Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [56]
Perhaps the story was embellished by the Herald, but whatever Bruder said, White and Anderson listened wide-eyed as they rowed their wounded friend to shore, trying to hurry yet make him as comfortable as possible. As the lifeboat surged through the waves, Charles Bruder closed his eyes and lost consciousness.
The Grande Dame
Mrs. George W. Childs of Philadelphia, the former Emma Peterson, was ensconced in a high and lovely suite at the Essex and Sussex, with fine views of the ocean. The space was small and spartan compared to the Childs mansion on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, where Emma and her late husband, publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, hosted Whitman, Twain, and their good friend Ulysses S. Grant in the Gilded Age's most glittering salon. Nor could any hotel suite match the comfort of Wootton, her “splendid country seat” on Philadelphia's Main Line, or the seaside cottage in nearby Long Branch, where Emma and George summered alongside President Grant and their closest friend, the Philadelphia banker, J. Anthony Drexel, who introduced them to his young and promising New York partner, John Pierpont Morgan. Those grand days were past, yet at the age of seventy-four, Mrs. Childs remained an imperial presence in Philadelphia society, a generous philanthropist, and a doting aunt. An ardent nature lover, Mrs. Childs had donated great tracts of open space to the state of Pennsylvania, and it was still a pleasure to breathe the wide sea airs at the Jersey shore. At the Essex and Sussex that summer, she planned to enjoy the ocean and society just a few miles from the old seaside cottage, and not far from the town of Deal, where her beloved niece, the child she never had, summered.
At 2:30 that afternoon, the grande dame had settled into her room for a respite before the social requirements of evening, when she heard, with a keen acuity for her age, disturbing noises floating through the windows over the sea. Her curiosity aroused, Mrs. Childs called to her maid to bring the field glasses, and stepped out on her private balcony, where she raised her glasses to the panorama of the sea. Far below and to the south was a scene of great confusion. Men and women were running toward the hotel in panic, their voices carried upward by the wind. Scanning south of the hotel, Mrs. Childs saw a small boat had breached the shore. Two men—in the bathing costumes of surfmen—lifted a man out of the boat and set him down on the sands. A small crowd had gathered at water's edge. Mrs. Childs's view was partially obscured by the shifting crowd, but presently she saw, to her astonishment, that the man lying on the beach was covered with blood.
Although born to wealth and security, Mrs. Childs was not unfamiliar with the idea that life could present not only disappointment and tragedy but horror—her husband had owned the original manuscript of The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, a writer who certainly chilled her. In her Victorian salon the intellectuals discussed the sublime thrill, then in vogue, of observing nature's terrifying displays from a posture of safety: a stirring view of mountainous waves from the cozy warmth of one's seaside cottage, for instance. Yet it is not likely Mrs. Childs had ever had an encounter quite equal to the feeling that swept through her as the field glasses revealed that the man's legs were missing. Mrs. Childs was a strong woman in crisis, and by then perspiration on her temples and her own beating heart sharpened her determination to learn what was happening. On either side of the fallen man, mothers hurried children out of the water as if it were boiling. On the sands, women in long dresses swooned. Men rushed to assist them. From her distant balcony the grande dame heard as if from the wind and sea itself faint but unmistakable cries of “Shark!