Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [102]
Late in the evening of July 14, a fisherman in the bay returned to shore with a battered boat and an eerie story. He had been cruising along when a big shark attacked his boat and tried to sink it. After a prolonged struggle, the fisherman prevailed in escaping from the shark, but not before he saw it close up: a great dark fish approximately eight feet long.
The great white that had escaped Matawan Creek, the big fish that had attacked five men in unprecedented frenzy, is as likely a suspect in that boat attack as the ocean could produce, yet it cannot be proven. What is known is that on that Friday the moon was nearly full, and the shark was intense with need, and as it cruised Raritan Bay there sounded a rich and confusing cocktail of scents and sonic bursts, boats and mammals.
North and east lay all the bays and harbors and beaches of New York City.
To Drive Away the Sharks
She was tall and voluptuous and men's eyes followed as she moved on the beach that morning. The Atlantic was a clear and distant blue with sea foam lathering the sand under a round, full sky, but it was her form that men saw when she appeared, the aquiline nose and cheekbones and cascading hair of the vaudeville star Gertrude Hoffman. There was said to be something dark, irresistible, and ruinous to men in the lush figure of Hoffman. She had popularized the Salome dance in the early 1900s, unleashing its cousins, the striptease and the belly dance, and the dance of the seven veils. She had been arrested for indecent dancing (albeit for publicity reasons, rigged by her producer, William Hammerstein) and ordered to wear ankle-length tights. Now the pearls and feathers of the stage were gone and Gertrude Hoffman stood unadorned in a bathing costume.
At midmorning, the dancer stepped delicately into the ocean and began to wade out. Thousands of bathers shared the water with Hoffman at Coney Island and Brighton beaches and all along the Brooklyn shoreline. Wednesday had hit ninety-one degrees, the hottest day of the summer until Thursday, when the mercury “aviated toward ninety-two,” the weathermen said. Friday, July 14 was another sizzler, and the Weather Bureau in Washington declared no end in sight to the heat wave.
New Yorkers were escaping to the beach early. The Sea Beach trains and electric streetcars rumbled in all morning from the boroughs, and steamboats from Manhattan disgorged passengers at Coney Island's Dreamland Pier. On the beach, a man and a woman could escape the heat that had killed eight New Yorkers. In Illusion Palace or the Village of Midgets or the Upside-Down House (where furniture was nailed to the ceiling), a father or mother could perhaps forget the infantile paralysis epidemic that had taken seventeen more lives the previous day.
In the distant towers of Coney Island was a world in reassuring miniature, where visitors could replay and resolve to their satisfaction the anxieties of modern civilization with the help of a thousand fancies. It was said, “If Paris is France, then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world.” In an age before television and the dominance of motion pictures, Americans flocked to Coney Island to witness the events they'd only imagined.
Yet nothing real or imagined by Coney Island's impresarios in the American experience prepared visitors for the events of that Friday morning on the beach. Shortly after wading out, Gertrude Hoffman slipped into the waves and began to swim, her slender arms arcing gracefully. She had swum several hundred feet off the foot of West Thirty-first Street, when terror stole her breath. A large, dark fin appeared in the water, moving swiftly directly toward her, whereupon the