Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [42]
Gertrude Schuyler planned to join her husband and daughter in the afternoon for a visit to the great hotels designed by William Lightfoot Price, who introduced the modern style to Atlantic City a decade before it reached Paris, declaring, “This is America, and art is the utterance of the living and not the dead.”
Rising over the ocean was Price's Marlborough Hotel, an immense Victorian hostelry of gables and turrets, circa 1902, with a tiny extra window conspicuously positioned on the side of each room. Price's public boast was that the Marlborough possessed the luxury, unheard-of then, of a private bath in every guest room. Connected by a bridge to the Victorian hotel was the Blenheim, a sultan's palace with Moorish domes. The fifteen-story tower of the Blenheim was the world's largest cement building built on sand, and people feared it would fall down. Beyond the Marlborough-Blenheim loomed the still-grander Traymore, nicknamed the sandcastle, an enormous beige pile of domed turrets that rose over the ocean.
The Traymore was an Edwardian wonder. Thomas Edison had developed the cement used in its huge art deco towers, and N. C. Wyeth painted the children's playroom with characters from Treasure Island. In the hotel restaurant, the Submarine Grill, Wyeth created a mural of mermaids, flying fish, and mermen rising to a ceiling that was a glass-bottomed aquarium-skylight through which sunlight streamed to the diner at the “bottom of the sea.” In the music room, framed by classical columns, stood a fountain, in the center of which floated a hollow crystal globe. Tiny goldfish passing through the globe were magnified to monstrous size.
But the ultimate pleasure, increasingly rare in the big cities, was the joy of separating from the crowds. As Gertrude Schuyler swam farther out, the swirls of light reflected by the sand dulled and the water deepened to an opaque blue-green. Under the surface, small, silvery fish flickered. Above, steamers edged along the horizon, traced by swooping gulls, and as the bather traversed the border between sea and sky, it was said habit dissolves and one's sense of wonder is renewed.
The surfmen stood on the beach, coolly eyeing the horizon and sea and crowds as if by standing still they could somehow take it all in, eyes alert for unusual movement. The surfmen were assisted by athletic young volunteers who strutted about with spools on their belts containing five yards of stout rope to toss to distressed swimmers. The surfmen had their hands full that day: There were thousands of people in the water now, a number that would grow, by day's end, to fifty thousand. The director of safety of Atlantic City, in addition to protecting innocent bystanders from the shudders and chance bewilderment of spying a swimsuit worn by one of the freaks of fashion in all its filmy brevity, also boasted the coast's largest and best-trained rescue platoon. On the beach stood long, stout poles to which rescuers tied their ropes to tow upset swimmers to shore, ropes pulled by chains of men opposing the sea in a kind of tug-of-war.
Thousands of men, and women too, draped the boardwalk rails, surveying the panorama of shore and sea like swells departing on the France or the Rotterdam; for the masses it was the nearest experience to being aboard an ocean liner. Men in hats leaning elbow to elbow, women carrying embroidered sun umbrellas pushed along in Shill's wicker rolling chairs.
In the random arithmetic of crowds, someone would have noticed Gertrude Schuyler in trouble before the surfmen. At a distance, her hands waved soundlessly in the warm air, and around her a patch of sea frothed white. There were so many people