Close to Shore (17 page)

She closed her essay with a prescient warning: “That shark that killed Bruder will hover about the spot and perhaps others will join him. Then we will be subjected to a reign of terror that will cause the public to shun the beaches and bring ruin to the bathing-house owners. Let a word in time suffice. We must have no more shocking cases on the order of the Spring Lake beach affair.”

That same morning in Spring Lake, the soul of Charles Bruder was committed to eternal life at a funeral service at
St. Andrew's Methodist Church, as employees of the Essex and Sussex, the New Monmouth, and other hotels filled the pews. Outside the windows, patrol boats buzzed along the coast through a steaming summer morning, and rowboats, packed with armed men, moored near the north and south bathing pavilions. Despite the heat, the beaches were almost empty, particularly at the South End pavilion, where Bruder was attacked, “indicating the fear felt by members of the cottage colony,” a local newspaper reported. Only a few ventured into the ocean and seemed to have no fear.

The fear had spread to nearby Manasquan, too. E. E. Sweeting, proprietor of Sweeting's bathing pavilion, tried to persuade bathers they had nothing to worry about. Sweeting had assigned Captain Charles Bentz of his surfmen to patrol the beach in a boat, “armed with a marlin spike, axe and other hardware that a shark might resent if he ventured too near.” But bathers were reluctant, and attendance was sparse.

After the church service, the funeral procession wended to Atlantic View Cemetery in Manasquan to bury the bell captain, in a grave near the sea, with a brief ceremony to bring closure and peace. Yet it was as if burial confirmed the strangeness of Bruder's death, as if opening the ground for a man killed by a shark released feelings of alienness and threat. Shortly after interment, five miles almost directly off the coast, John Anderson, a respected Manasquan fisherman, had a frightening experience he would later tell everyone on the docks. He was cruising in his small boat, when he saw “a school of sharks and porpoises disporting in the briny” with “other sea denizens which might have been whales.” Anderson had seen many sharks in his years at sea and worked among them, but now, fearful, he turned his boat toward shore, “loath to stay near the sea monsters.”

Disporting in a Perfect Surf

T
he next morning, Sunday, July 9th, Asbury Park's summer people in the hotels and cottages sat by eastern windows, as the newspapers instructed, to catch the healthful light from the sea. Hotel guests had breakfast and headed to church, where they heard soloists sing “Eye Hath Not Seen.” Afterward, gentlemen in straw hats and matrons in silk dresses strolled down the boulevards to the sea. Trolley car 32 was swollen with passengers bound for the beaches, for “visitors and hotel guests had fully regained their confidence,” the
Asbury Park Press
reported.

There was talk of the jewel heist of a huge eighteen-hundred-dollar diamond, the St. Claire was advertising for “colored waitresses,” the Surf House for “two experienced white chambermaids,” and Asbury Park had regained its “normalcy,” a word in use prior to its appropriation by Harding to restore the feeling of sultry days before the disillusionments of the Great War. Days like this one.

The beaches were thronged with crowds, the water aswarm with bathers who appeared to have forgotten the deaths of Charles Vansant and Charles Bruder with the denial that attended shark attacks. For if nothing could be more horrible than being swallowed by a monster fish, what could be more rewarding to forget?

Besides, sharks were nothing to worry about now. A day after hysteria swept Asbury Park, “the shark scare . . . is practically dead,” the
Press
crowed, “albeit there are sharks somewhere in the ocean and whales, too, for that matter. But Asbury Park's bathing grounds are free from sharks for the very simple reason that no sharks can enter them.” The beaches were all barricaded by steel wire that formed a U shape around the bathing grounds, and “timidity had given place to the pleasure of disporting in a perfect surf unmarred by the slightest evidence of danger.”

Just south of Asbury Park, in the village of Ocean Grove, town manager Frank B. Smith announced that a contract had been awarded to erect a protective net around the beach, but it was hardly needed. Unaware that shark attacks were more likely in shallow water, Smith declared the Ocean Grove beach was not as deep near shore as those at Beach Haven and Spring Lake and this “difference in character” would “greatly lessen the danger of a visit from sharks.” Even in Spring Lake, three days after Bruder's death, beach attendance was improving. While bathers were “loath to venture very far out,” the
Press
reported, “it is possible early next week will again see bathing
in vogue.”

Bathers were reassured by the comments that week by Hugh Smith, director of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, that they ought “not be unduly alarmed or deterred from going in bathing” as “sharks are not vicious.” Smith, fifty-one, one of the most respected fish scientists in the world, had directed the marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the turn of the century. From 1907 to 1910, he led the government's expedition on the steamer
Albatross
that collected four hundred thousand fish and aquatic animals, one of the largest and most diverse collections of marine life ever assembled. Aboard the
Albatross
he had befriended an international roster of renowned scientists, including Frederic Lucas. Like Dr. Lucas, Hugh Smith had studied sharks for years and shared his opinion that a shark had not killed Bruder or Vansant.

The commissioner believed the likeliest culprit in both men's deaths was the broadbill swordfish
Xiphias gladius
, whose tall dorsal fin would explain the fins sited during both attacks. The swordfish possesses great speed and enormous size—up to fifteen feet long and a thousand pounds—and there were reports, the commissioner said, of men run cleanly through by its long, flat sword.

“When we consider that there are hundreds of thousands of bathers on our eastern coasts every year and that for as long as anyone can remember no one has been bitten until these two recent cases, I think it is a word in favor of the sharks,” Smith said. “Our domestic animals, horses, dogs and others, have not anything like this record.”

Toward the World of Men

A
s the sun slid into the sea along the darkening coast, the shark descended with it, plunging thirty, forty feet to the bottom, where it righted and cruised on the pebbly landscape of the ocean floor. The night sea floor was scattered with fish seeking shelter, making themselves less of a target to predators. The shark blended imperceptibly with the ocean floor as its huge tail propelled it in the gloom.

The black eyes of the shark absorbed light, and out of the dusk swam the huge rusted boilers and engines of the steamer wrecks. Schools of big blackfish and hordes of cunners moved in and out of the wrecks maddeningly, somehow beyond reach. Through an eerie world of dead forms the shark swam past shipwrecks scattered like a behemoth's graveyard—such as
the bones of the
Western World
, a clipper ship that sank sixty years earlier with three hundred passengers, and the
Malta
, a 244-foot steamer that went down in 1885. The shark surveyed the bottom for the living and the dead, for things that couldn't flee. Deadeyes and bolts and deck lights, blue glass bottles and mustard jars, riding spurs and whiskey flasks, inkwells and school bells from the last century, were all there on the coastal bottom as the shark moved north. Pewter cups of a last supper, ginger ale bottles still full, gentlemen's pipes and ladies' perfumes from the 1870s, a load of Civil War rifles moldering in their cases.

And so the young shark darted falteringly toward great clouds of weakfish and black bass, red hake, monkfish, and menhaden. It was hapless to feed as it was accustomed. The fish of the mid-Atlantic were well organized in classes of predator and prey, a natural structure from which the shark had somehow removed itself or been removed through illness or failure. In the brute and unsparing choreography of nature, it no longer held a proper part. The waters of the deep were murkier than those it knew in the tropics, dulled by pale northern light and cloudy with masses of fish more numerous, if less diverse, than in southern waters, fleeing clouds of life that were mute witness to his enfeebled efforts to survive.

On the coast of southern and central New Jersey, old time fishermen were now speculating that the man-eater, whatever it was, would drift north in coastal currents—and this conclusion, among the many confounding puzzles of its behavior, would prove to be right. The pounding blows of an oar off Asbury Park, the gunshots splitting the waves of Spring Lake, were like larger predators frightening it north with the currents into a world that no longer sustained it. Its hunger or its madness were reaching an urgent point.

Yet the shark was adapted to handle the crisis of hunger in ways human beings did not know in 1916, and struggled decades later to understand. As the shark swam, there is evidence the legs and bones of Charles Bruder cut off below the knee and pieces of the bell captain's torso remained preserved in the fish's stomach for later consumption, in the manner of a camel. Gleaming specimens of dolphins and mackerel, fresh as if iced in the fishmonger's window, have been pulled from the stomachs of sharks, as well as still-legible paper documents. But the most compelling proof of the shark's camel-like ability in crisis occurred on April 17, 1935, when Albert Hobston caught a thirteen-foot tiger shark off a Sydney, Australia, beach and towed it alive to the Coogee Aquarium. Eight days later, dying in captivity, the shark regurgitated a bird, a rat, and, eerily visible in a cloud of muck, a human arm—a thick, muscular arm, so well preserved that the forearm was clearly marked with a tattoo of two boxers. On the basis of a photograph of the tattoo, published in a Sydney newspaper, a man identified his brother, James Smith, forty-five. The arm was preserved so well, it was accepted as evidence that led to the arrest of a man for murdering, dismembering, and dumping Smith at sea.

While myths have arisen to explain a mysterious “storage” capacity in the shark, in July 1916 there was no mystery. In the cooler coastal waters that week, the great white's body temperature lowered and its rate of digestion slowed. Gradually, the shark digested the flesh from a pair of human legs, gaining nutrition. The bones were indigestible, and the shark would later expel them with turtle shells and porpoise bones—like a dog retching up chicken bones.

But Charles Bruder's remains wouldn't sustain the shark for long. It may be difficult to understand that a young great white shark could falter in its native environment, that in the ocean wild animals make mistakes unprovoked by man, get themselves into situations they cannot get out of. The great white, in particular, has an image of perfection—invincible, unconquerable, free. Man is faulty, but evolution worked overtime at something and got it right.

At dawn the shark rose from the deep, quickly leaving the vulnerable middle depths to cruise on the surface, where its white underbelly glittered alongside the camouflage of the sun. As the fish swam, the day's sunlight penetrated the sea and was refracted and scattered, breaking and muting the spectrum to better conceal it. Twenty-five feet down, the long rays of red light were absorbed by the sea, disappeared, and the shark swam in an ether of dull brown little more apparent than the outline of a current. The fish was superbly concealed from its prey in the ocean and perfectly equipped to thrive. Lost, hungry, the ocean's foremost predator was still formidable. Yet, out of its habitat, it was an alien creature, headed toward the world of men.

The Beloved Heart of the Town

S
eventeen miles inland from Asbury Park, on the banks of Matawan Creek, was a typical early twentieth century American small town. Main Street rolled through its center, paralleling the creek, where flat-bottom boats set out with loads of tomatoes from the farm country. The tallest structures were the white church spires, which rose up over the shops and the fine houses that marched down the length of Main under elms and sycamores before thinning to barns and long gray fences that angled over brown fields and the vegetable rows beyond.

Matawan had long been a crossroads of the north-central New Jersey colonial breadbasket. The air was still clear and quiet but for the smoke from the beehive tile kilns along the creek and the percussive rhythm of the train making for New York City with tiles for the Eighth Avenue subway. More of the outside world was coming and going through towns in the new century, but little of it stayed or altered the people of Matawan, Scotch-Irish families of farmers and merchants and old self-reliant blood. These were the years small towns dug in against change and began to die slowly and with a long, sweet wistfulness, the years that spawned Norman Rockwell, then twenty years old and producing his first
Saturday Evening Post
cover, and Thornton Wilder, nineteen and gestating the bittersweet American fate of
Our Town
. If any change was most profound, it was that the goods and people and ideas now came by locomotive and motorcar and wire, and the town had stopped producing generations of rugged sea captains and fishermen. It was losing its old umbilical link, by the creek to Raritan Bay to the Lower New York Bay, to the sea, the blue Atlantic, fifteen miles distant. The town's mercantile heart had shifted from the Atlantic Ocean to Main Street.

Not all were happy with the transformation. Old-timers thought it a shame that Captain Watson Fisher's son—the only boy of the distinguished retired commander of the Savannah Steamship Line—had chosen, at twenty-four, to be a tailor. It seemed a waste to see the brawny W. Stanley Fisher—at six foot one, two hundred and ten pounds, the town's best athlete, towheaded and handsome, a giant of a man for the time—in his Cecil suit and Arrow collar, soft eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, bent over needle and thread. But Stanley Fisher was a new kind of American youth, the first generation of the automobile and mass production, a lad with the freedom to do anything, go anywhere, to forsake the small town of his birth. To his father's dismay, Stanley had left Matawan as a young man to make his way in Minnesota, where his sister lived. But Captain Fisher's heart was soothed when Stanley returned home and, after apprenticing as a steamer and presser, opened a tailor's shop on Main Street. The strongest young man in town was no prodigal son. The boy took out large advertisements in the weekly
Matawan Journal
to announce his presence as a merchant, and was swept up in the new community-minded small-town life—joining clubs, hauling buckets with the volunteer hook and ladder brigade, reclaiming his birthright as the star athlete on town teams, singing every Sunday morning in the church choir. As soon as Stanley Fisher met the right girl, he'd be settling down and having children. If it seemed a close, small existence to the men who'd spent their lives at sea, there were compensations that dazzled the older generation—motorcars, fancy clothes, telephones, the bounty of things available with seeming ease. Such bounty would soon be called the American Dream.

The older folks were somewhat taken aback, however, by young Stanley Fisher's aggressive
Matawan Journal
advertisements. Advertising had been an unseemly or unnecessary thing in the last century when each man had his place and advertisements were little more than listings; not to merely publish relevant information but to sell was unheard of. But now with competition in town, Stanley Fisher's advertisements displayed drawings of a gentleman in the tailor's newest suit, the Cecil, costing $16 to $38, a sophisticated “New York” look, “the ultra nifty style” he would custom-tailor “for
you
. . . to your
absolute
satisfaction from any of the hundred splendid fabrics in my store.”

The tailor's shingle was also a newfangled thing: Stanley Fisher was not a man hanging out his own name but working under the sign “The Royal Tailors, Chicago–New York.” The sign evoked the glamorous style of wealth and leisure associated then with the British Empire—twin columns framing an elegant Indian tiger, fangs bared—but was vaguely unsettling to old-timers who'd never gotten used to the new combinations of wealth. Stanley was not merely a tailor but an “authorized resident dealer.”

With the overeagerness of youth trying to assert his place, his advertisements declared, “We are doing a
splendid
business, and the best of it is that old customers are coming in for new orders—a splendid recommendation.” In fact, it was known in town that Stanley was struggling to establish his customer base like any new merchant. The previous week, he'd sold his skills in barter, and when his friends heard about it, they laughed incredulously, for Stanley Fisher, young and vigorous, had exchanged a custom-made new suit for a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. The old sea captains wagged their heads over the timidity and caution of the new generation. Stanley's young friends were astounded. “A life insurance policy!” one said, suggesting his friend should concentrate on enjoying this life, and hardly be thinking or worrying about the next one. “What are you, crazy? You're twenty-four years old.” The big, good-natured tailor just smiled.

On Tuesday morning, July 11, as Main Street awakened for business, Stanley Fisher opened the Royal Tailors early and, while his shop assistant tended to customers, sized a new suit. Old Dobbin, the big brown draft horse, clopped down Main, pulling the wagon of the Springdale Dairy, delivering Wooley's Aerated Milk in glass bottles. Main was still a wood-plank road with lots of dirt, and Old Dobbin wore netting to keep off the horseflies, whose bite could send the big workhorse into a runaway, which was dangerous with all the new traffic. Noisy, hand-cranked Model-Ts rattled behind the dust clouds of horse-and-wagon teams bringing crops to the train station. The smell of horse manure wafted over the street, mingled with gasoline vapors, yet gentlemen and ladies in Edwardian finery strolled the three blocks of Main Street with no fuss, for these were not fussy people. Rather they were hearty and resourceful.

It was unusual for a man like Stanley Fisher to have the luxury of a single profession. Martin Weber was a tailor, but there wasn't a living in the old days in fifty cents for a custom suit, so he opened the Weber Grocery Store right in his house, 263 Main. Weber sold flour and whatnot in bulk, scooping and packaging orders for women for miles around. John Wright, the bartender at the Aberdeen Inn across from the railroad depot, alternated mixing drinks with running the town telephone switchboard, which was behind the bar. Harvey Johnson operated the Farmer's and Merchant's Bank on one side of a house on Main and lived on the other side with his wife and children. And John Mulsoff, the Main Street barber, doubled as the constable. If a small town strangled a man with small-mindedness and familiarity, an idea Sinclair Lewis would soon introduce into the American consciousness with his best-sellers
Main Street
and
Babbitt
, these men felt the benefits of being known and needed.

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 York's lower bays killed the oysters and the oysterman's trade. Yet the old warehouse shaded a lovely wide bend in the creek. Sheltered by the limeworks and a thicket of trees was a natural cove, the most popular swimming hole in town, framed at one end by the old Wyckoff propeller dock.

The boys scrambled onto the pier and pilings and threw off their clothes, laughing and shouting, the beginning of a daily ritual of roughhousing boys enjoyed like a natural entitlement. Renny Cartan was standing naked on a dock piling, joking with his cousin and friends, when he began to lose his balance. The creek was only thirty feet wide and shallow, but the water was darker than usual with the turbulence of recent rains and Renny couldn't see the bottom, couldn't see what he'd be hitting as he fell. But a naked boy at the lip of a swimming hole in the middle of the placid farm country during the last summer of peace had little to worry about.

Renny Cartan gave in to gravity and the joy of the moment and let himself go, laughing, into the creek.