Yours Truly
Meyer Wolfshiem
and then a hasty addendum beneath:
Let me know about the funeral, etc. do not know his family at all.
I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.
He turned out to be Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man very helpless and dismayed, bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the point of collapse so I took him into the music room and made him sit down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat and the glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.
“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper; I started right away.”
“I didn’t know how to reach you.”
His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.
“It was a mad man,” he said. “He must have been mad.”
I hesitated whether to tell him the truth, that Gatsby hadn’t even been driving the car, but I was afraid to excite him any more.
“Wouldn’t you like some coffee,” I urged, “or some kind of sandwich?”
“I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.——”
“Carraway.”
“Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?”
I took him into the drawing room where his son lay, and left him there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.
After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be mixed with a certain pride.
I helped him to a bedroom upstairs and while he took off his coat and vest I reminded him that I had deferred all arrangements until he came.
“I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Gatsby——”
“Gatz is my name.”
“—Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body west.”
He shook his head.
“Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.——”
“We were close friends.”
“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here.”
He touched his head impressively and I nodded.
“If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”
“That’s true,” I said uncomfortably.
He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed, and lay down stiffly—instantly he was asleep.
When the phone rang that night I felt sure that it was Daisy at last. But it was a man’s voice, rather frightened—he wanted to know who I was before he would give a name.
“This is Mr. Carraway.”
“Oh—” He sounded relieved. “This is Klipspringer.”
I was relieved too for that seemed to promise another friend at Gatsby’s grave. I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd so I’d been calling up a few people myself. They were hard to find.
“The funeral’s tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock here at the house. I wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.”
“Oh, I will,” he broke out hastily. “Of course I’m not likely to see anybody, but if I do.”
His tone made me suspicious.
“Of course you’ll be there yourself.”
“Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is——”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How about saying you’ll come?”
“Well, the fact is—the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with some people up here in Greenwich and they rather expect me to be with them tomorrow. In fact there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.”
I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!” and he must have heard me for he went on nervously.
“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see they’re tennis shoes and I’m sort of helpless without them. I can’t play tennis or anything. My address is care of B.F.——”
I didn’t hear the rest of the name because I hung up the receiver.
After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby—one low dog to whom I telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor and I should have known better than to call him.
The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer Wolfshiem; I couldn’t reach him any other way. The door that I pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy was marked “The Swastika Holding Company” and at first there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. But when I’d called “hello” several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.
“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”
The first part of this was obviously untrue for someone had begun to whistle tunelessly inside.
“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”
“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”
At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s, called “Stella!” from the other side of the door.
“Leave your name on the desk,” she said quickly. “I’ll give it to him when he gets back.”
“But I know he’s there.”
She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up and down her hips.
“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,” she scolded. “We’re getting sickintired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago he’s in Chicago.
I mentioned Gatsby.
“Oh-h-” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—what was your name?”
She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood in the doorway, his face very solemn, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us and offered me a cigar.
“My memory goes back to when first I met him,” he said. “A young major just out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he come into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ’Come on have some lunch with me,’ I sid. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour.”
“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.
“Start him! I made him.”
“Oh.”
Gatsby’s life seemed to have had the same accidental quality as his death.
“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-appearing gentlemanly young man and when he told me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything—” he held up two bulbous fingers “—always together.”
I wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series transaction in 1919—and what else it included. I kept wondering until last winter, when Wolfshiem was tried (but not convicted) on ten charges ranging from simple bribery to dealing in stolen bonds.
“Now he’s dead,” I said after a moment. “You were his closest friend so I thought you ought to know his funeral is this afternoon.”
“I’d like to come.”
“Well, come then.”
The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly and as he shook his head his eyes filled with tears.
“I can’t do it—I can’t get mixed up in it,” he said.
“There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.”
“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different—if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental but I mean it, to the bitter end.”
I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not
