Careless People (24 page)

These are the murders about which gangster Meyer Wolfshiem becomes misty-eyed when he meets Gatsby and Nick Carraway at roaring noon in a well-fanned cellar speakeasy on West Forty-second Street in July 1922. “I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal,” Wolfshiem sighs. “Four of them were electrocuted,” Nick remembers. “Five with Becker,” Wolfshiem corrects him. After Wolfshiem leaves, Gatsby “coolly” informs Nick that Wolfshiem is the man who fixed the World Series—because he “saw the opportunity.” The idea “staggers” Nick: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” What staggers him is the scale of such a betrayal of faith. Faith, hope, and charity are at the center of
Gatsby
's moral universe; Fitzgerald's Catholicism may have lapsed, but it never expired completely.

In December 1924, in response to Max Perkins's suggestion that Gatsby's shady underworld dealings should be given more texture, Fitzgerald wrote: “
After careful searching of the files (of a man's mind here) for the Fuller
McGee case & after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.” Facts, or the illusion of facts, create the necessary conviction to produce a persuasive fiction.

Years later, reflecting on the composition of
Gatsby
, Fitzgerald said he chose material “
to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness' . . . rejecting in advance in
Gatsby
, for instance, all of the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the
small
focal point that impressed me—my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance.” Some of us are haunted by the story Fitzgerald never told, of the circumstances of that remarkable meeting. The only remnant we have, other than this epistolary trace, is Meyer Wolfshiem himself, the venal but sentimental gangster who backs Gatsby and sighs over bullet-riddled friends. Arnold Rothstein has forged his way into hundreds of footnotes on
The Great Gatsby
because he was the prototype of the comically sinister Meyer Wolfshiem. In fiction, Wolfshiem is haunted by the murder of Rosy Rosenthal; in fact, he is haunted by Arnold Rothstein, whose copy he is.

The cheating Black Sox, Rosy Rosenthal, and Charles Becker are all transposed directly into the fictional world, where they anchor
The Great Gatsby
in an actual American history of murderous corruption. He divagated over Gatsby's various vices, but Fitzgerald always knew that his central character was a gangster: this is a story about cheating. Gatsby admits to Nick that he has been in the drug business and the oil business: by 1925, both enterprises were notoriously corrupt. The oil industry was at the heart of the scandal that would bring President Harding's administration crashing down in 1923. Gatsby is implicated in the era's widespread financial swindles as well: eventually Nick learns that he was fencing stolen bonds. In the drafts of
Gatsby
, Nick reports hearing that Wolfshiem was later “tried (but not convicted) on charges of grand larceny, forgery, bribery, and dealing in stolen bonds.”

Gatsby's crimes are not merely an array of prohibition-era get-rich-quick schemes, although they are that. They are swindles, frauds, and deceptions, suggesting fakery and dishonesty. Everything about Gatsby is synthetic, including his gin—everything except his fidelity.

A
ll of America had become “
aroused over this double murder,” wrote
Town Topics
on October 26. “Had it not been for the publicity given to the affair by the New York press it would long ere this have been allowed to lapse into oblivion” by embarrassed officials, but it was too late for that now, especially while the papers had the Pig Woman—who kept improving her tale.

Asked how she had seen the murders on a moonless night, Mrs. Gibson suddenly recalled a car fortuitously appearing around the bend at just the right moment. Its headlights revealed “a woman in a light gray coat and a stocky man with a dark mustache and bushy hair,” a description that perfectly matched the photos of Willie Stevens that had graced the front pages for weeks. Then Mrs. Gibson remembered that she'd returned to the scene around 1:00
A.M.
, where she found the woman in the light-gray polo coat kneeling and sobbing by the rector's side. This image was felt to be “
in harmony with the loving care that some one took in arranging the position of the rector's body . . . The authorities believe that such touches were the work of the woman who knelt beside his body at 1 o'clock in the morning,” a remorseful woman who was now being accepted as fact. Mrs. Gibson next revealed that Mrs. Mills had “fought terribly” and been dragged along the ground before she was killed, a claim the papers said “was verified” by the autopsy, which showed long deep cuts on her right arm and wrist. But the results of the autopsy had been in the papers for weeks; like the repentant woman in gray, these reports were now being used to “verify” the stories they seemed to have inspired.

At the end of October Sir Basil Thomson, the former chief of Scotland Yard who was visiting New York, was asked to comment on the Hall–Mills investigation, as they “
had never seen so much publicity given to any crime nor so much interest taken all over the United States as there was in this
celebrated case.” Thomson declined to discuss the case in detail, but offered a helpful suggestion that was widely shared in the press: “I have found that there are many persons who seem to take delight in the publicity of being an identifier,” he pointedly observed.

Meanwhile the press suddenly announced that James Mills's accounts of his movements the night that his wife was murdered were, in fact, uncorroborated. But New Brunswick's officials were untroubled, for his claim that he was home all night, except when he went to the church to look for his wife, had not been disproven either. Although they had only his word for his actions during the hours when the murders had most likely taken place, between approximately 8:30 and 11:00
P.M.
, and having “
commented on the lack of corroboration for Mills's account of his movement,” they also “pointed out, however, that there was no proof that he was not telling the truth. If there was no one to corroborate, they said, there was no one to deny what he said was true. The same was said of Mrs. Hall's accounts of her movements.”

Unfortunately, the inability to disprove something is not a very good justification for believing it. By that line of reasoning, the law of New Brunswick admitted almost limitless imaginative possibility—a “hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing,” as Nick says of Gatsby's dreams.

For the first time the press was permitted to see the victims' clothing: Eleanor Mills had been wearing a blue velvet hat, which now had a three-inch blood stain; her dress, dark blue with red polka dots, was edged with cheerful red ribbon and “saturated with blood.” The
Times
noted that “
the clergyman's expensive garments contrasted sharply with the cheap material of which Mrs. Mills's garments was made.”

“Mrs. Mills's home was on the second floor of this house.”

The papers were making much of “
the contrast between the social status of the rector and Mrs. Mills.” Witnesses thought Eleanor's adultery was motivated, at least in part, by aspiration, her
“dissatisfaction” with life in her “drab apartment.” Eleanor Mills had tried to seize the day, to find something more romantic in life than an unprosperous existence with a gray, inadequate husband on the second floor of a dreary frame house at the edge of town.

When Nick Carraway meets Myrtle Wilson she is wearing “a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine”; he senses an “immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice.” Myrtle knows that you can't live forever; Eleanor Mills found in romance her only possibility for escape, and would die trying to leave her origins behind.

A
t the end of October, a young woman from the Midwest made the nation's front pages when she was acquitted of murdering her “sheik lover.” Although her defense was temporary insanity, this was recognized as a euphemism for the so-called unwritten law, which held that juries would condone violence provoked by sexual infidelity: “
ACQUITTAL
OF
PEGGY
BEAL
FOR
SLAYING
‘
SHEIK
LOVER
'
INVOKES
NEW
UNWRITTEN
LAW
,”
shouted the
World
. Peggy Beal had been lured by the “professional sheik” to
a hotel room with promises of marriage, but after he had seduced her Frank Anderson told her he had no intention of marrying her, adding that he had lied “because I am a devil.” Beal shot Anderson dead before shooting herself in the heart. The papers did not explain why she had brought a gun to a romantic tryst, or how she survived, but they did explain her inspiration: Beal “
had been reading a passage in a romantic novel in which a woman killed her lover.” Books kept leading women astray, it seemed.

As Jordan tells Nick the story of Daisy's romance with Gatsby at the end of Chapter Four, they are driving through Central Park in a Victoria cab. Floating past the apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties comes the sound of a hit song in the twilight:

I'm the Sheik of Araby,

Your love belongs to me.

At night when you're asleep,

Into your tent I'll creep—