Careless People (30 page)

The owl-eyed man haunts the dead center of the novel, a trace of life finding its way, ghostily, into fiction's facsimile of a library. “
We do love the center of things,” wrote Zelda eight years later. “You feel the motion so much less.”

B
unny Wilson invited Fitz to a party on Wednesday, November 8, at the Washington Square Book Shop on West Eighth Street, starting at 6:30: “
Can't you come? Dos Passos, Sew Collins, Elinor Wylie, and others are going to be there. The idea is to make
Playboy
[a literary magazine] a sort of mouthpiece for all the bizarre and scurrilous things which people can't publish elsewhere.” History does not record whether Fitz attended, but it is hard to imagine him declining the offer to discuss the bizarre and scurrilous over
drinks at a bookstore. As they partied, if they partied, and gossiped about the bizarre and scurrilous, the papers were reporting that the Swopes and Heywood Broun, the
World
's dramatic critic, were in a car crash in Great Neck. Mrs. Swope's injuries were “painful” but not serious; the two men and the Swopes' chauffeur escaped unhurt.
Swope told reporters that the worst part of the accident was that several oil paintings they were taking to New York from their Great Neck house had been damaged.

They were
changing the channels of their avidity, Fitzgerald remarked later. When the word “class” came into common currency in the sixteenth century it largely superseded “order,” as in the lower and upper orders, from peasants to the ruling class. Musing on the relationship between wealth and taste in his notebooks, Fitzgerald observed that bad taste among the bourgeoisie is called vulgarity when found among the proletariat. The vagaries of such ideas about taste and money interested him, he added, “
because it shows classes in movement.”

When Daisy and Gatsby meet at his cottage Nick beats a tactful retreat for half an hour (as he did during the parallel scene in Myrtle's apartment, when he reads
Simon Called Peter
), occupying himself by staring at Gatsby's house “like Kant at his church steeple.” Gatsby's house becomes a symbol of inspiration, an object of worship, and an emblem of futility and death:

A brewer had built it early in the “period” craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

The brewer's dreams of aristocratic grandeur are as vain as Gatsby's. Nick lives in a tiny cottage that has not yet been razed by developers, a vestigial trace of the old fishing village that will soon disappear altogether in the rush
to build ever more grandiose homes. “Like so many Americans,” Fitzgerald wrote a few years later, “he valued things rather than cared about them.”

To compensate Nick for arranging his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby clumsily offers remuneration: “You might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.” Nick understands that the opportunity, involving bonds, must be dishonest: “I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.”

In other words, Nick might have been tempted by financial inequality into contemplating a swindle, but he couldn't consider payment for organizing an adulterous afternoon with his married cousin. Nick's objection seems primarily focused on the fact that the offer is too “obvious” and “tactless”—perhaps he would have been open to a transaction less crass, less banal. So Nick arranges the rendezvous, but high-mindedly refuses compensation. He might occasionally be willing to be a panderer, but he is obstinate about being a pimp.

P
laying “Who Am I?” like one of Swope's party guests, we may be stumped by Fitzgerald's uncommunicative note of “Mary” in the
Man's Hope
outline as one of the imaginative sources for the reunion scene. Who is the Mary about whom Fitzgerald remembers thinking as he tried to invoke the “fire and freshness” of Daisy? Some have conjectured that Mary may refer to an actress named Mary Hay, who lived in Great Neck with her husband, the matinée idol Richard Barthelmess.

In February 1921 the
World
published a tribute to Mary Hay from a reader who felt she “deserved immortalization in rhyme”:

Look at the style of her,

Gaze all the while at her,

At that sweet smile of her,

Miss Mary Hay!

My, how real sweet she is!

And how petite she is!

What a real treat she is!

Miss Mary Hay!

It goes on, but it doesn't improve.

Fitzgerald made various observations about Mary Hay over the years—if this is the Mary to whom his note refers. In his 1935 essay “My Lost City,” he said that in New York in the early 1920s “
You danced elbow to elbow with Marion Davies and perhaps picked out the vivacious Mary Hay in the pony chorus.” Envisioning Rosemary in
Tender Is the Night
, Fitzgerald described her as being like “
Mary Hay—that is, she differs from most actresses by being a lady, simply reeking of vitality, health, sensuality.”

In April 1930 Zelda published a sketch called “The Girl With Talent,” which
Fitzgerald said was based on Mary Hay. It's the story of a young dancer with what would later be called sex appeal (in the early 1920s they called it “hot stuff”) who drinks too much gin and avoids her young husband and small child, until eventually she sails for Paris without them. When a friend asks if her husband knows that she's raising hell in Europe, the dancer responds incredulously that she is living so chastely as to make a nun look like a nymphomaniac. A week later she runs off with a man, and the narrator doesn't see her again until after the dancer's divorce, by which point she is about to run off with someone else. By the time Zelda wrote this sketch, Mary Hay had left Richard Barthelmess and their daughter for another man.

But “Mary” may not be Mary Hay at all. Deems Taylor's wife was named Mary, and in May 1923 Fitzgerald noted in his ledger a visit with a Mary Armstrong, who may have been the same Mary Armstrong who was married to Ben Hecht. Even Mrs. Rumsey was named Mary, although it's unlikely that the Fitzgeralds were on a first-name basis with her (Fitzgerald and his agent, Harold Ober, worked together for seven years before they used each other's first names in correspondence, and Nick Carraway thinks it is worth remarking that after their first drinks he and Myrtle Wilson called each other by their first names). Someone the Fitzgeralds knew better was Mary Blair, whom Edmund Wilson married in February 1923.

Just before the Fitzgeralds returned to Manhattan in September 1922, a
Tribune
article used Mary Hay as an example of the versatility of New York, “the skyscraper city,” contrasting her against a well-known suffragist with a very similar name: “
imagine the divergent New Yorks,” it suggested, of “Mary Hay, and Mary Garrett Hay.” Together, the two Mary Hays symbolized the impossibility of ever comprehending reality: “New York is like The Truth—an absolute concern in theory, yet so intricate and extensive as to be comprehended by no one . . . This Manhattan scope, this versatility, this enswirling of the individual is part of the city's peculiar charm.”

And
The Great Gatsby
is a novel that considers it a subtle tribute to be interested in someone whose origins you don't know. Fitzgerald's note of “Mary” is everything we can't know, this divergence, this scope, this versatility, these enswirled individuals who laugh, flicker, and vanish.

O
ver the first weeks of November, the press continued to wonder whether Mrs. Gibson's “
statements and romantic stories of a past adventure, culture and refinement” might give Inspector Mott pause. But as
New York and New Jersey went to the polls, and the papers reported the failure of a proposed mandatory equal wage for women (the court ruled that “
no greater calamity could befall workers than to have pay fixed by law”), headlines announced that an indictment of “one woman and two men” was expected in the Hall–Mills murder case.

Just as a grand jury was finally summoned, however, sentiment in New Brunswick was turning away from a trial. The community, reported the
World
, had already judged the killers “
in the court of public opinion and have acquitted them out of regard for the ‘unwritten law,'” which held that violence was a justifiable response to adultery. The citizens of New Brunswick regarded “
a formal court trial as a rank extravagance,” one which they were beginning to mutter against paying for.

On Saturday, November 11, Mott announced that Mrs. Gibson had identified the murderer of Hall and Mills. She had selected Henry de la Bruyère Carpender, a stockbroker who was Mrs. Hall's first cousin and lived two doors down from the Hall mansion in New Brunswick. The Carpenders had frequently been mentioned in the coverage of the case, and Henry de la Bruyère Carpender shared a first name with Mrs. Hall's brother. It was during the papers' initial discussion of Henry Stevens's whereabouts on the day of the murder that Mrs. Gibson had suddenly appeared, announcing she'd heard a woman cry out “Henry! Henry!” as shots rang out. Unfortunately for Mrs. Gibson, Henry Stevens had an alibi his lawyer described as “copper-riveted,” but then it turned out there was another Stevens relative named Henry. Mistakes in identity can sometimes be extremely convenient, a fact Tom Buchanan will ruthlessly exploit at
Gatsby
's end. In the case of the Henrys, Mrs. Gibson could keep changing her mind about which Henry she had seen.

Meanwhile a “negress” named Nellie Lo Russell, who lived near Mrs. Gibson and frequently quarreled with her, came forward saying that Mrs. Gibson had been with her on the night of the murder, “
at the hour the pig-raising Amazon says she was astride her mule watching the double killing.” But Mott decided once again to ignore questions about Mrs. Gibson's credibility, focusing this time on Mrs. Russell's credibility. A farmer who lived nearby claimed Mrs. Russell “
talks in bunches. I don't think she's reliable.”
She wouldn't be the only unreliable narrator in the story, but Mott defended Mrs. Gibson: “Why should any woman tell a story like that unless she had some real foundation for it?” Clearly, Mr. Mott was not au fait with current slang: the phrase “publicity hound” was first recorded in 1920, and “publicity-driven” would appear in 1925.