Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

“Bullshit!” he yelled.

  “Talk’s cheap, Stopka!”

  “I’ll show you!” Eddie said heatedly. “C’mon! I’ll show you!”

  He pushed Sal through the door of the bus and onto the carnival midway of Hotel Street.

  * * *

  Eddie woke with a headache the size of the island of Tortuga and a lancing pain in his right arm when he propped himself up on his bunk. He looked around him at the naval barracks, without the slightest memory of having come back here—with no memory, for that matter, of anything after he had grabbed Sal and shoved him off of the bus and onto …

  Oh, shit.

  His heart pounded, which only seemed to make his headache worse. He sat up on his bunk, panicky, and called out, “Sal! Ernie!”

  Four bunks away, Sal groaned in response. Eddie propelled himself off the bunk and to Sal’s side.

  “Sal! Jesus! Wake up,” he implored. When Sal didn’t respond, Eddie slapped him once across the cheek. “Will you for Chrissakes wake up?”

  Sal’s eyes fluttered open. “What? Can’t you just let me die?”

  “Sal, what the hell did I do? After we left the bus, what did I do?”

  “You threw up,” Sal said. “We all did. Seemed like the thing to do.”

  “Is that all? Then what?”

  “Then you showed us,” Sal said, and lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  Eddie shook him. “What? What did I show you?”

  Sal made no response, but from the other end of the barracks came another voice:

  “Jesus Christ, Stopka, stop shouting,” Ernie said, wincing.

  “Ernie, what the fuck happened?” Eddie demanded.

  “You showed us,” Ernie said, sighing, “how much you love your wife, okay? So shut the fuck up!”

  And with that, he flopped back onto his bunk with a loud groan.

  The lancing pain in Eddie’s arm awoke a dim memory—a sound of buzzing, like a swarm of insects—and he slowly rolled up the sleeve of his undershirt, all the way up to the shoulder.

  On his right bicep was the still-raw tattoo of a red Valentine’s heart, and inside it, a single word: ADELE.

  9

  Edgewater, New Jersey, 1942–43

  ADELE CRIED FOR TWO DAYS after Eddie left, though never again in front of the children. Resolutely dry-eyed, she woke them each morning, scrambled their eggs and fried their Spam (bacon being a casualty of wartime shortages), bundled them in the mummy wrappings of their winter clothes, and sent them shambling stiffly down Undercliff Avenue to school. Only then did she allow herself to sink into Eddie’s easy chair and dissolve into tears. At night she curled up with her head on Eddie’s pillow, still holding the pungent scent of his aftershave lotion; when she closed her eyes she could pretend he was still here, sleeping beside her. Then she would wake, alone, in the middle of the night, and weep tears of anger that he could leave her—alongside tears of fear that he might never return.

  She thought she was doing it quietly enough that the children couldn’t hear, but Toni, on the other side of the thin plaster wall, heard every sob. Toni was grieving too, though more for the loss of her father’s everyday presence than concern that he might not come back. At eleven years old she knew what death was, but simply couldn’t conceive of it happening to her father. He was like one of the tall, sturdy oak trees in her backyard, impervious to the storms and stresses of the world, and she assumed he would be there, roots firmly planted in her life, forever.

  After the second day Adele regained some of her moxie, telling herself this was just the way things were and she would have to live with it as best she could. Many of the women she worked with in the Red Cross also had husbands in the service, and there was comfort in their shared loneliness. Driving up River Road to the Red Cross office, she passed house after house in whose windows hung a white ribbon bordered in red, with a blue five-pointed star—sometimes more than one—signifying a family member who was in the service. Occasionally one of the blue stars would be transmuted, by tragic alchemy, into a gold one, representing a man’s life lost in service of his country. Adele flinched at these, and when she received her own blue-star ribbon she dutifully hung it in the front window, but far enough from the driveway that she couldn’t see it when she left the house.

  Being a housewife at war posed its own special challenges. Between what they had saved from Palisades, Eddie’s Navy pay, and the military’s dependents allowance, Adele had more than enough money to feed a family of three; but money was no longer all that was required to put food in her children’s mouths. Each time she went to the market, she had to bring along her government-issued ration book with its perforated sheets of red and blue stamps, each one assigned a point value. So in addition to paying forty-nine cents for a pound of pork chops, she also had to give the grocer seven points in Red Stamps. Canned spinach cost only ten cents a can, but required seventeen points in Blue Stamps. Butter set you back twenty points; cookies, which Adele found hard to believe were vital to the war effort, were even more pricey at twenty-two points. Each household member was assigned forty-eight points per ration period; Adele had to plan meals weeks in advance in order to purchase everything she needed.

  Supplementing their food budget was the Victory Garden that Toni and Jack planted in their backyard on the slopes of the Palisades, from which the family harvested a robust crop of carrots, celery, onions, and tomatoes, which Adele’s mother showed her how to can for winter.

  That first Christmas without Eddie wasn’t an easy one, but Adele made sure Santa delivered everything on the kids’ Christmas list—Jack got the watercolor paint set he craved, and Toni a Charlie McCarthy puppet. A holiday dinner at Marie and Franklin’s made them feel more like an intact family: along with Adele’s brothers, James and Ralph (who, as fathers, had so far avoided the draft), and their families, the Stopkas exchanged presents, sang carols, and gorged themselves on roasted turkey with all the trimmings, one of the few occasions they, like most Americans, were able to indulge themselves in these austere war years.

  Her father was in good spirits, even managing to abstain from spirits for most of the day, but Adele noted with disquiet that his complexion was gray, he seemed easily fatigued and short of breath, and he had a bad cough. But he found enough voice to raise a glass of apple cider and toast, “Here’s to our brave boys overseas … and one boy in particular,” with a wink to Adele.

  “Is Dad okay?” Adele asked her mother when they had a moment alone together, cleaning the dishes after dinner. “He doesn’t look good.”

  “He’s had that cough for a while,” Marie admitted, “but whenever I ask him how he’s feeling he just says, ‘I’m fine.’”

  “How much of the sauce is he putting away these days?”

  “I don’t like to think about that,” Marie said, ill at ease. “There’s nothing to be done about it anyway.”

  “Well, keep an eye on that cough, at least,” Adele cautioned.

  Even so, it came as a surprise when, a week later, Adele’s mother called to tell her, in a strained tone obvious even over the telephone, that their family physician had checked Franklin into Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck. “That cough of his got worse,” Marie explained, “and then he coughed up something pinkish brown, and I made him go to the doctor. They’re running tests now, can you come over?”

  Adele thought of cancer all the way there, an unexpected fear since she had worried for years about her father coming down with cirrhosis of the liver and had been alert to the telltale signs of it, girding herself against the day she noted a jaundiced cast to his skin. But instead she saw, as Franklin lay abed, that his legs and ankles were swollen and his neck appeared bloated in way she hadn’t noticed when he was wearing a shirt collar. He looked tired and weak, but smiled when she entered the room. “Ah,” he said, “everything will be all right now that my little star is here.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and forced some cheer into her voice. “That’s right. Everything’s going t
o be fine, Daddy.”

  Dr. Thomas DeCecio, a personable young internist in his early thirties, soon arrived with the test results and informed them soberly that Franklin was suffering from congestive heart failure.

  “There’s been considerable enlargement of the heart,” he told them, adding pointedly, “due to excessive alcohol consumption. It’s like a sponge oversaturated with water—the heart’s been so weakened it’s lost much of its pumping capacity. The blood is literally backing up into other organs, like the lungs, which is why we found traces of it in your sputum.”

  “Oh my Lord,” Marie said, and began to weep.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Franklin said, “don’t cry.”

  Adele held her mother as the doctor went on, “The good news is, the damage is to some degree reversible. I can prescribe a diuretic to reduce fluid retention, and digitalis to regulate the heartbeat. But as I’ve been telling you for years, Franklin—you must stop drinking. If you don’t, you’ll die, sooner than later. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.” Franklin’s voice trembled with palpable fear, striking a resonant chord of fear in Adele. “Abundantly.”

  “Good. Now, nobody’s saying this will be easy. If you need help, there’s this new organization, Alcoholics Anonymous, and I understand that Yale University is planning an outpatient program to treat alcoholism…”

  “I don’t need any help,” Franklin insisted. “I’ll lick this on my own.”

  That night, back home, Franklin went to bed without having had a single drink all day—for the first time in twenty years. Only hours before, Adele and Marie had searched every cabinet, cupboard, and closet for any bottles or flasks Franklin might have burrowed away. It took two hours to detoxify the house from basement to attic and pour all the booze down the drain—enough, Adele joked, “to sterilize the sewers for at least a day.”

  Franklin soon found himself running a torturous gauntlet of insomnia, tremors, sweats, chills, and deliriums. Marie was at his side and Adele visited whenever she could get away from the children, from whom all this was being carefully hidden. Finally, after ten long days, Franklin bottomed out and fell into a deep sleep, from which he did not stir for nearly twenty-four hours. When he at last opened his eyes it seemed to Adele as if he were truly awake, and alive, in a way she hadn’t seen since she had watched him on the set of the last film he had directed, back in 1917. He had been drowsing, like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, for twenty-six years.

  * * *

  Letters from Eddie to Adele, Toni, and Jack arrived at least once a week, and Adele made the reading of them an event to keep his voice alive in the household. In February, word came that another member of the Palisades Park family—Jackie Morris, son of Charles “Doc” Morris—had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Toni and Jack were properly awed that they knew a genuine, real-life war hero, and were certain that their dad would distinguish himself in the same way.

  As the park’s opening day in April approached, Adele had to face the fact that she couldn’t operate the concession by herself and reluctantly began looking for someone to help out. She asked for recommendations from friends and also placed an ad in the classified pages of The Billboard:

  WANTED—Concession Agent and Cook, French Fry Stand. Experience Preferred. Salary plus Percentage. Contact A. Stopka, Palisades Amusement Park, NJ. Cliffside 6-1341.

  The ad brought a dozen applicants, three of whom Adele invited to interview. They were all men, and all seemed startled upon learning that “A. Stopka” was a woman, but she bulldozed past their surprise and briskly inquired about their background and experience, even as she tried to draw some measure of their character. One was a grizzled old carny whose breath smelled of bourbon at ten A.M., which immediately eliminated him from consideration. The second was a middle-aged agent who had managed a pretzel concession at Rye Playland and who seemed to start every sentence with, “Listen, honey,” which Adele decided might become quickly tiresome. The third was an experienced talker in his late thirties who had a slick bally and who seemed neither condescending nor crooked, though there was no way to be sure of the latter. His name was Jim Lubbock.

  “And why did you leave your last job, Mr. Lubbock?” she asked.

  “I came down with a bad case of hoof in mouth disease,” he replied.

  “Hoof in mouth?”

  “I found out our meat supplier was stuffing ground horse meat into the hot-dog casings. The owner told me to keep my mouth shut. That night a lady asks me, ‘Are these really Twelve-Inch Footlong Hot Dogs?’ and I answer, ‘Absolutely. That was the distance between the fetlock and the knee.’”

  Adele laughed and hired him on the spot.

  * * *

  In the first warm weeks of spring, a number of local kids, taking advantage of the fact that Palisades didn’t open until the end of April, commandeered its parking lot and converted it to a softball lot, even as the concessionaires did on rainy days. After school two teams of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders squared off on the asphalt, bases marked in chalk, for the championship of nothing in particular. The teams had a rotating lineup but Toni was always among them: at twelve years old she already stood five feet four and had inherited her father’s batting prowess—she often sent the softball soaring off the edge of the Palisades, to fall like a canvas-covered meteor in somebody’s backyard in Edgewater. She was also a pretty good outfielder, adept at catching pop flies.

  Eleven-year-old Jack was on the same team, but his commitment to the game was questionable. Early on he had the bad luck to be sitting in the makeshift dugout just as a batter, connecting solidly with the pitch, tossed his bat aside and made for first base. The errant bat went flying into the dugout, where it connected with Jack’s forehead, sending him toppling backward and, ultimately, into the Holy Name medical clinic in Cliffside Park. Jack suffered no concussion nor any ill effects other than a lump on his head, but it didn’t exactly instill a love of the game in him.

  Today he was playing third base when the batter on the other team hit a line drive toward right field. The ball bounced once, Toni snapped it up, and with a runner heading into third, she threw the ball to Jack.

  Jack, however, seemed oblivious, the ball whizzing like a mortar round over his right shoulder, and the runner made it easily to third.

  The team captain, a towheaded, pug-nosed twelve-year-old named Slim, stalked over. “Christ on a crutch, Stopka! How’d you miss that?”

  “Oh,” Jack said innocently, “sorry. I was thinking about a comic book I read yesterday.”

  Slim slapped the heel of his hand into his forehead.

  “That’s it!” he yelled. “I’ve had it. You’re off the team, Stopka—go home and read your comic books!”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Toni came running up. “You can’t kick my brother off the team!”

  “He’s lucky I don’t kick him into the Hudson River!”

  “Yeah? Well, if he’s off the team,” Toni told him, “then I’m off it too.”

  “What? Don’t be nutty! You’re our best batter.”

  “Is my brother on the team?”

  “No!” Slim insisted.

  “C’mon, Jack,” Toni told Jack. “Let’s go.”

  As Toni walked indignantly away from the playing field, Jack said to her, “Sis, you didn’t have to do that.”

  “’Course I did. You’re my brother.”

  “Yeah, but he’s right,” Jack admitted. “I am a rotten softball player.”

  “So what?” Toni said. “Are we playing for the National League pennant? Is it going to kill him to let you play?”

  “Sis, it’s no big deal. I don’t even like the game all that much. I just like playing it with you.”

  Toni smiled and told her little brother, “Yeah, I like playing it with you too. But on our next team, let me cover third base, okay?”

  * * *

  Palisades opened on April 24 with a big War Bond rally headlined by “Uncle Don�
�� Carney, an aerialist called The Sensational Marion, and a bevy of beautiful magazine cover girls from the Walter Thornton Modeling Agency. The bond drive exceeded all expectations with $82,000 in bonds sold. A new ride, MacArthur’s Bombers—named after General Douglas MacArthur’s air defense corps in the South Pacific—was proving popular, and even Jackie Bloom’s ball game got a wartime renovation, with Jackie replacing old targets with new ones that he’d watercolored himself, featuring the likenesses of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini.

  Business was brisk and Adele and the new man, Jim, were kept busy cooking and serving Saratoga fries for the crowds. On weekends, before the end of the school year, Adele had Toni help out with the stand—peeling potatoes, wiping the counter, making change for customers—which pleased Toni and made her feel very grown-up, like she was pulling her weight in Dad’s absence. When school let out and the pool opened, she worked half a day at the stand and the rest she practiced swimming and diving with Bunty.

  Bunty had finally okayed her to ascend to the ten-foot diving board: “Keep your head in line with your spine, remember to arch your back, keep your legs closely aligned and your toes pointed.”

  After a little work on her “approach,” she was soon taking running jumps off the board, her momentum and the spring in the board launching her a good three feet up in the air. It was this moment, at the pinnacle of her flight, that thrilled Toni the most: for those few seconds of ascendancy and that split second before she began her downward plunge, she felt as though she were defying gravity, like a bird or a plane or—she could only admit this to one person—a strange visitor from another planet, with abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women). In that moment of midair suspension, she felt free of the bonds of earth, capable of doing anything, going anywhere. And when her arched body, arms outstretched, began its descent to the water, she sometimes fantasized that she was on her way to rescue someone trapped in a raging river (no need to change the course of it with her bare hands, just pluck the poor devil out and fly him away) or diving into the ocean to foil some dastardly plan of Luthor’s.