Free Palisades Park by Alan Brennert Page A

escaped unscathed, drove them all home to Bergen Boulevard. It was only after Adele put the kids to bed and kissed them goodnight that she sat down at the kitchen table, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed into helpless tears—the stress and terror of the past five hours finally taking their toll. Eddie went to her and held her, feeling kind of shaky himself.
    “Sssh, sshh,” he said soothingly, “it’s okay, we’re all okay…”
    “We could’ve been killed, ” Adele gasped out between sobs. “Antoinette and Jack could’ve been orphans!”
    “But they’re not. Everybody got out safe.”
    “Eddie, what if they’d been there? What if my mother had taken them to the pool today?”
    “They still would’ve gotten out safely.”
    “I’ll never let them set foot in that damned park again!”
    “Fires can just as easily happen in apartment houses.”
    “Oh, go to hell,” she snapped, but she only held him tighter.
    When Eddie dropped by the park the next morning, he saw hundreds of workmen busily hosing down the midway, tearing down the gutted remains of rides, digging up the blackened stumps of trees, and rebuilding concession stands. Eddie helped out a little with the latter, cutting some corner posts and roof joists, until construction boss Joe McKee wandered by and told him, “If you think you’re getting paid for this, you’re nuts.” Eddie laughed but McKee was serious: “For Chrissake, Eddie, you ate enough smoke yesterday to fill a chimney. Take a break, will ya?”
    The park opened as usual at noon, and for the first time since his trip here in 1922, Eddie found himself at Palisades without a job to do. So he did something he’d wanted to do for years: take a roller-coaster ride. The Big Scenic had suffered fire damage, the troublesome Cyclone had been demolished last year, so that left the Skyrocket. It was a great ride with steep climbs and stomach-churning hairpin curves—and at the summit of the first hill, Eddie looked down and saw again that enchanted island in the sky, no less magical than it had been thirteen years ago.
    By July Fourth weekend, Eddie was working at a newly rebuilt stand with a brand-new cotton candy machine and popcorn popper, alongside the same old Lew (minus one appendix). Lew fancied himself a jaded carny who’d seen it all before, but even he was impressed: “Jumpin’ Jesus,” he said, chewing around his cigar. “These Rosenthal boys really mean business. ”
    *   *   *
    After a brisk Fourth, life at the park proceeded as usual. In a publicity stunt, an American Indian wrestler named Chief Little Wolf began training for the world wrestling championship at Palisades and performed exhibitions in the ballroom. The ballroom manager, Clem White, also had a good instinct for musical acts, and “Whitey” belied his name with his interest in black jazz musicians. One of the first such bookings came in August, when the ballroom hosted an all-Negro band fronted by “Mrs. Louis Armstrong”—Lil Hardin Armstrong, Satchmo’s wife and the composer of some of his biggest hits. The music drifting out of the ballroom that evening reminded Eddie of the blues songs he had heard down South, and he longed to visit the ballroom on dinner break, if Lew could spare him. “Yeah, sure,” Lew said, “but God knows what you see in that nigger music.”
    There was a time this word, spoken as off handedly as Lew used it, would not have drawn Eddie’s attention. He might’ve even used it himself in the Ironbound, when players were selected for sandlot softball teams: Okay, you get the Polack, the wop, and the Mick, and I’ll take the nigger and the Jew. It was, he thought then, more descriptive than derogatory.
    Or so he thought until the day he was walking down a street in rural Alabama, and a young colored man walking ahead of him was suddenly set upon, like dogs on a crow, by three enraged white men. “Uppity coon,” one of them spat out, “where the hell you