Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [11]
The fish's arrival was choreographed by nature to be mysterious—a survival advantage—a mystery that only heightened human ignorance and fear.
The Doctor
A hundred miles from the sea, not far from the bank of the Schuylkill River in West Philadelphia, was a large yellow brick Victorian. The fine golden façade was popular among the city's nouveau riche. The house at 4038 Spruce Street was four stories with a mansard roof, nine Ionic columns supporting a sweeping front porch, and a marble staircase with a wrought-iron banister curving inward to the street. From its east wall sprouted its identical twin at 4036 Spruce, creating the impression of a huge nineteenth century mansion with the arms of a sphinx. A dozen four-story brick sphinxes huddled side by side on the block, scores of gray predawn windows concealing the enormous families and energies of the new bourgeois Edwardians. Once rolling farms and estates during the Gilded Age, the neighborhood was now a horsecar suburb for professional people fleeing industrial Philadelphia across the Schuykill. One of the first suburbs in America, it was a Victorian dream of nostalgia and nature in an ordered state. Halos of gas lamps smudged the coal-sooted shadows of English gardens and finely forged gates; sprawling Norman castles, Tuscan villas, other reverential manors of Old Europe commanded broad swathes of lawn down to the dazzling brightness of the river.
In the early morning the dusky outlines of the factories of Baldwin locomotives and Rohm & Haas Chemicals, Stetson Hats and Disston Saws, Whitman's Chocolates and Breyer's Ice Cream appeared in a lacework of smoke and coal dust and telegraph wires draping the “workshop of the world.” In refinery and foundry, warehouse and mill, men and thousands of children under ten worked in the gray clerestory light before dawn. Across from the city, in the fashionable town of Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman had not so long before boarded the white river ferry Wenonah and crossed to Philadelphia and back for hours, marveling at the “long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke,” glorying in the roar of progress and industry that he proclaimed the muscle of the great American era. “I cross'd and recross'd, merely for pleasure—for a still excitement. What exhilaration, change, people, business . . .” During Whitman's last years in the 1890s, the shad in the river had acquired the “peculiar taste” of coal oil. Now, on this morning in 1916, in a mystery to men of the time, the fish were almost gone. The process by which chemicals and human and animal waste consumed the oxygen fish needed to spawn was not then known. By 1916, Philadelphia had developed and dammed its rivers for commerce for parts of four centuries, expressed in a popular nineteenth-century sculpture “Allegory of the Schuylkill River,” depicting a wild-bearded river god in chains.
Shortly before daybreak, a slim and dapper gentleman of a certain age descended the marble steps of 4038 Spruce for his morning stroll. Dr. Eugene LaRue Vansant sported garb of the last century—beige seersucker suit, heavy gold watch fob, shore-white pants, white Oxford shirt, white shoes, panama hat, and bow tie, trailing a nimbus of fine cigar smoke. The doctor had dressed for the seashore, where the food was grand, the air delightful, a doctor could act like a man, and a man, if he wished, a boy. Eugene hoped to escape the restlessness