That Summer, 1922: A Counter-Memoir

By Thomas Buchanan

Author’s Note: This reimagined version of The Great Gatsby was inspired by a comment Fitzgerald made in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in December 1924 while revising the novel. “I suppose,” he said of Tom Buchanan, “he’s the best character I’ve ever done.” He confides to Perkins that he considered at one point abandoning Gatbsy and having Buchanan “dominate the book.” So in this fictitious memoir I let Tom Buchanan dominate and tell his side of the story. It was originally published in The Believer online in a six part series between June 12 and June 19, 2013.  Since the six episodes are no longer available online and the story has disappeared, I decided to make some small edits and republish it in The Hodge Review, where I hope it might find some new readers. If Tom’s counter-memoir motivates you to reread The Great Gatsby with a refreshed perspective then it has accomplished what I had intended it to do. R.A. 

Lands End at Sands Point, The inspiration for Tom & Daisy Buchanan's Mansion. Photo: Natasha Commander

I

I am a gravely misunderstood man and have been for a very long time, thanks to a perennial bestseller written some sixty years ago by a Manhattan bond salesman turned procurer, one Nicholas Carraway, the author of a deceptive and biased memoir that thinly disguises itself as a mythic novel. 

“A sly seed,” is how I first referred to him among my circle when we were at school in New Haven, Class of 1915. He was an insidious character, though with some touch of brilliance that enabled him to disarm even discerning people, usually catching them off-guard, and to insinuate his way into their lives and affairs. Although he liked to claim that we belonged to the same senior social club, no one for a moment considered us part of the same social set. 

It was Wednesday, June 7^th, a warm breezy evening in 1922 when Carraway dropped by to visit my wife Daisy and me for drinks and dinner. After graduation, Carraway--who also happened to be Daisy’s second cousin--went off to serve in the War to End All Wars and to Help Save the World for Democracy.  I had not seen him since he visited us in Chicago for a few days right after he returned from Europe. He wore his uniform then and I could tell it made an impression on Daisy, though I noticed no decorations. He didn’t speak much about the war, which as a staunch isolationist I opposed. I would become a dedicated supporter of Mr. Republican, Ohio’s great Robert Taft (Yale ’10), who even John F. Kennedy admired for his principles and courage. 

I formed the distinct impression that Carraway had seen little combat despite his claim that he served with a machine gun battalion in France. I don’t believe he saw as much action as another of our classmates in the society and a teammate of mine, Archie MacLeish, who rose to be an artillery captain and then, mainly through his left-wing connections, would become Librarian of Congress. Many years later, Daisy and I took in the opening of his play J.B. on Broadway and we exchanged greetings at intermission. I didn't care for the drama but Daisy thought it was “enthralling.”

I met Carraway that evening on the front porch. Daisy was inside chatting with her old Louisville friend, the golfer, Jordan Baker. I had just returned from a few practice chukkers at the Meadow Brook Club and was still in riding gear. I had played poorly, the mounts were sluggish, and I’m afraid I was in an irritable mood when Carraway puttered up the drive in a beat-up and dusty 1915 Dodge Model 30. As he got out, I noticed he appeared painfully thin and it looked like he had lost a little hair. Back at New Haven he was always the least imposing member of our class, which I think helped account for his success at securing the confidences of others. 

Carraway’s inclusion in our group came about largely through what I considered social blackmail. A good friend of mine in a drunken fit of intimacy happened to tell Carraway one night a shocking story that I believe he stupidly made up simply as a boast. He had never mentioned this story to me until after it was too late. It involved a beautiful Mulatto girl who worked as a housekeeper for his parents in their Madison Avenue penthouse. He claimed he had sexual relations with her over the course of a summer and just as school was to begin she announced she was pregnant. He drove her to a Harlem doctor he learned about from a hotel doorman, handed her two-hundred dollars, said that he loved her but had to return to Hotchkiss, and left her there. 

The girl never went through with the procedure and tearfully informed his parents about her situation. She was alone, her folks lived in Georgia, and her only northern relation was a deaf rheumatic aunt. My friend’s parents, the story went, touched by the girl’s predicament offered her five thousand dollars to cover all expenses and to return to her family. She accepted the money and was never seen again. They nearly pulled him out of Hotchkiss but in the end relented and as a punishment for his foolish behavior forbade him the use of the Pierce Arrow for the fall term. This story may or may not be true, but Carraway with subtle threats leveraged this uninspired confidence into a social advantage. 

I don’t know how Carraway, who had just come East from Minnesota, found a position with the obscure and soon to be discredited down-town brokerage house ironically called Probity Trust but I do have my suspicions about how he came to live next door to the ostentatious fraud who called himself Jay Gatsby, a name now nauseatingly associated with the American Dream. A young colleague at the firm had somehow found a beat-up bungalow near the Sound and suggested that he and Carraway share it. Then suddenly Probity Trust dispatches this “roommate” to Washington and Carraway moves in all by himself--no rent sharer needed any longer--and very conveniently right next door to Gatsby, practically on his front lawn. The whole maneuver seems to have been engineered by Gatsby from the start, although I doubt Carraway was ever aware of it. Gatsby had many shady contacts and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them operated at Probity Trust. 

The dinner that first evening did not go well. Daisy quickly took Carraway into her confidence and told him I had a “woman.” This disclosure was prompted by an unwanted phone call from the very “woman,” Myrtle Wilson, the voluptuous wife of a garage mechanic who lived along the main road to Manhattan. In those days Daisy was not able to satisfy my desires—she had lost weight after our daughter Pammy was born and seemed quite content to retain the unappealing boyish figure that had become fashionable among smart women. In contrast, Myrtle enjoyed being a female of the last century. At dinner, Carraway, Daisy, and Jordan seemed to gang up on me, ridiculing the opinions contained in an influential anti-immigration book I had just read by a prominent Harvard professor and eminent Unitarian. When I saw how easily Carraway played into this game, I had a momentary flash that the sudden entrance into my life of this old classmate and now new neighbor did not bode well. 

II.

At first I thought Daisy had a crush on Carraway. You could even see a family resemblance. They were both slender, dark-haired, and small-boned, fair-skinned and fragile. They flirted and Nick would easily fall into the inane exaggerated idiom she used with all her crowd. Simple opinions were stated “absolutely,” ordinary things were “gorgeous,” news about friends would be “simply amazing,” a noisy party was “crazy,” she was always “awfully glad” to see anyone. Daisy possessed such a lovely, musical voice that she grew up knowing she could utter the silliest morsels and ravenous men would eat them up. Carraway doted on her and never failed to laugh at her aimless jokes, but he could also adopt a serious, sympathetic expression when she began one of her preposterous heart-to-hearts, usually about something that was making her miserable. I always thought the old saying was wrong: company loves misery is what it should be. And it was clear Daisy loved Carraway’s company. 

Am I being hard on Daisy? I don’t intend to be. We had our difficulties--that awful summer, then seven years later I lost nearly everything in the Crash, and then when Pammy was killed tragically while serving as a Red Cross volunteer during the North African campaign--but for sixty-two years we shared what was practically a secret society, a separate world inhabited by just the two of us. Having said this, I still find it odd that Americans tend to judge the quality of a marriage by its longevity, as though staying married for thirty years, despite daily overt rancor or suppressed misery, is in itself far superior to being pleasurably together for only five years. As an investment expert, I found clients often preferred positions they had stubbornly held on to for a decade more valuable than an unquestionably rising equity. “Marry your girlfriends,” I would tell these men, “but for God’s sake don’t marry your investments.” 

Daisy died a year ago, a few days after Ronald Reagan defeated the indecisive Jimmy Carter. She died at our West Palm Beach home after a long illness.  During much of her final days she was incoherent. Although it was late October she asked several times if we were approaching the longest day of the year. I joked and said, “See, you missed it again.” But by then banter was lost on her. She passed the final day of her life in total silence. There were no last words I can recall, just gibberish. But on the day before, the nurse came out to the patio, where I was with a golfing pal toasting the Gipper with a gin and tonic, and leaned over to whisper that Daisy wanted to speak with me. I hadn’t visited her bedroom since that morning and I was shocked to see how frail she suddenly looked. The Miami Herald lay open on the bed. Her blue eyes did her smiling for her: “I hope you will be deliriously happy with your Bonzo, dear.” We never agreed on politics. 

After Daisy’s quiet funeral which was attended by only a few neighbors, my golf circle, and her devoted nurse, Miss Dawn Westover, I turned the Palm Beach property over to an agent and made a reverse snowbird migration, settling back into the house in Great Neck that Daisy and I returned to each Memorial Day. Not the Georgian Colonial that figured so prominently in Carraway’s memoir, one of the few things he got right, but the smaller though quite comfortable place we moved to after Wall Street fell to pieces and we sold the mansion on the bay. Despite the tax advantages, I always disliked Florida, Miss Westover had never been north, and I needed to jog memories for the counter-memoir I have finally decided to write. Though I feel in tip-top shape at eighty-seven, I’m not sure how long I have left. My father lived to ninety-two, collapsing on the green after sinking a fifteen foot putt. The doctor says my heart is strong, and I continue to walk three miles each day. But I recently opted for non-surgical prostate treatment and anything can happen at this age. 

Part III.

I am not a writer like Carraway, who had achieved a minor literary reputation at college for a series of pompous columns he penned for the Yale News in support of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. But a year before she died, Daisy persuaded me to enroll in a memoir-writing course conducted for adults at a nearby community college. The course was taught once a week by a retired literature professor who had published several writing books, a Dr. Kaye Hunter. I was surprised to discover that I was not the oldest person in the class. We would all read our “works-in-progress” aloud and on a few occasions I read my recollections of New Haven in the days prior to the First World War. I never mentioned Carraway and was vague about other details, and since I have gone by the not uncommon name Thomas Buchanan since Carraway’s memoir was published, no one, not even Dr. Hunter, put two and two together. One gentleman in the class, however, a pulmonary specialist, had been at Cambridge around the same time, played on the football team, and we traded rivalry jokes. He had a few friends at Yale and at one point during a class break asked if I had known Walter Chase who had been at Deerfield with him. “Walter passed away a long time ago. A charming fellow but, well, a serious gambling problem,” he added with a reminiscent sigh. I said I didn’t recall him and changed the topic. I was relieved when he missed the next class and then felt disheartened to learn he had suffered a fatal stroke while driving to his practice, where he still saw patients one day a week. 

Chase! Walter Chase! The name propelled me backwards and I envisioned Walter again as I saw him on that September afternoon in 1922 when I invited him to lunch at a popular speakeasy to ask him frankly what he knew about Jay Gatsby. I suspected that Gatsby, with his ostentatious mansion and pink suits and tasteless parties, was just another “bootlegger,” profiting from Prohibition. I knew, as did everyone, that he was a business associate of the notorious Meyer Wolfsheim, a slippery crook who always cleverly kept himself out of jail. I knew too that Walter spent the month of August in a New Jersey prison and I suspected Wolfsheim may have been involved. I felt sorry I hadn’t paid Walter a visit, nor had I seen him since, and when he entered the restaurant I saw that the experience had taken a tremendous toll. 

Walter had been one of my closest friends at New Haven, a burly, jovial sort of fellow who would bet on anything and who later became a sucker for bad business deals, a lethal combination. He would lose money betting then try to recoup his losses through some get-rich-quick investment deal that would only deepen the losses. I had tried on numerous occasions to offer professional advice but my propositions were always too slow for him and I eventually gave up, hoping one day he’d come to his senses. He had already gone through both a sizable inheritance and the marriage that brought it, and he appeared to be living at the Yale Club, always on the prowl for another deal. He looked awful in a suit fitted for a much stockier man and his thin shoulders were slouched like those of the men looking for handouts around Grand Central Station. 

To this very day, sixty-four years later, I recall that meeting, though of course the conversation I report is an approximation made to the best of my memory. 

“Walter Chase, you old son of a bitch,” I said, getting up from the table and extending my arm. He smiled faintly and took my hand gently, as though it were an effort for him to form a solid grip. He must feel disgraced, I thought, and also disappointed I didn’t come to New Jersey to pay him a visit. I suspect none of his friends did. I ordered highballs, apologized for being busy, suggested we see more of each other, and then got down to business. “About this fellow Jay Gatsby,” I said, “do you know anything?” Walter straightened his tie, lit a cigarette, and looked down at the menu. “He bought a ridiculous palace across the bay from us not long after we moved out this way from Chicago. I think he’s some bootlegger trying to seduce my wife,” I added, “with Nick Carraway’s help—you remember sneaky Carraway?”  Through all of this Walter kept staring at the menu. “And Gatsby’s an associate of Meyer Wolfsheim,” I paused and lowered my voice, “a person you know.”

Walter looked up and we clinked glasses. “To old times, Tom.” He looked around the room, probably hoping no one he knew was lurking about. 

“What’s happening to the world, Tom? Bootleggers, gangsters, jazz, women running around naked. This God-damned railroad strike. You know, I’ve come to think it’s all because of Prohibition.” He took a long drink. “To hell with the politicians.”

I realized he was already a little tight. “Only thing Wilson ever did which I agreed with was to veto it,” I commented. “It was Congress.”

“Did you ever meet this Gatsby, Walter?”

He looked at me nervously. “I’m not prepared to go into too many details, Tom, but yes, I met him a few times with Wolfsheim last winter. That’s when my troubles began. Then again at one of his parties early in July. He said he wanted me to meet someone big, a tycoon known as “Rot-Gut,” a James B. Ferret…”

“Christ,” I interrupted, “I hope you didn’t do any dealings with him?”  

Walter crushed out a cigarette and immediately lit another. “Tom, I’m in a pretty rough spot. Our style of speculation requires not just know-how but capital. I have the know-how but no ready cash, not yet at least.”

“What happened at the party?”

He closed his eyes momentarily as if better to recollect the scene. “It seems I was one of the few guests with an invitation. It was a noisy affair and crowded. Plenty of gorgeous women of questionable character. I’ve never seen so much food and liquor in one place. I woke up at 4AM on an enormous white sofa, lying between inebriated twins in identical yellow dresses. On my way back to town I was stopped for speeding and then put under arrest. Gatsby had it set up. I think he was worried I might rat on him. He knows everyone, including the police commissioner. The idea was to put me in jail as a way to scare me. It worked.”

“Was Wolfsheim there?”

“No, he would never show his kike face out there. But I saw Nick. He was with that golfing friend of yours, Jordan Baker. Now there’s a smart-looking girl.”

“She’s a swell girl, Jordan. Daisy introduced them. He’ll do her wrong, the way he did that poor girl he was engaged to in Chicago. He’s not reliable, Walter. Don’t do any trading with Carraway.”

“I heard about that Chicago affair. Surprised there was no breach-of-promise action. Anyway, I avoided Nick and he didn’t see me. I’m not sure Jordan would recognize me—I haven’t seen her since your wedding.” 

 “What was your business gonnection with Wolfsheim,” I asked, exaggerating the speech as a joke, hoping to catch him off guard.  

Walter inhaled and held his breath for what seemed like a full minute. I thought he might choke. Then a burst of smoke and “Tom, I wish you wouldn’t ask me that.”

“I’m asking you in complete confidence, Walter. This information is very important to me in a personal way. We go far back. Our fathers were friends. I’m sorry that in the last few years after the marriage I haven’t been in closer touch. I will correct that. Daisy would love to see you—you’ll come out to dinner and stay a few days. I’ll make sure Jordan is there without Carraway. And I will put you in touch with better sources of financial know-how than ‘Rot-Gut.’”

I signaled the waiter and ordered more highballs. Walter remained silent, his eyes darting about the room as I studied the menu. I then added: “Walter, if you could use a little extra cash right now….”

 “That’s quite all right,” he replied, holding up his hand, “old sport.”

We laughed and he picked up the fresh highball, glanced around the room again, and leaned forward. “Buchanan, you’ve always been a straight-up fellow. I know a lot of people in New Haven hated your guts but whatever it was they said about you they never claimed you were dishonest.”  He winked—“Except maybe with the ladies.”

He paused and raised his glass in another toast. “Here’s to integrity. You still have yours, but my reputation is…ruined.” 

“People forget fast these days, Walter. It’ll all blow away.”

He didn’t seem convinced. I refused a cigarette and he lit another. “Let me tell you something about this town, Tom. You have suspicions, I know, but you have no idea, none, about the degree of corruption all around us. It’s not just Meyer Wolfsheim or that nobody Gatsby, they’re just a small part of a colossal web of fraud that if the truth were ever exposed would bring down the entire city.”

 

Walter suddenly stopped, realized something, and lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper. The restaurant was boisterous and as I leaned in towards Walter I felt I was not hearing him so much as reading his lips. “The deal with Wolfsheim involved buying up a lot of side-street drug-stores around here and in Chicago and selling cheap wood-grain alcohol across the counter. This Prohibition is destroying us, I tell you.”

“But the drug-store purchases are legitimate?”

“They seem to be. So long as the police make a buck they’re a going concern. But as Wolfsheim well knows, Chicago is a tough town for New Yorkers to muscle in.” 

“Is that what Gatsby is worried you’ll rat on?”

Walter finished his drink with a long swallow, and I called the waiter. Walter slid his menu aside. “I don’t feel much like lunch today, Tom. But I’ll have a refill.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, returning to the faint whisper. I leaned farther in. “They’re operating a bucket shop, Tom—using one of Wolfsheim’s Wall Street pals at a brokerage house.” He shook his head, “Sorry, Tom, I can’t say who, where, or how, but you know what I mean. They’re defrauding clients by gambling with their funds.”

“Shoddy furnishings and all the deals are by telephone, like Carraway’s concern? 

“That’s it exactly.”

 

The waiter set down the drinks, but he seemed to linger at the table. Walter stopped talking and didn’t pick up his highball until the waiter drifted away into the crowd.  

“Don’t look so shocked, Tom. What did you expect? This drug-store business is just small change for Wolfsheim, Gatsby and Associates. And I’ll tell you one more thing and then I’m done. If they can pull off what I think they ultimately have in mind, then fixing that World Series a few years ago will look like child’s play. Now I’m done.”

Walter and I finished our drinks and I dropped him off at the Yale Club before returning to my office. We shook hands and he promised to take me up on the invitation. I urged him to do so, but that was the last time I would see him. A few weeks after Myrtle and George Wilson--and the despicable lout responsible for their deaths--were buried, Walter Chase drowned while at an all-night yachting party on Long Island Sound. His body was never recovered. A few witnesses said he got very drunk, fell overboard and disappeared into the dark waters in a matter of seconds. 

IV. 

I had learned from Walter Chase that day all I essentially needed. Gatsby was no romantic enigma, no fabulous mystery, and certainly not the mythic hero that Carraway displayed in his deplorable and deceptive book. He was precisely what I imagined all along, a common criminal ready to swindle innocent people simply to achieve his sleazy goals, one of which was to amass an ill-gained fortune and another to steal my wife. Perhaps he foolishly thought the only way to seduce Daisy was to amass the fortune. Daisy liked money—who doesn’t, really?—but she would never be content with money like that. She had made it clear to me about three weeks before I met Walter, after we left the only party of Gatsby’s we ever attended (even she found it distasteful), that she believed, or wanted to believe, that Gatsby’s fortune came from his enterprising chain of drug-stores. I wanted to investigate this preposterous claim. From what Walter hinted, I knew I could never interfere with Gatsby’s criminal activities but I now had what I needed to prevent him from destroying not only our marriage but Daisy’s life. 

I had been suspicious of her behavior since that party. I could tell something was up. It wasn’t just her fox trotting with Gatsby and practically spending the entire evening in his company, but rather that she began to seem more dismissive of me than usual that summer. In the early years of our marriage she took that tone often, not so much in private but usually around her friends, pretending I was dense, or dull, or entirely dispensable as a husband. It disturbed me sometimes but lately because of Myrtle I usually let her go on and endured the ridicule as the only way she had of getting back. Daisy was an accomplished flirt and I knew she was no virgin when I married her but until the night of that party I never thought she could be unfaithful. 

As Daisy and her friends well knew, I myself had been unfaithful on a number of occasions. My infidelity began during our honeymoon with a hotel chambermaid in Santa Barbara, a stupid and careless fling on my part that Daisy soon found out about. The girl was half-Mexican and a beauty and she wound up costing me quite a bit of money. There had been a few others before Myrtle—one back when we lived in Chicago, the charming wife of a business colleague, then a quite unruly affair with a would-be actress I met on a family trip to Paris. Just before Myrtle, I enjoyed a pleasant rendezvous with a successful advertising copywriter who had a splendid sense of humor, lived a fashionable life, and even dined occasionally with Dorothy Parker--but we knew too many of the same people for my comfort. I made an artful exit and in no time found a creature from another world. 

Daisy knew of Myrtle but not her full identity until I confessed all of it that terrible evening after Gatsby ran her down. The reader, I hope, will forgive my jumping ahead. Everyone knows what happened anyway and I will eventually correct Carraway’s incredulous account. That night Daisy and I finally had the heart-to-heart she said she always wanted and needed. We talked through the night and I told her about the Wilsons, the up-town apartment, and even the time I went there with Carraway, and all the while I could hear someone shuffling about on the gravel drive outside. After I confided all of this, and admitted I struck Myrtle for repeatedly shouting out her name (Carraway’s description of that drunken evening is fairly accurate) she put her hand over mine and told me through tears how Gatsby had taken her in Louisville when she was just eighteen. 

He had vowed to marry her but then left for the war. He was twenty-seven, nearly ten years older, worldly, and with a determination she found appealing. He had deceived her and her family about his background, as he would continue to do with everyone he met. I long suspected she had given herself to one of the Camp Taylor officers but of course I had never heard of Gatsby until I saw him in Manhattan with Carraway and the unsavory Wolfsheim earlier that summer. 

Daisy then broke down and confessed to their afternoons together for the past month. 

“I’ll never see him again, Tom,” she sobbed, “never again. It was too cruel what he did to Walter. And then your…Mrs. Wilson. I begged him to stop and turn back but he sped up instead. I was terrified, Tom, it was terrifying…the whole evening…”

“I had the goods on him, Daisy. But I wasn’t sure when I’d confront him with it. I started to before lunch but your damned cousin got in the way. I was completely surprised Gatsby brought up Walter first. Did he mention it on the ride back?”

“He was enraged, at himself mostly. He beat his hands against the steering wheel and made no sense, assuring me he had nothing to do with Walter’s arrest and then saying how stupid it was of him to mention Walter. Kept repeating you tripped him up. Nothing he said was making sense—he was driving too fast.”

Daisy paused. “I’m glad you pressured him about Oxford, too. I now realize what a vicious liar he is.”  

“He’s no Oxford man, Daisy.” 

“No, I don’t mean that way. When he didn’t return to me right after the Armistice, I was devastated. I kept writing to him, growing more nervous by the day. He explained that he was frantic to see me but couldn’t come back because of certain complications and that he was under orders to go to Oxford. I tried to be patient but as the months passed I began to drift away. I went on dates with other officers at the camp--and, well, then I met you.” 

She was trying to stifle deep sobs. “I did love him once, Tom—it’s true what I said at the hotel. But tonight, after you questioned him, his story changed. I didn’t put it together right away—I was so angry with you at that moment—but to you he says he was at Oxford because he took advantage of an opportunity they were offering officers. He never said that in his letters. I brought this up on the ride back and called him a pathetic liar. He tried to explain his way out of these stories by making up another one about Oxford. And then… Mrs. Wilson ran into the road. He was in the middle of another lie just as he struck her.” 

“Tom, why did you insist I drive back with him? After what happened in that room? “

“I’m not sure, Daisy. I was playing by instinct, like on the football field. Maybe because after his admission I knew you would have no more to do with him and I wanted you to see him fully for what he is—an imposter, a crook, a complete Nobody. Everything about him is a lie. I had no idea he was a coward as well. He killed Myrtle, just as he probably murdered others who got in his way.”

“How did you know about the drug-stores?”

“I had a long talk with Walter yesterday afternoon and he told me about that scheme and hinted that there’s much more going on. Walter was crazy to get involved with these people but he was desperate, he’s flat broke. Now he’s frightened of what Gatsby and Gatsby’s associates might do—you’ve never met Meyer Wolfsheim, I hope….”

 

Daisy shuddered. “Jay would talk to him on the telephone.” She said she was aware that Gatsby’s new butler was one of his people: “A vile character.”

 

It was dawn when we finished talking. I embraced Daisy tenderly and she kissed me softly on the lips. She went into her room, and turned off the light. I never slept. I thought of going into Daisy’s bedroom to comfort her but all I could picture was Myrtle’s battered body lying on that filthy work-table in George Wilson’s garage and his pitiful, wailing moans. I felt like a heel but I also keenly felt the loss of her heavy intimacy and I despised Gatsby for what he did to both my marriage and my love affair. I lay in bed and seriously considered slipping out into the dawn, breaking into his gaudy mansion, and firing six shots into his dastardly head. 

Later that morning, Daisy suggested it would be a good idea if we visited her family in Louisville for a few weeks.  As we were upstairs packing, a disheveled and wild-eyed George Wilson forced his way into the house. I warned Daisy to stay in her room and went down to confront him. He had a gun and he threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell him who killed Myrtle and where he lived. At first I tried to calm him down and talk him out of it and said I was certain the police would find the driver soon enough. But he was crazed and dangerously incoherent so I simply told him the truth. Knowing Wilson, I did not think he would have the guts to pull it off. I’ve come to believe that this mad, determined act may have been the finest moment of George Wilson’s unhappy life.

I don’t think Wilson suspected me of being Myrtle’s lover. Had he confronted me about that I would have confessed and taken my chances. But he kept insisting he wanted to find the man who ran Myrtle down—he well knew from the night before that I was not the one--so I merely gave him what he asked for. I have never regretted that. Wilson, bless his soul, did what I should have done.  

I heard that hardly a soul attended Gatsby’s burial. At the conclusion of his memoir, Carraway makes it appear as though all his friends deserted him. But the truth is that Gatsby had no friends. When Daisy and I returned two weeks later, Myrtle’s sister Catherine called me to say that the funeral for George and Myrtle was well attended and that after they were buried in adjoining plots Wilson’s friend Michaelis threw a nice reception for all the guests at his Greek coffee counter. Catherine mentioned that she’d been to the 158^th Street apartment and rescued the pup I’d bought Myrtle back in July, that Sunday afternoon I brought Carraway into town to meet her. I had forgotten all about the poor mutt. I thanked her.

“The Greek and I are going to be married soon, in November. I know Myrtle would have considered him beneath me but I’m not getting any younger, Tom, and the Greek was always so nice to George. So maybe something good has come of this.”

I congratulated her. “We have the silver leash you bought Myrtle for the puppy,” she added tentatively. I said they could keep it.

V.

Yes, there is all that business about swapping the cars and who was actually driving—Daisy or Gatsby--when Myrtle was struck down. As I have admitted, Carraway did get some things right or at best half-right in his memoir. Daisy and I read the book when it first appeared in 1925. Afterwards, she tossed it into the trash and, despite its enormous popularity over the years, we never looked at it again, until Daisy suggested the memoir course and I began to plan this counter-memoir. It was painful but in order to proceed with an accurate version of those now distant events, I had to force myself to re-read it, fifty-five years later. So much has changed since that era when we lived as though the good times would never end. Now that I’ve restricted myself to one or sometimes two gin and tonics a day and haven’t touched a cigarette since Watergate brought down Nixon, it’s now hard to believe how much we all drank and smoked back then. 

I bought a used paperback edition at the community college bookstore (Lillian Civette had scrawled her name on the inside cover, dotting each “I” with a heart) and I read it aloud to Daisy over the course of a few evenings. Now and then, she would stop me, shake her head, and say she couldn’t believe we did this or that, or said such devastating things to each other. I often had to remind her that Carraway took many liberties with the chain of events and often put words in our mouths. I would also stop reading at times to take notes when I thought a particular event or conversation would require my attention for this memoir. I used a separate notebook as my used book had been so marked up there was hardly any room in the margins. I grinned when Lillian scribbled next to my name Racist! or Upper-Class Snob! or Chauvinist Pig!—I imagined she had been merely copying remarks made by her English instructor. It never ceases to amuse me how easily people apply the political cant of the present to the prevailing customs of the past. Yet I admit I could now and then be a snob and a cad.  

 

At times, as I read aloud, I would add my comments to the story, sometimes to help minimize the pain Daisy might feel, and at other times to set the facts straight. When we first read the book we were so astonished we barely spoke about it. But now, from the perspective of a half century, with every character except the two of us dead (Carraway and Jordan married a year after the book came out and were killed instantly on their honeymoon when their car spun out of control on a treacherous stretch of curvy mountain road in, of all places, Montenegro), I felt more like confronting the details than I ever had. I had suppressed so many of these until I began the memoir. I also found my commentary increased the farther into the book I got, mainly because Carraway grows increasingly unreliable as the events draw towards their horrible conclusion.

Any careful reader, though obviously not my dear Lillian (who I imagine is now on the Dean’s List at Florida State University), will observe Carraway’s inconsistencies, implausible details, and self-deceptions. I ask you, what writer boasts that he’s the most honest person he knows except a dishonest one? What could be more implausible than a self-absorbed individual like Carraway forgetting his thirtieth birthday? We all knew it—in fact, it was why Daisy had invited Gatsby and Carraway to our house for lunch that blistering, end of summer day. She knew I wouldn’t want Gatsby in our home under normal circumstances, but the birthday gave her some leverage. Carraway doesn’t mention that we all toasted his thirtieth. Daisy also had a gift for him—a pair of gold monogrammed cufflinks, what we then called “cuff buttons”—but it was forgotten as the day unraveled. I suspected the way Jordan glanced at him during our toast that she also had a present in store.  

Carraway makes it appear that the real reason behind the lunch was so Daisy and Gatsby could declare their love for each other in front of me. But that is preposterous, as anyone who knew Daisy would know that she would never allow herself to do such a thing in the presence of others and never in our house with our daughter in the next room. She may have gotten muddle-headed at times but she had too much decorum to make a circus out of such an announcement. Still, I could detect there was something going on between Gatsby and Daisy and I resented it. It was difficult for me to read aloud the part in which she practically makes love to Gatsby in our salon while I was tending to the drinks. Daisy tearfully admitted she had carried on like that but she said her behavior that entire day was a result of sheer fright. On the basis of their end-of-summer romance, Gatsby had been pressuring her to break with me and she was completely on edge. She did not want a scene. She was glad when Pammy made an entrance with her nurse but our daughter’s sudden presence made her realize all the more our inescapable bond. 

Hoping to avoid a scene, I decided to take matters into my own hands and confront Gatsby privately then and there with what I found out from Walter about his business partners and their operations. I thought that once he was aware of what I knew he would quietly back off, maybe even move away. He knew as well as I that Daisy would have nothing to do with a common crook. I invited him out to the veranda pretending I wanted to show him the view. But to my disappointment Carraway decided to join us and I was forced to go through the motions of small talk. As I see it, had the “sly seed” Carraway not intruded himself at that precise moment the sad sequence of events which marked that evening may never have been set into motion. 

And then Daisy, in a state of panic, but still her impulsive self, ridiculously suggests we drive into Manhattan. Why? To escape the oppressive heat! Daisy never considered what she was going to say before she said it—it was part of her charm but also led others to think she was superficial when she really was not. I don’t think she ever realized, though, even on our second reading, how often Carraway enjoyed making fun of her spontaneous conversational habits in his memoir. Her notion to drive into an even more sweltering city made absolutely no sense but I decided in my frustration to take her at her word and insisted we do just that, especially when I noticed she was herself beginning to resist her idea. I wonder what that sort of emotional strategy is called: someone (child, friend, wife, husband) suggests doing something absurd that one does not want to do but then in anger the person who doesn’t want to go along instead insists on doing just that, now forcing the other’s hand.    

Why did I insist I drive Gatsby’s car and he would take mine? Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that question over and over throughout the years. Even now, as I bring all of these moments back into the present I cannot be sure. But here are three possible reasons: First, it was a gaudy, new, expensive automobile that I had seen advertised in the Saturday Evening Post and I was curious to feel how it handled on the open road. Second, I didn’t want Gatsby to pack us all into his car and to take control of the situation. Third, I wanted to be with Daisy alone to tell her the unsavory details of her lover’s so-called “drug stores” that Carraway earlier prevented me from telling Gatsby.  

But with a flirtatious gesture, Daisy went conveniently off with Gatsby and I found myself one-upped in the enormous front seat of Gatsby’s car with Jordan and Carraway who both seemed irritable and not at all sympathetic with my situation. Were they on Gatsby’s side? Did they want to see Daisy run off with him? Did they both prefer that mendacious, murderous criminal to me? 

It was a fact, as Carraway reports, that Gatsby’s roadster was low on gas and that I stopped to fill up at Wilson’s garage, where I learned he was planning to take Myrtle out west. I find it difficult to deal with pathetic people but I did promise to help George out by selling him the old coupe. As I write this I realize that a part of my motive to switch cars was to force Gatsby to be seen in an old car I was ready to discard. Although I found Myrtle sensual in a way that Daisy, with her boyish flapper figure, wasn’t, I was growing tired of her continued whining about my leaving Daisy for her, something I repeatedly informed her I would never do. And I did not like the fact that she had taken to telephoning me at home. When paying Wilson, I did not notice Myrtle peering at us from the upstairs window. I believe Carraway when he claims she did and that she mistook Jordan for my wife, an error that proved fatal a few hours later. 

How the five of us wound up in a stifling suite at the Plaza Hotel at four that blistering afternoon is anyone’s guess. Carraway doesn’t attempt to explain it and with all the nervous tension and afternoon drinks and forced hilarity, I could tell from the moment we entered that suite something awful would happen, something irreversible. It seemed that everyone had turned against me and I felt like a cornered animal. Here in an anonymous hotel room Daisy might do what she would never do at home and it momentarily occurred to me perhaps it was why we were here—she engineered it even if she hadn’t thought it out fully. 

No one appeared to want a drink, though Daisy asked me to order up ice for mint juleps, her favorite drink from Louisville days. Ironically, we could hear the sounds of a wedding in the Plaza ballroom. The conversation turned imbecilic as we joked about some Yale imposter who fainted in the heat at our Louisville wedding. Daisy brought the topic up and I quickly saw it was not one Gatsby cared to hear about—first of all our wedding and then someone who pretended to have attended a college he hadn’t. I could see he was uncomfortable with a past he wasn’t a part of. I sensed an advantage. Daisy herself had given me the opportunity and I pounced. I questioned him about Oxford. 

Daisy, bless her soul, had provided me--maybe unwittingly, maybe not--with an edge: our shared past. I ignored his inane fiction about Oxford, even though he scored some points with the others, and moved directly to the issue: what was he trying to do to our marriage? Of course, I fooled around and enjoyed my affairs but I respected the institution of marriage and would never consider leaving Daisy for anyone else. (I can now hear my star English major Lillian: Hypocrite!). I could see Gatsby was ready to make his proud announcement but it turned out to be a terrible error: it was one thing for him to claim that Daisy loved him and didn’t love me; but it was quite another thing for him to go on and say that Daisy “never” loved me. I knew she felt no love for me at that moment but I also felt confident she could not honestly own up to the “never,” and I was right. She wavered; I felt it coming; she could not give Gatsby-- who was now bullying her as I so often regrettably did--what he required most of all: the absolute absence of the past. How he must have despised me for embodying a past he could never eliminate.

I was not sure when or even if I would introduce Walter Chase to the present company. He was my secret maneuver but when I saw Gatsby’s expression after Daisy acknowledged that she did love me once, I didn’t think I would need to run it. So I simply challenged Gatsby next with what I learned about his partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim and their crooked side-street drug stores. I wanted to expose him in front of Daisy. But instead of denying my accusation, however, he fumbles the ball again: he himself brings up Walter. I will never forget the expression on Daisy’s face when she finally understood that the man she thought of leaving me for was nothing but a common crook--worse, one deeply involved in organized criminal activity. Even Carraway notes her expression of terror. I could hardly believe my luck. The game was over. Yale 14-Oggsford 7.

VI.

Then Myrtle. I have always blamed myself for that accident because had I not swapped cars it would not have happened. But if I hadn’t exchanged cars on the way to Manhattan I might have wondered--after reading Carraway’s version of events-- if Daisy had been in fact behind the wheel. The inquest, to be sure, never even considered that possibility, none of the eyewitnesses noticed a woman driver, and if Gatsby really did take over the wheel after Myrtle was struck he certainly made no effort to return honorably to the scene. Instead, he headed straight to his house along back roads and hid the car as any coward guilty of a hit-and-run homicide would do. I never thought Gatsby ran her over on purpose; what I could not forgive was his running away. 

To my surprise, Gatsby’s car was harder to drive than I expected. I’m an experienced driver but it took me a while to adjust to the transmission. Before I suggested swapping, I’d asked Gatsby if it was “standard shift” and he claimed it was. But as Carraway observes in the memoir I had some trouble with the “unfamiliar gears.” Now if I had difficulty, why indeed would Daisy, who never liked to drive and would avoid it whenever possible, suggest—as Gatsby apparently told Carraway while hiding in our driveway—that after the two of them left the Plaza Hotel she needed to drive to steady her nerves? She never would have been able to handle those gears—or brakes—and who in God’s name would ask to drive a huge unfamiliar car through New York City’s evening traffic in order to steady their nerves? 

No, Daisy never drove that car and it is utterly implausible to think so. An outrageous and notorious liar is the only person who says she did. And yet, Carraway believed him, as have all the thousands upon thousands, perhaps millions, of his readers since. 

Over the years I’ve asked myself a single question, again and again. I have no good answer for it. The question is: why did Carraway allow himself to be duped by Gatsby? Why did he come to believe that, despite our faults, a duplicitous, vicious imposter was morally superior to Daisy and me, presumably his old friends?  Was it merely Gatsby’s money? Surely, so many of us at that time on Long Island had bigger fortunes and those more or less honestly earned. Was it his ostentatious manner? Carraway may have been a sly fox but he wasn’t crass or pretentious? Was it his aura of mystery? Carraway was no dummy and he must have seen through the fraudulence and inconsistent stories. I sometimes think Carraway admired Gatsby simply because Gatsby was a felon and certain types of people, like Carraway and perhaps even Daisy, find such criminals appealing and fascinating, romantic even. As the nation would see a decade later in the midst of the Great Depression, every thieving killer would find his fan club. 

I saw Carraway only twice after the events of that September. Towards the end of October I ran into him in front of Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue. I was about to order some pewter settings to be sent as a wedding gift to Catherine and Michaelis. Carraway in his usual distorted moral perspective refused to shake hands at first and acted as though I were responsible for Gatsby’s death as well as Wilson’s. I ran into him for the last time at the Yale Club in March 1925. I was with a large raucous group discussing our upcoming tenth reunion. Someone recognized Carraway and he came over to say hello. He said he was engaged to Jordan Baker, was living temporarily in St. Paul, had given up bonds to get back to writing, and happened to be in town to meet his publisher in regards to a forthcoming book. 

“What sort of book is it?” someone asked.

“A novel,” he said, with a straight face.

#The End#

Aerial of The Great Gatsby Mansion of Jay Gatsby. Demolished late 1940s. All that remains is the gatehouse and the garage outside the gates.