with Harry Shepherd, the bar manager. “Phil,” she said, “do any of your lifeguards give swimming lessons?”

  “Sure, they’re all certified by the Red Cross.”

  “Um, what about this Lesnevich guy?” Adele asked, feeling a twinge of guilt, but not so much that she didn’t ask.

  Phil just shook his head. “Naw, he’s too busy training. He’s got a fight coming up in two weeks. You want Bunty.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s a swim coach at the Hackensack Y. Trained some professional athletes, too.” Phil went to the bar entrance and pointed to another one of the bronzed lifeguards overseeing the pool like minor Greek deities.

  “That’s the man you want. Bunty Hill.”

  5

  HIS NAME MAY HAVE sounded like a battle in the Revolutionary War, but even compared to Gus Lesnevich, Bunty Hill was hardly chopped liver: six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and ruggedly handsome, with crystal blue eyes that crinkled in the corners when he laughed. In his mid-thirties, he confirmed that he was indeed a professional swim coach for the Hackensack YMCA as well as the Women’s Swimming Association of New York. He was happy to teach Adele’s children to swim, and wouldn’t brook any suggestion of payment: “Nah,” he said, “I do it for all the kids here. Bring ’em over tomorrow morning and I’ll have ’em swimming like guppies by afternoon.”

  He had a soft, soothing voice, carefully modulated from years of coaching swimmers indoors, where loud echoing voices could be a jarring distraction. Adele was tempted to ask for lessons herself, but her kids knew she could swim and would likely rat her out. Besides, she reminded herself, as good as Bunty looked in swimming trunks, Eddie looked even better.

  The next morning, Toni and Jack were only too happy to be taken to the Palisades pool for the day. With Adele working her stand across the midway and Marie settled comfortably beneath the shade of a beach umbrella, Bunty told the youngsters, “You midgets ready to learn to swim?”

  “Yeah!” Toni said.

  “Sure,” Jack agreed, following his established policy of concurring with anything his big sister said.

  Bunty waded in with them into the shallow end. “Okay, first thing I want you to do is to bend down, cup your hands like this, scoop up a big handful of water, then take a gulp and gargle. You know what gargling is?”

  Toni and Jack shook their heads.

  “You keep the water in your throat and kinda blow bubbles with it. Here, watch me.” Bunty sucked up some pool water, tipped his head back, and gargled with the salt water as if it were mouthwash—then spit it out over the side of the pool. “See? Easy as pissing in a jar. Your turn.”

  “Do we get to spit, too?” Jack asked eagerly.

  “You bet. Live it up.”

  Toni and Jack obligingly scooped up water, took in a mouthful, tipped their heads back, and did their best to gargle. But they quickly gagged at the highly saline water, swallowing half of it, coughing out the rest.

  “Ugh!” Jack cried out. “It’s salty.”

  “Yep,” Bunty said, “and that’s good. You know why? ’Cause the more salt there is in the water, the more buoyant a swimmer is—it makes you float better. Every time I go for a swim in the Hudson, I gargle a mouthful of it first, to see how buoyant the water is that day.”

  “You swim in the river?” Toni asked.

  “Every day. And on my birthday I swim across it—from Hazard’s Dock in Fort Lee to the little red lighthouse on the New York side.”

  “Wow,” Toni said. “All by yourself?”

  “Sure. So can you, someday. But first you’ve gotta learn how the human body floats in water, and how you won’t sink to the bottom, even if you’re afraid you will.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Toni told him.

  “Sweetie, I can tell you’re n
ot afraid of anything. I was thinking more about your brother here.”

  “I’m not afraid either,” Jack insisted.

  “Great, we’re all fearless fleagles. So let’s start with floating.” He had them curl up with their legs tucked to their chests—“Like a couple of cooked shrimp,” he said, which made them giggle—then slowly straighten out until they were floating on their backs, the water pillowing their heads. “Good, now take a breath. Relax. You can’t swim well if your muscles are all tensed up.” He had them raise their hands above their heads to raise their center of gravity. “Keep your hips up, that’s it—there ya go, you’re floating.”

  Toni and Jack were grinning as they bobbed on the surface like untethered balloons. “Don’t get cocky,” Bunty cautioned, “so far all you’re doing is a great imitation of a piece of driftwood. Kick your feet, just a little—it’s called a flutter kick. Keep your knees bent and give a little kick.” The kicks propelled them backward. Once they were comfortable moving through the water, he added a backstroke to the lesson: “One arm should always be in the water while the other is out. Elbows bent, one arm reaching down to your waist as the other comes up above your head—yeah, there you go, you got it.”

  When they had mastered a simple backstroke, Bunty had them flip over and moved on to the American crawl, or freestyle stroke. As with most kids learning to swim, their arms and legs were all over the place, and he had to show them how to keep their limbs extended in a straight but relaxed line from the rest of their bodies. Jack had a tendency to splay his fingers, and Bunty admonished, “That ain’t gonna get you far, kemosabe. If you want to get any traction on the water, you’ve got to keep your hands loosely cupped—otherwise you’re trying to row a boat without an oar.”

  After an hour of lessons they took a lemonade break at Bunty’s lifeguard station, where he kept a stack of newspapers he read on breaks, and sometimes a book from the Everyman’s Library. Bunty was a popular guy at the pool, especially among the ladies, with whom he flirted outrageously—and most of whom flirted right back.

  “Is Bunty your real name?” Toni asked him.

  “Nah, that’s just a nickname I picked up in school. I was a great bunter in softball, soon everybody stopped calling me John and started calling me Bunty.”

  “So your name is John Hill?” Jack said.

  “No, it’s Hubschman. Hill was my mother’s maiden name, I took it when I was doing a comic diving act with a friend named Dale. Hill and Dale, get it?” They stared blankly at that. “Besides, let’s face it—if your name was John Hubschman, wouldn’t you want to change it to Bunty Hill?”

  Toni nodded. “My real name is Antoinette, but I like Toni better.”

  “See, that’s the great thing about America,” Bunty said. “Everybody can be whoever they want to be. When I was sixteen and the Great War started in Europe, I wanted to join the Navy and fight. So I just told the enlistment officer I was eighteen. Said I’d lost my birth certificate.”

  “You fought in a war?” Jack said. “Was it fun?”

  Bunty shook his head. “No. And it’s not gonna be fun this time around, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothin’,” Bunty said quickly. “C’mon, no more goldbricking—let’s get back to work.”

  True to his word, Bunty had them swimming like goldfish by afternoon. Toni loved swimming—loved being weightless in the water, soaring like an airplane across a liquid sky, imagining her arms as propellers. She’d never thought of water as anything other than something you drank or bathed in, but now she began to realize—as much as you can at seven years old—that it had other properties. It was thicker than air but not as hard as earth. It could be gripped, in a way, and that thing Bunty called “traction” allowed you to travel across its surface like a train on a track. You could submerge yourself in it, but only, Bunty warned, as long as you held your breath. Stop holding your breath—start taking in water the way you took in air—and you drowned, you died. Bunty was very clear on that: he loved the water, he wanted them to love it too, but you had to follow certain rules or the water would exact a price. Toni wasn’t a hundred percent clear yet on exactly what dying meant, but she did understand that it would stop her from ever again scaling the cliffs or doing anything else she loved doing.

  Her mother visited the pool in the afternoon and watched proudly as Toni and Jack demonstrated their swimming prowess. Bunty was pleased with the progress they’d made, but he also warned them, “Now don’t go thinking you know all there is to know about swimming. I’ve been doing it for thirty years and I don’t know everything. Johnny Weissmuller, maybe he knows everything, but I’ve still got a thing or two to show you tadpoles.” This excited Toni because it meant she’d be coming back to the pool, and she realized suddenly that she wanted to come back more than anything.

  Just as thrilling was what happened shortly before they left. There were three diving boards projecting out over the side of the pool near the bathing pavilion: two were five feet high, the third twice that. Toni watched as Gus Lesnevich climbed up the ten-foot ladder to the tallest diving board, high above her head. Then he leaped into the air, diving like a seagull after its next meal, and plunged into the water. Dimly Toni remembered the silver-haired man, a long time ago, who had done this same thing—jumping off an even taller diving board into a much smaller pool. Up till now, she had thought that this was something only he could do—but here another man was doing it too. And if he could do it, she wondered … could anybody?

  * * *

  Toni quickly became a real waterbug, cajoling her grandmother into bringing her to the Palisades pool up to four times a week. “She’s taken to it so fast, you’d think she was born in that pool,” Marie said, puzzled by the stifled laughter this evoked from Eddie and Adele. They each took turns visiting their daughter as she swam, Eddie striking up friendships with both Lesnevich, with whom he talked endlessly about boxing, and Bunty—a huge baseball fan and one of the most well-read people at the park, even though, like Eddie, he had never graduated high school. Though Eddie wasn’t a big book reader, he also enjoyed his morning paper, and he and Bunty shared their worries over the crisis in Europe and Germany’s obvious designs on Czechoslovakia.

  Sometimes Irving Rosenthal would drop by the pool, and Toni and Jack, as coached by their parents, would greet him, “Hello, Mr. Rosenthal.”

  “Call me Uncle Irving,” he said warmly.

  “Are you really our uncle?” Jack asked.

  “No, but I’ll give you a dollar to call me Uncle.”

  Their eyes popped like silver dollars.

  “Hi, Uncle Irving!” they spoke in unison, and Rosenthal smiled and gave them each a dollar, which they stared at with astonished glee.

  “Uncle Irving Uncle Irving Uncle Irving!” Toni added breathlessly.

  “Nice try,” Rosenthal said, “but it only works once a day.”

  No matter—Toni and Jack had two dollars, they were rich.

  When they weren’t at the pool, Grandma Marie took them on rides—as on one Saturday when the park was hosting an event that would become a thirty-year annual tradition. As they had for the first time in 1937, the NYPD’s Police Anchor Club had transported thousands of orphaned and underprivileged children from New York, admitted free by the Rosenthals, who happily rode the coasters, ate hot dogs and cotton candy, and enjoyed the George Hamid Circus acts. Toni and Jack rode beside many of them on the Scenic Railway, laughed along with them in the Funhouse, and played games side by side in the Penny Arcade. But there was one thing about some of these children that puzzled Toni.

  “What’s the matter with your face?” she innocently asked a young boy in the arcade, whose face was a strange, dark brown.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with it,” he said. “I’m just colored.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Different people got different colored skin, that’s all.”

  Toni was fascinated. “Can I touch it?”
r />   “Sure.”

  Toni reached out and touched the skin of his arm. It felt just like her skin, warm and smooth. She was a little disappointed.

  But before she could say anything, her arm was suddenly yanked away by Marie, who spun her around, saying, “Don’t do that,” and pulled her away from the young boy and his dark skin. “Come along. You too, Jack.”

  When they were outside the arcade, her grandmother explained, “He’s not like us, Toni, and you shouldn’t go touching him or others like him. It’s better that people associate with their own kind, you understand?”

  Since they had all been having a good time together, Toni didn’t understand; but she didn’t let on, just nodded and said, “Okay.”

  That night, when she casually recounted this to her parents, her father sat up straight in his chair and said, “That’s just your grandmother’s opinion, honey. People are people, you have to treat them all the same.”

  “You mean … Grandma’s wrong?” Toni said, confused.

  Eddie glanced at Adele, who turned to Toni. “Grandma is … mistaken,” she told her. “Your father’s right. People are people.”

  This would make a lasting impression, not least of all because it was the first time Toni realized that adults could be wrong about something.

  * * *

  For someone who grew up in the worldly realm of show business, Minette Dobson could be surprisingly parochial: she attended Mass every morning, and one Friday when they were having lunch together at the Grandview Restaurant, Adele ordered roast beef and Minette gave her a little grief over it.

  “Eddie’s the one who takes the kids to Mass on Sundays,” Adele pointed out. “I’m Presbyterian.”

  “So? Would it kill you to have fish on Friday?”

  Minette would sit smoking some of the discount cigarettes she’d been stuck with and didn’t want to waste, as she recalled her experiences on the vaudeville circuit with her father. Her showbiz lineage extended to both sides of her family: her grandfather, Charles E. Dobson, was one of the all-time banjo greats of minstrelsy and he married Minnie Wallace of the singing Wallace Sisters, also headliners in vaudeville. Listening to Minette almost made Adele feel like she was still in show business and not just a hot, sweaty French fry vendor in an amusement park. But then she quickly told herself she was a damn fool and should thank God that she had a job—an increasingly lucrative one at that—in these hungry times.