Beautiful Little Fools(95)

“You deserve this house,” he said. “We deserve this summer.” And wasn’t that true, after all they’d been through the past few years. Dolores’s eyes already shone a little brighter, her cheeks a little pinker out here than they had been in Brooklyn.

“Still, I hate to think of how we only got here because of that awful man.” She shuddered a little, and it wasn’t clear whether she meant Wolfsheim or Gatsby. Dolores knew every last detail of his interviews and investigation and gut feelings, right down to Jordan’s insistence he’d never prove anything over cherry pie in Santa Barbara and the lie he’d told Meyer Wolfsheim over lobster.

He didn’t quite regret the choice he’d made with Wolfsheim, but something still sat unsettled in his gut about the whole thing. It was the thought of Miss Baker out on the golf course, and Mrs. Buchanan in that vast mansion in Minnesota, and Miss McCoy he’d heard had settled in Chicago. They’d all moved past what had happened last summer, onward with their lives. While Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby would never get that chance. But maybe he did believe what he’d told Wolfsheim, too: we all get what’s coming to us. Eventually.

Dolores reached up and grabbed his face with her hands. “You know what,” she said softly. “Let’s forget about who brought us here. We’re here, aren’t we? And you, Frank Charles, are one of the good ones.” She stood up on her toes and kissed him softly on the lips.

Maybe he was one of the good ones, and maybe he wasn’t. But Dolores looked so happy, and when all was said and done, she was the only woman whose future he truly cared about. He kissed her back, and then grabbed her hand. “Watch the sunset with me out on the veranda,” he said.

She laughed. “We have a veranda!”

She clung to him and followed him outside, and suddenly they were twenty years old again, and everything was right with the world. There wasn’t a thought of death or gloom or illness or anything bad at all.

“Look at that,” Dolores said, pointing across the water, to West Egg. “They’re having quite a party. Maybe we can get invited to the next one.”

He looked to where she pointed, and he recognized the house immediately. He’d been there before, staring into the blood-red pool, rummaging in the bushes and discovering a diamond hairpin. It had been quiet then, hallowed by death. But almost a year had passed. It was a new summer, a new man’s home.

There, across the sound, Gatsby’s former house beat on: lit up, glittering, alive.





Daisy August 1923

LOUISVILLE




AFTER A YEAR, I REMEMBER only the smallest details of our last days in New York: the bright yellow light of Jay’s Rolls-Royce parked in front of the Plaza at dusk as he handed me the keys, the sound of a gunshot interrupting the wooded air in West Egg the next morning, the pounding of my own heart when I opened my eyes and realized I was still alive. Still breathing.

It’s all far away from me now, a bad dream, a wayward memory. It never happened, or it happened to another Daisy, a woman who still had the smallest bit of hope, deep down. A woman who thought there could be such a thing as a permanent home for her and Tom. Maybe not New York, but Minnesota.

Except the year in Minnesota was long and frozen, and by summer I wondered if my blood had turned to icicles in my veins. Because I didn’t feel any longer. Not pain, not pleasure, not fear. Not even when the detective came to our door unannounced last fall, nor when Tom began slipping away from me at night again through the never-ending winter and I’d awake to a cold and empty bed. Not even when Jordan wrote me in February and told me not to worry, she was fine, she was certain we would all be fine. But even that—worry, relief, Jordie—didn’t penetrate my iciness.

The thing that finally did it was the sudden ring of the telephone on a cool summer evening in late July, just after supper, that voice on the other end of the line. Tom was off god knows where, and I’d fired Pammy’s nurse in June because I hadn’t at all liked the way Tom was looking at her.

Do you know how hard it is to find a good nurse? Tom had chastised me then, his voice tinged with disgust. But I had simply shrugged and told him I would be taking over all of Pammy’s care myself, for the time being.

The phone jangled just as Pammy and I had been walking toward the stairs to get her ready for bed, and I grabbed her little hand and we ran to get it. “Daisy Fay.” Mother’s voice sounded small and very far away. “I’m not feeling so good.”

And suddenly, I could feel something again, too: my body turned hot and my heart pounded restless in my chest. “We’ll get the next train,” I told her, breathless, clutching Pammy’s hand.

“Oh… no. I don’t want you to fuss or trouble Tom. I just wanted to hear your voice, that’s all. I’m feeling better already.”

I didn’t explain to her how it would not trouble Tom at all, that I was unsure how long it would even take him to notice if Pammy and I left. “Mother, stop,” I’d said instead. “We’re overdue for a visit anyway. Pammy’s so big, you’ll barely recognize her.”

The snow goose made a muffled noise, and maybe it was a protest or maybe it was a little cry of joy, but either way I told her I’d see her soon.

After I hung up, I faced the backyard, and suddenly there were a thousand bursts of gold and green light. Fireflies lit up the sky like sparks. It was Pammy’s bedtime, but maybe it wasn’t just yet. I pulled her toward the porch, then out onto the dew-covered grass. “Do you know,” I told her, “my younger sister and I used to chase these lights and then I’d collect fireflies in glass jars.”