See Part I here, and Part II here. 

III.

I am not a writer like Carraway, who had achieved a minor literary reputation at college for a series of pompous columns he penned for the Yale News in support of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. But a year before she died, Daisy persuaded me to enroll in a memoir-writing course conducted for adults at a nearby community college. The course was taught once a week by a retired literature professor who had published several writing books, a Dr. Kaye Hunter. I was surprised to discover that I was not the oldest person in the class. We would all read our “works-in-progress” aloud and on a few occasions I read my recollections of New Haven in the days prior to the First World War. I never mentioned Carraway and was vague about other details, and since I have gone by the not uncommon name Thomas Buchanan since Carraway’s memoir was published, no one, not even Dr. Hunter, put two and two together. One gentleman in the class, however, a pulmonary specialist, had been at Cambridge around the same time, played on the football team, and we traded rivalry jokes. He had a few friends at Yale and at one point during a class break said that my name sounded familiar and asked if I had known a Walter Chase who had been at Deerfield with him. “Walter passed away a long time ago. A charming fellow but, well, a serious gambling problem,” he added with a reminiscent sigh. I said I didn’t recall him and changed the topic. I was relieved when he missed the next class and then felt disheartened to learn he had suffered a fatal stroke while driving to his practice, where he still saw patients one day a week.

Chase! Walter Chase! The name propelled me backwards and I envisioned Walter again as I saw him on that September afternoon in 1922 when I invited him to lunch at a well-known speakeasy to ask him frankly what he knew about Jay Gatsby. I suspected that Gatsby, with his ostentatious mansion and pink suits and tasteless parties, was just another “bootlegger,” profiting from Prohibition. I knew, as did everyone, that he was a business associate of the notorious Meyer Wolfsheim, a slippery crook who always cleverly kept himself out of jail. I knew too that Walter spent the month of August in a New Jersey prison and I suspected Wolfsheim may have been involved. I felt sorry I hadn’t paid Walter a visit, nor had I seen him since, and when he entered the restaurant I saw that the experience had...