GATSBY

If you have heard of my father at all, it is because of a telephone call about a pair of tennis shoes.

He made it in the first week of September, 1922, to a house in West Egg, Long Island, where the greatest of his many hosts lay newly murdered in a bedroom upstairs, with nobody to sit by him but one honest neighbor — there is always one honest neighbor, and he is never any use. My father had lived in that house for the better part of a year — slept in its beds, played its piano badly, drunk its cellar down to the racks — and when the man who paid for all of it was shot dead in his own swimming pool, my father did not come to the funeral. He telephoned. He wanted his tennis shoes back. He was, he explained, in some inconvenience without them.

You will find the whole disgraceful business set down in a book that everyone praises and nobody believes, which is a pity, because it is the only reliable thing ever written about my family. Fitzgerald changed most of the names, of course — he was a novelist, which is to say a coward of a specialized kind — but he kept ours.¹ I have always supposed this was because he could not imagine anyone owning to it voluntarily, and in this, as in so much else, he underestimated the Klipspringers.

I set all this down now because everyone concerned is dead, my attorneys assure me that what remains is merely civil, and I find, at seventy-seven, that I am the last man alive who knows what actually happened — at the house in West Egg, on the mesa at Los Alamos, in the orchards that became Santa Clara County, and in that final splendid lunacy just concluded, when the whole country turned into one of Gatsby's parties and I, alone of all the guests, remembered how those end.

They call me a visionary now. I have the doctorates — six of them, honorary, which is the only kind I ever earned — and the medal from one President and the photograph with four others, and last March a boy from CNBC with a haircut like a golf green called me "the conscience of the Valley" on national television, because I had sold everything in the first week of March, 2000, at the exact top of the greatest bubble in the history of money. Sound judgment, they said. Deep pattern recognition. Fifty years of wisdom.

I sold because I was fleeing a subpoena. I shall come to that in its proper place.²

The truth — and you had better have it now, at the start, so that we understand each other — is that I have been a fraud since before I was born. I never invented anything, never understood above a tenth of what was explained to me, and never once stood my ground when there was a door available. The men who stood their ground are on plaques now, and I have read a great many plaques and never met one that was enjoying itself. But I have three gifts, and I will set them down here like the assets they are, for they carried me through the American century the way a good horse carried better liars through earlier ones. I could always talk a subject I did not understand, in its own accents, half a beat ahead of exposure. I had an unfailing instinct for standing next to the right man at the right moment, wearing the right expression. And I could smell a catastrophe two full days before it arrived — which, since I never once used the warning to help another living soul, meant that I have been photographed walking calmly away from more burning buildings than any man alive, always described in the caption as "the last man out."

On those three rocks I built everything. But rocks want ground to stand on, and mine was laid at a party in the summer of 1922, at the house in West Egg, some months before the tennis shoes.

My mother was seventeen that summer and dancing in the second row at the Follies — a respectable trade in the way such things were respectable, which is to say by polite agreement among people who knew better — and on the weekends she went with the other girls out to Long Island, where there was a man who gave parties that did not require an invitation, only nerve, of which she had a sufficiency. She told me about those parties all through my boyhood, in a cold-water flat in Astoria with the airshaft for a view, and I want it understood that she never told them bitterly. There was an orchestra, she said, not a five-piece band but a whole orchestra, and a machine in the kitchen that could juice two hundred oranges in half an hour if a butler stood there pressing a button two hundred times. She thought that was the most wonderful thing she had ever heard of, and so, when she told it, did I, though I have thought about that butler's thumb my whole life since. It was the first piece of technology I ever encountered, secondhand, and it taught me everything: out front, the miracle; in the kitchen, some poor devil pressing the button; and the whole apparatus existing so that a man could seem to be what he was not.

My father was at those parties too — he was living there, the famous boarder, the man nobody remembered inviting. He was tall, my mother said, and played the piano when asked and sometimes when not, and he had a way of making you feel that being imposed upon was a privilege extended to very few. She was seventeen. I was born the following April.

He gave her nothing, then or ever — not a dollar, not a name, not the tennis shoes. She got the name off the newspapers when the murder made them, and had the effrontery to put it on my birth certificate, reasoning, she said, that a man who lived free in a mansion for a year must be somebody, and that I might as well have what could be got from him, which was six letters. But the first name she chose herself, for the host — for the man who had given her the only splendor she ever saw in this life, who had once, when a waiter turned her away from the champagne for her age, brought her a glass himself and called her mademoiselle.

She named me Jay.

I want to be exact about what I am claiming, because half the fortunes I ever raised were built on the inexactness. I am not saying that man was my father. My mother never said it; she would have laughed at you; she knew precisely whose I was, and told me, and it was the piano player who wanted his shoes back. But I discovered very young — nine or ten, when a schoolmaster in Astoria first heard my full name and looked at me over his spectacles in a new way — that I did not have to say it. I had only to say nothing, and let the name do the work, and drop my eyes as if the subject pained me. I have made that same silence pay in Pasadena, in Santa Fe, in Washington and Palo Alto and a hundred boardrooms since. It is the only inheritance I ever had, and it is this: people will build you out of whatever materials you leave lying about, and they build grander than you would dare.³

The rest of my boyhood you may have in a paragraph, for it was spent getting out of Astoria. My mother married a radio repairman named Kowalczyk, a Pole out of Greenpoint and a decent man — two conditions held in our neighborhood to coincide only in exceptional cases, and our neighborhood was Polish — who never once raised his hand to me, though God knows I gave him cause, and from him I learned to solder a joint and read a schematic and — far more valuable — to talk radio, the vocabulary of it, superheterodyne and cathode and impedance, words that made grown men nod. I found that I could hold up my end with engineers twice my age on vocabulary alone, provided I asked my questions confidently and left before the arithmetic started. I was quick at school in the shallow way that dazzles teachers and evaporates under pressure, and in the fall of 1940, on a scholarship endowed by a man whose fortune I would help misplace thirty years later, I went west, seventeen years old, to the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, to become a physicist.

I lasted five terms.

The details of my leaving Caltech I shall give in the next number, for they deserve room — there was a cloud chamber involved, and a set of photographic plates that showed particle tracks of a kind never before observed in nature, for the excellent reason that I had drawn them, and there was also, I regret to say, the wife of a trustee, a woman of forty with a Duesenberg and a view of undergraduate morals that would have emptied the seminaries. I don't ask pardon for that one, either. No man of nineteen has ever declined that particular education, and the few on record as claiming the distinction are liars, or bishops, or both. The one crime might have been survived without the other. Together they put me in front of Dr. Millikan himself on a fine morning in June of 1942, and whatever you have read about that great man's Christian forbearance, I am here to tell you it had a floor, and I went through it.⁴

But mark the date — June of 1942 — for that is the whole point of this memoir, and the reason a fraud's confession is worth your reading. Any other year in the century, a boy expelled from Caltech for forging data was finished in science, and I would have lived out my days selling radios, or Duesenbergs, or myself. But in June of 1942 there was a war on, and the war had developed a bottomless appetite for young men who could say cathode and impedance with a straight face. The Army got me that autumn. And the Army, God preserve it, does not read files; it weighs them.

Mine weighed just enough. At the classification interview at Fort Monmouth, a corporal with a rubber stamp and the expression of a man who found the funny papers heavy going looked at the single line — California Institute of Technology, physics, 1940–42 — and did not ask why there was no degree, and I, watching his face the way my father must once have watched a doorman's, said quietly that I had left my studies to serve, and that I had done some work in the radiation line, at Berkeley, under Professor Lawrence. It was the first time I ever said it. It cost me nothing to say. Lawrence ran a cyclotron and a small empire, and everyone in physics had been to Berkeley or said so, and I calculated — correctly, as it proved for the next fifty-eight years — that no man holding a rubber stamp has ever in history telephoned to check.

Six months later, with two stripes and a duffel bag, I stepped off the train at Lamy, New Mexico, which is a depot, a water tower, and a quantity of sunlight I had not believed possible, and was driven into Santa Fe with five other bewildered enlisted men to an address we had each been given separately and told to forget: 109 East Palace Avenue. Behind a wrought-iron gate there was a cool old courtyard, and an office at the end of it, and in the office a handsome, unhurried woman of about forty-five — I was twenty and made the inventory automatically, as every man of twenty does and every man of seventy denies — who processed the whole future of warfare across a plain wooden desk as if it were a dude ranch, which in a sense it was.⁵

She checked my orders against a list, and I saw my own name upside down with a typed annotation beside it, and she looked up at me with the first of the ten thousand friendly, careless, annihilating questions that make up a security state, and said:

"Klipspringer — that's not a name you forget. You'll be the one who was with Lawrence at Berkeley?"

And God forgive me — no, He won't, I've had the actuaries look into it — I said yes.