The Great Gatsby | A Winrina Story

Legacy

Two days later the police let me into the house. I was as close to an executor that Gatsby would ever have.

Between the police leaving and my visit Wolfsheim's crew of gangsters had stripped the mansion bare. Wolfsheim had been Gatsby's mentor. She had to know how the underworld worked. How had she kept from becoming a Wolfsheim?

I arranged a funeral for two days later. The only people who attended were tabloid reporters and young children hoping for a glimpse of a body. All of them were kept outside the gate. In the grand ballroom of her home, I sat, alone, next to the casket and studied her face. Even now there seemed to be an optimism. I don't know. I was barely staying contained.

She had entertained hundreds of people every Friday evening, with free booze, music, fireworks, and the illusion that the world was only about pleasure.

I sat for almost four hours, waiting for the hearse to arrive to take her to her modest grave. Then there was a knock on the door. I answered and saw a gray-haired couple in modest shoes and clothes. They worked for a living. The man held his hat in his trembling hands, and the woman's eyes were bright pink from crying.

"May I help you?" I asked.

In a wavering voice, he said "Yes ma'am, we're Jane Gatz' parents, and we would very, very much like to see our daughter."

I led them into the ballroom, and then let them have some privacy. The room dwarfed the casket to an almost ridiculous extent, and I regretted not picking a smaller room. But then, I thought that many of the people who owed Gatsby so much might have had the humanity to spend a few minutes bidding her farewell.

. . . . .

I had everything loaded in the car and was preparing to set out in any direction that caught my fancy. I so badly needed to be away from the world of money and parties. On the one hand, what happened broke something in me that would never heal, but on the other, I felt safer when I dreamed of where my life might take me. Gatsby showed me that dreaming was an end in itself.

Years later, whenever I was in New York, I put flowers on her grave. Such a small, minuscule gesture felt almost awkward. She deserved better.

The Crash of 1929, and then the Depression, would bring the crystal heavens crashing to Earth. Men who had made outrageous fortunes lost everything and jumped out of windows. Such is the American view of the worthiness of a life that isn't bathed by a constant stream of money.

But the Depression was still six years away, and we all clung to our illusions. The harder you held them, the harder they resisted.

So we would keep trying harder, keep reaching farther. We were like boats desperately trying to row upstream against a strong current, but we were being dragged backwards, back into the past.

THE END