Close to Shore

by Michael Capuzzo

  It was an unspoken rule that a proper Philadelphian did not swim in the ocean. The upper classes rode horseback, painted portraits, went on hikes and walking parties. To swim was decidedly middlebrow, messy, and perhaps dangerous. The sea held mysteries a Quaker saw no sense in divining. Philadelphia's first Jersey shore summer refuge was Long Branch, and there, according to Charles Biddle, father of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, occurred “the archetypal confrontation of Quaker caution and the wild waves.”

  In Louisa's day, it was frowned upon for both sexes to be in the water at the same time, even a body of water as big as the Atlantic. Ocean swimming was chaste. In her time European women entered the ocean in horse-drawn “bathing machines,” small, roofless cabins on wheels complete with windows and drapes, where a modest woman could enjoy the healing waters of the sea free from prying male eyes.

  The modern beach was a hedonistic Xanadu that shocked her and Dr. Vansant. In the caress of the warm sea (which the Romantics equated with sex), the styles and mores of the past were relaxed, flesh bared, the cult of the body risen, Pan idealized, Venus reborn. To the sea, young men and women vanished in roadsters, entwined in the privacy of a movable parlor. At the ocean they kissed in the seaside bathhouses where burlesque postcards were sold. Women sheared their hair, smoked cigarettes, and drove automobiles. Young women bared arms and shoulders to the sun and waves. The power of the female form inspired gawkers, shocked or aroused. There was alcohol, dancing, suggestive songs. Lousia and Eugene, like many Americans, could deny “the problem of the young” until F. Scott Fitzgerald raised the banner for wanton youth in 1920 in This Side of Paradise, revealing that most nice girls in fashionable cities had kissed many boys. Yet at the seashore in 1916 there was ample evidence of the new freedoms to worry them. The dissolution of the formal nineteenth-century world they knew was first revealed at the beach, as if the restive ocean were the agent of change and the shoreline the advance guard.

  The most shocking development was in the water, where the rising hems of swimming costumes became a battle line drawn by the Victorian establishment. In that summer of 1916, there was a cultural revolution over the ideal female form—the cover-all Victorian skirt-and-trouser bathing costumes gave way to lithe, form-fitting swimsuits, and the modern American image, practical and sensual, was born. The appearance of languorous female arms, legs, and calves as public erotic zones roused a national scandal. On Coney Island, police matrons wrestled women in the new clinging wool “tube” suits out of the surf. In Chicago, police escorted young women from the Lake Michigan beach because they had bared their arms and legs. In Atlantic City, a woman was attacked by a mob for revealing a short span of thigh. The American Association of Park Superintendents stepped into the fray with official Bathing Suit Regulations, requiring trunks “not shorter than four inches above the knee” and skirts no higher than “two inches above the bottom of the trunks.” Police took to the beaches with tape measures and made mass arrests.

  Louisa, reading the newspaper, worried about the potential ruckus awaiting at the Jersey shore. Atlantic City—the glittering sea metropolis of four hundred hotels and fifty thousand guests only ten miles south of tiny Beach Haven—was a seat of the rebellion, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported. Under the headline “Startling Hosiery Fad Rules the Beach,” the Bulletin noted that ladies wore bathing socks rolled down instead of up, exposing the knee. This moment was a turning point in American fashion; once that line was crossed, more flesh and less fabric became the style of the twentieth century. “The very modish thing . . . is reminiscent of the Highland laddies in the wee kilties, which permit the air of Heaven to play freely on their braw limbs,” the Bulletin noted. “The mode is popular among the damsels who have dimples in their knees . . . The lifeguards are primed to remonstrate if the craze continues. ‘It draws too many sharks,' they explain.”

  It was Dr. Vansant's masculine privilege to read the Public Ledger uninterrupted each morning at breakfast. Sometimes he retired to his Morris chair in the library, a cozy, dark, wood-paneled room decorated specifically for the man of the house, who had time for the leisure of reading. Here were displayed his fine old books, his busts of Shakespeare and Aristotle, his collection of minerals (to illuminate his interests in learning, history, and the natural sciences), his humidor, and his stack of Saturday Evening Posts to be perused as he sat by the small fireplace, swept clean of the ashes from December's chill. The furniture and objets—heavy wooden European pieces, silver ice bucket with carved lion's-head handles—expressed the grandeur of the past.

  The newspaper lay on the ottoman, raising a dusty smell of lead ink, and Dr. Vansant could not have been blamed if he lifted the broadsheets with trepidation. Big headlines, photographs, advertising, telegraph dispatches from Europe—it was all new, as startling as the messages it conveyed. The narrow columns of gray nineteenth-century type had never revealed a world so consistently urgent, not during Reconstruction or the bank panic of 1893 or even the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, during Vansant's first year of medical school. For much of the nineteenth century, the Philadelphia Public Ledger had greeted Eugene like a genial friend, the voice of Republican saneness. A visitor at the turn of the century observed: “Philadelphia has its own dry drab newspapers, which are not like any other newspapers in the world, and contain nothing not immediately concerning Philadelphia. Consequently no echo from New York enters here—nor any from anywhere else.” Lately, the Ledger's companionship had failed the doctor.

  Across the Atlantic, south of Neuve Chapelle, France, the British were firing a million shells a day, lighting the night sky for thirty miles “brilliant as if with the glare of the aurora borealis.” The Germans, in a triumph of military science, had recently turned air into a weapon, poison gas. The federal income tax, levied for the first time in 1913, was soon to be doubled to pay for increasing government expenses, including construction of the Panama Canal. The Treasury Department announced a new tax on inheritance over $50,000, and the doctor's fortune far exceeded that. The tax would compromise the legacy he planned to leave his children.

  The doctor thought of his son when he read that Wilson was being pushed toward war on two continents. Declaring he would rather be judged by the “verdict of mankind” than by the election of November 7, the President had dispatched the 1st and 2nd infantries of the Pennsylvania National Guard from Philadelphia to Texas on troop trains as a protection force against the border raids of the Mexican Pancho Villa.

  In Philadelphia, forty thousand machinists were expected to strike that morning for the rights to an eight-hour workday and overtime—unheard of and excessive rights, the doctor believed, advocated by the Democrat Wilson. What had happened to the rugged, self-reliant Republican nation Dr. Vansant had known? The city grand jury was investigating the “slaughter” of sixty-three pedestrians by motorcars in the past six months. Angry motorists were running down staid pedestrians and poky horse-carriages in a war over the streets. Many men and women simply didn't know how to operate the fast, jerky machines. Motorcar salesmen were supposed to provide five lessons before letting a man leave the dealership, but salesmen often skipped the last few sessions, the Ledger reported gravely, inspiring the newspaper to publish a daily driving lesson. That morning's tip concerned a fundamental element of driving in reverse: One must stop before moving ahead for “the car cannot move in two directions at once.”

  The doctor found no succor from the sports columns either. Grover Cleveland Alexander suffered a rare loss to the New York Giants as a Phillies infielder “stuck his finger into a hot grounder and was added to the hospital roll.” The proud Philadelphia Athletics were walloped by the Yankees 7–0 despite the presence in the A's lineup of the game's greatest slugger, Frank “Home Run” Baker. (Babe Ruth was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series that fall, and was said to have a promising swing.)

  Dr. Vansant was proud of his famous neighbor, Pr
ofessor William Curtis Farabee, who returned from South America having discovered “the Garden of Eden of British Guiana.” The explorer added to the archaeological museum's peerless collection a few shrunken heads of the Jivaro and measurements of the limbs of the Macusl, Wapiatiana, Prokoto, Zapara, and Asumara tribes. But Dr. Vansant was astonished to read that many Americans were disappointed in Farabee's expedition. It was a great age of exploration, when Peary reached for the North Pole, and many believed Farabee had set out to find “the lost world” of Jurassic dinosaurs on a remote Amazonian plateau discovered by the British Professor Challenger in 1912. Dr. Vansant was mystified that the average man didn't seem to understand that both the Jurassic dinosaur and Professor Challenger were fictions in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 bestseller The Lost World. Indeed Dr. Vansant was frequently struck by the ignorance of the public in scientific matters.

  Aside from the report on infantile paralysis, which, to his relief, had not reached the southern Jersey shore, the doctor was keenly interested in the War Department's recent analysis of the new class of German U-boats, said to be the most devastating marine weapons ever invented. They were capable of crossing the Atlantic entirely underwater, and according to the Ledger, mid-Atlantic seaports such as Baltimore, Atlantic City, Wilmington, and Cape May were the most likely targets of attack, for much of the nation's coal, iron, oil, and munitions was produced within an eighty-mile radius of Philadelphia.

  The family had been disappointed when the doctor announced that they were not going to their summer home in Cape May, with its Baltimore and Philadelphia society, Queen Anne mansions, and familiar rhythms. Charles was especially dejected; he cherished his hours sailing in his own boat. Louisa, however, was relieved, for she fretted about her son's safety in the sailboat, far at sea. Given the headlines in the Ledger, Dr. Vansant thought Beach Haven, a remote, little-known family resort, was a prudent choice—the safest possible place.

  An editorial in another newspaper that summer left the doctor pondering the new century. Noting an unusual occurrence of wars and revolutions, strange crimes, divorces, heat waves, and unforeseen hurricanes, the editorial writer pondered the possibility that technology had destroyed a natural equilibrium, setting something amiss in this “erratic era”:

  Mariners tell of strange storms arising, seemingly, from convulsions beneath the deep rather than in the heavens above. Can it be that the forces of destruction let loose by man have been mighty enough to throw the terrestrial adjustment off its balance and put the universe out of whack? Is it possible that our submarine prowlings and torpedoings have disturbed the Atlantic currents, or displaced the Spanish mainspring? Something certainly is wrong somewhere, and it would seem to be up to the geodetic gentlemen to solve the matter 'ere we monkey further with forces that may turn upon us to our complete annihilation.

  The Most Frightening Animal on Earth

  Fortunately for everything else that swam, the great white grew slowly. Its body stiffened along three parallel muscles that ran from snout to tail. With the new bulk came a decline in speed, and the shark's narrow teeth, once ideal for snaring fish, broadened out so that catching small fish grew almost impossible. Adaptation was not difficult. The shark's size and strength were enormous advantages now, and its speed still remarkable for its size.

  Like an infant child, the shark's head had rapidly achieved adult size, expanding massively. Twenty-six teeth bristled along its top jaw, twenty-four along the bottom jaw. Behind these functional teeth, under the gum, lay successive rows of additional teeth, baby teeth that were softer but quickly grew and calcified. Every two weeks or so, the entire double row of fifty functional teeth simply rolled over the jaw and fell out, and a completely new set of fifty rose in its place. White and new, strong and serrated. Broken or worn teeth were not an issue for the apex predator.

  Little is known about the shark's appetite, except it was enormous, and like a man who didn't know where his next meal was coming from, the fish gorged itself. The waters of the subtropics, off southern Florida, had lured the shark that winter, emerald shallows crowded with prey. As the shark grew, its appetite shifted from small, cold-blooded fish to large, warm-blooded creatures, luscious with blubber and fat, rich with the oil that it would store in its liver for long periods to prevent starvation. It was a lesson in survival, and the shark was survival's star pupil.

  With quick thrusts of its dorsal fin, the shark plunged to the bottom of the ocean, huge eyes widening to absorb light from the gloom. On the surface it tore great hunks of blubber from the carcasses of whales. It was capable of astonishing leaps out of the water, rocketing almost vertically to the surface, the huge fish hanging in midair, oyster-black top and glistening white bottom separated by a ragged line, like a child's charcoal drawing, unusually small triangular teeth set in a crude pointed snout, and round, fist-sized, expressionless black eyes.

  The shark was designed hydrodynamically, and with its new bulk it moved with the majesty of a Boeing 747, master of the seas. After eight years, the shark had nearly doubled in size—to almost eight feet, and more than three hundred pounds. It remained years away from sexual maturity, less than half grown. It was a shadow of the nearly twenty-foot goliath that would bite big sea turtles cleanly in two, shell and all—it was merely a juvenile. Yet already it was as close to invincible as a living thing can be.

  The shark knew, instinctively, not to fear the behemoth shadows of the blue whale—the largest creature in the sea—who had somehow bypassed the laws of scale of predation and grazed on plankton and plantlike krill. There was nothing to fear, either, from fifteen-foot tiger sharks, formidable man-eaters that attacked almost everything else. Already the shark was larger or more powerful than almost anything else in the sea; it was, according to Harvard naturalist E. O. Wilson, “with the saltwater crocodile and Sundarbans tiger the last expert predator of man still living free . . . by all odds the most frightening animal on Earth, swift, relentless, mysterious and unpredictable.”

  Only two creatures in the sea, scientists believe, would be emboldened to attack a seven- or eight-foot great white aside from another, much larger, great white. The first is speculative, but ichthyologists believe the huge sperm whale, armed with impressive teeth and already documented as an attacker of the giant megamouth shark, must also seize great whites from time to time. The second attacker of great whites does so rarely, it is believed, but an attack is documented. In October 1997, veteran biologist Peter Pyle was riding his seventeen-foot shark research whaler near California's Farallon Islands when he witnessed “a very amazing sight . . . [an] orca with a ten-foot white shark in its mouth.” Two female killer whales—the smallest one twelve to fifteen feet long—had been seen killing and eating a sea lion when apparently the white shark investigated and was not welcome. An hour later, the orca was seen pushing the shark along as it writhed in its mouth. But the orca did not consume the white. Instead the whale eventually dropped the eviscerated shark and it sank, while gulls began a “feeding frenzy on the liver and other bits of the shark floating to the surface.”

  Yet the juvenile shark cruising in the subtropics knew no natural enemies and felt no fear. Perhaps it felt something resembling curiosity, or excitement, as it searched ceaselessly for appropriate prey, but not fear. The great white sliced through the cool, shallow waters of southeastern Florida with princely arrogance that winter. Amberjacks, dolphins, other sharks, and small whales fled its approach or died swiftly for their mistake.

  In the late spring the shark was swimming slowly several miles off the coast of southeast Florida, somewhere between the Keys and West Palm Beach, when it was seized by a current much warmer than its liking. The shark resisted, but the current was unimaginably powerful, a mighty river that swept the shark away from the shallow, familiar coast. The force of billions and billions of gallons of water tumbling with trillions upon trillions of tons of plankton and algae and uncountable fish—wahoo, tunas, dolphins, sailfish, blue marlins, and flyingfishes—bore
the shark away from shore. The current was miles wide and rich with prey, but the water was uncomfortably warm and deeper than it liked, and in this new environment the juvenile began to struggle. The young shark coursed through the rushing water, stalking yet somehow unable to kill or eat. The shark was not engineered to know fear, but perhaps for the first time in its life it experienced prolonged failure, failure leading to hunger. The shark was still formidable and could sustain itself without food for days. It battled the current, but the current whipped along like moving walls, providing the shark yet another alien experience—powerlessness. As it swam and tried to adjust to this new environment and grew hungry, the Gulf Stream, warm and wide and inescapable, carried the shark north.

  A Train to the Coast

  Warm air baked in waves from a sea of rooftops across the city. Crowded tenement rowhouses were steeped in odors of sweat and boiled cabbage, laundry motionless over dank alleys where children and dogs made retreat. The wealthy drowsed on a sticky Saturday morning, while the gentlemen of the press, dark stains under serge vests, reported “complete stagnation of the normal action of the human race” with outbreaks of “intense suffering” among the poor and destitute.

  A baby died in the arms of her mother waiting in the office of the overseer of the poor to charge her husband with desertion. Another infant perished from sunstroke at the moment of victory in the Sixtieth Street Business Men's Association baby parade. A dockworker collapsed and died receiving a ship at port. A man had a heart attack reaching for the front door of his house. A young police officer suffering “acute mania from heat” climbed to the top of a five-story building and jumped off. July would transform Philadelphia into a tomb sized for a thousand new corpses, most of them destined for the local potter's field.