Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [80]
Despite the town's traditional ways, many of the citizens of Matawan considered themselves modern and sophisticated, for they had time—freed at last from plowing and planting—for leisure. Matawan happily shared the new American craze for sports and clubs and entertainment. It would be thirteen years before the Rivoli Theater dominated entertainment by showing talkies. For now the domino tournament was the talk of the town. On the Fourth of July, men played the ladies' baseball team wearing long Victorian dresses and women's broad-brimmed hats festooned with flowers—all except the mayor, who dressed like Uncle Sam. People were proud of the town library, which boasted more than three thousand volumes. If a man wasn't interested in James Joyce's new Dubliners or the new poem by Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” there were dime novels and westerns, and the new magazine, Detective Story, and the pulps Argosy and All-Story, whose editors vowed to “give the ordinary guy what he wants, that is . . . action, excitement, blood, love, a little humor, a taste of sex, a pepper of passion, a lot of escape.” “Tarzan of the Apes” was a new adventure in All-Story.
Yet the industries that gave men and women the money and time for leisure in Matawan—the town made not just tiles but matches, candy, pianos, baskets and bottles, waxes, asphalt, and copper castings—crowded portions of the creek and the land beyond Main with factories and tainted the air. By 1916, the creek was dotted here and there with manufacturers but still wound through vast tranquil prairies of spartina grass and sky. And so it was that by July of that year Matawan Creek flowed as an increasingly sentimental link to the rural and Romantic past, a place where “overcivilized man,” as Roosevelt called the urbanizing masses, could retreat to the quieter stretches. A woman could be courted in a natural setting, and a man could seize his last chance to be a boy or at least remember what it was like. Behind Main Street, sixty feet down a muddy embankment, was a place where boys went fishing and snared turtles for soup. The Matawan Journal was filled with poems and odes and remembrances of Matawan Creek—the gentle waters where friends picnicked on the banks, where lovers idled in moonlit canoes. The creek was the beloved heart of the town.
That afternoon of July 11, a hot summer day, Rensselaer “Renny” Cartan Jr., a dark-haired boy unusually athletic and broad-shouldered for fourteen, left the Cartan Lumber and Coal Company, his father's business, and walked down the street to find his cousin, Johnson Cartan. Johnson, a smaller, quieter boy of thirteen, stocked shelves at Cartan's Department Store at 92 Main, owned by Renny's uncle, A. J. Cartan. The Cartans were one of the most prominent families in town. A. J. Cartan had started as a telegraph operator before opening A. J. Cartan Furniture, Dry Goods, Shoes, Groceries, Hats, Western Union Telegraph Service, where folks got almost everything they needed. In recent years he'd dropped the telegraph service and put in one of the new telephones for the whole town to use.
Renny and his cousin Johnson cut down a bank to the creek, winding through tall grasses toward the swimming hole. Skinny-dipping in the old swimming hole was a Matawan tradition going back generations, and all the businessmen along Main let their sons and hired boys go to cool off for a few minutes every afternoon. Back behind the houses on Main was a barn, and beyond it the old brick limeworks stood on the bank of the creek. The limeworks, which crushed oyster shells into lime, had closed recently, as industry along New