CHAPTER TWELVE
Dinner with Aunt Justine that night was a late affair at Christine’s with some of her friends. I affected a rather bored air whenever I was around them, women much older than me who occasionally said the odd deeply unfortunate thing about my race, but truth be told, I liked their company. I liked their independence, their wealth, the fact that they were so well-fed and poison-tipped, and they never cared who knew it.
In some ways, it was a version of the role I had played in Louisville to the older girls, pet and doll and charmer. In other ways, it was like being set adrift in a sea where I couldn’t drown, where all the monsters lurking in the depths rather liked me and wouldn’t upset my little craft.
After a rather good dinner of jellied chicken bouillon and a spectacular crown of lamb, the ladies lit cigars or their delicate hashish cigarettes according to their preference and got down to the real business of the day, which turned out to be the holy march that was setting up in Washington, DC, in just a few weeks.
“It really is too very bad that everyone couldn’t keep their eyes up front and their hands to themselves,” said Mrs. Crenshaw. “I tell you, if you had not had the foreigners campaigning for the vote and devils putting their fingers into politicians’ pockets … well, the fun might never have stopped.”
“I never thought it would last,” said Mrs. Wentworth, thumping her horse-head cane on the carpeted floor. She was a formidable woman who glared about her as if we were going to fight about it. “Demons, foreigners, one’s as bad as the other. By all rights, they should have been pushed back the first time we tried to quell the Chinese, begging your pardon, young Jordan.”
“Accepted, since I’m not Chinese,” I said with a light laugh, but Aunt Justine frowned.
“Really, Beulah,” she said. “I don’t see the Chinese or the demons making as much trouble as your average young hawk on the hill. I’m still not convinced the march needs my time or my dollars.”
They were talking not just about the demons, I knew, but also about the soulless, though where they thought they could push them back to was unclear.
The number of people who had actually sold their souls, I learned much later, was far less than what it was made out to be that summer. They were discerning, the men in dark suits who came through Jay Gatsby’s door. They liked power, they liked promise. The newspapers made it sound as if we were drowning in an infernal tide, and of course everyone knew someone who knew someone else who had done it. The temperance marchers, out their target after Prohibition passed, came after the damned, and there had been meetings, marches, the whole song and dance.
I thought of what my aunt’s friends would make of Gatsby and his palace in West Egg. They had seen greater excesses at the fin de siècle, however, and they had also seen how that ended. As in, they might like to have their good time, but they also might have wanted to get well clear before the shooting started.
After dinner, I kissed Aunt Justine good-bye and asked her to have Lara pack up some of my good dresses and my nicer shoes and send them on to East Egg, care of the Buchanans.
“You’re getting along well with Daisy this summer,” she said.
“I am. She’s been a dear, having me stay before my matches and all.”
“And her man, is he behaving himself?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course not, Aunt Justine. But you know the type. A new girl every time he looks about and finds his arm free.”
“Well, that’s a shame for Daisy, then. She ought to keep him in better line.”
I thought sometimes that my aunt forgot about how big men were, how much space and air they could take up. Even Nick did it sometimes, though he made up for it at other times by being little more than a shadow at the back of the clubs and in overfull booths. Tom was like a hulking stone that some great hand had set down in the world, and it was the responsibility of others to move around him.