The Good but not Great Gatsby

The moon, which had hung like a bad orange over Kansas, sank at last from view.

"The poor son of a bitch," Bo Bender said.

He couldn't help thinking of it as an onlooker at a party unsuccessfully crashed, a yokel gaping wistfully in, as he stood on the rear observation platform of the private train he had especially bought to whisk a flock of hand-picked merrymakers from the West Coast to Long Island, where he and his guests were to fling themselves into an even gayer round of bashes celebrating the release of The Great Gatsby. A genius for the well-timed splurge had always marked Bo Bender's style, as well as furthered his upward climb. Now everything had fallen beautifully into place, the undiminishing reverberations of Watergate even contributing a counterpart to the Teapot Dome scandals that had checkered the Twenties they were all bent on recapturing. From time to time, as their string of blazing coaches writhed like a prehistoric reptile through the mid-American night, Bender would reach into his wallet and fling crisp 20s about, favors for his guests to scramble for in uproarious particular antics symbolic of the great Lark itself. Perhaps the most finely (continued on page 184) Good Gatsby (continued from page 109) calibrated echo of all lay in the red-and-gold plush upholstery of the parlor car, which thus evoked the Roaring Twenties by conjuring rather the Naughty Nineties for which the Twenties had, in their turn, been nostalgic. It was a nicety not lost on the porter.

Bender's daughter, Penny, slid down off the piano he'd had brought aboard for her to sit on and came toward him across the parlor car, frowning worriedly. Pretty Penny they called her, that being what she cost him. Something his business manager, Poolwater, had said to her as the hammered out some vintage jazz at the keyboard had evidently disturbed her. Poolwater, in striped silk shirt sleeves with arm garters, grinned wickedly through the smoke.

"Daddy, he says we're bankrupt."

"Only morally," Bender reassured her with a pat on her alabaster hand. "Only morally, baby. He's just teasing you." She nodded and, comforted, went back to the piano, sticking her tongue out at Poolwater.

Bender watched her do the Charleston upside down on top of the piano as Poolwater thumped out the song itself. The party was on the boil. Oh, they would revive once yet the legendary Babylonian whirl to which so many so longingly looked back. The sense of speed, impalpable on a plane, could be exhilarating on a train. He fancied the glib scherzo of the wheels beneath them as rhythmically orchestrated with the collective beating of their hearts, wildly imagined to be pumping directly through their veins the '29 Latour they'd been drinking since afternoon of the day before, when, streaking through the desert, they'd had a lunch of Spartan simplicity--champagne and caviar.

Penny's inverted version of the flapper ended, applauded by several women now rather effigies of that incarnation of coquetry, some admitting to 50! "Believe me, if all those enduring young charms," Bender ruefully murmured to himself. Christ, was his wit as corroded as their beauty? Just then Vivian Surplus, her black eyes like two burrs caught accidentally on his own browsing gaze, drank to him only with these, being drunk enough to do so. "I guess you've still got it, old sport," he said with a wink at his phantom in the dark windowpane. "The old wastrel charm. But she's too old for granny dresses." Then he rose and slipped away to his bedroom.

Within the cool cocoon of sheets, he lay on one elbow and, through the window there, caught fleet, improbable glimpses of farmhouses and Godforsaken Baptist churches and small towns drowned in anonymity. Sounds of his own rolling house party drifted in: the arpeggio of a woman's laughter, whispers and running feet, a delinquent sigh.... He fell asleep hearing Feelingwell, the transplanted but still impeccable Englishman, apparently poking his head into the next compartment, say, "Oh, I beg your pardon, but isn't that my wife you're lying on?..."

• • •

When he awoke, it was daylight and they were in Omaha. The train had ground to a halt on a siding there. He could hear Penny's murmurous voice somewhere down the car. "Daddy's taking on some more money."

That was true. They were to refuel on currency here through a branch-office factotum Poolwater was to meet at the station, principally 20s to throw around for the rest of the trip, but also cash to pay the railroad crew and private staff Poolwater had been stalling since they'd left home and even before. Then why was Poolwater rapping urgently on the bedroom door and the next moment standing inside, his face a bag of worms, saying: "There's no more money"?

"I know that. So get some. Where is Abernathy? Didn't he show up?"

"He's out there. But he says it's all gone. Living too high on the hog too long----"

"This is no time for metaphors."

"That's right. You're wiped out. Credit exhausted everywhere, mortgaged to the eyeballs, even the train's being.... I mean you can't count the bailiffs out there with writs, court orders, papers--they've got more papers than the newspaper boy, I tell you...."

Poolwater's face vanished, to make room for the porter's, phantasmally smiling, phantasmally kind. "Choo choo repossessed?"

That was it, then. The last fling had proved so much the best that his guests would never get to East Hampton. How consummate a host could you be? Bo Bender must certainly go down as the last, the absolute and definitive very last, Last of the Heavy Spenders. In a rapture of ruin, he could hear the news passed in whispers up the corridor, like fire along a fuse. People, most of them up all night, got off to look for a restaurant where they could get some coffee. The diner had been disconnected. He could see it being hauled round a bend when he raised the shade to look out, putting a hand up to protect his eyes instinctively from a sun that hadn't come out. Instead, the moon had risen again and hung like a mildewed lemon over Nebraska. His bacchants were picking their way across the cinders to the station--among them Feelingwell, guiding his crumpled bride from tie to tie. The trip had been their honeymoon--Bo Bender's gift to the pair. How long had this scene and all these ruminations taken? Five minutes? An hour?

The porter still stood there, chimerically smiling.

"So then y'all not gettin' off Scott-free."

Bender shot him a look, wildly imagining that he had heard right. He pointed to an eviscerated Gladstone bag on the floor.

"Would you dig that bottle of bourbon out for me, please?"

"That stuff is slow death, sir."

"I'm in no hurry."

So that was how it was all to end--all the antic splendor and squandered wit and phosphorescent gaiety, the beautiful damnation--in a last guttering candle end of repartee with a porter on a siding in Omaha. And his own end of it stolen from Benchley to boot.... Or no, wait.... Couldn't it have been that Bender himself made that rejoinder, to a cautionary waiter at the Plaza, way back Then? No matter. He had plucked it whole, the mot, still mint-fresh, from the haunting jumble of recollections.

"Pull yourself together," the porter was going on. "Because you know what this reminds me of? The Thirties. Those were the days, in lots of ways. People who lost everything in the great Depression bounced right back. I saw it lots of times. You do that too, hear? Bounce back?"

Bender already had. He sat bolt erect on the berth, galvanized into fresh spirit by what the porter had unwittingly given him: not only the key to patience but the clue to salvage. Of course! As master of their revels, the muse of their festivities, he had not failed his party all that completely in the quest for that shining grail of Memory. He had, after all, missed their goal by only a decade, of the many to be traversed in their giddy backward flight. He had recaptured the Thirties, and, as his grandfather used to say then:

"Take the best you can get in the way of nostalgia, old sport."