Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  Eddie stared at it as if it were a venomous snake coiled an inch away.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Toni said.

  Numbly, Eddie picked up the envelope, tore it open, and took out a letter. Toni watched as his face seemed to show first relief, then shock.

  “What? What does it say?” she asked.

  “It says that … Jack is coming home,” he said flatly. Before Toni could react, he added softly, “On a medical discharge.”

  22

  EDDIE AND TONI WAITED as Jack’s train pulled into Newark’s Central Station, not knowing what to expect when its doors opened and Jack walked out. Would he even be able to walk? “Medical discharge” could mean anything, and in the week since Eddie received the Army’s cryptic letter he had feared the worst. Would he be crippled? Blind? Disfigured? In a wheelchair, on crutches, or missing an arm, a leg, an eye? The fact that they hadn’t received a letter from Jack himself only amplified his anxiety.

  “At least he’s still alive,” Toni said, reading her father’s face perfectly.

  The train braked to a halt and within minutes was disgorging passengers, largely civilian with a scattering of khaki-clad soldiers or white-uniformed naval personnel. Some of these did, in fact, wear visible badges of injury: an eye patch, crutches, a face half swathed in bandages, the absence of a limb. Eddie braced himself for the worst.

  “Look!” Toni cried, pointing. “There he is!”

  Emerging from a train door about fifty feet down the track was Jack, carrying a duffel bag and wearing his khaki-and-olive-drab Army uniform and garrison cap. From what Eddie could see, he still had two legs, two arms, two eyes, and walked with no perceptible limp.

  “Jack!” Toni called as she took off like a bullet toward him. “Jack!”

  He turned and looked in Toni’s direction, saw her, and seemed to smile. Eddie, following, thought it a thin smile at best—as thin as Jack himself appeared. Toni ran up to him, threw her arms around him, and hugged him. “Oh God, Jack, thank God you’re okay!”

  Jack didn’t return the hug and even seemed a little uncomfortable with it. “Hey, Sis,” he said quietly. “Thanks, but—gimme a little air, okay?”

  “Oh. Sure,” she said, letting go. “God, it’s good to see you again.”

  “Good to see you too,” he said, a little weakly.

  Eddie came up, outstretched a hand. “Welcome home, son.”

  Jack just stared at Eddie’s hand, his eyes betraying something like panic, and did not take his father’s hand.

  “Thanks, Dad,” he said, hefting his bag nervously from his left hand to his right. “It’s … good to see you. Good to be … back.”

  The way he said it, it sounded almost as if he wasn’t sure of either.

  “Well, let’s get you home,” Eddie said, reflexively taking Jack’s bag from him. Startled, Jack stuck his hands in his pants pockets.

  Jack spoke little as they made their way through the terminal and out to the car, so Eddie and Toni filled the silence by updating him on doings at the park and the bar. Jack slid into the backseat, Eddie and Toni in front. As Eddie keyed the ignition he said, “Hey, they finally finished the turnpike. It goes all the way up to the George Washington Bridge.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jack said, leaning his head back on the seat. “God, I’m tired. Feels like I haven’t slept in days.”

  He closed his eyes, and within minutes he was out for the count, sleeping through the manifold wonders of the New Jersey Turnpike.

  * * *

  Eddie had left Lehua in charge of the bar for the night, so when they reached home, he and Toni prepared the kind of dinner they figured Jack hadn’t had in a while—grilled steak, baked potato with sour cream and chives, and homemade split-pea soup. While they were cooking, Jack settled back into his old room, then walked around the house, looking out the windows at the Manhattan skyline or at the Palisades. He turned on the television set, watching Howdy Doody for a minute or two with a look of bemused wonder on his face—the same look he gave to everything in the house, including the kitchen where Eddie and Toni were working. He stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, and said quietly:

  “I can’t believe this is all—real.”

  Eddie looked up from stirring the soup. “What do you mean, Jack?”

  “A few weeks ago, I was in a—a snowy foxhole in Korea, my feet freezing, ducking low to avoid burp gun fire while I took potshots at Chinese troops up the hill. That was real. All this—just doesn’t seem real to me.”

  “It will,” Eddie assured him. “Takes time. Is it really as cold over there as they say it is?”

  “Colder. Forty below on a good day. So cold your canteen bursts. Your feet never get warm because they sweat inside their Army-issue, Mickey Mouse rubber boots, and then the sweat freezes in the boot.”

  “My God,” Toni said.

  “Frostbite kills as many men as enemy fire,” Jack said. “And when a man dies in that kind of cold, his body just—freezes solid. Stiff as an ironing board. I saw men stacked up like—”

  He caught himself. “This—this isn’t dinnertime conversation. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Eddie said. “Sounds like you saw some … awful things.”

  Jack made no reply.

  “Soup’s on,” Toni announced. “Let’s eat.”

  They sat down to dinner, Jack last, and for several moments he stared at his plate with a mixture of longing and hesitation. Then, slowly, he took his hands out of his pockets and reached for a spoon with his right hand.

  Toni noticed first: Jack’s hand was trembling like a leaf in a storm, so badly it appeared to be an effort to even lower his spoon into the soup. And when he did raise it, the spoon shook off half the soup before it could reach his mouth. Toni didn’t want to stare but couldn’t help herself.

  Eddie felt as if he’d had a stake driven into his chest.

  Jack switched the spoon to his other hand, and this time he was able to get something close to a full spoonful of soup to his mouth. “Left hand’s a—a little better than the right,” he said.

  “Jack, my God, what happened?” Eddie said softly. “Some kind of … nerve damage?”

  “Something like that,” Jack said, eyes downcast, concentrating on trying to finish his soup without spilling half of it.

  “Were you … shot?” Toni asked in an atypically small voice.

  Jack shook his head.

  “Mortar strike?” Eddie asked.

  Jack looked pained to speak of it. “A mortar was involved.”

  “But there’s something they can do for that, right?” Toni asked, ever the optimist. “They can operate on the nerves?”

  Jack put down his spoon, picked up a fork with his right hand and a knife with his left. He used his trembling right hand to anchor the steak as best he could, then sliced off a small piece of meat with his left hand. It clearly took an effort; perspiration beaded his forehead.

  “No,” he said in response to Toni’s question. “But they say it—may get better with time, and rest.”

  He chewed his steak with nothing like the pleasure Eddie and Toni had hoped he would. Eddie’s heart was breaking.

  “You know, Jack Rosenthal—Irving’s brother—has Parkinson’s disease,” Eddie said. “I’ll ask Irving for the name of Jack’s doctor. Maybe he can suggest something—”

  “I’ve seen enough doctors, thanks,” Jack said flatly. He managed another piece of steak, then, embarrassed, let his knife and fork drop back on the table. He stood up. “I’m not really hungry. I’m sorry, I know you went to a lot of trouble. But I’m just going to go lie down for a while.”

  He hurried away from the table and out of the kitchen.

  For a long moment there was silence in the room … then Toni began to cry. She made no sound, but tears streamed down her cheeks and her chest was wracked with sobs she couldn’t vocalize. Eddie went to her, wrapped his arms around his daughter, and let his own tears fall.

  * * *

&n
bsp; Toni woke around one A.M. to the sound of floorboards creaking in the hallway. She got up, passed her father’s bedroom—he was sound asleep, nothing short of a tree falling on the house could wake him—then past her brother’s, which was empty. Hearing footfalls on the back steps outside, she returned to her bedroom, pulled on a winter robe and slippers, then opened the back door and hurried down the steps.

  She peered around the corner of the house into the side yard, where she saw Jack, fully dressed, standing in front of a metal barrel in which their landlords, the Murphys, would burn leaves. Jack threw a handful of oak leaves into the barrel—even from here Toni could see his hand tremble, giving the leaves a shaky spin as they spiraled into the big metal drum. After a few more handfuls he reached into a pocket—and took out a book of matches. He held the book in his left hand as his right tore off a match, then struggled to strike it against the matchbook. He missed it once, twice, swore softly, then finally got the match to ignite and tossed it in.

  The leaves burst into flames, which spouted up, sucking oxygen from the air with a fiery inhalation. Toni, concerned, started toward him. At her approach he started, spun round, then saw it was her and let out a breath.

  “Jack?” she said, coming to his side. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Getting rid of stuff,” he said, and bent over to pick something off the ground. He came up with a handful of comic books—Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Plastic Man, Detective Comics, Superman.

  “What?” Toni said. “You’re not going to—”

  But he did, tossing the half-dozen or so comics onto the fire, which crackled and surged as it fed on the old, dry pulp paper.

  He bent down to pick up another handful, but Toni stopped him, gently putting a hand on his arm. “Jack, don’t. You’ll be able to draw again someday, I know it—we’ll get you the best doctors in the country—”

  “This isn’t about that,” he said, shrugging off her hand. He stooped to pick up more comics and pulp magazines: The Shadow, Doc Savage, Human Torch, USA Comics, All-Winners Comics, Blackhawk. They shook for a moment in his hand, then he tossed them into the fire.

  “Jack, why?” Toni asked as his old four-color dreams turned ashen.

  “They’re all lies,” Jack said tonelessly, watching the corners of Blackhawk and The Shadow blacken and curl. “That’s all they are—lies.”

  Toni stared helplessly as he threw the last of his comics onto the pyre.

  “Jack,” she said softly, “what the hell happened over there?”

  “If I tell you, Sis,” he said, “then it’s not just in my head anymore, it’s in yours. And I’m not about to do that to you.”

  He waited until the flames died down, then returned to the house.

  Toni stayed behind, staring without comprehension into the dying embers of Jack’s childhood.

  * * *

  The next morning, as Jack slept, Toni shared what happened with her father, and they decided that if Jack wanted to talk about his experiences he would, and if he didn’t, that was his business. “He needs for home to start feeling ‘real’ to him again,” Eddie said, “and I think that’s the best thing—maybe the only thing—we can do for him right now.”

  That first day all Jack seemed to want to do was sleep, which was understandable, but on his second day home Toni talked him into a walk along the riverfront. They bundled up in winter clothes and strolled along the banks of the frigid Hudson, toward the George Washington Bridge. “Remember when we found the ‘dinosaur bone’ here?” Toni said, pointing out the slippery rocks they had clambered over in grade school.

  Jack smiled. “Yeah. Johnny Lamarr was there that day. I never did manage to meet up with him in Korea. Hope he’s okay.”

  Toni took him to lunch at Callahan’s, where his trembling hands needed no utensils to grip one of the gigantic franks. As he wolfed it down, something of the old Jack glimmered in his tired eyes. “Man, these are great. After a year and a half of Army chow, this is like eating at the Ritz.”

  When he finished that one he promptly ordered another, as well as a second Yoo-Hoo to wash it down. Toni was glad to see him so happy.

  After lunch they dropped by Eddie’s Polynesia, where a light afternoon crowd was gathered to graze on the day’s appetizers: Mandarin dumplings, Tahitian fruit poi, and shrimp grilled in coconut oil. Jack sampled one of each, even after the two hot dogs, but passed on Eddie’s offer of a Singapore Sling: “After the injury, I drank a lot of beer, hoping it would help, or at least help me forget.” He shook his head. “All it did was make me feel even less in control of my body.”

  When he first sat down at the bar, he stared at the mural behind it—his mural—with an intensity that alarmed Toni. Too late, she realized it might be a mocking reminder of what his once-healthy hands could do. But a small smile crept onto his face and he said, “There is something peaceful about it … isn’t there? Almost like a window into the past, into Gauguin’s South Seas—not that it comes close to Gauguin. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of it, but … it’s nice to sit here and imagine I could step through it into another time, another place. Another me.”

  Jack seemed to feel so at ease in the bar that after a couple of days Eddie suggested he help out there, to give him something to do. “Dad, are you nuts?” he asked. “I can barely hold on to a fork, can you imagine how many mugs and glasses I’d break?”

  “I was thinking you could work the cash register. You were always good with math and numbers. What do you say?”

  Jack agreed to give it a try, and the next day came to work wearing one of the gaudy Hawaiian shirts Eddie kept for fill-in personnel. Jack had little trouble operating the cash register; his fingers were shaky, but they could press a key all right. The trickier part was taking money—directly from customers, Eddie, or Lehua—placing it in the cash drawer, then dispensing change. His hands shook as he tried to separate dollar bills from fives and tens, putting them in separate compartments, but he managed.

  Worse were the coins, which he could barely pick up one at a time, much less hand back to Eddie or Lehua. Even his left hand would shake so violently that he would spill the coins all over the counter, his frustration mounting. Finally, after three hours, it came to a head when he tried to open a roll of quarters and wound up scattering them all over the floor.

  He looked ready to burst into tears.

  “That’s it. This was a crappy idea from the start,” he told Eddie, and got out from behind the counter. “I’m going home.”

  “Jack, wait—”

  But Jack ignored him and hurried out the door. Eddie ran after, catching up to him in the parking lot. “Jack, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have— Will you stop, for Chrissake, and let me talk to you?”

  “There’s nothing to say!” Jack snapped, but he did slow and let his father approach. “I’m just a goddamned spastic cripple.”

  “Let me find out the name of Jack Rosenthal’s doctor,” Eddie pleaded. “There’s got to be something they can do for you.”

  “Dad, there’s nothing they can do, because it isn’t a physical injury!” Jack blurted.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “It’s a psychiatric problem, all right? I cracked up! I broke down. I’m a goddamn coward, Dad—is that what you wanted to hear?”

  Eddie was too stunned to respond. His face red with shame, Jack turned and started to run away.

  Eddie shook off his stupor and ran after him, grabbing him by the arm before he could cross Palisade Avenue to the nearest bus stop.

  “Jack, there are still doctors who may be able to help you—”

  “Shrinks? In Korea they’ve got traveling psychiatric detachments, ready to fix you up and send you right back to the front. I was so fucked up, they sent me home. I’ve seen enough shrinks for one lifetime, thanks.”

  He pulled loose from Eddie, who made no further effort to stop him. The truth was, Eddie didn’t know what to say to him—this was so far outside his
experience, he was afraid anything he said might make things worse.

  Eddie’s eyes filled with tears as he watched his wounded son hurrying down Palisade Avenue toward Route 5 and Edgewater. Goddamn it, he thought, it wasn’t fair. Why had Eddie, with a hardier constitution, been spared the horrors of war, while his son—sensitive, physically slighter—was sent straight into hell?

  Worst of all—Jack had been following his father’s example by volunteering to go to war. Eddie knew in the pit of his soul that this was all his fault—and he would never forgive himself for it.

  * * *

  On Saturday night, Jimmy took Toni back to the Chimes Restaurant, but all the way there and into the meal, all Toni could talk about was Jack and how worried she was for him. Jimmy, who had started the evening out jovial if a bit nervous, slowly deflated in enthusiasm as Toni related the story of Jack burning his comic books in the dead of night—until finally she looked into Jimmy’s face, saw the dismay in it, and said, “Oh God, I’m sorry, this must be so depressing to you. I’ll shut up now.”

  “No, this is what I love about you. You love your family, like I love mine. It’s just…” He sighed. “I wanted this night to be special. Don’t you remember? It was exactly nine months ago we came here on our first date.”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet. You’re so much more romantic than I am.”

  “I thought it would be a good time to … oh, hell, it still is. Why not?”

  He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a small velvet-covered box, placed it on the table, and opened it.

  Inside was a gold ring inset with a small cluster of diamonds.

  “I love you, Toni,” he said, taking her hand. “Will you marry me?”

  Toni stared at the ring—this had been the furthest thing from her mind when the evening started—and then her face lit with a smile.

  “Of course I will,” she said, and kissed him with a ferocity not quite befitting a public place.

  The next morning she told her father and brother, who were both delighted for her. But as Eddie and Toni washed the breakfast dishes together, Eddie said gingerly, “Honey, I know you don’t want to hear this, but … I think you should seriously consider inviting your mother to the wedding.”