Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [14]
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