Chapter Text
The final cicadas of summer were rasping in the maples when I first noticed the pile of letters crowding the silver salver beside our front door—a pale flank of envelopes, each one barbed with crimson-ink warnings from the Manhattan Company, the Guaranty Trust, or some other institution that liked to print its threats in the season's liveliest color. I bent for the lot of them because the footman never dares disturb Tom at breakfast. From the dining room I heard the stiff traveling of pages: The Wall Street Journal unfolding like a concertina, Tom's slipper heel pressing impatience into the quarter-sawn floor.
I held the letters behind my back, the way a little girl conceals a mischief, and drifted through the perfume of toast and burned bacon grease. Tom sat beneath the portrait of my grandmother—her powdered neck rising out of a lace fichu like a pheasant's—all tusks and bullish shoulders, brown hair parted with an iron comb.
"Morning," he said without looking up.
"Morning."
I kissed the top of his head; he smelled of Fougère Royale and the faint mineral reek of the Long Island Sound at low tide.
"Traders say we've another record coming," he told me. "Bethlehem Steel is on the march. You should have let me put your old Colonial notes into Bethlehem. Thirty percent since August."
"I imagine Grandfather would tumble from his pewter frame if I risked the Revolution's wages on steel."
"He'd thank you if he were alive." Tom snapped the paper straight. "You can't ride into the Twentieth Century on wooden teeth and whale-oil lamps. Imagine, Gatsby does have the sense to keep money liquid—call loans at six and seven percent. Sharp fellow."
"That sharp fellow spends more on hydrangeas than most men earn in a decade," I said.
Tom reached for the coffee urn. His cuff links—the black-on-gold Cairo pair—tapped against the china pot.
"What's that you're hiding?"
"Only letters, darling. Business things."
"Let's have a look."
Reluctantly I relinquished them. He sliced them open with a mother-of-pearl knife—cshh-cshh—and as each seal tore he tossed the contents into a drift beside his grapefruit. Red ink bloomed like small hemorrhages on the paper:
FINAL NOTICE; ADDITIONAL MARGIN REQUIRED; CALL LOAN MATURITY—REPLY BY RETURN WIRE.
Tom's jaw tightened, but his voice remained dry.
"Routine rubbish. Banks fling threats the moment the barometer slips. They'll be crawling back for our business by noon."
"If they're so eager, why write in blood?"
"It's theater, Daisy. They're actors, and we are the gallery." He hunched above the ticker column, as though his very body might keep the numbers aloft. "Speaking of theater—Gatsby's giving a smaller affair Saturday. Not one of those orchestral orgies—just a supper dance for a dozen. He asked particularly for you."
"How flattering." My tone made it plain that flattery bored me. "Does he ever sleep?"
"According to rumor, he counts cash instead of sheep."
Tom's laugh was genuine. Mine was not.
Outside, headlights swept the drive. Wall Street was calling, and Tom Buchanan answered like a prizefighter climbing into a ring whose ropes were spun from other men's sinews. I watched the Hispano-Suiza vanish beyond the privet and considered how a marriage can, in lean seasons, resemble a call loan of the heart: secure until it is inconvenient, and then subject to recall without warning.