Palisades Park

  Leaving the building, Eddie offered to buy Duke dinner by way of thanks for his help. They dined at one of Duke’s favorite haunts, Tarantino’s on Palisade Avenue, where they consumed hearty helpings of spaghetti and split the bottle of pretty good whisky Bennett had given them. “Dick gets this hooch from a guy at the track,” Duke said, “who uses it to spike a nag’s water before a big race. Man, I could run a few lengths myself after this.” He looked at Eddie, snapped his fingers, and suddenly announced: “I got it!”

  “Got what?”

  “What is it they say? ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole’? You’re our Ten Foot Pole! There’s your nickname.”

  Eddie smiled and hoped not.

  The next day, with the money the Chief fronted him, Eddie went to Schweitzer’s Department Store and bought a blue worsted suit for $14.95 and three white dress shirts for 88¢ apiece. He bought some toiletries at Ghiosay’s Pharmacy and groceries at the Big Chief Market—mostly cans of pork and beans, Dinty Moore beef stew, a pound of Hills Brothers coffee—and moved into his new apartment. It was tiny, lacking in niceties—but it was his, not a carnival tent or boxcar. Maybe he couldn’t go back to his old home in Newark, but he was determined to make a new one for himself.

  Like all concessions at the park, the Chief’s candy stand—in a good location, halfway up the main midway—fronted a larger stockroom behind what the public saw, crammed with supplies, gaming equipment, or prizes. Eddie was one of two concession agents, the other a short, round man named Lew who never seemed to be without a lit cigar in his mouth. As they shook hands, Lew said, “They call you Ten Foot, don’t they?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Eddie said, appalled.

  “Word travels fast. I was on the job less than thirty minutes before I became Lew the Jew.” He shrugged with equanimity. “Whatcha gonna do?”

  Ride operators worked in shifts—four hours on, four hours off—but concessionaires didn’t have that luxury, often only having time for bathroom breaks and maybe twenty minutes to wolf down a quick meal. Lew and Eddie agreed to alternate doing the “grind,” the pitch to the crowd, while the other worked the counter and rang up sales. They spent the first day inspecting and cleaning the working parts of the candy floss machine—the copper bowl, the spinner with its colander-like holes in its surface, the heating elements—which Lew warned could be a little erratic.

  Lew also introduced Eddie to the agent next door, a veteran grind man named Jackie Bloom, who worked a “cat rack”—an old carny game in which marks tossed balls in an attempt to knock fuzzy stuffed cats off a shelf and win plush prizes. Then Eddie made the faux pas of asking, “Where’s the gaff?”—the button or lever that threw the game.

  Jackie looked at him with a mix of scorn and amusement: “You’re not working the carny anymore, kid. Everything here’s on the up-and-up. Now, that doesn’t mean this is an easy game to win. See all that fuzz on the cats? A ball can sail right through that fuzz with barely a ripple—you gotta hit the center of the cat to knock it down. But that’s not a gaff, it’s a challenge.”

  Eddie was surprised to find how much the park reminded him of the Ironbound, where so many nationalities shared just four square miles of neighborhood. Palisades was a similar melting pot: August Berni, an old-timer who ran the Penny Arcade with Phil Mazzocchi, had emigrated from Italy. Plato Guimes, originally from Greece—and looking with his pince-nez glasses like a stuffy European professor out of a Hollywood movie—had operated the shooting galleries and soda stands almost from the park’s beginning. Harry Dyer, from Colchester, England, had the mug of a street brawler but the soft heart of a carny; he co-owned many park restaurants, though not the chop suey place above the roller-skating rink, which was run by Yuan Chen. All were struggling to stay afloat after the Crash.

  But one concession agent made a particular impression on Eddie.

  Directly across the midway was a root-beer stand whose red, white, and blue awnings one day unfolded like a flower opening to the sun. It was run by two women agents—one a shapely blonde about Eddie’s age. She had a sweet face with delicate features; he found himself stealing glances at her whenever he could. When she was at work, her wavy blonde hair would periodically get in her eyes and she would blow air out of the corner of her mouth to clear her vision. Somehow Eddie found this very fetching.

  “Who’s the blonde across the way?” he asked Lew.

  “Adele something-or-other,” Lew said indifferently. “She and Lois work for Norval Jennings.”

  It wasn’t long before Eddie decided he needed a bathroom break and moseyed across the midway, pausing in front of the root-beer stand. He waited until the girl came up to the cash register at the front of the stand, opening the cash drawer to dust it out. Eddie stepped up, smiled, and said, “Hi.”

  She looked up. Her eyes were gray—not blue, not violet, but the lightest, most beautiful shade of pearl gray. They stole away Eddie’s breath.

  “Hi.” So perfunctory, she made it sound like less than one syllable.

  “I’m Eddie.”

  “I’m busy.”

  She clanged shut the cash drawer and turned away.

  Eddie’s smile sank to somewhere below his knees. He skulked off to the men’s room, and when he returned to the candy stand he concentrated on his work, doing his best to put the girl out of his mind.

  But she was hard to miss, and every time he looked across the midway he saw her working her stand, her blonde hair getting in her eyes—which Eddie now knew, maddeningly, were as lucid as pearls.

  2

  Fort Lee, New Jersey, 1930

  THAT MORNING, ADELE—still in her bathrobe, hair unwashed, utterly bereft of makeup—had answered the doorbell to find a tall, handsome man, impeccably dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, standing on the doorstep. He was a dead ringer for Greta Garbo’s onetime heartthrob John Gilbert, but Adele, suddenly conscious of an unruly lock of hair in her eyes, feared she looked less like Garbo than Harpo.

  “Does a Mr. Franklin Worth live here, ma’am?” he asked.

  And he called her ma’am. Could the day get any worse?

  She blew the hair out of her eyes and replied, “Yes. He’s my father.”

  He flashed a badge at her. “Special Agent Crais. I’m with the United States Secret Service. May I come in?”

  Holy Toledo—a real, honest-to-God G-man. “Yes, of course, come in.”

  Her mother, Marie, appeared just as the agent was showing Adele a letter addressed to President Herbert Hoover. “Have you seen this before?”

  Adele immediately recognized her father’s handwriting. Her stomach began to coil. “No,” she said. “He wrote this to the President?”

  “Just the latest in a series, I’m afraid,” the agent informed her.

  Unbeknownst to Adele or Marie, Franklin had apparently been mailing belligerent letters to President Hoover for months. Hoover had served as national conservator during the Great War; Franklin’s screeds accused him of killing the East Coast’s film industry by withholding coal needed to heat studios. Since Hoover was currently being blamed for all the ills in the country up to and including acne and cloudy days, the White House didn’t pay much attention until Franklin’s letters became overtly threatening.

  Marie was mortified beyond words, but when Adele introduced the agent to Franklin, her father appeared surprised.

  “I never wrote this,” he said as he examined the letter. Grudgingly he conceded, “I thought I’d only—thought about writing it.”

  “So when you tell the President you would like to, quote, remove his liver with a pair of garden shears, unquote,” the agent said, “you’re saying that wasn’t your actual intention?”

  “Oh Good Lord, no! I’d never really do that, not even to Hoover.”

  Adele caught the agent’s eye and mimed the tipping of a glass. Crais took a step closer to Franklin, and to the smell on his breath at eight in the morning.

  “I … think I understand,” he said
slowly. “Mr. Worth, may I suggest you refrain from writing any further letters to President Hoover.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Franklin agreed gruffly.

  As she showed him out, Adele promised the agent that in the future she and her mother would more closely monitor Franklin’s correspondence.

  He tipped his hat. “Thank you, ma’am, your country appreciates it.”

  Again with the ma’am. Adele forced a smile, then closed the door. Marie, just a few steps behind her, said, “I’m so embarrassed I could die.”

  “You’re embarrassed? He looked like John Gilbert, for God’s sake!”

  By the time Adele got to Palisades to ready the root-beer stand for tomorrow’s opening, she felt humiliated, angry, and in absolutely no mood to have some husky blond guy from across the midway put the make on her—so she bit off his head with one bite.

  But opening days always put Adele in a better mood. The next day, the park smelled of French fries, waffles, roast beef sandwiches, and sizzling hot dogs; the weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot, and crowds intent on having a good time thronged the midways. Palisades may have been just an amusement park, not Broadway, but there was still an air of theatricality about it: many concession agents not only had a signature bally but a wardrobe designed to capture attention. Kid Fiddles worked the crowd with a cowboy hat and a live horse. Jimmy Feathers, whose grocery wheel paid off in these hard times not with kewpie dolls but with food, did his bally in five different languages, which always drew a big “tip,” or crowd. Jackie Bloom wore an immaculate white linen suit, and despite the hundred fifteen-watt bulbs illuminating the prizes in his showcases, he always managed to look cool and composed:

  “Knock down a cat, win a prize! Kayo just one fuzzy feline and win a piece of fine imported china!”

  “Try your hand at the Penny Pitch, first throw is free, hit the right square with the penny and win a prize!”

  “Ride the Skyrocket, see the moon and stars up close, come hurtling back to earth and up again! Just ten cents for a Skyrocket to the stars!”

  Adele launched into her own bally:

  “Root beer, ice-cold root beer! Only legal beer in the park! Not as much fun as malt, but just as delicious and twice as foamy! C’mon, lift a glass to Carrie Nation!”

  It wasn’t the Great White Way, but it was still performing—and Adele loved to perform.

  * * *

  From across the midway, Eddie noted that the snippy blonde at the root-beer stand was building a pretty good tip with her grind. But Lew’s wasn’t half bad either: “Cotton candy, popcorn! Watch it being made, sugar spun into delectable fairy floss right before your very eyes!” Business was brisk and Eddie was kept busy providing pink clouds of candy on a stick for the crowds. Everything went smoothly until late afternoon and the sound of a loud, slurred voice emanating from Jackie Bloom’s stand next door:

  “Hey! Hey! I godda great idea—”

  Eddie glanced over to see a man bobbing on his heels like a wobbly ten-pin, who then bent over to pick something off the ground. In his back pocket was a flask, doubtless containing a recent vintage of bathtub gin.

  Eddie heard him call out, “Gotcha!”—and when the drunk stood up again he was holding a tiny white kitten in his fist, one of a new litter of woodshop cats stalking the park for scraps of food. Eddie saw where this was heading, and so did Jackie Bloom, who held up his palms and said, “Now, wait a second, pal … put the little critter down…”

  “No, no, thiz great, see?” the man announced loudly. “Use a cat—to knock down a cat! Oughta get extra points for that!” He laughed uproariously, and a few of the idiots with him laughed along.

  The kitten hissed and snarled, but he was gripping her so tightly she couldn’t lash out. Now he made a great show of winding up his pitch, like Lefty Gomez about to launch one across home plate.

  Eddie vaulted the counter of his stand, and before the drunk could let the fur fly, literally, Eddie reached out and grabbed his right arm.

  “Yeah, you’re a riot, all right,” Eddie said. “Now put the cat down.”

  Eddie squeezed the man’s arm, hard, which caused his fingers to relax their grip on the feline. Eddie reached up with his free hand, grabbed the kitten by the scruff of the neck, and let it spring out of his hand and onto the ground, where it quickly made a run for the border.

  The drunk was furious that his joke, his grand stunt, had been ruined. “Who the fug are you?” he snapped.

  “I’m the guy who just stopped you from making an even bigger knucklehead of yourself,” Eddie said mildly.

  The man glared belligerently at him but took in Eddie’s size and staggered away without further incident. Eddie was on his way back to his own stand when he noted that across the midway, the blonde at the root-beer booth was staring at him, as if noticing him for the first time. Then, catching his gaze, she quickly turned away and returned to work.

  But come midnight, closing time, Eddie was startled to find the blonde standing at his counter, asking, “Your name’s Eddie, right?”

  “Uh … yeah, that’s right.”

  “See? I’ve got a good memory, just bad manners.” She smiled sheepishly. “A girl gets so many come-ons in this business, she starts thinking every guy who looks at her cockeyed is a wolf she’s got to beat off with a stick. And I was having a bad day too. Sorry.”

  “Oh, well … that’s okay,” Eddie said magnanimously.

  “My name’s Adele Worth. I’m on my way over to the sideshow, we’re putting together a little party. You want to come along?”

  Eddie was surprised but pleased. “Sure.”

  “It’s potluck, you got anything left over?”

  Eddie filled a big bucket with cotton candy and another with popcorn; Adele cadged a tub of fries from the hot-dog vendor. As they made their way to the sideshow tent, Eddie asked, “So how long you worked here?”

  “Two seasons. But it’s just a summer job. I’m really a movie actress.”

  Eddie tried not to sound incredulous. “You are?”

  “I was in a bunch of two-reelers when I was a little girl. Fort Lee used to be the motion picture capital of the world, didn’t you know?”

  Eddie had to admit that no, he hadn’t.

  “I haven’t done any pictures in a while,” Adele admitted. “The directors say my eyes don’t photograph well because they’re so light. I’m waiting for Technicolor to become standard, then I think they’ll be an asset.”

  “I think your eyes are beautiful,” Eddie said. “Or was that a come-on?”

  She laughed. “Probably. But I’ll take it as a compliment instead.”

  They arrived at the tent housing the Palisades Park Circus Side Show—or, as Eddie knew it from the carny, a “ten-in-one,” ten acts under one tent. A line of colorful banners flapped in the breeze, each displaying illustrations of the attractions alongside breathless prose:

  ALL ACTS ALIVE ON THE INSIDE!

  FATTEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD—JOLLY IRENE!

  SUSI, THE ELEPHANT SKIN GIRL!

  CHARLES PHELAN, STRONG MAN!

  VICTOR-VICTORIA—HALF MAN, HALF WOMAN!

  HOPPE THE FROG BOY!

  They went around back, where Jolly Irene, all six hundred and fifty pounds of her, was reclining on a divan big enough to seat three people, eating pizza pies—she had several stacked up beside her—consuming them as if they were Communion wafers. Her real name was Amanda Siebert, and her husband, George, was the sideshow’s inside talker. Amanda was usually a featured performer at Coney Island, but Adolph Schwartz, the sideshow manager, lured her to Palisades for the season. “I was born in Jersey City,” Amanda told them. “I got a soft spot for Palisades.”

  Adele said, “I like your act. How you joke around with the audience.”

  “Nobody likes a sad fat girl, honey. I’m not some skinny film star like Vilma Banky and I know it, so why not have a laugh about it? Besides, what do I have to be sad about? I probably make more money than Vilm
a Banky, I’ve got a wonderful husband, and I can eat whatever I want.”

  “And you’re a star,” Adele said, with noticeable envy.

  “Star, hell. I’m a whole galaxy!” Amanda laughed.

  Eddie knew that a good fat lady could command a lot of money, even in bad times like these; but it still seemed odd to him that a beautiful girl like Adele should envy the life of a freak.

  Soon, three more performers arrived: Charlotte Vogel, aka Susi the Elephant Skin Girl, and Julius and Erna Keuhnel, who, like Charlotte, came from Germany. Julius was Charlotte’s manager and she lived with them in their apartment in Manhattan. “You do the magic act, don’t you, Mrs. Keuhnel?” Adele said. “You don’t see many women magicians around.”

  “Yes, well, if women now have the right to vote,” Mrs. Keuhnel said wryly, “why should we not have the right to saw other women in half?”

  Charlotte—Susi—was a young German woman who suffered from ichthyosis, her skin resembling the thick, gray hide of an elephant, though her face was normal and quite pretty. Like Irene, she had performed at Coney, where she said she’d had one particularly ardent fan:

  “There was a gentleman, if you wish to call him that, who came to every one of my shows and began loitering around the tents waiting for me to leave. Eventually he proposed marriage. And when I turned him down, he went right to work making time with Lena the Leopard Girl!”

  Amanda hooted at that. “Oh, I had a couple guys like that. One wanted me to sit on his face. I told him, ‘Are you nuts? I’ll kill you!’ He said, ‘Yes, but I’d die a happy man!’” After a burst of laughter all around, Amanda said, with a tender glance toward her husband, “Boy, was I ever lucky to find George. See what he gave me last year for our eighth wedding anniversary?” She showed off a jeweled wristwatch that glinted even in the dimness. Adele and Charlotte cooed enviously at it, but it seemed to Eddie that “Susi” was envying more than just a piece of jewelry.

  After an hour of convivial talk, the party broke up and Eddie and Adele walked together down to Palisade Avenue. “We had an alligator-skin girl on the Sheeshley Show,” Eddie recalled, “but she wasn’t as smart and sweet as Susi—Charlotte. She just seemed kind of … damaged.”