Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [32]
It swelled Louisa's heart to see her son, young and handsome, relaxed and at play for the first time in many months. She was struck by what a fine young man he had become, but it was a bittersweet sight too; it was Charles's last summer away with the family before he married and started his own family, his own life.
Louisa and the girls joined the doctor on the boardwalk. The Vansants, proud of their athletic son, stood looking out over the sea, enjoying the light breeze, the balmy twilight air, the grandeur of the ocean, and the knowledge that a fine dinner and a comfortable bed awaited. The moment was crowned by the joyful sight of Charles charging into the surf, and, to the delight of the small crowd, the dog leaping after him into the waves. Splashing and kicking in tandem, trailing a wake of bubbles and froth, both of them, man and dog, began to swim.
Twins of Darkness
Toward the eastern horizon the tide flowed out, away from the sun, and the Engleside tower chased the fleeing waters with its shadow. The great wooden tower lifted lazily toward the summer clouds tinged in burnt copper, its honeycomb of open-air balconies shading wicker rockers. Men with spyglasses stood in glassed-in observation rooms on the rooftop for a last glance of three-masted schooners in the lonely distance. The hundreds of sailing craft that adorned the coast during the day had vanished. In the floors below, guests drew hot baths as the hotel windmill spun, pumping water from an artesian well. Women donned fresh corsets and hoop skirts, desperate that each dress be different from their neighbors', while the men all endeavored to dress exactly alike in white flannels, blue blazers, and neckties. Nannies and servants herded the young upstairs to be dressed for the children's dining room, from which the children would graduate, at age five or six, to dine with the adults.
Robert Engle strolled through his hotel in a crisp Oxford shirt and bow tie. The windows to the sea revealed knots of guests on the veranda, isolated strollers returning on the boardwalk over flattened dunes—all the fruits of a booked hotel, clear weather, and tranquil seas. Guests admired his photographs on a folding screen by the front desk—tennis players on the hotel courts, the wreck of the Sicilian bark Fortuna from '08, the lighthouse, claimed by the tides, toppling into the sea. Late-arriving motorists were checking in after a rugged journey across the state over the dirt roads of the Pine Barrens. Their eyes were rimmed with dust in the shape of goggles.
In the oceanfront dining room, with hunt scenes on the walls and chair backs in the shape of lyres, waitresses in crisply starched white uniforms and bobbed hair prepared for the 6:30 dinner seating. There was a small hubbub surrounding a group of sportsmen with sunburned necks and brine-smelling clothes who spoke slightly louder than necessary. The day fishermen had returned grumbling. Beach Haven fishing was legend. Robert Engle trumpeted the abundance of marine life off his beach. But now there was a scarcity that men struggled to explain.
Beach Haven's fish stories were eye-popping in those days, and supported by fact. The ocean abounded, unpolluted and primordial. Mrs. Charles W. Beck caught 258 weakfish in the bay in two and a half hours, including two on a double hook thirty-eight times. Through the inlets whipped great ocean species that were mistaken in those days for “sea monsters”: huge manta rays, eight-hundred-pound ocean sunfish. One morning in the summer of 1907, Charles E. Gerhard, a musician with