Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  They were saying: WHERE WERE YOU?

  * * *

  With their mother working the day shift at Ford, Toni and Jack were left to their own devices—reading comic books, scaling the cliffs, roaming Edgewater on their bicycles, and longing for Palisades Park, especially the pool. One morning, as Jack was occupied elsewhere—swapping issues of Blue Beetle and All-Winners Comics with friends before they were given up to the paper drive—Toni biked up River Road, then turned right onto Henry Hudson Drive, which forked north toward the George Washington Bridge. She was looking up at the curved, yellow-and-blue facade of the famous Riviera nightclub—jutting like a ship’s prow beached atop the summit of the Palisades, though closed for the duration of the war—when she noticed a familiar figure making his way down through the bramble of the cliff’s slope, carrying a rucksack and holding a walking stick.

  “Bunty!” Toni yelled joyously.

  She pedaled furiously to meet her friend as he reached the road and waved to her. “Hey, toots, what’re you up to?”

  She braked and jumped off the bike. “Not much. Summer’s pretty dull without the park.” She could see now that the walking stick he was holding had what looked like a can opener taped to its side. “What’s that for?”

  “My shillelagh? I carry it in case I run into any copperheads as I come down the cliffs. I use it to chase ’em away. And this,” he said of the can opener, “comes in handy for tapping the occasional can of ale.”

  He crossed the road to an old boat dock on this pebbled river frontage beneath the G.W. Bridge tower. “You been to Hazard’s before?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” She abandoned her bike on the side of the road and followed him toward shore.

  “Hazard’s Beach. I was a lifeguard here for six summers in the twenties—this was all white sand back then, though we had to have it shipped in by barge. It was a popular place—there was a ferry that came over from 157th Street and New Yorkers just swarmed over here. Three boats daily, five on Sunday, when there must’ve been five thousand people on this beach. They’d give the lifeguards box lunches and whenever we pulled somebody in trouble out of the water, we’d get a quarter tip. Man, those were the days.

  “Up there”—he pointed north—“was Bloomers Beach, where I got my first lifeguard job when I was eighteen. Worked there three years. Today it’s an oil slick. There was a dance pavilion here too—lots of dancing, laughing, cold beer, wonderful music, and beautiful girls.” He smiled at old ghosts, adding quietly, “But the bridge put the ferry out of business, and eventually, all the beaches too.”

  At water’s edge he took off his T-shirt with its tiny crucifix pinned on, kicked off his shoes, and shucked off his pants, revealing his red bathing trunks.

  “You really swim here every day?” Toni asked.

  “Weather permitting, yeah. I’ve been swimming in the Hudson since my brothers threw me in when I was five.” He laughed. “Swam across it for the first time when I was twelve. This river is my life—I was born within sight of it, grew up along its banks, worked here when I was young. And I still do, kind of, since this is where the Palisades pool’s water comes from.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of coming here?”

  “Hell no. Who could get tired of this?” He gazed fondly into the distance. “See how calm it is now? In an hour, it could kick up and the big waves’ll roll in. Unpredictable—I like that. I follow the river. The river never has plans either. It’s cold one day, hot the next.

  “See, the Hudson’s a tidal river—the tide rolls in from the sea, pushing all the way up to Albany. Before it even gets there we get an ebb tide here, going in the opposite direction. The Indians called it Mahicantuck—‘the river that flows both ways.’” He pointed to the mile-wide gulf between bridge towers. “See how it narrows here? As the waters squeeze through, the currents run faster. You gotta be damn careful.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Toni said wistfully.

  Bunty put on his little red diving cap. “So give it a try sometime. Not on your own, mind you—I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve had to pull out of these waters before they drowned. But I can show you the ropes, how to swim in the river and stay safe.”

  Suddenly Toni wanted to do nothing else. “Okay!” she said brightly. “How about tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be here. Same time.” He gave her a two-fingered salute, then dove off the dock and into the Hudson, his powerful breaststroke and kicks propelling him through the water like a motorboat.

  Toni jumped on her bike and excitedly pedaled home. She couldn’t wait to come back the following morning.

  The next day she brought Jack along too, and Bunty instructed them in river swimming, considerably different from swimming either in the Palisades pool or in the ocean. Bunty had them gargle with the water, as always, to determine buoyancy. Toni blanched a little at this—the water wasn’t nearly as clean as it became when it reached the pool. He had them stick close to shore at first: “These currents can run as fast as two and a half knots—three miles an hour. That may not sound like much, but take it from me, it is.” When they came up against a swift current, he showed them how to use eddies—currents that formed in the lee of outcroppings of rock, and which flowed in the opposite direction from the main current—to their advantage.

  Toni was surprised how choppy the water could be—the result of heavy water traffic in the Hudson—and how navigating in the chop was like swimming inside a washing machine. She spent most of her time just trying to keep her head above water to take in enough air before the next wave buffeted her. It was nothing like swimming in the pool with its tame artificial waves—this was real. But that made it even more exciting.

  Over the next few weeks, more of Toni and Jack’s friends from Edgewater and Fort Lee joined Bunty on his morning swim, the river taking the place of their beloved pool in this summer without Palisades. He was happy to instruct them all in swimming—though never admitting that any of them ever really knew how to swim—and afterward they would sit on Hazard’s Beach as Bunty shared slices of liverwurst on Saltine crackers (and occasionally a sip from his can of Ballantine Ale) and he would read the comics section of the newspaper aloud to them. He would tell stories about the river, or show them how to catch blue claw crabs, or sometimes Toni and her friends would assist him as he scanned his daily racing form:

  “Okay,” he’d say, “in tomorrow’s fourth race at Monmouth we’ve got Frisky Filly, Six of One, Dreamboat, Full Moon, Champion…”

  “I like Dreamboat,” Toni said.

  “Aw, that’s sappy,” Dave objected. “Champion’s a winner!”

  “I think there’s a full moon tonight,” Jack said.

  “That’s a good omen! Full Moon, it is,” Bunty decided.

  The horse placed, and the next day Bunty bought lunch all around.

  After a few weeks of swimming and watching Bunty cross over one day to the little red lighthouse at Jeffrey’s Hook and back, Toni decided she wanted to try to cross the Hudson, too. “If that’s what you want,” Bunty said, pleased, “I’ll coach you like I did Millie Corson.” They spent a week working on her stroke, her kicks, her breathing, building up her stamina for the mile-wide crossing. The plan was to swim across to Jeffrey’s Light, then swim back, but if the tides were against her she would climb up the New York side and walk back across the George Washington Bridge.

  When Bunty decided she was ready, he dove into the water and shadowed her as she headed for open water. At first she cleaved the water like a fish, until Bunty called out a caution: “Don’t use up all your energy at the start! Pace yourself.” But her enthusiasm got the better of her and she slowed down only a little. By the time she was a quarter way across she began to tire and now slowed down out of necessity. Then a ferry crossing the river fifty yards south of them kicked up some heavy chop, the waves slapping her sideways, obscuring her sight of land. She fought back a surge of panic by reminding herself that Bunty was right beside her, but the fear ha
d taken root. As she fought the waves, trying to move forward, she thought of Anne Ringens lying at the bottom of the water tank, and suddenly it seemed that much harder to swim. She gritted her teeth and kept going, but the currents were starting to pull her northward. “Keep on course!” Bunty called, but it took more of Toni’s strength to do it.

  Finally, only halfway across, Toni came to a dead, weary stop. Treading water, she called, “Bunty!”

  He was alongside her in a moment. “Yeah? You okay?”

  “I—I can’t do it,” she told him.

  “Sure you can. Don’t panic.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You’re halfway there, kiddo. You gotta swim the same distance to get home. But if you keep going, you can say you swam across the Hudson.”

  “I can’t do it!” she yelled, pivoting in the water and starting back.

  Bunty heard the fear in her voice, said, “Okay, then, let’s go back,” and turned in the water to follow her.

  She made it back safely, but was ashamed as she touched the coarse pebbles of Hazard’s Beach. She quickly threw her clothes on over her wet swimsuit and she and Jack headed back to Edgewater.

  “You okay, Sis?” he asked as they biked home side by side.

  “Yeah, sure I am,” she said, but knew she wasn’t.

  This would be the end of river swimming for her that summer.

  A few days later, she faced another arduous task: the annual shopping trip for school clothes at Schweitzer’s Department Store in Fort Lee. This would be Toni’s first year of high school, but since there wasn’t one in Edgewater, she would be bussed up the hill to Cliffside Park High School. Toni would have to abandon her summer wardrobe of blue jeans or shorts and revert to dresses for the school year. Adele enthusiastically pointed out some lovely floral prints by Carole King, a darling ruffled blouse from Joan Kenley, and a smart Vicky Vaughn peplum dress; but as usual Toni resisted any kind of frilly petticoats, pinafores, or embroidered eyelets in favor of simple (and to Adele’s mind, simply boring) Tattersall checked dresses.

  “Why can’t I wear these?” Toni asked, pointing out a “playsuit”—a pair of cotton slacks and a blouse that looked like a man’s striped shirt.

  Adele was appalled. “It’s one thing to wear overalls and jeans when you’re scrambling up those cliffs, but you can’t wear pants to school.”

  “You wear pants when you go to work,” Toni pointed out.

  “You go to work on an assembly line like me, I’ll buy you slacks. You go to school, you’re wearing dresses.”

  Toni acquiesced, but her mother’s torture did not end when they got home from the store. Toni was told to sit down at her mother’s makeup table, something she had never done nor ever wanted to do.

  “Now that you’re entering high school,” Adele said, picking up a small brush, “you’re going to need to know how to apply makeup.”

  “Why would I want to know that?”

  “Because all the other girls are going to be wearing it and you’ll stand out like a sore thumb if you don’t.” She opened a tin of face powder and lightly touched the brush to its surface. “Now this doesn’t quite match your skin tone but we’ll get you one that does…”

  She brushed the powder onto Toni’s face as meticulously as a painter laying down strokes on a canvas, then evened it up with a sponge. Toni crinkled her nose. “It smells like perfume.”

  “Yes, isn’t that nice? Now, after you’ve applied an even base of powder, you apply a little blush on the cheekbones…”

  She applied a light swath of blush to Toni’s cheeks.

  “It’s pink,” Toni said in alarm.

  “It just puts a rosy glow in your cheeks.”

  “Take it off!”

  “Stop being a baby. We’re almost done. You’re too young for mascara and eye shadow anyway. Now this is the most important part: your lips.” Adele picked up a tube of lipstick, unsheathing a crimson fingertip which she liberally applied to Toni’s lips.

  “Is it supposed to be so red?” Toni asked.

  “Yes, that’s the style. Stop talking, I can’t apply it with you jabbering.”

  Within a minute Toni’s mouth, which had hardly even commanded her own attention before, now shouted back at her from the mirror, shrill and scarlet as a circus clown’s mouth.

  “Jeez-us!” Toni gasped.

  “Watch your mouth, young lady.”

  “I can’t watch anything else!”

  “You look lovely.”

  “I look like Emmett Kelly!”

  Toni grabbed the nearest handkerchief and began furiously rubbing off the lip rouge as if it were blood from a wound.

  “Antoinette, for heaven’s sake,” Adele sighed, “you’re going to have to wear makeup someday!”

  “Give me one good reason,” Toni replied, going to work on the blush.

  “Well, for one thing, a girl who doesn’t care about her appearance isn’t going to attract much attention from boys.”

  “I know lots of boys and I don’t have to wear this stuff.”

  “You may be just one of the guys now, honey, but one day you’re going to start looking at them differently. Don’t you want to get married someday, like me?”

  “No!” Toni snapped. “I don’t want to be like you! Your life is boring!”

  Scraping off the last of the powder, Toni jumped to her feet and stomped out of the room. Adele looked after her, feeling—what did she feel? There was a time this would have infuriated and depressed her, might have made her collapse sobbing onto the bed, devastated that her daughter was rejecting everything Adele was, everything she loved.

  But not now. Now she had to admit: Toni was right. Her life was boring. Even she hated it—how could she expect her daughter to want to follow in her footsteps when Adele herself didn’t want to be in them?

  * * *

  Reconstruction of Palisades proceeded throughout the winter: the sinking of power lines underground was completed before a blast of icy weather blew in, and a new water main was installed with an eye toward future fires. Joe McKee designed a new coaster, the Cyclone, similar to the one the Rosenthals had built at Coney Island, as well as a novel dome-shaped building to house the new Philadelphia Tobaggan Company Carousel; surrounding it was a block of food and candy concessions, quickly dubbed Candyland and largely owned by Chief Borrell. All the old wooden buildings were replaced by brick, concrete, and other fireproof materials.

  The park was the last place Adele wanted to return to, but she and Eddie had a lease and she knew that one good summer could net more than her annual salary at the Ford plant. So as the park was resurrected out of its own ashes, Adele collected the insurance money, reluctantly ordered new cooking equipment and supplies, and tendered her resignation from Ford.

  On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died, just one month short of Germany’s surrender. All Bergen County schools and courthouses closed for a day out of respect. On May 8—V-E Day—two hundred thousand New Yorkers flocked to Times Square, which fully blazed with light for the first time since dim-out regulations went into effect.

  Four days later, Palisades Amusement Park just as triumphantly reopened with a gala party attended by invited members of the National Association of Showmen. Forty thousand patrons filled the park that day; no sooner had Adele and Goldie cooked one batch of fries when they had to start on another. As the cash register rang up a merry tune, Adele thought less and less of the inferno of last summer and more about her deliverance from slacks, snoods, and the assembly line. The stand could also be something of an assembly line, but at least she could wear a dress under her apron.

  On May 28 the Palisades pool opened for the season, a welcome reward at the end of Toni’s freshman year of high school. She grudgingly admitted to herself that her mother had been right, high school was different from grade school—bigger, for one thing, with students from three neighboring boroughs attending. The kids seemed to band together in little cliques—gym rats, eggheads, bobby
-soxers—none of which Toni comfortably fit into. She was also frustrated by the fact that outside of Phys Ed, there were few varsity sports for girls, and she chose gymnastics only because Bunty had once advised her it would prove useful in her diving.

  She still played sandlot baseball with the boys, but in Edgewater she had been on more of an equal footing—able to climb, swim, or play ball with the best of them. Now, as the boys entered puberty, getting bigger and stronger—eliciting new and disturbing feelings in Toni—she found herself no longer on an equal par. And she was too much of a tomboy to fit in with most of the girls. She felt confused, isolated, and missed the comforting presence of her brother, still in junior high in Edgewater.

  So she was relieved when classes ended and she once more became a full-time employee at Palisades, with her usual hour off for the pool.

  She hadn’t seen Bunty since her failure to cross the Hudson, but he quickly put her at ease: “People do things in their own time. You’ll tackle it again when you’re ready. I’ve got faith in you, kiddo.”

  Toni beamed. That faith was as warming to her as the summer sun.

  Jack worked his paper route and helped out some at the stand, but through a chance encounter at Woolworth’s five-and-dime he had acquired a new enthusiasm: magic. Standing in line behind a dapper man with a familiar voice, Jack found himself face-to-face with Joseph Dunninger, a Cliffside Park resident and professional magician and mentalist whose national radio program went out over NBC Blue. Dunninger was warm and friendly to the starstruck boy, and when Jack asked, “Can anybody learn to do what you do?” Dunninger smiled and said, “Absolutely. Why, a three-year-old could do it—with thirty years’ practice,” and winked a goodbye.

  The “three-year-old” part got Jack’s attention—the “thirty years” barely registered—and he immediately set out to learn everything he could about the magic business. He listened religiously to Dunninger’s Wednesday-night radio show and borrowed from the library a copy of Blackstone’s Secrets of Magic by the world-famous magician Harry Blackstone.