This is where Nick’s recounting ends, but I’m a woman, and so I’ll have the last word.
Nick ended our story in a romantic way—the beautiful heroine together again with her original hero, her husband (even if he didn’t paint us in the most flattering of tones) after tragedy occurs. Nick was a romantic, and I think, despite his role in bringing Jay and me together, he wanted to believe that I’d make my marriage with Tom work out well, that it could return to some blissful union, strengthened by the drama we’d gone through. So he wrote it that way.
That wasn’t to be. I didn’t stay with my “hero.” He was no hero at all.
For a long time I barely talked to Nick once he wrote our story. After all, he made me a murderer in it, running down “poor” Myrtle Wilson. Of course he made me the villain, the hare-brained, foolish woman, so feckless she’s not even aware of the destruction in her wake and careless about it all after she hears what she wrought.
I was no such thing. When his story became a success, Nick refused to tinker with the denouement, and convinced me for a while that if the money helped me, it was best to leave it alone. He published it as a novel, after all, not a work of non-fiction.
Tom’s death was the finale in that summer story, though, and he met it in the same way his mistress met hers.
If Mr. Delacorte’s “associate” drove up to the house the day I left, he didn’t fulfill the contract then, maybe because there were too many people about. All I know is that one day in New York, Tom stepped off a curb or was pushed or tripped, and fell in front of a taxi. So he died as his mistress had, crushed under the wheels of a shiny machine, one he might have even called a “circus car” since it was a bright lavender vehicle, one of the newest of the fleet.
Nick gave me the news. I called him once we’d gotten settled, and asked he not let Tom know where I was, but I needed some help with the very last of the bonds I’d bought through him and not cashed out.
He told me I had no worries about Tom anymore. Tom was dead. I expected to feel less sad than I did, but I wept at the news. He had been my husband, after all, and was Pamela’s father. I think I cried longer for him than for Jay. Tom had been more real, our life more substantial, and I cried for what I’d hoped our marriage would be. My time with Jay had been nothing but a dream.
I asked for the details.
“As soon as he realized you were gone, he stopped the move,” Nick said. “He didn’t figure it out for hours because I guess something went wrong with one of the trucks, and it took a long time to get a new one out to the house.”
I could imagine the scene, Tom angry with the movers, supervising the rearrangement of our things once a new truck was brought out, maybe even irritated with me that I wasn’t around. I could envision him snapping at servants to go find me.
He called Nick, eventually, demanding to know where I’d headed, but of course, poor Nick didn’t know and suggested Tom wait a bit to see if I’d call.
“When he noticed the boat was gone, he was pretty shaken, Daisy, not mad, just quiet. He couldn’t believe you’d take Pamela,” Nick said, and I wondered if he was deliberately trying to make me feel worse than I did. “He thought maybe you’d taken her out for a short sail to get away from all the mess. Then evening fell, and, well, he knew you weren’t coming back. He was worried. I told him to call the police—I didn’t know if you’d need help, out in the boat alone—but he didn’t want to do that right away.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Tom might have been shocked I’d left with our daughter, but he wouldn’t want to confess to police his wife might have abandoned him, taking his own sloop to do so—it was too embarrassing. So he’d not let anyone know right away that we were gone. He’d want to fix things on his own.
Even if he had headed to the police or coastal forces, they’d not have found our boat. I slipped into our first port in New Jersey and immediately had a new name painted on her stern, something bland, Calm Waters. I paid a premium for that quick work but knew it was necessary.
Then Pamela and I had a wonderful day in a fairy palace inn along the shore, with rose-patterned coverlets and china that reminded me of the set Jay had used that first tea we had at Nick’s house.
Tom went into the city a few days after I left, Nick said, to hire a private detective to look for me and Pammy. It was there he met his fate, and I don’t know if it was at the hands of the Delacorte man or simply bad luck.
I’d not seen the obituary because my life was too filled with deciding my future with Pamela, with arranging for rooms and destinations and travel and all the things I’d relied on men and servants to do for me in the past. I’d not picked up a newspaper for months after leaving Tom.
I was settled by the time I got the news, as I said, and after my grief passed, I set about living a new life, one where I alone was responsible for myself and my daughter.
I wrestled with how to make sure Pamela got her father’s inheritance, but that would have meant contacting the estate, and Tom’s father was still alive. He was an old-fashioned man, and I had no doubt he might try to take over Pammy’s upbringing, perhaps sending me to a madhouse to get me out of the way.
So I did nothing to claim what was rightfully mine and Pammy’s. I decided I’d wait a while, and when I felt safe, I’d contact the appropriate lawyers.
The party of those crazy years ended, as you know. The big party of the Roaring Twenties burnt out, the lights were flipped off, celebrants went home, it was over. Everyone became more serious.
In the crash of the stock market that came at decade’s end, poor Tom would have faired poorly, so his death saved him that humiliation. As it turned out, he’d used a good portion of his family’s fortune on stocks bought on margin and other dubious deals, all so he wouldn’t feel left out of the big money party going on at the time. His was one of the few old rich families to lose everything. No need for me to claim an inheritance now.
His father, I learned later in a newspaper article, ended up killing himself, just as mine had when a jolt in finances had left him hopeless and ashamed. Yes, I eventually figured that out, that my daddy’s trip down the stairs had not occurred at all, and that a rope broke his neck, not a fall.
I suspect Jay would have done all right in the tumult. A lot of his money came from bootlegging, which continued as Prohibition crawled into the early part of the next decade. And then I imagine he would have lit on some other wealth-producing plan. He always, always looked to the future.
Nick lost everything in the crash of ’29, too, and headed for Hollywood where he worked as a writer for a while, skills he used when penning our tale.
Jordan married well, someone inured against the economic upheaval. She lived in a lovely apartment overlooking Central Park until she met someone else, an actor without a penny to his name. Then her husband divorced her, and she went back to playing golf, having secured a lovely nest egg from her ex-husband when they ended their marriage. She lives near a golf course in the Hamptons now. I’m not sure if she is still with her actor lover. We exchange letters, but Jordan, like Jay, leaves a lot out of her recounting of her life.
As for me…
I was grateful for Nick’s investment advice, but more grateful for my own good sense in cashing out as soon as stocks were high as I sought to protect myself and Pammy. I’d even had the sense to sell all my jewelry before it lost its value. It was a risk of a different kind to have all that money on me, but I managed to keep it safe. We lived modestly enough that we never drew attention to ourselves.
After a short stay in Virginia as I contemplated heading west, I sold the boat, and we eventually made our way back home, to Kentucky, where it was my dream to buy back my family homestead.
That was not to be. Beyond my price when I arrived, it sold to some young upstart who made changes and turned it into a boardinghouse. The most I could do was rent some rooms in it for Pammy and me, and I couldn’t bring myself to make that move, even though I did go look at quarters there one day, thinking it might be a good choice for us. But to face the heartbreak of being in my lovely old home, where I’d felt safe and feted and loved, seeing it all chopped up with strangers living in the white-and-gold bedroom I used to occupy—that would have been too much to bear.
Instead, we settled into a very small cottage not far from my mother’s own similar dwelling, which I decorated with used furniture and sweet little mementoes, having more fun than when I’d had the money to select expensive silverware. This was all mine, not something bestowed on me by a condescending husband or a sweetly obsessed lover. Never once did it feel “shabby” to me.
Pamela asked a few times that first year where Daddy was, and I told her he’d decided to stay in New York. Eventually she stopped asking, and when she was old enough to understand I said he’d been killed in a horrible motor accident shortly before we were supposed to move. She accepted this explanation, and I gave her some photographs of Tom to cherish, so she knew she’d had a loving father.
It was good to be back near my mama. I told her the whole story of that summer, and then she read it anew when Nick’s account was published, both of us shaking our heads at what he’d gotten wrong when I pointed out where our stories diverged. After objections on my part, he agreed to share credit, but that, as I already mentioned, eventually faded, even if the royalties came for a short time at least. It was the least he could do since I’d been the one to inspire him to put pen to paper after I’d sent him my own recollections of the tale.
I made my money last for a considerable time before I had to think of supplementing it, and it did come upon me one panicky night after doing numbers at the kitchen table after Pamela’s bedtime that I probably had harbored the illusion I’d find and marry another wealthy man who’d raise me back to my former position in life.
It took just that one night to get over that ridiculous notion, and I was determined the very next day to secure a position somewhere.
In some correspondence with Jordan, she suggested I try looking for work at some country clubs and golf courses. Doing what, I asked. “Dear, you’re a pretty face,” she wrote. “All you need to do is smile at people and make them feel they’re the only ones you care about. It’s a talent you’ve had all your life.”
That wasn’t much of a duty roster, but I did manage to land a position as a hostess of sorts at a club nearby, greeting people at the door and making sure they knew how to get on the course or find their way to the restaurant on the grounds. It was only a few hours a week—clubs lost a lot of members during those lean years—but it, combined with what was left of my savings, was enough to keep Pammy and me and Mother, who eventually moved in with us, comfortable, and we lived simply and without want for many years. I actually enjoyed the work. I liked meeting people and being nice to them, and they seemed to like me.
Mother passed quietly after contracting pneumonia in the spring of ’39, and truth be told, I was glad she didn’t live to see horrors visited on Europe again and war come to our very shores.
Pamela turned into a bright young woman, as pretty as I was at that age, with my golden hair and Tom’s piercing eyes, a bit taller than I am, and with a fine athletic body and quick, purposeful movements. She always looks as if she has somewhere to go and strides off with the determination of an explorer, even if just to retrieve a notebook from her room.
She had a string of beaux in her high school years she didn’t take seriously. She was too serious herself, winning honors at school for writing and swimming. I was so proud of her when she graduated and decided she might even want to go to college.
When she enrolled in Vassar, I worried about how I’d pay for it, but Mother had bought a life insurance policy, unbeknownst to me, and after she passed, I used the proceeds to finance Pamela’s education, happy she wouldn’t have to work her way through.
Then, the war came, and that’s where we are now, with men storming the shores of France to reclaim the battlefields Jay had once helped win.
There’s plenty of work at last, and I applied and was accepted at an airplane factory. That money let me buy a new car, and that work with all the women around me who’d been a bit beaten down over the years lifted me up. I finally felt my own life had meaning.
They didn’t know me as Daisy Buchanan or even Daisy Fay, my maiden name. I chose to be called Lenore at that time, finally giving myself the romantic moniker I’d always wanted.
I thought I’d be lonely for a man’s attention, and over the years there had been a few suitors who called on me, treated me to dinner, but all and all, I was content with my single life, especially now as I work in the factory. None of the luxuries I used to have compares with the radio I was able to buy with a bonus for good work or the money I can send to Pamela from my earnings.
I miss her terribly, but rejoice that she is on her own, able to provide for herself. Jordan sometimes sees her in New York when she herself is there, because Pamela occasionally writes for a magazine.
Pamela wrote me she’s seeing someone, a soldier named Richard, Richard D’Invilliers or some other ostentatious name, about to go overseas, and she worries about whether he’ll be safe, if they should marry before he goes, or if she should wait until he returns.
Thinking of Jay, I started to write to her to wait, that she’d regret not waiting. I tore up that paper and began anew:
Dearest Daughter,
Aunt Jordan says you are doing very well and might be hired as a staff writer soon. You are making your way in the world. I am so proud of you. It’s hard for me to advise you on whether you should wait or marry now. Only you know what is best for you and what future you wish to choose. That’s the important thing, dear—what you wish to do…