“Yeah,” the girl, whose name was Agnes, said, her voice shaky. “You should’ve seen it. The Scenic Railway went up like a pile of straw.”
Adele walked past them to Bunty and the other men. “Bunty, what in God’s name are all these people still doing here?”
“We can’t risk taking them out through the Hudson gate,” the fire captain told her. “Any minute now those buildings are going to blow and there’ll be a solid wall of flame blocking that midway.”
“And it’s already started to spread to the Casino Bar,” Bunty added, “so we can’t get to the gate through there.”
“Unless you’ve got experience in fire dancing,” George added wryly.
Adele usually found George’s jokes funny, but not today. “And how in the hell am I supposed to get my children out of this firetrap?”
“We’ll get ’em out, dollface,” Bunty said reassuringly. “George, you sure it’s safe to bring ’em all down there?”
“Safer than staying here,” George said. “Just tell people to take it slow and easy and everybody’ll get out okay.” He turned to Adele. “Just follow me, Mrs. Stopka, and your kids will be fine.”
The blithe confidence with which he stated this startled Adele. She hoped to God he was right.
Bunty and the other lifeguards had the remaining beachgoers form an orderly line, and with Adele, Toni, and Jack in front, George Kellinger led them onto the wooden sundeck on the eastern edge of the pool. Between the lemonade stand and the pool’s waterfalls there was a narrow gangway. George cautioned everyone, “Okay, take it nice and easy going down,” and to Adele’s amazement he led them down the gangway and into a cellar with a wooden floor hidden behind the waterfalls. The roar of the falls grew muted, the cavernous space humming with machinery. “This is the filter room,” George explained. “Takes eight of ’em to keep the pool water clean.”
“Wow,” Jack said. He and Toni were entranced by this underground world they never knew existed, as George led them past eight coal-burning filtration machines the size of apartment house boilers. There was also a pair of huge valves—like something out of a Flash Gordon serial—that George said released the pool water when it had to be drained, and five-foot-high gauges almost as tall as George himself.
“Keep looking up, you don’t want to hit your head on one of these,” he said, rapping his knuckles on one of the big wooden ceiling beams.
“My God,” Adele said, “it’s like a catacomb down here.”
“Yeah, Lon Chaney lives here during the off-season,” George said with a smile. He motioned to the right and said, “This leads under the bathhouses, it lets out near the old trolley tracks. We’ll be out in no time.”
He led them past the enormous motors powering the artificial wave machine, the floor vibrating a little as they walked. Behind them Toni could see the rest of the pool patrons, all in their swimsuits and most of them barefoot, being shepherded along by Bunty and his fellow lifeguards. They were looking around them as if they had, indeed, wandered onto the set of The Phantom of the Opera, but Toni and Jack exchanged delighted grins.
“This place is the greatest,” Toni declared.
“Can we come back after the fire’s over?” Jack asked.
“Sure, but let’s get out first,” George replied. “We’re right below the bathhouse now. Just a little bit farther.”
He was right. Within a few minutes they were ascending another gangway and out into hazy sunlight tinted a Martian orange by the fire—finding themselves on the park’s northern border on Route 5, where a dozen fire engines were lined up along the park fence.
“Hallelujah, we have reached the promised land,” Adele whooped, giving their rescuer a big hug. “You’re a regular Moses, George, thanks!”
George blushed, then made sure all the remaining pool patrons were safely out of the park. Joining earlier escapees in a line that ran uphill to Palisade Avenue, most people wore only bathing suits, clutching no more than a towel. So they fell into line in varying states of undress, looking embarrassed but relieved that they had made it out.
Adele herded the kids past the line and onto Palisade Avenue, where twenty fire companies from all over Bergen and Hudson Counties were battling the blaze. Water from dozens of fire hoses fountained above the roped-off entrance to the park, cascading down onto the flames; other hoses snaked inside the park itself as firemen bravely fought the fire close up.
Ambulances were parked on both sides of the street as medics tended to the injured, treating civilians and firemen alike for heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation. One man sat on the ground breathing gratefully into an oxygen mask. Onlookers gaped at the sight of flames shooting a hundred feet into the air as smoke wreathed the collapsed Skyrocket in the distance.
Adele was puzzled to see Anna Halpin sitting on the curb, rubbing salve from a huge jar onto John Albanese’s hands.
“That should hold you until you get to the hospital,” she told him.
Adele and the kids came up to them. “John, that was very brave of you, going after those girls in the Virginia Reel. Are you okay?”
“Aw, hell, this is nothing,” he said, “compared to what those poor kids in the Reel went through.”
Anna nodded. “Some of them, their whole bodies were nearly burnt to a crisp. I covered them from head to toe with salve, then flagged down every passing car and told the drivers to take them to Englewood Hospital.”
Into the sober silence that followed, Jack said innocently, “That’s a big jar, where’d you get it?”
Anna had to smile. “Funny thing, Jack. I’d ordered a smaller jar for the first-aid station, but last week the medical supply company sent me a gallon jar by mistake. I was going to return it, but then the fire broke out and this salve turned out to be a godsend.”
The fire burned for two hours, at the end of which Palisades Park was a smoking ruin. This was not the 1935 fire, where only a small portion of the park had been destroyed and the rest reopened that evening. This time the fire had gutted the main midway, the very heart of the park—three-quarters of it lay in cinders. The Skyrocket was little more than a pile of burnt bones. The Scenic Railway had gone up, in John Winkler’s words, “in a single blast.” The grand old Dentzel Carousel on which Adele had taken her wedding vows had also been ravaged; all that remained of the painted ponies were charred stumps of wood clinging to brass poles. The administration building, the Funhouse, Penny Arcade, Casino Bar—all gone. The only attractions left untouched were the pool and bathhouse, Bobsled coaster, and free-act stage. It was speculated that the fire began when sparks off a hoisting cable ignited oily rags in a storage room below the Virginia Reel.
Worse, one hundred and fifty people had been injured, twenty-four requiring hospital care, seven critically—and all of these between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.
That could have been any of us, Adele thought numbly.
Irving Rosenthal went consolingly from person to person, reassuring them that he and his brother would rebuild Palisades. Adele almost snapped at him, Who gives a shit, Irving?
When the embers had cooled, Adele and the children went into the parking lot and found what remained of their old Studebaker: a blackened chassis squatting in four pools of melted rubber. Two cars down, a woman stood weeping over the burnt-out shell of her sedan. “I don’t care about the car,” she explained tearfully to Adele. “But there was a photo in the glove compartment of my boy. He’s with the invasion in France. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, and now I’ve lost the only photo I have of him.”
Adele put her arms around the woman as she wept, and she shed no tears for the Studebaker. She used a telephone at Johnny Duke’s to call her brother James, asking if he could take her and the kids back to Edgewater.
There the children fell asleep quickly, exhausted, but Adele remained awake for hours, the heat outside still oppressive even late into the night. The courage she had mustered to get her through the cataclysm dissolved and she lay
in bed sobbing and alone. The thought of how close to death she and her children had come made her sick. The thought of returning to Palisades, even in the distant future, made her even sicker.
Over the course of the next two weeks, all seven of the most severely burned youngsters would die at Englewood Hospital.
Even after writing its brutal signature on so many lives, the heat wave would not loosen its grip on the Northeast. Thunderstorms bellowed and raged, turning daytime skies as black as the soot and smoke that had shrouded Palisades Park. Driving rain, gusting wind, and lightning strikes raked the New York metropolitan area. Even so, it was gentle compared to the storm that was raging in Adele’s heart.
12
THE ROSENTHALS ESTIMATED DAMAGES to Palisades at a million dollars and wasted no time in fulfilling Irving’s promise to rebuild. Within a week the U.S. government had granted them priority in acquiring the necessary building materials, strictly regulated due to the war, judging Palisades vital to morale by providing recreation to servicemen. Perhaps, too, the government could now begin to see an end to that war, since that same week Allied forces liberated Paris. Irving Rosenthal put the sunniest face on the disaster that he could, announcing that he would create “a bigger, better and safer playground than ever dreamed of by park owners before” and that the new Palisades would open on Easter Sunday, 1945.
The true tragedy of the fire was the loss of seven young lives and the injuries suffered by many more, but it also exacted an economic toll on the concessionaires whose livelihoods had been wiped out in the blaze. They lost everything—their stands, their stock, a full season’s income. Those who could quickly replace the tools of their trade jumped onto the carnival circuit. Hardest hit was Helen Cuny, who just that season had elected not to renew the insurance on her stands: “I thought, ‘I haven’t had anything happen in thirty-five years, I’m not going to worry about it,’” she told Adele. “In hindsight my timing might have been better.” She lost eighteen thousand dollars in merchandise, including stock purchased for the next season, yet never considered folding her tent, vowing to return in ’45.
Adele had insurance, but it would take months before she saw a dime of it. Of more immediate concern was the loss of income for that season: without it they had only Eddie’s servicemen’s allowance of seventy-two dollars a month. Fighting back panic, Adele decided the only thing to do was to get a job.
Jobs were plentiful these days, but not necessarily ones to her liking. She had done some waitressing before going to Palisades, but the pay was low—as little as twenty cents an hour, plus tips. The real money to be made was in the defense industry, factory jobs that had, with the advent of the war, been opened up to women in greater numbers than ever before. Women could earn between forty and sixty dollars a month on the assembly line, and in most cases required only minimal training. There was no shortage of defense factories in Edgewater, and Adele had no trouble securing employment at the Ford Motor Plant where Eddie had worked before gallivanting off to the South Pacific in pursuit of guts and glory. She was given a position on the line, assembling and installing light switches in Jeeps being made for our Russian allies.
She had thought the atmosphere inside the French fry stand was greasy, but inside the assembly building the air was thick with the smell of motor oil, and the ventilation system merely stirred the viscous grease in the air like chicken fat congealing in soup. The building was a high-ceilinged barn illuminated with dead white fluorescent light that would have done justice to a police interrogation cell. The ambient noise around her was loud and constant, a clanging racket of gears shifting inside conveyor belts, the triphammer stutter of rivets being driven into metal, the gunning of engines being tested, the hiss of blowtorches spitting fire.
But for Adele the worst part was being forced to wear slacks—dresses presented too much risk of getting your skirt caught in a gear or motor or wheel base—and, even worse, having to cover her long blonde hair with a snood, a ghastly fabric hairnet that covered the back of her head and made her feel like a frumpy, middle-aged fishwife from Vladivostok. Some women at the plant actually wore these things out on the street as a proud badge of service to their country, but Adele tore hers off the instant she went off-duty. She knew she should feel some kind of pride in what she was doing, but she didn’t. She hated this place. She hated looking like a man, doing a man’s job. Eddie should have been here doing this, goddamn it, not her.
The day after the fire, Adele had sent a postal telegram to Eddie, care of the Armed Forces APO in San Francisco:
PARK DESTROYED BY FIRE. STAND LOST. CHILDREN OK. WHERE WERE YOU. ADELE.
She knew it was needlessly cruel when she sent it—but found she no longer cared.
* * *
Toni stood atop the pool’s ten-foot diving platform, watching the flames across the midway consume her parents’ concession as if it were no more than an appetizer before a really good meal. WHOOSH, and it was gone! Sparks flew like spittle across the midway and ignited the Funhouse, the exterior walls gobbled up like a snack, exposing bones of dry tinder, which were then devoured in turn. The bathhouse behind her was next for the fire to feast upon, and Toni on her high perch found herself nearly surrounded by the hungry flames. Her body was covered in sweat, she shook with fear and called for help, but there was no one to come to her aid. Where was the Human Torch? Where was Bee Kyle? She could command these flames to retreat, couldn’t she? The skies above her glowed red and the air all around her was choked with acrid smoke, making her cough up black soot. There was only one safe place to go, and that was the water below her. She stood at the edge of the diving board, telling herself to jump, but fear paralyzed her—fear of falling, of hitting the water the wrong way, her body snapping like a twig. She looked up and saw the flames converging on the pool like a blazing army battalion, eating up what little air she was able to take into her lungs. Finally her fear of the fire won out, she pushed off from the diving platform and dove into the air, a perfect swan dive, her body arcing gracefully down toward the water …
But on her way down the water ignited and burst into flame, and she found herself diving headlong into a sea of fire.
She screamed, waking herself but not really—the flames were still all around her, licking at the walls of her bedroom. Her shrieks brought Adele racing in to comfort her: “Honey, it’s okay, you’re home, you’re safe—”
The flames were quenched more easily than Toni’s fears. She hugged her mother and collapsed into sobs.
Jack came running in from his room, joining them in bed. Adele cradled them both, stroking her daughter’s back and comforting her as best she could: “Everything’s okay, you’re safe. It won’t happen again…”
She was wrong. It happened again the next night. And the night after that. And every night for weeks to come.
* * *
Eddie opened the small envelope addressed to “Seaman First Class Edward Stopka, APO 708” to find a telegram from Adele, which alarmed him even before he’d read it: why would she send a telegram if not bad news? Her terse, carefully chosen words had the desired effect upon him: shock, confusion, fear, shame. Palisades burned down? All of it? Thank God the kids were okay, but were they there when it happened, were they really okay? Finally, there was no mistaking her intent in that mocking, angry last line:
WHERE WERE YOU.
Now he asked himself the same question.
I’m on an island in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean, he answered, instead of being with my family when they were in danger.
He balled the telegram up in his hand but couldn’t bring himself to toss it, even with that barb in its tail, and stuffed it in his trouser pocket.
Adele would surely have known that news was slow to reach the South Pacific and that the telegram would arrive well before any newspaper accounts—and that between the time he wired back and she responded, Eddie would spend several days agonizing over just how close to harm’s way his wife and children had come
and what the full extent of damage to the park and their business had been. It was her punishment for his leaving them, and he understood that, understood the hurt and sense of abandonment that motivated it. If her feelings of anger and betrayal were as painful as the helpless disgrace he felt now, he could hardly blame her.
He wired back:
SO SORRY NOT THERE WISH ANYTHING I COULD HAVE BEEN. PLEASE CLARIFY WHETHER TONI AND JACK AT FIRE. HOW MUCH DAMAGE TO PARK. LOVE TO ALL WILL WIRE MORE MONEY. EDDIE.
He wired her all that remained of his Navy pay for that month.
In his quarters, Eddie sat down and wrote a long letter to Toni and Jack, telling them how much he missed them and how much he wished he were there, but that their mother was a strong woman and would take care of them until the day he came back. The only bright spot for him was that that day seemed to be getting closer. In addition to the good news out of Europe, the United States in June had begun bombing the Japanese home islands, starting with the island of Kyushu. A month later, the Americans wrested Saipan away from the enemy, and in August, Guam fell to U.S. forces. The slow tide of history was finally turning in the direction of the Allies.
To calm himself, he went back to working on another tiki, his fifth so far this year. This time Eddie was using his chisel to sculpt a wide-mouthed, jagged-eyed Kū out of a six-inch palm log, lopped off clean and straight at the bottom, which he would hollow out from the top. His idea was to create a tiki mug, in the vein of the ceramic glasses he had seen at Trader Vic’s. After he hollowed it out, he would burnish it with a fine sandpaper and varnish it with shellac from the paint shop. He tried to lose himself in his carving, telling himself there was nothing else he could do for Adele and the kids until he knew more about what had happened.
He turned the mug-to-be over in his hand, appraising the hollow eye sockets that seemed suddenly to be staring into his soul.