Careless People (38 page)

Fitzgerald's natural milieu was on Broadway, in the “Roaring Forties” or in Harlem cabarets, Boyd continued; a typical night consisted of “music by George Gershwin, under the baton and rhythmically swinging foot of Paul Whiteman; wines and spirits by special arrangement with the Revenue Department,” followed by a wild drive back to Long Island in their secondhand red Rolls-Royce, “the most autonomous automobile in New York.” After a night during which they wandered from cabarets like the Palais Royal to the Plantation Club, from the Rendezvous to Club Gallant, with many a detour en route, finally would commence a miraculous departure for Great Neck. Scott would pull out his checkbook “for the writing of inexplicable autographs in the tragic moments immediately preceding his flight through the weary wastes of Long Island,” and a madcap drive home would ensue. “By an apparently magic, and certainly unexpected, turn of the hand,” the car would suddenly swing round, “dislodging various friends who have been chatting confidently to the occupants,” while standing on the running boards. After summarily dispensing with extra passengers, Scott would begin the erratic journey back to Long Island. “When it is a moral certainty that one is miles off the true course,” Fitz would suddenly turn over the wheel to some passenger who had never driven a car before and climb into the back to join the sleeping party, confident that they'd be carried home. Eventually, after “consulting” with various policemen who were willing to overlook the Volstead Act when presented with evidence of a fiduciary trust, the car would glide graciously to their front door in Great Neck.

Boyd ended his portrait of the Fitzgeralds by noting that after rising at midday, and finding some party to while away the afternoon, “the evening mood gradually envelops Scott Fitzgerald.” Another “
party must be arranged. By the time dinner is over, the nostalgia of town is upon us once more. Zelda will drive the car.”

Glowing lights scintillate and vanish into the darkness. We are trying to find what Henry James called “the visitable past,” to revisit Babylon—but it isn't easy to discern the route to the lost city.

C
harlotte Mills announced on Friday, December 1, that she was “disgusted” by the prosecution's failure to bring anyone to trial for her mother's murder. A resourceful girl, she had decided to solve the mystery herself—by speaking to her mother's ghost. She had been inspired by recent press reports of Arthur Conan Doyle's experiments with séances and his well-publicized insistence that science supported his investigations. “If what I read is true,” Charlotte explained, “I shall certainly be able to communicate with my mother and learn the truth.” Unfortunately for Charlotte, what she read wasn't true, but she insisted that she would continue to “
fight for a real investigation.” A week later
Conan Doyle wrote to the
New York Times
to protest about a large reward recently offered by
Scientific American
magazine for any proof of the claims made by Spiritualists. Such a reward, Conan Doyle argued, would “stir up every rascal in the country,” inciting fakers, frauds, and publicity seekers.

That Sunday, a New Jersey minister preached about the Hall–Mills “fiasco,” inveighing against the widely held opinion that local citizens had “put the question of expense ahead that of justice and the protection of society.” “
There is a trend,” the minister observed, “toward a luxurious and vicious form of life, exceedingly wicked and corrupt, and the use of violent power to obtain advancement. This constitutes our modern Babylon and it will assuredly be destroyed as was the Babylon of old, not leaving a vestige of its greatness behind.” Their Babylon would disappear, it is true—but another would rise in its stead.

If revisiting Babylon is difficult, even visiting Babylon was a dangerous enterprise. On Tuesday, December 5, 1922, the
Tribune
reported with palpable amusement that a monkey had been killed in the town of Babylon, Long Island, for “hugging the postmaster's wife”: a small monkey, which might have been the “bootlegger's baboon” that had escaped and terrorized Babylon a few weeks earlier (“though those who saw the latter animal
emphatically deny it”), was shot when it leaped into the open horse-drawn surrey of Mrs. Samuel Powell. She was on her way to buy a goat when
the monkey “dropped right into Mrs. Powell's lap and embraced her fervently.” Her passenger, Henry Kingsman, was an expert on goats, the reporter noted, but knew nothing about monkeys; however, as Mrs. Powell screamed at Kingsman to help her he “obediently detached the monkey and flung it to the road.” A hunter emerged from the side of the road, as if in a modern fairy tale. The hunter's “specialty” was neither goats nor monkeys, but rabbits; however, “being a somewhat less ethical savant than Mr. Kingsman,” the hunter aimed his gun and “blazed away” at the monkey. “The charge struck the monkey, and the monkey bit the dust.” The hunter refused to give his name to Mrs. Powell, but he “presented the defunct monkey to her,” which it seems she kept as a souvenir. Mrs. Powell drove home “with a dead monkey and a live goat and an anecdote that will brighten the winter for Babylon.” The
World
was also amused enough to share the story, hinting that the monkey might have been a victim of the unwritten law: “
A monkey was shot near Babylon, L.I. for hugging a married woman. Monkey business of this kind is always dangerous,” as the murders of Hall and Mills had shown.

M
urder mysteries creep into Chapter Seven almost immediately. When Nick and Gatsby arrive together for lunch at the Buchanans' on the last day of the summer, Nick imagines that the butler roars at them from the pages of a detective novel: “The master's body! . . . I'm sorry Madame but we can't furnish it—it's far too hot to touch this noon!”

On this climactic day Daisy inadvertently reveals that she is in love with Gatsby by telling him how cool he always looks—Tom suddenly hears an inflection in her “indiscreet voice,” that voice full of money, and realizes that she and Gatsby have been having an affair. The realization sets the plot
into motion and all five main characters drive into New York. Tom insists on driving Gatsby's yellow “circus wagon” of a car and Gatsby grows angry, his anger as revealing as Tom's. Nick observes a look on Gatsby's face that he declines at first to characterize, but that he sees two more times before the episode is finished: “an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words.” Near the chapter's end Nick will finally tell us what it was: Gatsby looks like a killer.

Meanwhile Tom says repeatedly that he's been making an “investigation” into Gatsby's affairs. Insisting that he's not as dumb as they think, he claims to have a kind of “second sight” and begins to say that science has confirmed such phenomena, before realizing that he can't explain how. Abruptly abandoning another of his pseudoscientific theories (when “the immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss”), Tom settles for repeating that he's been making an investigation, and Jordan jokes: “Do you mean you've been to see a medium?” The jest merely confuses Tom, while Jordan and Nick laugh at the idea of Tom as a Conan Doyle using séances to solve the mystery of Gatsby's identity.

They stop for gas at the garage among the ash heaps, as gray, ineffectual Wilson emerges from the dark shadows of the story's margin. He looks sick, telling them as he gazes “hollow-eyed” at the yellow car that he “just got wised up to something funny the last two days” and wants to go west, the place of fresh starts and frontiers, along with his wife.

As Nick looks up and sees the giant eyes of T. J. Eckleburg keeping their composed vigil, he also notices another set of eyes, discomposed, peering out at their car from an upstairs window above Wilson's garage. It is Myrtle, and she too has “a curiously familiar” expression on her face (her symmetry with Gatsby subtly recurring), an expression that seems “purposeless and inexplicable” until Nick realizes that “her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife,” as they drive off in their expensive car to New York. Scholars have asked why Nick finds this expression “curiously familiar,” and speculated that perhaps
he recognizes it from the movies. But expressions are also phrases, and a woman with jealous terror in her eyes would be a curiously familiar expression to anyone who had been following the Hall–Mills case, as well.

When the party from Long Island arrives at the Plaza, Tom forces a confrontation over the affair by calling Gatsby's relationship with Daisy a “presumptuous little flirtation.” The
Trimalchio
drafts are rather more explicit, as they often are: Nick says he and Jordan wanted to leave, for “
human sympathy has its curious limits and we were repelled by their self absorption, appalled by their conflicting desires. But we were called back by a look in Daisy's eyes which seemed to say: ‘You have a certain responsibility for all this too.'” Nick's responsibility remains, but his acknowledgment disappears in the final version, an implication of his culpability to which he never admits.

It is as Gatsby grows more betrayed by Daisy's admission that she loves him “too,” instead of with the singular devotion he has brought to her, that Nick realizes Gatsby “looked—and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had ‘killed a man.' For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.” How murderous is Gatsby? Fitzgerald will not tell us, preferring to “
preserve the sense of mystery” as he later wrote in a letter, but he carefully makes the insinuation, even if it's a conditional one.

Daisy and Gatsby leave in Gatsby's car to return to Long Island, while Tom, Jordan, and Nick drive the blue coupé back across the ash heaps. Nick suddenly remembers it is his thirtieth birthday and begins to reflect on aging as they drive “on toward death through the cooling twilight.” By placing this remark just after Nick's meditation on mortality, Fitzgerald cushions its barb. We may be lulled on first reading into thinking that they drive toward death in the general human sense, as if Tom's wheeled chariot hurries them toward it. But there are more imminent, and more violent, deaths waiting. When Daisy and Gatsby leave the hotel, Fitzgerald hints at what will come: “They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated like ghosts even from our pity.” People can become accidental, too, material accessories—in this case, to murder.

D
uring the first week of December 1922 a swindler named Charles Ponzi was making headlines across America. The “get-rich-quick financier” and Boston-based “exchange wizard” who'd promised his victims 50 percent profit in forty-five days had two years earlier given his name to a particular form of financial fraud: a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi was indicted for one of the biggest swindles in American history, broken by the investigative journalism of the
New York Post
. Ponzi had been in jail since 1920; by early 1922, financial swindlers across the country were labeled a “Chicago ‘Ponzi'” or an “East Side ‘Ponzi'” as other “Ponzi schemes” quickly followed in the press, and the nation exploded in protest at his willingness to help so many Americans try to get something for nothing. When the Ponzi story first broke in 1920, the
New York Times
ran an editorial on “The Ponzi Lesson,” a lesson America would spend the rest of the century forgetting.