Palisades Park (7 page)

He was standing on the shoulder of the concourse that led to the George Washington Bridge, its latticed steel tower looking uncomfortably like a memorial arch in a fools’ graveyard.

Scores of cars were being funneled through that arch. Amid the noise and commotion, Eddie saw no sign of Arthur; but there was only one place he could have gone.

Eddie ran up to the bridge, flipped a dime into the toll booth for the pedestrian toll, and hurried up the walkway on the right. He had no idea whether Arthur had taken the right-hand path or the left, so he tried to take in as much of the other side of the bridge as he could through the shifting kaleidoscope of cars whizzing by on the roadway.

Eddie had to stop for breath a few times, having been running flat-out for the past fifteen minutes, but when he was a third of the way across the bridge he saw someone up ahead at about the halfway point—standing at the low pedestrian railing, looking down at the river below.

Eddie redoubled his pace as, up ahead, Arthur began peeling off his clothes, stepping out of his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt.

“Art! No!” Eddie shouted over the traffic noise.

Somehow Arthur heard him and looked up—but though he appeared surprised to see Eddie, it didn’t give him any pause. He shrugged off his shirt and began unbuckling his belt.

“Jesus, Art!” Eddie cried again, drawing closer. “Don’t do it!”

Arthur’s trousers fell, revealing his white diving trunks underneath.

“Eddie,” he called out, “I’ve got to!”

Arthur stepped out of his trousers just as Eddie ran up, winded and pleading, “Art, please, it’s got to be a three-hundred-foot drop from here!”

“Oh no,” Holden corrected him, “only two hundred and fifty-seven.”

“You’ll be killed, is that what you want?”

“No, no! I’m just going to show the Rosenthals I’ve still got what it takes, that’s all. Like when I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yeah? How high was that?” Eddie asked, stalling desperately.

“Hundred and nineteen feet.”

“My God, Art, this is twice as high!”

“Well,” Arthur said brightly, “I’m twice as good as I was then.”

Eddie was groping for a reply when he heard the wail of a siren and turned to see a police car weaving in and out of the bridge traffic, cutting off at least two cars before it pulled to the shoulder with a squeal of brakes, just feet from where Arthur stood. A uniformed cop immediately jumped out of the car and called out: “Mr. Holden, stop! Fred Stengel, Fort Lee Police!”

“Aw, hell,” Arthur said dejectedly, “what is this, a convention?”

“Don’t do it,” the officer told him as he approached. “Your wife called us. She begs you not to jump!”

“How did Flo know I was coming here?”

“She saw you put on your bathing suit before you left the house. She doesn’t want to be a widow, Mr. Holden.”

Holden looked at the cop, and there was a weariness in his voice that echoed the tone Eddie had heard on Palisade Avenue: “I’m just so tired of being out of work. Of feeling worthless.”

“You’re not worthless, Art,” Eddie said.

“Who the fuck are you?” the cop demanded.

“A friend of his from the park.”

“The park? Is this a publicity stunt, did they arrange this…?”

“Oh,
shit,
” Arthur snapped with uncharacteristic indelicacy, “you’ve both just gone and ruined this whole thing. Would’ve been a grand dive, too. I hope you’re damn well satisfied with yourselves!”

With that, he picked up his pants and put them back on. When he’d finished dressing, Officer Stengel apologetically took him into custody.

Arthur was charged with disorderly conduct and held a few hours in the Fort Lee jail, then released in the custody of his wife pending a hearing.

Less than a week later he received a suspended sentence in exchange for a promise to the judge that he would not attempt again to dive off the George Washington Bridge. Arthur gladly agreed, since that morning he had been rehired by the Rosenthals to return to Palisades Park.

The day of his triumphant comeback happened to be one on which Marie had brought Antoinette and Jack to the park, and Eddie, wanting to share in Arthur’s victory, got Lew to cover for him as he, Marie, and the kids went over to the free-act stage at four o’clock. Eddie lifted Antoinette onto his shoulders so she could see; Marie hoisted Jack up into her arms. They watched as Holden strode onstage in his white diving trunks, basked in a round of applause from the audience, then began to climb the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot ladder.

“Daddy, what’s he doing?” Antoinette asked.

“He’s going to jump into that tank over there.”

Her eyes followed Holden all the way to the small platform at the top. He walked out to the edge of the diving board—and jumped.

Antoinette gasped as he sprang off the platform, doing a backward somersault, his body gracefully turning over in midair, then plummeting down, down—plunging feetfirst into his customary five feet of water.

Antoinette’s eyes were wide with amazement.

“Oooh,” she said, a sigh of both wonder and delight.

Arthur climbed out of the tank, unhurt and unfazed by his long fall. He raised a hand to the crowd, which burst into applause.

So did Antoinette, her little hands clapping together gleefully as she watched the silver-haired diver take his bows.

*   *   *

Jack Rosenthal showed up for work every morning at eight
A.M.
, always sporting a light-colored suit, spats, and a cane. When Eddie arrived around ten thirty he was amused to hear the sound of violin music issuing from the administration building—Jack, on his coffee break, filling the amusement park not with the sounds of a calliope, but a Mozart prelude.

The Rosenthals were sticklers for cleanliness—insisting that every stand be regularly scrubbed inside and out, even fining concessionaires five dollars for every burned-out lightbulb on their marquee. Irving Rosenthal spent more of his time at first managing the brothers’ interests in Coney Island, but when he did show up—always wearing a dark blue or black suit—he would patrol the midways, assuring himself that each ride and concession was spotless and that all refreshments were up to snuff. Anna Halpin made certain that these rules were strictly complied with, and Eddie was beginning to share some of the other men’s resentment toward her.

So each Friday morning Eddie and Lew would scrub down the candy stand until it shined … until one Friday in late June when Eddie had to do it on his own, since Lew was nowhere to be found. As the morning wore on, Lew continued to be a no-show, and Eddie had to stock the shelves by himself. It wasn’t until eleven thirty that Eddie found out why, when Anna Halpin herself appeared unexpectedly at the stand and announced, “You’re Eddie, right? Lew’s having his appendix taken out. Show me what he does.”

“What?”

She entered the stand through the side door. “Show me what he does, I’ll fill in for him until Chief Borrell can find somebody else to bring in.”

Eddie was momentarily nonplussed. “Uh, Mrs. Halpin, you’re going to get your nice dress all sticky and dirty.”

She just laughed. “If I cared a hoot about that I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in this business. I’ve handled a popcorn popper before but not a candy floss machine—show me how it works.”

Eddie did as he was asked, Mrs. Halpin observing as he put in a batch of sugar and pink food coloring, then switched on the heater and set the spinner to spinning. Halpin had a plain, serious face, but she smiled a little when the liquefied sugar was forced out of the spinner’s holes: “Like a pasta maker,” she said, “only with pink pasta.” He demonstrated how to capture the pink strands on a stick, making an artful cloud of sugared cumulus. She nodded once, said, “Okay, I’ve got it,” and made the next batch on her own, letter perfect. By the time the park opened at noon there were the requisite number of cotton candies in the display case waiting to be snapped up.

Eddie went into his grind, Mrs. Halpin working the counter, until his throat started to get sore and Anna stepped in and took over, even if she did have to stand on a couple of phone books at the counter:

“Cotton candy!” she cried out to the crowd. “Sweeter than a mother’s kisses, lighter than a cloud! Get your cotton candy here, heaven on a stick!”

Goddamn, Eddie thought: she could actually build a tip. The stand enjoyed brisk business for the next hour; finally, during a lull, Eddie told her, “Nice grind. You’ve done this before?”

“Oh, I’ve done a little of everything,” she said. “I started out working for my uncles at Savin Rock Park as a cashier. I carried change to the concessionaires, but I made it a point to watch every concession agent and ride operator to see how he did his job. By the time I became manager I could pinch-hit on almost anything, if need be.”

“The rides, too?”

“Sure. I worked the Whip, the Water Scooter, the Airplane Swings … I may be small but I’m no weak sister.” Now Eddie realized: she wasn’t trying to catch Palisades’ ride operators lying down on the job, she wanted to see how they
did
their job. “It’s been a while since I’ve worked a grab stand, though. The past few years I was boxing promoter at Golden City Park Arena.”

“You were?” he said, doing his best not to sound disbelieving.

She smiled at the skepticism in his voice. “We had a few comers we brought up at Golden City. Canada Lee, Tony Canzoneri…”

“Canzoneri? The guy who beat Lou Ambers for the lightweight title?”

Anna nodded. “Eddie, you know what I was going to be when I grew up? A piano teacher.” She laughed. “Imagine that—me teaching kids to play ‘Chopsticks’ all day. I met my husband at that park too—that cashier’s job was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

A customer stepped up to buy a cotton candy, another asked for popcorn, and that was their last chance for small talk for the rest of the morning. By midafternoon Chief Borrell had brought in a man from one of his hot-dog stands to take Lew’s place until he recuperated from his appendectomy. Eddie actually found himself sorry to see Anna return to the front office.

“Thanks, Mrs. Halpin,” he said. “You can work my stand anytime.”

“I’m here if you need me, Eddie,” she told him—and he believed her. It wouldn’t take her long to win over the remaining doubters.

*   *   *

Monday, July 1, was warm and sunny, a perfect day for the fifteen hundred visiting children—white, black, rich, poor—who, in May, had received free tickets to Palisades at Hearn’s Department Store. They came from New York City, swarming eagerly over the park, riding the coasters, the Carousel, the miniature train, and flocking to the George Hamid circus troupe two blocks away, to be entertained by clowns, jugglers, acrobats, and the trained animals of Captain Walker’s Jungle Wonders.

Most of those kids were at the circus at 4:45 that afternoon when Eddie—having just handed some cotton candy to an eight-year-old tyke, one of perhaps fifty left on the midway—felt his nose twitch at a familiar, ominous smell and then heard the cry most feared by carnies everywhere:

“Fire!”

Eddie’s head jerked up. A park staffer was running up the midway, sounding the alarm—as behind him clouds of bilious black smoke rose from the Old Mill, only a few hundred yards down. Licks of flame charred the low wooden roof of the ride as cinders ignited the walls of the squat, rambling structure. In the time it took for Eddie to lock his cash register and jump the counter, the flames were consuming most of the Mill.

Other concessionaires now jumped their counters, the ones closest to the Mill unfurling a long fire hose. It quickly inflated and began spraying water onto the blaze like an elephant spitting water from its trunk.

Eddie looked across the midway to Adele’s stand and saw her standing inside, frozen to the spot by the fiery spectacle. He ran across the midway, grabbed her by the wrist and said, “Get out of there! Hurry!”

That shook her out of her daze, and she quickly clambered over the counter. In the distance came the sound of approaching sirens.

But when they looked back at the fire they saw that the flames had spread to the Spitfire ride next door to the Old Mill. It was not lost on anyone that the fire was now blocking the path to the park’s front gate.

Among the spectators were dozens of children standing there transfixed, drawn like moths to the raging fire and the billowing clouds of smoke. “Somebody’s got to do something about all these kids,” Adele said. Before Eddie could reply she ran up to a ten-year-old boy enraptured by the flames, grabbed him by his shoulders, and turned him around:

“Get out of here! Run!” she told him. “There’s an exit by the pool, you know where that is?”

“Uh, yeah,” the boy said, “I think so.”

“Up to the end of the railway, turn left, run straight out! Go!”

The boy did as he was told and Adele rushed up to a young girl, giving her the same instructions. As Eddie got as many kids into the hands of Hearn’s employees as he could, the Spitfire lived up to its name and began spewing hot cinders across the midway—where they quickly ignited the fencing around the Whip. From there the sparks jumped to the Fascination game booth next door, its canvas roof erupting into flames with a rush of air like the beating of giant wings. The flames raced down the roof supports as if they were fuses and in less than a minute the entire booth exploded.

Eddie could hear the crackle of timber being consumed and felt the heat being pushed up the midway on an easterly breeze. The smoke was so thick he could no longer make out the Old Mill, or what remained of it.

“Shit,” he told Adele, “we’ve got to get out of here, now!”

They herded together as many kids as they could and led them to the Hudson gate near the pool. There were thousands of visitors hurrying to leave the park, but no panic, as park employees calmly guided people to the available exits. When Eddie and Adele reached the Hudson gate they found a fire company from Fort Lee waiting and left the children in their care.

By now the fire engines of seven communities—Fort Lee, Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Englewood, Leonia, Fairview, and Ridgefield—had begun converging on the park. The engines pulled up to Palisade Avenue, hooked up hoses to hydrants, and began dousing the flames, or trying to.