(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a
straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)
—I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks
and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on
shoes from England with rubber knobs on the soles that bit into the
soft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the
wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in
front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut,
in a disapproving way.
The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to
Daisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and
by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She
dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long
the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp
Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that
night. “Anyways, for an hour!”
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was
beside the kerb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had
never seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she
didn’t see me until I was five feet away.
“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”
I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the
older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red
Cross to make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she
couldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was
speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at
sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the
incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on
him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I
didn’t realize it was the same man.
That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux
myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very
often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone
at all. Wild rumours were circulating about her—how her mother had
found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say
goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually
prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for
several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any
more, but only with a few flat-footed, shortsighted young men in town,
who couldn’t get into the army at all.
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a début
after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a
man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago,
with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He
came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a
whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he
gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars.
I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the
bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June
night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle
of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.
“ ’Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how
I do enjoy it.”
“What’s the matter, Daisy?”