Free Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo, Mike Capuzzo Page A

idealistic dreams of the future, and particularly enjoyed a fanciful poem written by one of his prep school classmates in 1906, titled “In 1999”:

    Father goes to the office

In his new bi-aeroplane

And talks by wireless telephone

To Uncle John—in Spain

Mother goes a-shopping

She buys things more or less

And has them sent home C.O.D.

Via “Monorail Express.”

Sister goes a-calling

She stays here and there a while

And discusses with her many friends

The latest Martian style

And when her calling list is through

She finds a library nook

And there with great enjoyment hears

A new self-reading book.

    Although Dr. Vansant was immensely proud of his son, it was pride that masked a certain uneasiness or even shame. The boy, just like his sisters, had inherited his mother's looks and charismatic, creative personality. The doctor's concern was a classic one in the Victorian age, faced by the German burgher Thomas Buddenbrooks in Thomas Mann's popular novel of the turn of the century: how to hand his thousand-year mercantile line to his artistic son? The doctor knew that there had been two personality types in the Epting and Vansant lines for many generations: the stoic and the creative, the latter manifested in a famous Vansant opera singer who collapsed on a Paris stage during a performance. All four of his children, even “baby” Eleanor, eleven years old, were precociously creative, and the doctor knew from his colleagues at the Hospital for the Criminally Insane and experts in melancholy, that such gifts could be unhealthy and unproductive, especially in a boy. Discipline, self-denial, honor, and duty, strength in deeds and not words were the elements of Victorian manhood.
    In the demanding way of a patriarch who has invested great expectations in his son, Dr. Vansant had groomed Charles from an early age to carry the family torch. He enrolled the boy at age thirteen in a prestigious prep school such as no Vansant had enjoyed—the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, whose venerable stone halls were a passage not only to manhood but to the Ivy League and the Philadelphia oligarchy.
    But Charles struggled to fit the model. A thin and fragile boy, he failed to hold up to the rigors of baseball, football, cross country, or any of the varsity sports that allowed a boy to proudly wear the E on his sweater. Instead, he tried hard to position himself as the rakish class wit. In his graduation picture for the class of 1910, he is wearing the standard dark suit and high starched Arrow collar, but he is the only one in the class sporting a gold watch fob and chain—styling himself in an acceptable masculine image of the day, the Edwardian dandy. Later at Penn, Charles tried out for the French Club and German dramatic society.
    Thus the doctor, seeing in his son a feminine spirit, urged him into business, and pressed upon him the need to develop stoicism through physical, manly pursuits.
    The central question for the doctor involved the boy's manliness. Eugene Vansant wasn't alone in his worries. His colleagues at the club shared a deep concern for the femininity of their own sons. It was a larger concern, too, of the President. In the Industrial Age, Woodrow Wilson said, young men lost the attachment of a father and work that bound them through history. Men left the farm, the stable, and smithy for the factory and office, leaving their sons home in the company of women. Concerned about the softening of boys in the Victorian age, Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts, where “manliness was taught by men, and not by those who are half men, half old women.” All-boy prep schools soared in popularity to provide surrogate fathering: to remove a boy from the world of his mother and five o'clock teas, “from the contagion of his sisters' company . . . and thence to Rugby.”
    Feminine softness was a difficult reputation for any young man, especially in an age when President Roosevelt rallied the nation to the “strenuous