A story of hopeless love-a serial philanderer and gambler married to a woman much younger-and impossible love-his wife, Casey Googan, and a black boxer. Turn of the century Boston comes alive with crew races, balloon races, boxing, rat-baiting, and fashion competitions judged by Isabella Stuart Gardner. Boston's sculling champion, blue-blood Foxhall Codman, is obsessed with the possibility that the phantom sculler who rowed through him in fog on the Charles River was a woman. Thirty-thousand spectators-Brahmins and geeks, catch-penny operators and thimble riggers-turn out for the epic race on the Charles, a battle of the sexes prefiguring Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King seven decades later.