Careless People (17 page)

In addition to cascades of gin rickeys and mint juleps, Swope's parties were renowned for his games, as Swope was also a compulsive, high-stakes gambler. He was especially fond of cutthroat croquet tournaments; when it got dark the guests turned their cars toward the lawn and switched on the headlamps. They played charades and twenty questions, and set up
treasure hunts with sapphire cufflinks and gold-lined dressing boxes as party favors, sending urban sophisticates crashing through shrubbery to find them. Gatsby's parties are similarly punctuated by games—“wild routs that resolve themselves into ‘hide-and-go-seek' or ‘sardines-in-the-box' with all the house thrown open to the game”—although the guests at Gatsby's parties don't play two of the Swopes' favorites, “Who Am I?” and “Murder.” But then in
The Great Gatsby
mistakes in identity and murder are serious business.

The Swopes had spent the summer of 1922 in Paris, where Alec Woollcott visited them at the Ritz; he and Margaret shot craps in the Swopes' suite to amuse themselves. Woollcott sent Edna Ferber, the popular novelist, an account of the afternoon at the Swopes' suite, enclosing a letter from Deems Taylor, a friend of Swope's and the music critic for the
World
, in which he described the high life as “living like Swopes.” Soon after the Swopes returned to Great Neck, the Fitzgeralds moved in and began visiting Lardner. Before long they had drifted Swopeward.

A
s the Fitzgeralds began enthusiastically living like Swopes, the
World
and the other New York papers were reporting mounting anger in New Jersey. Indignant citizens protested against the “
framing” of Clifford Hayes, a new enough term that the
New York Times
framed it in quotation marks; a hostile crowd chased a deputy policeman down a New Brunswick street, hurling stones and other missiles at him. When a reporter asked Prosecutor Beekman if he believed the truth of Schneider's confession, Beekman snapped, “
Truth? We are not trying to determine the truth of his statement. I don't have to do that. All I have to do is to look for a reasonable basis for prosecution.” The magnificently literal Beekman would stand
defiant in his resistance to interpretation: the prosecution doesn't judge, it prosecutes—anyone it can find. As moral philosophies go, this is fairly limited.

Meanwhile the papers focused their skepticism on the character of Raymond Schneider, “
shiftless at twenty-three,” said the
World
, and “mentally deficient.” They were equally dubious about Pearl Bahmer, a girl who, noted the
Times
, “
has exhibited a willingness to tell almost anything to almost anybody.” One of the things Pearl told the police resulted in her father's immediate arrest. The accusation was evidently not “fit to print” in the
New York Times
, which said first that Pearl accused her father of an “
abuse” that had recently led her to attempt suicide and then became more specific, quoting Pearl saying that a judge had told her father “to stop bothering me”: “Father never wanted me to go out with a single fellow. I never knew a girl who had to go out with her own father.”

The
World
was clearer, although it too stopped short of the word “incest.” Fifteen-year-old Pearl, reported the
World
, “admitted to the judge that she had been intimate with Schneider for a year and also with her father.” Arrested on a charge the
Tribune
called “
the most despicable that can be lodged against a father,” Bahmer “flung up his arms and cried that Pearl was his own flesh and blood, that her charges were untrue.” He
admitted to carrying a .45 revolver on the night of the murder, but Hall and Mills were both shot with a .32. He had been drinking heavily for several days; pressed by reporters, Bahmer drunkenly admitted, “I was gunning for Schneider.” He also insisted that he could “prove” that his daughter's charges were untrue: “
he would bring to bear competent testimony to show that he could not have been guilty.” No one speculated in print as to what such proof might be, but the papers suggested the law's attention might be swinging toward the bootlegger.

P
arties were a matter of infinite hope; one came to them ready to perform. The guests did stunts, tricks, songs, variety acts, dances, recitations of poems or disaster, tricks, cartwheels, and cabarets: show businesspeople called it “doing your stuff.” Fitzgerald, too, did his stuff.
He liked to sing a mock-tragic song called “Dog, Dog, Dog,” that he'd composed:

Dog, dog—I like a good dog—

Towser or Bowser or Star—

Clean sort of pleasure—

A four-footed treasure—

And faithful as few humans are!

Before long, Fitzgerald's song made Rascoe's Day Book column. “
Fitzgerald, Wilson said, composed these idiotic songs all day long and sings them to himself—one of them going, as he ran up the stairs to shave in the morning: ‘The Great Fitzgerald goes up stairs; the Great Fitzgerald goes up stairs. Oh, the Great Fitzgerald!' Ring Lardner, who is Fitzgerald's neighbor, is also addicted to this pastime, and the two of them compose the lyrics to impromptu songs.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe's account in his scrapbook.

Instantly recycling the story, the popular columnist O. O. McIntyre embroidered the myth, adding that Lardner answered Fitzgerald's songs with his own: “
Soon across the space booms the voice of Lardner: ‘The mighty Lardner prepareth to shave. Soapsuds and lather! Oh, the beautiful, sylphlike Lardner.' Neighbors have been trying to mitigate the annoyance, but to no avail, for Fitzgerald and Lardner continue their rhyming fooleries at intervals all during the day.” They must have had loud voices: the Fitzgeralds and Lardners lived almost exactly two miles apart. Fitzgerald saved this notice too.

That reality tends not to live up to our myths, or our memories, is the truth that destroys Jay Gatsby. There is a photograph of the Fitzgeralds and their friends at a party during their Great Neck days, which Zelda preserved in her scrapbook, writing in the names of most of the guests. It was taken in the Fitzgeralds' modest living room. The men are mostly, but not all, in dinner suits; Zelda, in profile on the far left at the back, wears a bracelet on her upper arm, the most iconically Jazz Age accessory in the picture; her face is obscured by her bobbed hair falling forward. Fitzgerald lounges on the floor, third from left on the bottom, looking louche.

In
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald invented the perfect mythical party, which is why this photo comes as something of a disappointment. Where is the insatiable luxury, the Babylonian decadence, the glamor, the glitter? Where are the saturnalian revelries? The sequined dresses, feathered headbands, sumptuous grounds, cigarette holders, jazz orchestras, and finger bowls of champagne? The flowers, the lights, the color, the people twinkling like diamonds? Where is the magic?

Pinning our hopes on the idea that the real glamor was found at the phantom Goddards', at the Rumseys' and Hitchcocks', or among the Swopes' treasure hunts would leave us as lost in nostalgic fantasy as Gatsby. Alternatively, we could cultivate the Hall–Mills prosecutor's cavalier disregard for
higher truth, but that would mean being trapped in his literalism, content with the merely plausible.

If reality disappoints, art seems all the more necessary. In his lovely, neglected 1929 story “The Swimmers” (“the hardest story I ever wrote,” he told his agent, “too big for its space”), Fitzgerald wrote “
There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.” He realized how foolhardy this idea was: if America forgot its past, there would be no meaning in its future. History might be a stowaway, but we need the ballast it provides.

F
riday, October 13, 1922, was an auspicious day. As New York honored Columbus by arguing over whether he had been Italian, Spanish, or even Jewish, construction began on a “vehicular tunnel” running under the Hudson River to Jersey City, which would become the Holland Tunnel. It was also reported that America would spend an estimated three hundred billion dollars over the next six years on the “electrification” of the nation: in 1922 even New York City was not fully electrified, and neon lights would not be introduced until the end of the decade. They thought their city was blindingly bright, and toweringly high, but to us it would seem shrouded in darkness, with scattered, enormous signs blinking their electric bulbs over abbreviated buildings.

And in New Brunswick the news went around that Clifford Hayes had been cleared of all charges as Raymond Schneider retracted his accusation that Hayes had killed Hall and Mills, saying he realized “
what a skunk I was in framing him up like that.” Stumbling on the bodies of the murdered lovers had proven disastrous for the hapless Schneider and his girlfriend. A local judge issued two warrants for Schneider's arrest, for perjury against Hayes and for the statutory rape of Pearl Bahmer, who would also be arraigned for “incorrigibility,” while her father would be arraigned on Pearl's accusation of incest. Amidst this imbroglio of charges and countercharges, the delightfully nicknamed
“Happy” Bahmer, Pearl's brother, was to be brought in for questioning. Happy had been arrested eight times that year on minor charges; a few years earlier, the papers added for good measure, “a negro roustabout was acquitted of a murder charge” after “disemboweling Happy's uncle.”
The jury decided the homicide was justifiable; no one explained what Happy's uncle had done that a jury of his peers thought warranted his disembowelment.

The
Times
reported that Schneider's story was “
considered the height of absurdity,” as well it should have been. Unfortunately, their reasons for disbelieving Schneider were almost as weak as his story. The tale was considered ridiculous “by those who had believed ever since the bodies were found that the circumstances pointed to jealousy as the motive and a woman as one of the participants in the crime.” There was still no evidence that a woman was one of the criminals, but the story had made up what little mind it had left.