Gatsby le Magnifique

IV

On a Sunday morning, while church bells tolled along the shore, the world and its straying mistresses returned bleary-eyed to Gatsby’s mansion, where the lawn still glittered with the debris of another night. Between the cocktails and the hothouse roses, the young ladies whispered that he was a bootlegger, that he had killed a man, that he was the nephew of Von Hindenburg and a distant cousin to the devil. None of it could be proved, and none of the partygoers much cared to try.

Nick Carraway, the neighboring observer, later transcribed the names of those who had passed through Gatsby’s house that summer onto an old timetable dated July fifth, nineteen twenty-two. From East Egg came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, Doctor Webster Civet (recently drowned in Maine), the Hornbeams, the Willie Voltaires, a clan of Blackbucks, Clarence Endive in his white knickerbockers, and the reckless Ripley Snell, who was so drunk he let Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s car run over his hand three days before he was carted off to the penitentiary. From West Egg came movie people, the Catlips and the Bembergs, gamblers like Ed Legros and James B. “Rot-Gut” Ferret, and a Mr. Klipspringer, who haunted the place so persistently he had been nicknamed “the boarder.” Benny McClenahan, Nick noted, always arrived with four interchangeable girls whose first names ran to flowers and months, and whose surnames they confessed, if pressed, to be the surnames of great American capitalists.

A morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous cream-colored car lurched up Nick’s drive with a three-noted greeting, the first time Gatsby had called upon him. He invited Nick to lunch, and they set off through West Egg village in a rolling glass conservatory on wheels. Nick had spoken with Gatsby perhaps half a dozen times and had begun to find him disappointingly thin of conversation, a man reduced to the role of proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse. Then, before they had gone a mile, Gatsby began to lose the endings of his elegant sentences and to slap his knee in agitation.

“Look here, old sport, what’s your opinion of me, anyhow?”

Nick offered polite evasions, but Gatsby cut him off. He was the son of wealthy Midwesterners, all dead. He had been educated at Oxford, by family tradition. He came into money. He had lived like a young rajah in Paris and Venice and Rome, collecting rubies and hunting big game. In the war he had been a major, had led a hundred and thirty men in the Argonne Forest, and had won a decoration from Montenegro itself. He produced the medal, and a photograph taken in Trinity Quad that looked authentic enough to make Nick wonder whether the whole improbable tale might not be true. Then Gatsby announced that he had a request to make, and that it concerned a Miss Baker, and that he would rather have Jordan speak of it than speak of it himself.

In a cool, well-fanned cellar on Forty-second Street, Nick was introduced to Meyer Wolfshiem, a small flat-nosed man whose nostrils were graced with twin tufts of hair. Wolfshiem spoke of the night his friend Rosy Rosenthal was shot outside the old Metropole, of coffee and electrocutions, and he sized up the room with the caution of a man who has long trusted no surface that was not his own. He gave Nick a businesslike glance and wondered if he might be looking for a connection, but Gatsby waved this off: Nick was merely a friend. Wolfshiem wore cufflinks of human molars, spoke fondly of “Oggsford,” and assured Nick that Gatsby was a gentleman who would never look at a friend’s wife. When he rose to leave, he raised a benedictory hand and announced that he belonged to another generation, his tragic nose trembling.

“He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in nineteen nineteen,” Gatsby said coolly, when Wolfshiem had gone.

The idea staggered Nick, though he had always known, abstractly, that the fix had occurred. It had never crossed his mind that one man might have done such a thing with the single-mindedness of a burglar.

Nick paid the check. Across the crowded room he caught sight of Tom Buchanan, and brought Gatsby over for an introduction. They shook hands briefly, and an unfamiliar embarrassment settled over Gatsby’s face. When Nick turned, Gatsby had vanished.

That afternoon, in the tea-garden at the Plaza, Jordan Baker sat up very straight on a straight chair and told Nick the rest of the story. In October of nineteen seventeen, she had been crossing lawns in Louisville in English rubber-soled shoes, and Daisy Fay had hailed her from her white roadster. Beside Daisy sat a young lieutenant, looking at her in a way that every girl wishes to be looked at once. His name, said Jordan, was Jay Gatsby, and she had not set eyes on him again for more than four years.

Wild rumors had circulated about Daisy afterwards: of a winter-night suitcase packed for New York, of a soldier sent overseas, of a mother who locked her away. Then came the début, the engagement to a man from New Orleans, the wedding to Tom Buchanan with a hundred people in four private cars, and a string of pearls worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Jordan had been a bridesmaid, and had found Daisy the day of the bridal dinner lying on the bed in a flowered dress, as lovely as the June night and as drunk as a monkey, with a letter crushed in one hand and a bottle of Sauterne in the other.

“’Gratulate me,” Daisy had muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”

She had wept. She had clutched the letter into the tub with her. The next day, at five o’clock, she had married Tom without so much as a shiver and gone off to the South Seas. They had come back from France with a daughter, and Daisy had come out of it all with a perfect reputation, perhaps because she did not drink.

About six weeks ago, Jordan said, Daisy had heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years, and had come into Jordan’s room with that strange voice, asking, “What Gatsby?” It was only then that Jordan had understood the man in West Egg was the same officer in Daisy’s white car.

They had left the Plaza now, and were driving in a victoria through Central Park, the clear voices of children rising through the twilight.

“It was a strange coincidence,” said Nick.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all,” said Jordan. “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”

The modesty of the demand that followed shook Nick. Gatsby, who had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths, only wanted to come over one afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

“He wants to know,” said Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house for tea, and then let him come over.”

It was a small thing, and an enormous thing, and Nick found he could not refuse.