Palisades Park (9 page)

“Then I heard Mom say, ‘Don’t be so hard on him, Sergei. He can’t help it that he’s just an ordinary boy.’” Eddie winced, even in recollection. “I felt like I’d had a nail driven into my heart. That was the last straw. To hear my own mother call me
ordinary
 … that was just too much to bear.”

Tears welled in Viola’s eyes. She put a hand on his.

“I’m so sorry, Eddie. You’re not ordinary. You left home without a dime to your name and still managed to make a success of yourself here.”

“I don’t want my kids anywhere near that sadistic son of a bitch,” he said. “I don’t even want him to know where they are. And if Mom knows, he’ll know.” His tone softened. “But you’re welcome in our home anytime. I’d be proud to introduce Antoinette and Jackie to their Aunt Vi.”

She got to her feet. “I’ll take you up on that. And I won’t tell Mama where you are. It was good to see you, Eddie. I’ve missed my big brother.”

Teary-eyed, they hugged again, for longer this time, then left the restaurant, Eddie walking her to the trolley that would take her down to the ferry. He kissed her on the cheek, then watched as the trolley, lit by the frosty yellow glow of a bare bulb hanging inside, rattled forward on its tracks and disappeared down the hill, along the stone gash cut into the face of the Palisades. Then he walked on, turning north on Marion Avenue toward Bergen Boulevard, and headed home to his family.

4

Palisades, New Jersey, 1938

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
for the Rosenthals to turn around Palisades’ fortunes—even before the 1935 season ended the brothers exercised their option to buy. Palisades Amusement Park would now become synonymous with their names, and they were not shy about promoting their kingdom in the clouds. Construction began on a new electric sign, a million-watt marquee perched on the edge of the cliffs: twenty-four feet high by two hundred forty feet long, its scrolling ballyhoo for Palisades became a familiar sight to motorists on New York’s Riverside Drive. The Rosenthals claimed it was the largest moving sign in the world; this may even have been true.

New rides were introduced, including the Water Scooter—managed by an up-and-comer named Joe Rinaldi, who also ran the Dodgem cars—and a hair-raising new coaster, the Lake Placid Bobsled, whose steep drops and hairpin turns could hardly have been called “placid.” The pool saw the inauguration of the new Sun & Surf Club: swimmers could enroll on a seasonal basis and enjoy use of the pool all summer, as well as their own personal lockers in the bathing pavilion (though patrons could also join the club on a daily basis). And the park’s musical acts now included big-name bandleaders like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.

Arthur Holden finally retired from his long, storied diving career, but with Palisades a going concern again, old faces came back to the fold: Dick “Lightning” Bennett returned from his nightclub ventures with several games of chance, including his wife Kate’s balloon game (throw a dart, pop a balloon, win a prize). Dick also organized a baseball team to be played against one coached by Kid Fiddles on the first rainy day of the season. The Palisades baseball teams would meet for years to come, the rain-slicked parking lot reconfigured into a baseball diamond with sacks of sugar serving as bases. Eddie was a powerful batter who hit more than a few home runs for Dick’s team, sending the balls hurtling into the stands—literally. If a ball went over the tops of the concession stands and onto the midway, it was considered a homer. But it was murder actually sliding into home, or any other base, on the parking lot’s wet, gravelly surface.

Concessionaires who had stuck with Palisades through the hard times saw their perseverance finally paying off in dollars. Eddie began to see some real money from his two percent of the gross at the Chief’s candy stand, and by the end of the ’37 season he and Adele were able to move from their cramped apartment into larger quarters in Edgewater, renting the top floor of a two-story house on Undercliff Avenue for twenty dollars a month.

More important, when one of the French fry vendors—on the downhill side of sixty and weary of the smell of grease—decided the time had come to retire with a few shekels in his pocket, Eddie and Adele bought his entire stock—cutlery, cooking vats, fry baskets, fry cutter, and sundry containers of salt, vinegar, and Mazola corn oil—for twelve hundred dollars.

Thrilled by the prospect of owning their own concession, Eddie and Adele assumed that signing a lease at Palisades would be a routine matter, and arranged for a meeting with Irving Rosenthal.

Irving was a short, smiling, exacting man resembling either a leprechaun or “Little Caesar,” as some concessionaires called him (but never to his face). He welcomed Eddie and Adele into his office, and though this was the first time they had met with him, he said at once, “You’re the couple that got married on the merry-go-round, aren’t you?”

“Yes, we are,” Adele said, pleased.

“This will follow us to our graves,” Eddie muttered.

“That was a sweet gag,” Rosenthal said admiringly,
gag
being carny slang for stunt. “We may try it again next year, on the roller coaster this time. If you two ever decide to get divorced let us know, we may be able to work something out there too.” They laughed. “So, what can I do for you?”

Eddie told him of their plans to open a French fry stand. Rosenthal listened quietly, then when Eddie was done he said, “Well, we’re embarking on a new policy this season,” and explained how he and his brother were expanding their personal ownership of concessions from twenty-five to fifty percent of those operating in the park. “This will mean, of course, fewer concessions available to outside operators,” Irving said, “as we’ll obviously be giving priority to concessionaires with a long history at Palisades.”

Eddie’s heart sank like a stone. Suddenly all he could think was that they had just foolishly blown twelve hundred bucks on a hundred gallons of corn oil and some old cooking equipment, with no place to set it up.

“But you know,” Rosenthal went on, “history isn’t always measured in years. I understand, Eddie, that you swallowed a great deal of smoke in the ’35 fire, helping Chief McDermott get all those children out of the park.”

“I wasn’t the only one,” Eddie said diffidently.

“You helped a lot of kids out yourself, didn’t you, Mrs. Stopka?”

“Well … sure,” Adele said. “Somebody had to.”

Irving Rosenthal got up, looked out his window at the park spread out below him like his own personal Monopoly board. “If even one of those children had, God forbid, been killed or injured, it would’ve killed Palisades too. That early on, the publicity would have been fatal. We would have dropped our option like a hot coal.” He turned, smiled. “But thanks to you and others, that didn’t happen. That’s what I mean by history.”

He went back to his desk and unfurled a large map of the park that covered the entire desk. “I have a nice location available across from the pool, near the Carousel. Used to be a roast beef stand, I believe—has all the utilities you should need. I can offer you a two-year lease at a thousand dollars per season. How does that sound to you?”

A thousand bucks for five months’ rent was far from cheap, but Eddie didn’t hesitate. “It sounds great, Mr. Rosenthal.”

“Irving. Mr. Rosenthal is my brother.”

They all laughed at that. Eddie took out his checkbook and wrote a check payable to Rosecliff Realty Company. He and Adele then signed a standard lease agreement, and Irving smiled warmly and shook their hands.

“It’s a pleasure,” he said, “to welcome back people of your quality to Palisades Park.”

*   *   *

The town of Edgewater was three miles long but only three blocks wide, a bootstrap of land that lay at the stone foot of the Palisades. Factories and refineries crowded the shoreline; rail line spurs from Weehawken serviced the manufacturing plants, bracketing Edgewater’s waterfront with metal tracks. There were barely a handful of retail establishments, most near the ferry terminal: the Plaza Drug Store, Manufacturers Bank, a few taverns and lunchrooms. Between River Road and the base of the Palisades the streets were a rabbit warren of single-family homes, rooming houses, schools, and the odd commercial property like the Edgewater Loom Works. The houses had been built closely abreast of one another, but the ones on Undercliff backed up onto the slopes of the Palisades, with a whole forest in their backyards, as well as magnificent views of the Hudson and New York City.

The Stopkas were renting the top floor of one of these houses, at 670 Undercliff Avenue: the exterior walls of the first story had been laid with stone from the Palisades, while the second story, added later, was made more conventionally of wood. It had a kitchen separate from the landlord’s downstairs, a back entrance of their own so they could enter and exit with some degree of privacy, and a living room whose windows at night framed the lights of Manhattan, glittering like sequins on an evening dress.

Antoinette loved Edgewater. She loved having a thickly wooded backyard that sloped up to meet a wall of granite taller and more awe-inspiring than any ride she had yet seen at Palisades Park. That fall she would tramp through a thick bed of oak, maple, and hickory leaves—bright red, orange, yellow, and green—her steps making a satisfying crunch all the way up to the foot of the cliffs, beyond which, at six years old, she didn’t yet dare venture, contenting herself to merely gaze up at its beckoning summit.

But Antoinette would come to love Edgewater for another reason: Edgewater was where she ceased being Antoinette.

She and Jack attended George Washington School No. 2 on River Road, Jack in kindergarten, Antoinette in first grade, having transferred from Cliffside Park’s School No. 1—where Antoinette had learned the many annoying ways her name could be mangled or mocked by fellow students:

“Antoi-
ne-e-e-tte,
” one girl, who thought the name too highfalutin, would singsong.

“Aunty! Aunty Netta!” one boy would always greet her, knowing it annoyed any little girl to be called an aunt.

And then there was the classmate whose older sister was studying French history. “You know what happened to Marie Antoinette?” she asked. “She got her head chopped off!”

Enthusiastically, she mimed the falling blade with the flat of her hand.

By the end of her year of kindergarten at Cliffside, Antoinette was more than happy to transfer to Edgewater.

Since the school stood very nearly in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, the first-grade teacher, Miss Kaplan, told her class, “You know, history and science are all around us. Just a few years ago, the men who blasted away the stone of the Palisades in order to build the George Washington Bridge found what we call a ‘fossil’ in the rock—a footprint of a dinosaur that existed two hundred million years ago! And years before that, in the same place, they found a skeleton of a prehistoric reptile called a phytosaur. This is what scientists believe it looked like.”

She passed around a newspaper clipping, and when the picture came to Antoinette she gasped at the artist’s rendering of what looked like a prehistoric crocodile with a long snout and sharp fangs—and next to it, an actual photograph of the creature’s skull, with jaws like pincers and teeth like a saw blade. Antoinette couldn’t stop staring at it, and the boy behind her had to give her chair a kick to remind her to pass it on.

At recess, she and her classmates spoke wonderingly of these prehistoric monsters, Antoinette voicing a thought that electrified them all: “If they found two dinosaurs here,” she said, “maybe there are more!”

After classes ended that afternoon, Antoinette led an expeditionary force of half a dozen first-graders—all, but for her, boys—along with her brother, Jack, to the Edgewater shoreline, where they happily clambered over the mossy rocks in search of a brontosaurus, pterodactyl, or even just another run-of-the-mill phytosaur. They initially planned to hike all the way to the George Washington Bridge, but when that began to seem impractical they got as far as Van Dohln’s Marina, a sleepy little boat basin at the northern tip of town. It was here that Antoinette’s life changed forever, when—as they all busily searched the stones for dinosaur tracks—her classmate, Guy, called out, “Hey, Toni, I think I found something!”

She didn’t know which was more thrilling, the idea of finding something prehistoric or the name Guy had just used. She climbed over the rocks between them and asked, “Why’d you call me Tony?”

“My aunt is named Antoinette. Everybody calls her Toni.”

“They do?”

“It’s spelled with an
i.
Look, you wanna see what I found or not?”

“Oh, sure, what is it?”

He reached into a crevice and pulled out a hard, triangular object about two inches long, wedged like a stone doorstop between two rocks. “It’s a dinosaur bone,” Guy declared excitedly, “it’s gotta be!”

“If it is,” Antoinette said dubiously, “it musta been a
small
dinosaur.”

“That one Miss Kaplan showed us was only sixteen feet long.”

Jack suggested, “Maybe it’s part of its shoulder.”

“Do dinosaurs
have
shoulders?” another boy noted skeptically.

“We’ll ask Miss Kaplan,” Antoinette decided. “She’ll know.”

They trekked excitedly back to school, where their teacher was working late. Though amused to learn of their archaeological dig, she regretfully informed them that what they had found was not, alas, a piece of dinosaur bone. “But it’s almost as exciting as that,” she said. “This appears to be an Indian arrowhead. It probably dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when there were still a few Lenape Indians living here.”

This was not anywhere near as exciting as finding a dinosaur bone and they all knew it. But along that slippery shore, Antoinette had found something far more exciting: a new identity.

Not only were she and Jack late coming home from school, it did not escape their mother’s notice that their shoes were sopping wet and Antoinette’s pretty floral dress—one Adele had spent many long hours sewing for her—was dirty and discolored, with swaths of green obliterating the pretty pink fabric. “Antoinette, what
is
this? Where on earth were you?”