Palisades Park

  “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.

  Bunty Hill was turning in his seat at the lifeguard’s station when he suddenly saw the figure of a little girl standing atop the ten-foot board. “Holy shit!” he cried, jumping to his feet, starting to run toward the ladder.

  Toni saw Bunty below, tried to remember everything he had taught her—she wanted to make him proud—and dove off the board.

  But the plunge down was a million times worse than her moment of vertigo and she panicked. She forgot her form, her arms akimbo, her body arching as if recoiling from the water that was hurtling up to meet her.

  Her belly hit the water with such force that every bit of air in her lungs was squeezed out of her, along with a cry of shock and pain—and then, as they said in the movies, there was a brief intermission.

  * * *

  When she came to, she was being carried in Bunty’s arms onto the sand, and as she glanced up she saw her father and mother running through the pool gate toward her, wearing their white aprons. Bunty turned and Toni’s grandmother floated into her awareness, looking pale and stricken:

  “Is she all right?” Marie asked, afraid.

  “Don’t die, Toni,” Jack said tearfully, not helping matters.

  “Nobody’s dying, pal,” Bunty said. “She’s breathing okay.”

  He laid Toni down on a beach blanket as Eddie ran up and crouched down at her side: “Baby, are you okay? How do you feel?”

  “My tummy hurts,” she said plaintively.

  “She took a real belly flop,” Bunty explained, “from ten feet up. That’s like getting whacked in the solar plexus by Max Schmeling.
We’d better get her to the first-aid station so Doc Vita can take a look at her.”

  “Oh God, Toni, why did you do it?” Adele said in a small voice, and Toni was surprised to see she had tears in her eyes.

  “I’ll bring her over,” Eddie said, then, to Adele: “Honey, you lock up the stand. Marie, maybe you should take Jack home.”

  Eddie tenderly took his daughter in his arms and carried her off. Adele ran across the midway to shutter and lock the stand, after which she went to join Eddie and Toni at the park’s small but well-equipped first-aid station.

  Dr. Frank Vita was a young physician who worked at a Cliffside Park medical clinic affiliated with Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck. In summer he was also the Palisades Park medic. When Eddie entered with Toni, Nurse Cooper prepared an exam table for her as Vita asked, “What happened?”

  “She jumped off a ten-foot diving board and landed on her stomach.”

  “Did she lose consciousness?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Toni, honey, did you black out when you hit the water?”

  “Uh.… just a little,” she said sheepishly.

  “Take a deep breath, Toni, okay?” Vita put his stethoscope to her chest, then her back. “Now cough.” She complied. “I don’t hear any fluid in her lungs. Look at me, Toni, and keep your eyes open.” He shined a light in her eyes. “Normal dilation, that’s good. What’s your name again, honey?”

  “Toni Stopka.”

  “Can you tell me your father’s name?”

  “Daddy.”

  Vita laughed. “What does your mother call him?”

  “Eddie.”

  “Know what day it is today?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Who’s the favorite in the third race at Monmouth?”

  “Huh?”

  “Nurse,” Vita said with a smile, “make a note: patient seems alert, awake, but useless at picking horses.”

  Eddie laughed, and that made Toni relax a little. Adele entered the aid station and hurried to her daughter’s side as Vita said, “I’m going to feel your stomach now, Toni.” He palpated her abdomen; she winced slightly. “Does that hurt? Do you feel sick, like you’re going to throw up?”

  “No, it’s just sore.”

  “Okay, Toni, that’s all.” He turned to Eddie. “She’ll be fine. She may have lost consciousness for a few seconds, but there are no other signs of concussion. None of her internal organs seem bruised—she’s just going to wake up tomorrow with some very sore muscles. Apply liniment, give aspirin as needed for pain, and keep her out of the water for a while.”

  “Oh, I can guarantee you that,” Adele assured him.

  Toni found out what this meant when they got home, when after an ominous private consultation between her parents, her father told her, “We’re glad you’re all right, honey, but what you did was both wrong and dangerous. Dangerous because if Bunty hadn’t rescued you, you could’ve drowned while you were out cold. And wrong because Bunty told you not to dive off those platforms and you did it anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” Toni said quietly. “I thought I could do it.”

  “We’ve decided,” her mother said, “that as punishment you won’t be allowed back in the pool for a month. Maybe that way you’ll think before you do anything as foolish as this again.”

  Toni nodded, accepting her fate, but in truth, the average seven-year-old has at best an uncertain grasp on the notion of time—and it was only after she was denied a visit to Palisades for a whole week, and then another, that Toni began to understand that a month was really a long time.

  What’s more, Adele was taking no chances that her daughter would substitute rock climbing for swimming: Marie brought both children to her home in Fort Lee, where the most excitement to be had was a game of marbles with the neighborhood kids. Worse, Toni had to watch as several local boys returned from Palisades Park with their swimsuits still dripping—they, like most kids in Fort Lee and Cliffside Park, knew that there was a hole in the park fence behind the free-act stage, and behind the pool’s waterfall was an opening through which you could swim into the pool without paying admission. What they didn’t know was that Irving Rosenthal was well aware of this gap in security and made no attempt to fix it—on the theory that even if the kids sneaked into the park for free, they’d still part with some of their money on rides, games, and food, and everybody went away happy.

  Everyone, that is, but Toni, who at the three-week mark began to chafe, asking her mother one morning, “Is it a month yet?”

  “Nope,” she was told, “not yet.”

  “How long before it’s a month?”

  “Try another week on for size.”

  “Another week?” Toni said in disbelief. “Mama, can’t I please go to the pool? I won’t try to dive, I’ll just swim, I promise!”

  “The deal wasn’t three weeks with time off for good behavior, it was a month. Don’t worry, you’ll have about a week’s worth of swimming left before the season ends.”

  “Only one week?” Toni was horrified. “That’s not fair!”

  “Neither was ignoring what Bunty told you not to do.”

  “You don’t want me to have any fun at all,” Toni insisted.

  “You can have fun at Grandma’s house. She still has my old dolls and dollhouse in the attic, you can play with those…”

  “Who cares!” Toni yelled. “Dolls are stupid!”

  “Lower your voice, Antoinette.”

  The name only stoked Toni’s anger all the more.

  “I hate dolls! I hate you!” she blurted.

  Adele flinched, as if physically struck. Reflexively, her hand lashed out and slapped Toni across her left cheek. Not hard, but enough to sting.

  “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again, young lady,” Adele said, though her voice nearly broke halfway through.

  This was the first time either of her parents had ever struck her, and Toni sat there a moment, less hurt than shocked—then burst into tears. She jumped off the kitchen chair and ran into her room, wailing.

  Adele looked down at her hand. It was trembling.

  She stood, feeling wobbly and nauseous. Thank God Eddie had gotten up early to go to their wholesaler. Somehow she managed to propel herself into the bathroom, Toni’s cries still ringing behind her.

  Every awful memory of life with Franklin paled beside that of hearing your child tell you that she hated you. Adele turned on the faucet to drown out her sobs, then sat on the edge of the bathtub and cried her heart out.

  She was a terrible mother; all this had been a terrible, terrible mistake. She’d thought having a daughter would be so joyous, being able to share with her all the things she had loved as a child—but at every turn Antoinette demonstrated her disdain for everything Adele loved, everything Adele was. Her own daughter’s heart was a mystery to her. She sat and cried for five minutes—cried for letting her anger get the better of her, for being a bad mother, and most of all, for wanting more out of life than this.

  * * *

  Toni’s hurt was forgotten almost as soon as she returned to the pool the next week—or most of it, anyway. She was still bothered by something her mother had said—not on the day she’d slapped Toni’s face, but on the afternoon they had watched Captain Solomon’s death-defying leap.

  Now, as Bunty gave her some pointers on improving her form, Toni said hesitantly, “Bunty? Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, kiddo, what is it?”

  “My mom says girls can’t dive like boys. She says we’re not strong enough. Is that true?”

  Bunty snorted. “Aw, that business about women’s bodies not holding up to the rigors of diving, that’s just an old wives’ tale—not that I’m calling your momma an old wife,” he added with a wink. “Just ’cause you’re too little now to dive off a ten-foot board, doesn’t mean you won’t be able to do it hands down in a couple of years.”

  “So could I”—she hesitated to even speak the words aloud—“could I div
e like Captain Solomon when I grow up? Even if Mama says I can’t?”

  Bunty sighed.

  “Listen, kid, at some point everybody gets told that they can’t do something in life. Like this girl I knew at the Women’s Swimming Association in New York. Her name was Trudy—Trudy Ederle. She had measles as a kid, so her hearing wasn’t so good. But man, she was a torpedo in the water. She was fourteen, fifteen years old, and her dream was to swim the English Channel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s thirty-one miles of damn cold water between England and France,” he said, “with strong tides and a helluva chop. The first time Trudy tried it, her trainer thought she was in trouble and pulled her out of the water only six and a half miles from shore—even though Trudy was sure she could have made it. On her second try, a year later, she wouldn’t let anyone pull her out—and became the first woman to swim the English Channel.”

  “Wow,” Toni said. “Really?”

  “Yep. And there was another gal in New York—Millie Gade Corson—who I helped train, and she became the second woman and the first mother to swim the Channel.

  “So look, honey—you’re seven years old. When you grow up you may decide what you really want to be is a crocodile hunter, or an opera singer. You may not have what it takes to be a high diver. But don’t take somebody else’s word for that—give yourself the chance to find out for yourself.”

  * * *

  Due to spotty weather, the ’38 season didn’t entirely live up to expectations, but Eddie and Adele, like most concessionaires, still made a profit, and that was nothing to sneeze at these days. On September 7, the last day of the season, the Rosenthals threw a big blowout, starting at midnight, in the park’s Midway Restaurant. Staff and concessionaires toasted to each other’s success, dined on roast chicken, listened to entertainers brought in—courtesy of “Lightning” Bennett—from local nightclubs like Ben Marden’s Riviera, and a few even got up and serenaded the crowd themselves. (Frank Vita was a surprisingly good singer, for a doctor.) Bunty attended with a knockout blonde who could have been a model. Afterward, tables were moved aside as Palisadians joined in the dance craze that was sweeping the nation: the jitterbug.