Palisades Park (12 page)

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?”

“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.

“So what are you going to do,” Adele asked, “after the season ends?”

“Choreography. I’ve got a gig lined up, producing chorus routines for theaters. Hey, do you dance?”

“Me?” The question took Adele by surprise. “I can rumba as well as the next girl, but—you mean line dancing?”

“Sure. You’d look great on a chorus line.”

It killed her to say it, but Adele admitted, “I appreciate the thought, but … I really don’t have enough experience.”

“Too bad,” Minette said. “I could’ve used a beautiful gal like you.”

But Adele was flattered that Minette had even considered her. “So how are things going with this fella of yours? What’s his name?”

Minette hesitated a moment—she was fairly close-lipped about her personal life—then said, “I call him Jay. No one else does.” Reluctantly she admitted, “You’ve met him. He’s … my boss.”

“Really? That handsome businessman guy?”

“He’s separated from his wife,” Minette said. “We’re trying to keep a low profile, you know? Until the divorce is final.”

Adele said delicately, “So he’s technically still married.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Pardon me for asking, but … how does that square with the Masses and the convent school and all that?”

Minette didn’t bat an eye.

“That’s what confession is for,” she said. “None of us is perfect, so we admit our sins to the Lord and we ask His forgiveness.”

“And then go back to being not perfect.”

“Says the gal who orders roast beef on Friday,” Minette shot back, and Adele could only laugh.

*   *   *

It wasn’t long before Toni asked Bunty if he could teach her to dive like Gus Lesnevich. “Well, you
might
need to set your sights a little lower than that, at first,” he laughed, but agreed to coach her. Gus himself even offered a few pointers, showing Toni proper body alignment by having her stand against the wall with her heels exactly one inch away: “Keep your arms straight, but not rigid. Relax.” After she had mastered this, Bunty moved her to the edge of the pool, where he demonstrated the proper position of her arms and bend of her legs to propel herself into the water at the correct angle. Toni was getting very impatient with all this relaxing and bending and arm-raising—she wanted, literally, to dive into it—but eventually she made her first plunge. Her first few attempts were belly flops, but slowly she began to enter the water at the proper angle, diving off the side of the pool with acceptable enough form that Gus smiled: “Not bad, kid, not bad.”

Toni now reckoned herself ready to begin diving off one of the tall diving boards jutting out over the pool. She was annoyed when Bunty told her she wasn’t ready: “You’re too small to be diving from that height, even the five-foot board. You’ve got to grow a little more first.”

Grudgingly, Toni contented herself with side-of-the-pool dives and started making little pencil marks on her bedroom wall, noting her present height, then rechecking on a daily basis. But frustratingly, she didn’t seem to get any taller in the next month and a half.

It was in late July that Toni noticed a very tall tower that had been set up, overnight, on the free-act stage. She recalled Arthur Holden plunging off a similar tower, and when Bunty confirmed there was in fact a high diver booked that weekend, she begged her mother to let her watch. Adele saw no harm in it, and at four o’clock that afternoon she took a break and brought Toni to the free-act stage. On closer inspection Toni could see that the tower was just a skinny ladder a hundred feet tall, secured to the ground by four thick wires and two heavy braces. At the base sat a round tank about twenty feet in diameter and five feet deep, with the words
SOL SOLOMON’S DIVING ACT
inscribed on its curved side.

After a short introduction by announcer Clem White, a fairly ordinary-looking man in swim trunks took to the stage: “Captain” Sol Solomon. He began ascending the tall ladder, Toni watching with excitement as he made the long climb to the top. He walked out onto the short diving platform—paused at the edge for dramatic effect—then sprang off the board, his body somersaulting as he fell. Toni’s heart raced as Solomon’s body flipped end over end, plummeting a hundred feet in just a few seconds … straightening just in time into a full gainer, feet pointed down at the shallow waters of the tank. He plunged in, creating a waterspout on impact. The crowd held its collective breath, waiting for him to surface.

A hand appeared above the rim of the tank, and Captain Solomon climbed out to the cheers and applause of the crowd.

Toni cheered longest and loudest. She thought it was grand.

Later, as she and her mother made their way back to the pool, Toni confided, “I really want to do that someday.”

Adele looked at her and laughed. “I sincerely hope you don’t.”

“I do! I’ve never wanted to do anything so much in my whole
life.
”

“Don’t be silly,” her mother said dismissively. “It’s too dangerous. Women’s bodies aren’t built to withstand that kind of punishment. And besides, it just isn’t ladylike.”

Toni scowled. Anything that was fun, her mother said wasn’t ladylike. “What if I don’t
want
to be a lady?” she said stubbornly.

Adele fought back a flash of irritation: it seemed sometimes as if her daughter was deliberately rejecting everything Adele was trying to teach her. “Well you
are
one whether you want to be or not,” she said in a tone that made Toni bite her lip and fall into sullen silence.

Two days later, when she and Jack returned to the pool with Marie, Toni splashed around on her back for a little while, gazing up at those diving boards high above—beckoning to her as the summit of the Palisades once did. She thought a moment, got out of the pool, told her grandmother she’d left something in the locker room, and headed for the bathing pavilion.

But instead of entering the locker rooms, she veered left, toward the tallest diving board—and without hesitation she began climbing the rungs of the ten-foot ladder. Her heart raced as it had when she was watching Captain Solomon, but this was even more thrilling: this was
her
adventure.

In moments she had reached the top. She hadn’t bargained on the moment of dizziness she felt as she looked down, but that passed as she reminded herself it was no different from scaling the cliffs or riding a roller coaster. Slowly she inched her way to the end of the diving board.