Close to Shore

by Michael Capuzzo

  His fine reputation earned Dr. Vansant referrals from doctors in Philadelphia as well as from outlying towns and other cities. His thriving practice allowed him to acquire many pieces of Philadelphia real estate in addition to his stately home on Spruce Street, substantial holdings in railroad stocks and bonds, and a seashore house in Cape May, New Jersey, a fashionable enclave of Baltimore and Philadelphia society, where the family summered. He belonged to the Union League, one of the nation's most prestigious private clubs, where he dined with actors, titans of industry, and statesmen such as President Rutherford B. Hayes. The doctor's wife, Louisa, the former Louisa Epting of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, was an heiress to one of the great fortunes in the Age of Coal, and a grande dame of Philadelphia society.

  But when he counted his blessings, the doctor placed his family ahead of his material bounty. He was a devout member of Walnut Street Presbyterian Church, where the pastor denounced the excessive materialism of the modern age, and Dr. Vansant hewed to the Victorian conviction that home, his wife, and four children were the sacred harbor in the tempest of the world. There were, contrary to modern perceptions, emotional and playful Victorian fathers, but Dr. Vansant was not one of them. To his three daughters and son he turned the stoic, disciplined countenance of nineteenth-century manhood. Yet there is little doubt, according to family members, that Eugene Vansant shared the Victorian sentiment for family. As English author John Ruskin's father, a wine merchant, once wrote: “Oh! How dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side and with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy.”

  The Biter with the Jagged Teeth

  The shark's life began with a male and female entwined. Other fish reproduced without touching, but for the shark's parents there had been courtship, albeit in its most rudimentary form—chase. In ancient times Aristotle was struck by the intimacy of shark mating, but the union of great whites has never been witnessed by a human being. Scientists can reconstruct the moment only based on their understanding of other sharks.

  Somewhere in the Atlantic, male and female circled each other with supreme grace. The male grabbed the pectoral or side fin of a female and the brutal choreography began. Each would have been at least twelve to fourteen years old to be of sexual maturity—huge, practiced predators. The male, equipped with two claspers, or pseudo-penises, inserted one sideways into the female's cloaca, the reproductive opening. If there is implied intimacy in union, the tenderness ended there; biting and slashing left the female bleeding like the victim of an attack. Her remarkably tough skin protected her from some of the worst of the biting during intercourse.

  The union produces something rare in the ocean: the embryo of Carcharodon carcharias, named from the Greek harcaros (teeth), karcharias (shark), sometimes translated as “the biter with the jagged teeth.” The embryo shared a family tree, a phylum, and a subphylum with Homo sapiens. The shark was an individual, nurtured in a womb, attached to its mother by an umbilical cord. Like man, the developing cells of the embryo differentiated into a symmetrical form, vertebrae, a brain, a jaw, intestines, dermal skin; from the same layer of embryonic tissue that produced the dermal skin arose distinct teeth. The shark shared the womb with eight to ten other “pups,” all attached to individual umbilical cords, all being nurtured by their mother. During gestation, the shark's brain triggered a simple equation: life=food=life. The life was very close, and the shark attacked—killed and fed, devouring its mother's fertilized and unfertilized eggs. So the shark began life as a kind of in utero cannibal. Twelve to fourteen months after conception, it emerged having won the most elemental of sibling rivalries—the privilege to be born.

  The shark began not, as most fish did, as a helpless egg, one of millions adrift in the sea to be plucked by predators, a good-luck-to-you discharge, a primitive lottery drawing for life. It came out of the womb four to five feet long, fifty to eighty-five pounds, hunting. The shark had no air bladder for buoyancy, like most fish, so it had to keep moving, moving and killing and eating, or it would sink to the depths and die.

  There was no playful puppyhood, no more nurturing from parents, no innocent gamboling with brothers and sisters. The newborn shark fled them as one would an enemy—fled its mother, especially. Her instinct was to eat the nearest food source. Nature pumped her full of hormones that diminished her appetite temporarily. Mother's parting gift to her pups was to give them a brief window of escape before she devoured them.

  The waters off Long Island were cool, to the shark's liking. Even to scientists in the twenty-first century, the birthing of Carcharodon carcharias is veiled in mystery. Yet the great white was probably born off Montauk, as early as 1908, one of the few places scientists have seen populations of pups.

  In the Atlantic, off the eastern tip of Long Island, the fish moved at the speed of a walking man, so slowly it seemed hardly to be swimming at all. The slow speed was vastly deceptive. When aroused the fish was alarmingly quick, capable of speeds of perhaps thirty miles per hour. It darted and fed gluttonously on small fish and squid in the early months, but grew slowly. Its pyramidal head carried rows and backup rows of smallish teeth—baby teeth. Speed was its chief defense at this size, when the shark was young and vulnerable to larger predators. Like a mackerel or tuna, it flew on the power of a sickle-shaped tail, but unlike them its skin was covered with thousands of tiny sharp denticles, miniature teeth that aided speed and stealth. The navy tried to emulate this design for its submarines but was unable to duplicate it. Speedo, the swimsuit manufacturer, succeeded in mimicking the denticles in its full-body suits to give swimmers added speed. But there were important differences. On the shark, the denticles were like razor-sharp sandpaper. A man who brushed against them would be instantly bloodied. The baby fish was a missile of teeth.

  As winter approached, the waters south of Long Island gradually cooled. As a large predator, the great white needed a huge home range to find big prey, and cooler waters expanded its range. Soon the shark began to migrate south as far as the cooler waters and available prey would take it—in the winter, as far south as Florida. Come late spring and summer, the warm, wet season in the subtropics, the shark, preferring cooler water, headed north.

  All its movements were in shallow waters now, near shore. As a full-grown adult, huge and unassailable, the great white would be capable of open-ocean migrations—in the deep where prey was scarce—capable of crossing between continents in search of new hunting territory. Yet now it stayed near shore, near familiar and abundant prey. The shoreline was its world, the natural habitat of Carcharodon carcharias. The young shark would range out in waters as deep as sixty to eighty feet and swim into waters four feet deep—or shallower, if it was chasing something. It chased seals up on the rocks. The young shark was equipped to follow its prey wherever it fled, almost all the way up onto shore.

  To Be Different from What Has Been

  Butchers' carts and icemen's carriages moved sluggishly behind the great houses as Dr. Vansant strolled back toward his home. The Gothic towers of the University of Pennsylvania, modeled after Oxford and Cambridge, swam high in the brightening sky. A neighborhood park was still but for wrens flitting between trees and the statues of Charles Dickens and Little Nell. The peace of Saturday morning reigned at the City Hospital and Almshouse, where the doctor had interned and knew well the nightly bellowing from delirium tremens in the drunk wards and the miserable shrieking in the madhouse. Dr. Vansant's colleagues, the alienists, believed mental illness could be cured by cleansing blasts of cold water and a stay in the sylvan country. Whether this was true or not, the suburbs now surrounded the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

  Dr. Vansant hurried along, his mind wandering with protective concern for the children, especially the girls sleeping in close, hot quarters on the third floor—Mary Eugenia, twenty-two; Louise, seventeen; and Eleanor, eleven. The doctor was heartened that his son Charles, the oldest, a month from his t
wenty-third birthday, had his own house now in West Philadelphia and could take care of himself. The boy was showing the independence of manhood, and even, to the doctor's delight, had a “special girl” who would soon become something more.

  Early risers respectfully tipped their hats to the doctor, whom they saw often in dark suit and derby hat, carrying his black bag, making his rounds in a hansom cab. His seersucker summer going-to-the-seashore suit was a sign of wealth. Lightweight suits were unheard of at the turn of the century outside the deep south. Most men possessed only one trusty, heavy blue serge.

  Number 4038 stood in the deep shade of American sycamores. Behind the wrought-iron fence rose the perfume of a small English garden. The Packard, one of the first automobiles on Spruce Street, was parked in back, at the servants' entrance. The house was only twenty feet wide, yet, reflecting the hunger for space as the first professional class sprawled westward, it was immense beyond the façade, stretching a hundred and twenty feet back, an imposing five thousand square feet in all.

  In the kitchen the doctor found the plain cook, who handed him a cup of café au lait, the American breakfast drink of choice, although sometimes to settle his nerves the doctor sipped the new decaffeinated brew, Sanka. Hearty aromas rose from under the hand of the fancy cook—a breakfast of grilled plover or filet mignon, littleneck clams, mushroom omelets, and robins' eggs on toast was typical in the Vansant household, where the doctor broke the fast in the traditional nineteenth-century manner, with locally harvested foods. Boxes of Post Toasties and Kellogg's cereals were on hand for the children: John Kellogg's Corn Flakes in particular had taken over the American table in the past decade with claims of healthfulness and efficiency for the twentieth-century family in a hurry.

  Louisa, too, had succumbed to modern touches: one of the first electric refrigerators, new from Chicago; an electric stove; a toaster. The whole country marveled at the gadgets science had supplied for the kitchen. The servants baked fresh bread each morning, but the bin also was stocked with “white bread,” one of the new “pure” factory-made foods said to be an improvement on nature itself, a wonder of machine efficiency, milled with the wheat germ removed. Not until the next year, when half of American men weren't healthy enough to fight in World War I, were white bread's nutritional deficiencies recognized. Dr. Vansant had never heard of a “vitamin,” nor had anyone else.

  As the lilting voices of the girls trailed through the rambling Victorian, Charles clattered into the kitchen, joining the family for breakfast. The children were uncommonly excited that morning, and Dr. Vansant responded severely. He commanded the dining room table with stern visage, demanding silence while the servants brought silver trays of food. “If the children were not sitting at the dining room table before Dr. Vansant himself was seated at the head of the table,” a relative recalled, “they were sent to their rooms without eating. The doctor was a true Victorian patriarch.”

  As breakfast commenced, Dr. Vansant, without lifting his eyes from the Ledger, swiftly corrected his daughters' posture. The hollow of their backs could not touch the chair. A man was the lord of his castle and his domain extended not just over the children. Were Louisa to venture a comment at table, it was not unusual for Dr. Vansant to silence his wife with an abrupt “Ta-ta, Lulu, I don't believe it was your turn to engage in conversation.”

  Mary Eugenia bristled at her father's dominance of her mother. That year she marched in a suffragettes' parade in downtown Philadelphia. She cheered when President Wilson, in a speech in Atlantic City, promised his support for women's right to vote. Dr. Vansant had little sympathy for the rights women were claiming in those days. His plans for the futures of Mary Eugenia and Louise were one year of finishing at a fine college in Massachusetts (Wellesley for the former, Smith for the latter), then back to Philadelphia to attend the Pierce Business School until the right man came along. It had been necessary only for the boy, Charles, to receive a full university education.

  It was a man's world in 1916. Father answered his divine calling by working outside the home, providing for his family while also serving society's greater good. Eugene was part of America's first bourgeoisie, the white Anglo-Saxon professional class whose sons would prosper in the Ivy League, on Wall Street, and in corporate boardrooms in the first half of the twentieth century, who would entrench their families as the American elite. At 4038 Spruce Street, all such dreams rested on the boy.

  Mother's mission was in the home, the sacred crucible of Victorian life. Louisa was the family chronicler, creating meaning and a sense of place. In her home she expressed the richness and variety of life in a wealth of different rooms that were just beginning in those days to be swallowed up, one by one, by the modern “living room.” There was the music room, where Mary Eugenia, Louise, and Eleanor practiced the piano lessons published daily in the women's section of the Ledger, and there was the library, study, and conservatory.

  But it was in the parlor, where strangers and social inferiors were not invited, that the story of the family was told. In the parlor the woman of the house expressed, through carefully chosen antiques, heirlooms, photographs, daguerreotypes, travel curios, and objets, a series of complex and interwoven feelings intended to be experienced as art—a room telling a silent story that only family and dear friends of fine sensibilities were entitled to hear. The story told in the Vansant parlor, typical of the Victorians, was of the preciousness and loss of children. Photographs of Mary Eugenia, Louise, and Eleanor in a rowboat with Dad and Patty, the family terrier, on the lake in the Poconos, the lake where Father proposed to Mother. The girls in long white dresses at the summer home in Cape May. A grinning Charles and his friends from prep school, arm in arm on the deck of the steamer Belfast in morning suits, white pants, black vests, Arrow collars, and ties, sailing the Atlantic for a grand tour in 1912, after the Titanic sank. There, too, were black-rimmed photographs of two sons, Eugene, Jr. and William, who had succumbed to pneumonia and whooping cough in infancy.

  Louisa was so firmly rooted in the sturdy brick fortress on Spruce Street, it was difficult to leave to set up housekeeping in a hotel, and the shore itself was vaguely threatening. Young Americans in 1916 rediscovered swimming as it was invented by the Romantics—not to traverse water but to explore every sensation of the soul. The serene and reclusive sought Lord Byron's “rapture on the lonely shore/there is society where none intrudes/by the deep Sea, and music in its roar.” Sensualists “rolled in the sea, shouted like a savage, laved [their] sides like a bull in a green meadow, dived, floated and came out refreshed.” Romantic artists and poets threw themselves upon the waves “for the thrill which the very real possibility of drowning offered.”

  There was little wonder the late Victorians of Old Philadelphia were uneasy in the presence of the great heaving form of the sea and the restlessness it inspired: It was so un-Philadelphian. In the terra firma of Louisa's parlor on Spruce Street was a life inscribed by a constellation of virtues, certainties as fixed and brilliant as the stars. Philadelphia was the most comforting of big cities to call home. It proudly termed itself “the most Chinese of American cities,” changeless behind a great wall of contentment and ritual and shared belief. Louisa believed in love, beauty, honor, duty, piety, and honest work. If God didn't exist (and many since Darwin were sadly skeptical), the morality of the Holy Bible was nonetheless absolute. England and France were suitable addresses, after which the sole civilized point on the map stood, according to turn-of-the-century Philadelphia writer Christopher Morley, “at the confluence of the Biddle and Drexel families . . . surrounded by cricket teams, fox hunters, beagle packs, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.” Law or medicine, her husband's profession, were the solid occupations, followed by banking and insurance. The military or national politics were out, for they removed a man from Philadelphia. Louisa knew with certainty that the social Five Thousand never divorced. (And in the rare case that someone did, it was not with the indiscretion of the middle class).

 
Novelty was frowned upon, be it embodied by Whitman, Audubon, Eakins, or Joseph Leidy, who had introduced to the world the idea that a species of monstrously large reptiles not described in the Old Testament had existed on the far shore of the Delaware River. From a backyard in nearby Haddonfield, New Jersey, Leidy assembled the bones of a creature taller than a house, which he said had the pelvic structure of a bird, the tail of a lizard, and walked upright like a man, foraging with armlike limbs. This, Leidy said, was a Hadrosaurus foulkii, what he called a dinosaur, whose existence suggested the unimaginable idea that the world was millions of years old and had not been made exclusively for human beings.

  Philadelphia in 1916 defined itself proudly as a place lost in time, an island of Victorian virtue in a sea of American change. That year a journalist from Harper's Weekly visited the city and found the forces of tradition resolute, the nibbles of modern erosion few. “The one thing unforgivable in Philadelphia is to be new, to be different from what has been.”

  When Philadelphians ventured beyond the wall each summer, they moved in flocks to safe and sedate places favored by other Philadelphians—Northeast Harbor, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine, and Cape May. The classic Philadelphia outing—in the words of Dr. Vansant's colleague Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, contemporary of Freud and famed founder of the “rest cure”—was a leisurely walk in the woods after which “the servant busied himself with the lunch, and put the wine to cool in the brook.”