Careless People (11 page)

Schneider and Pearl Bahmer had not only been at the crime scene on the morning of Saturday, September 16; they had also been seen near there two nights earlier, when the murders were committed. In addition, Schneider lived two doors down from Buccleuch Park.

The authorities remained “
convinced that jealousy was the motive and that a jealous woman played a leading rôle in the tragedy.” The
World
finally explained why the authorities were so certain that a woman must have been involved, despite the complete lack of evidence: “
The precise manner in which the bodies were laid out in the field of goldenrod has convinced all investigators that a woman must have been one of the accomplices.” Of this much, at least, they were sure: a man would have been careless about the bodies. Only a woman, however homicidal, would be careful to ensure that her corpses were neatly laid out in a field of flowers. That the killer might have intended some meaning to be read into the scene, rather than simply composing an attractive tableau, seems not to have occurred to anyone.

Gossip continued to be revealed about “dissension” in the New Brunswick community because of Mrs. Mills's reputation for “officious” behavior. The papers reported on September 26 that James Mills had asked Mrs. Hall the morning after the rector and his wife disappeared whether she thought the couple had eloped. Rumors began to circulate that they were planning a trip to the Orient. It was a year for such dreams: Rudolph Valentino's performance as
The Sheik
was still thrilling audiences across the country and in November Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were about to discover the tomb of a young pharaoh named Tutankhamen and start a craze for all things Egyptian.

Although police had not yet bothered to interview Mrs. Hall's other brother, Henry H. Stevens, reporters had. He spoke freely, saying he had nothing to hide. On the night of the murder he'd been at his summer home on the Jersey coast having dinner with friends with whom he'd been fishing all day, some fifty miles from New Brunswick. When he was informed on Saturday, September 16, that his brother-in-law had been found dead, no mention was made of the manner of death; Stevens later said he'd assumed the rector had been killed in an automobile accident. He caught a train to his sister's house the next day and
only learned about the murder by reading the newspapers en route.

Jay Gatsby's father will learn of his son's murder in the same way. “I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” Henry C. Gatz tells Nick Carraway. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper.”

A
t the foot of a forked peninsula that stretches up into Long Island Sound, the touring car carrying the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos turned north at Lake Success (the name itself an intimation, as well as a touching relic of the original settlers' shamanistic literalism) toward Great Neck, a former fishing village that in the early 1920s found its proximity to New York was tempting those flushed with new success into building their own ancestral estates.

By 1922 the next generation of the newer rich was beginning to migrate east out of the city, encroaching upon Long Island's Gold Coast, the barbarians knocking at the tycoons' gates. They settled across the bay, especially in Great Neck, across the narrow inlet from Sands Point and home of some of the most opulent mansions of them all. Great Neck had suddenly become host to that new category of the rich and famous: celebrities. So many Broadway producers, vaudeville actors and movie stars, directors and songwriters, magazine illustrators and successful writers thronged there that
Town Topics
had reported in August (using a new phrase, “the show business”): “
Great Neck is becoming known as ‘the Hollywood of the East,' because of the number of men and women in ‘the show business' who pass their summers there.”

This is the “slender riotous island” where Nick Carraway settles, in a village Fitzgerald renames West Egg to reinforce both America's symbolic geography of east and west and the importance of origins to the story of
Gatsby
. (The name also reflects the currency of “egg” as slang in the early 1920s, a term of which Fitzgerald was very fond. His stories have many “good eggs” and “bad eggs,” and a 1924 story was titled “The Unspeakable Egg.”) Fitzgerald later told his daughter that the term “egg” “
implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life.”

West Egg sits across the bay from East Egg, Fitzgerald's reinvented Manhasset and Sands Point, as western new money begins outfacing eastern old money. Nick Carraway's “eyesore” of a cottage has been overlooked by the parvenus nearby: “I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.”

In 1922 Great Neck was a boisterous town with a population of about twelve hundred mingling in its heady atmosphere of ambition, talent, and partying. The skyscrapers of Manhattan, where any enterprising young man
could hope to make a fortune on Wall Street, were still visible fifteen miles to the west, a mirage floating on the far horizon. In an early draft of
Gatsby
“the tall incandescent city on the water” could be seen at night from Jay Gatsby's house.

When they arrived in Great Neck that brisk autumn afternoon, the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos collected a real estate agent, who took them along to view “several ritzy mansions.” Scott and Zelda began mocking the salesman's pretension, mimicking “his way of saying ‘gentleman's estate' until I was thoroughly disgusted with them,” Dos Passos wrote. Deciding that “nothing pleased them”—or more likely, that they saw nothing they could remotely afford—“they wearied of tantalizing the real estate man” and decided to pay a call on Ring Lardner, whose writing they had been discussing all the way across Long Island: “Scott and I had been agreeing that no one handled the American lingo better.” In her scrapbook Zelda kept a card from Frank Crowninshield, the editor of
Vanity Fair
, on which he had scrawled, “Introducing Scott Fitzgerald to Ellis and Ring Lardner.”

One of the most famous writers of the day, Lardner earned a reputed hundred thousand dollars a year, allowing him to live in an elegant colonial house overlooking the narrow bay on the east edge of Great Neck. The Lardners had only finished building their house, which Ring called “The Mange,” the previous year, and Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Lardner's writing—as were most writers and readers. H. L. Mencken praised Lardner's “
authentic American” voice, and in 1925 Virginia Woolf singled him out as offering “the best prose that has come our way” from America, in a list that included Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and even Edna Ferber—but not F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she did not mention.

The Lardners' house—which Dos likened to the houses they had been viewing—stood on a rise on East Shore Road, overlooking Manhasset Bay. Just beyond it, behind a new apartment complex, one can still see right across the narrow courtesy bay to the docks that continue to jut out into the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound (although they have no green lights on the end of them).

Ring was a famously hard drinker even in the thirsty days of prohibition, and when the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos arrived at Lardner's house in the early evening, Ring was already so “helplessly drunk,” Dos said, he could barely talk; “when his wife tried to get him to speak, he stared at us without seeing us. He was literally out on his feet.” After an abortive attempt at conversation, and drinking some of Ring's whiskey, they all piled back into the touring car and Scott, clearly very drunk himself by this point, began repeating that “Ring was his private drunkard; everybody had to have his private drunkard.” Perhaps that seemed a mark of distinction in an age of increasingly public drunkards.

As they were chauffeured back into Manhattan, the trio passed a carnival with “whirling lights, a calliope playing.” Radiant jewel colors dotted the grounds; the Ferris wheel, a bracelet of yellow lights, rolled slowly against the deepening gas-blue sky. Zelda and Dos “clamored to be allowed to take some rides.” Scott sulked in the car, taking belts from the whiskey bottle he'd stashed under the seat and moodily watching his drunk, flirtatious wife and the attractive dark-haired young writer as they revolved lazily on the Ferris wheel.

According to Dos Passos, writing almost half a century later, Zelda said something during that ride that made him think that she was “mad,” although he couldn't later remember what she'd said that was so insane. But
he'd suddenly realized, Dos claimed, that there was a “
basic fissure in her mental processes”: “though she was so very lovely I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically.” Still, despite her erratic behavior, “she was never a girl you could take lightly.” As for Scott, his bad taste generally, Dos felt, was compensated for by his brilliance on the subject of literature: “When he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to me full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as a diamond . . . He had no taste for food or wine or painting, little ear for music except for the most rudimentary popular songs, but about writing he was a born professional. Everything he said was worth listening to.”

A few days after their meeting Dos Passos was bemused to see himself depicted as part of a new literary scene on an overture curtain for the 1922 Greenwich Village Follies. Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, Gilbert Seldes, and Dos Passos were all in a truck racing toward Washington Square, where Zelda, at the center of the curtain in a white bathing suit, stood poised, forever young, forever ready to dive into the fountain. In June, Burton Rascoe's
Tribune
book section had published a cartoon naming the two writers
les enfants terribles
: Fitzgerald clipped it and saved it in his scrapbook.