Careless People (32 page)

In his
Times
article that Sunday, “
Biography as Fiction,” Cournos argued that the best art was produced when “realities themselves are used as symbols.” In fact, Cournos was prepared to go further and say that the only fiction that deserved to be called art was “fact in the light of imagination.” This is the difference between art and documentary reportage, being debated in the pages of the
New York Times
that rainy mild Sunday in November as the Fitzgeralds trained back to Long Island, trailing a hangover.

O
ver the weekend, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks traveled to Princeton, the papers discussed the forthcoming grand jury trial in the Hall–Mills case, which was finally going to be convened on Monday.
Witnesses would include the hapless Pearl Bahmer and Raymond Schneider, still awaiting trial for the misdemeanors that followed their finding the bodies; the maids in the Hall residence; the doctors and detectives who'd been at the scene when the bodies were discovered; and, of course, Jane Gibson. Mr. Mott intended to argue that Mrs. Hall was behind the crimes: “
The motive accepted by Mr. Mott for proof before the grand jury was that Mrs. Hall's intense desire for the preservation of the conventions, outraged by the furtive spooning of her husband and the singer, led up to anger which caused the situation which got beyond her control and brought about the murders,” explained the
World
, in what was possibly the first and last instance of “furtive spooning” being cited as a motive for murder.

The Hall–Mills story was beginning to be defined by women, a novel and somewhat disturbing development, said the
Tribune
. “
A jury will decide between the two women—one throughout her life a symbol of exclusive respectability in New Brunswick; the other a turbulent character, who in recent years has made a living transmuting New Brunswick's garbage into pork”—and its swinishness into garbage. Charlotte Mills was reported to be “aggrieved” at not having been called to testify, complaining that
Prosecutor Beekman had cut her off when he deigned to question her at all, saying, “That's all right, little girl. That's all we want to know.”

American women had finally won the vote two years earlier, in a constitutional amendment that followed hard on the heels of the Volstead Act. The question of women's role in public and professional life was now urgent, and much debated: suddenly something called the “woman's vote” was taken into account in elections and treated as very different from the normal vote made by people who were not women. Equally concerning was the idea that women were beginning to sit on juries, a development much discussed that autumn. The women who would join the Hall–Mills grand jury were named by the press, which speculated on their likely attitudes toward the case. That October the American
ambassador to Britain had given a talk asking if women had souls; if they did, he said, they would need their own set of commandments. The speech caused a small storm in America: asked for comment,
Ring Lardner said there was no point in writing new commandments for women, as they would only break them. He recommended that all the women in the world be killed or sent to New Jersey.

On November 18, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks made their merry way to Princeton, the
Saturday Evening Post
featured a woman golfer on the cover, viewing her club with a certain amount of dismay—or confusion.

As America waited with mounting anticipation for the New Brunswick grand jury to convene, two new witnesses came forward, strengthening the state's case. Another hog farmer, named George Sipel—promptly dubbed the “Pig Man”—was said to have corroborated Mrs. Gibson's statement, claiming he was the owner of the truck that drove past the crime scene, illuminating the murder with its headlights just in
time for Mrs. Gibson to witness it. Another witness was claiming to have been the confidante of Edward Hall.
Paul Hamborszky was a Hungarian minister in New Brunswick who had recently been relieved of his ministerial duties after complaints of his drinking, and had since
become a used-car salesman. Although Hamborszky's statement was hearsay, vague, and did not actually deal with the crime, and thus could not be put before the grand jury, “
the authorities do not consider this a fatal defect in the Hamborszky story.”

In the meantime, an enterprising local had opened a “
murder museum” at the Phillips Farm, charging admission and serving “soda water, sandwiches, peanuts, and pop corn as refreshments.”
The crab apple tree had disappeared, torn down by souvenir-seekers, so sightseers brought shovels and dug up earth from the crime scene; those who had forgotten containers could purchase paper bags to carry their dirt home.

The
Tribune
sardonically suggested a route for Sunday drives. Given the rise of tourism as a pastime, the crowds that “
burned up New Jersey roads to the scene of the Hall–Mills murder . . . [and the] bits of houses, trees and furniture” that now “have a wide distribution on mantles and bureaus in homes,” perhaps America should consider organizing “Ideal Crime Tours”: “On left, turf field in which motorists may search for new evidence or souvenirs . . . Large excavation dead ahead. On that spot the crime was committed. Entire spot has been carried away by souvenir hunters. Drive on.”

One woman wrote to the
World
, describing such an excursion: “
having read much about the Hall–Mills murder, we decided to visit the Phillips farm. We drove along till we came to a sign reading: ‘This is the way to the tragedy.' Then we came upon another sign, reading: ‘This is the spot.' But the crab apple tree has disappeared, taken away by souvenir hunters. However, there is a stick with a black string tied about it to show where it was.”

What is the difference between the historian and the souvenir hunter? Both are in search of relics, of sacred objects; both tend to linger over scenes of carnage and tragedy. Ideally, historians do less damage to the source material, but this cannot always be guaranteed. The same is true of their search for meaning. The tour guide is not morally superior to the tourist, only more familiar with the route.

This is the way to the tragedy. But when you get there, instead of a historical relic, a sacred object, the totemic tree itself, all you may find is a stick with a black string tied to it by someone who got there first. History makes rubberneckers of us all.

De Russey's Lane, autumn 1922

O
n their journey home that Sunday, the Fitzgeralds would have had time to read a large illustrated feature in the
New York Times
on the “romance” of “Border Rum Runners.” Although there's no evidence that they did, there is a reason for us to read it, as it explains something that the Fitzgeralds knew but is now largely forgotten. For the previous three years, outlaws had been running whiskey on the border states between Canada and the American Middle West: rum-running was America's last frontier romance. By 1922 such romance was already doomed: alcohol was beginning to make its way across the country by means of rapidly organizing crime, “
from Chicago by the dirty channels of bribed politicians and ‘fixed' garages.” What would become the National Crime Syndicate was gathering force. Soon rapacious men like Arnold Rothstein would be obliterated in the public memory by celebrity gangsters such as Al Capone—who in 1922 was manager and part owner of a speakeasy and brothel in Chicago, and looking for bigger things.

Although the “dashing rascals of the romantic novel type” who first ran the whiskey trail were already disappearing, said the
Times
, “the spirit of adventure still lingers in the lake lands of Northern Minnesota,” where “the whiskey was running” from Canada across Lake Superior, or in a “four-hour dash across the border” to Minot, North Dakota, the gangster capital of the west in the 1920s. The crossing from the Canadian border to North Dakota was called “Whiskey Gap.” North Dakota became the pipeline for bootleg alcohol traveling to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul—which Scott and Zelda had just left. At first, public sentiment in North Dakota had been disposed toward bootleggers: any business was welcome in a state that had gone bankrupt before prohibition was enacted. But now, in 1922, rum-running in North Dakota had become déclassé: “
there are too many common people who have managed to climb into it . . . There's taint in the blood of the people who have fallen to the lure of the easy money of the bootleg industry.”

After the reporter comes calling on Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway reveals that he is really—or at least originally—James Gatz, the son of shiftless farm people in North Dakota, who grew up convinced that he was destined for greater things. Although seventeen-year-old James Gatz's departure from North Dakota in 1907 predates prohibition, Gatsby is constantly associated with images suggesting bootlegging—including the state from which he hails. The investigative reporter is drawn to Gatsby by “contemporary legends such as the ‘underground pipe-line to Canada,' [which] attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore,” like a boat in Rum Row. The truth, we are about to learn, is that Gatsby got his start from a “yachtsman”—another common euphemism for bootlegger, because of the flotilla of boats running rum up from the West Indies.