Looking for Gatsby

“You can’t go home again.”

The writer Thomas Wolfe believed that if you returned to a place from your past, it wouldn’t be the same. My husband Richard also says that. And yet he planned a fall trip around the Great Lakes, near where he was born, so that I could discover the area he had called home.

It was good to get away. A year of medical issues had disrupted our life and well-made plans. We needed a change of scenery that didn’t involve gray walls and bright ceiling lights.

After landing and touring Detroit, we headed north to explore Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. After ten days, we pointed south, traveling Highway 61 from Grand Marais, Minnesota to Minneapolis. Hugging the shoreline for miles, we marveled at the wind-whipped waves of Superior’s deep water spraying foam into the gray-blue sky.

We had found the fall color we were looking for. Stands of needle-leafed tamarack glowed like gold bars. Sprinkled among them were maples, their blood-red leaves contrasting with those of the mustard-shaded quivering aspen.

Making our way into Minneapolis, we crossed a band of shimmering silver — the Mississippi River, separating the city from its twin, St. Paul.

Construction cranes loomed over the cityscape as skyscrapers caught the champagne-tinted sunrays, spilling shadows on broad sidewalks.

Push me, pull me

Once we got our bearings, we decided to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Pulling up in our rental car, we took in the original neoclassical front façade. A nod to an era long gone, it mirrored the grand columns of an ancient Greek temple.

In contrast, the west wing entrance of MIA, which housed contemporary art, sported large abstract Michael Graves-designed concrete cubes, cylinders and circles.

“Where do you want to start?” I asked.

“Let’s go to the Impressionists,” Richard said.

“Love that!”

We climbed a wide staircase to the second floor and proceeded into the first room. Richard carefully examined the information plaque, studied the art, and nodded. Then he moved to the next painting.

I perused the first painting, the second, the third, and then skipped over to a huge piece on the opposite wall. As I was reading the plaque and studying the artwork, two young people crowded next to me. I could hear the audio coming from their earbuds as clearly as though I was wearing them myself.

Sighing loudly, I moved on.

Strolling room to room, my heart raced seeing vivid portrayals of contemplation or joy or suffering. At times, my eyes grew damp viewing my beloved Impressionism period: Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas.

“What do you see in this picture?”

I turned to look in the direction of the voice. A young woman was standing in front of a group of antsy elementary students, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

I noticed two little boys bumping shoulders. Softly at first, then harder and faster, until they knocked into a little girl with curly blonde hair.

“Boys!” their teacher hissed.

The guide again gently prompted the children. “What do you see in this picture?”

“A haystack!”

“A sky.”

“A field.”

“Yellow!”

How we like to simplify, I thought.

Pausing in the middle of the room, I watched the children from a distance.

My shoulders relaxed.

I loved Monet’s “Haystacks,” remembering that he painted the subject multiple times. In each piece, he depicted the sun’s movement by shifting the position of light. At times, the haystacks glowed; at others, plunged in shadows.

He captured time by painting one moment, then another, and another.

Mesmerized by the agrarian scenes, I found myself transported to my childhood on the farm. Baling hay on cool fall mornings, we heard the honk of Canada geese flying overhead.  Glistening dew moistened our skin as we walked through fragrant mown grass.

Memories linger of my diminutive but strong Polish grandmother, her babushka reining in a mop of brunette hair, raking hay into massive piles on the Pennsylvania farm where my mother was raised.

A warm, long breath escaped my lips. Then, an unnerving feeling of losing something washed over me. What was it?

Richard. I turned away from images of horses and wagons laden with straw to look around the galleries. He was nowhere to be seen. Pulling myself out of the past, literally and metaphorically, I grabbed the ubiquitous symbol of modernity. My cell phone.

All that jazz

“WRU?” I texted. And waited. Several minutes.

My phone vibrated. “Cool exhibit. Gatsby. Come see.” he texted back.

“Where?”

“Near where we started.”

My toes silently tapped. He was still in the first part of the museum. I had already viewed ten or eleven galleries. I pictured myself in a child’s harness, Richard tugging on the leash.

He took his time. Savoring each morsel of information his brain could take in. Until he thought he fully understood it. As I restlessly hopped from one idea to another, I envied him that.

Backtracking through the maze of rooms, I found Richard in the “Gatsby at 100” special exhibition.

There he was, his nose a foot away from a placard, completely immersed. Much like his approach to life: curious, fact-based, analytical.

I placed my hand gently on his back. He didn’t jump.

“You have got to see this exhibit, Wendy!” he said happily as he turned towards me.

“Gatsby, yeah, it’s like the 100^th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, right?” I asked, thinking he would be impressed, but knowing this was a bit of a cheat. I had just read the entrance gallery panel explaining the exhibit.

“So, they took pages from the book, then paired those with artwork of the period,” he said. I hadn’t seen him this excited since the Georgia Bulldogs beat Ohio State in the 2022 Peach Bowl.

“Look here,” he said, tugging my arm, reminding me of a fifth grader.

“Okay, I will. I was in the Impressionism gallery. You should check them out,” I said.

We switched places.

Finding a glass-enclosed case with an original 1925 edition of The Great Gatsby, I paused. The worn, faded cover revealed its own passage of time. Two sad yellow-green eyes hovering in an indigo sky stared back at me. A pair of ruby red lips floated beneath them. Under this haunting image sat a miniature glittering city skyline.

I felt the emptiness.

I remember reading it the first time. Gatsby was chaotic, brilliant, fractured. Fresh. Like the Jazz Age of the Roaring ’20s it portrayed.

I recalled that as a young man, Gatsby fell in love with Daisy, but they parted. Later, he bought a mansion and then obsessively looked across the bay for a green light shining from her dock. Close, but unattainable. Tragically, he died taking the blame for something Daisy did.

The last line of Gatsby had stayed with me. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Meandering through the exhibit, I discovered page upon page, tacked to the wall alongside works that were completed in the early 1920’s, just like the novel. Matisse, O’Keeffe, Wanda Gág.

My body relaxed as though being carried downriver.

Gatsby’s past was always his present, I thought. But he couldn’t have what was in his past. His great love, Daisy. Ultimately, he unknowingly sacrificed his future — literally his life — to protect hers.

In front of me was a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, City Life, completed in 1926. Sharply angled white NYC skyscrapers punctured the night sky. Low in the horizon and deep in the background, a bright, glowing moon spread its beams — something familiar, organic, grounded.

I wanted to find Richard.

Wandering back through the museum, I thought about Fitzgerald. He was a St. Paul, Minnesota native, so it was fitting that his original works had come home. In their heyday, he and his wife Zelda were the embodiment of the Jazz Age.

She was a writer and artist who didn’t receive full recognition for her work. Some narratives even accuse her husband of using her writings without acknowledging her.

I imagined her sitting at a desk. She brushes an ashen blonde curl from her face as she taps a manicured finger on a wooden desk. Her hands hover over typewriter keys, just as mine do over the keyboard.

Coming home

Arriving at the exhibit, I saw Richard standing, mouth agape, staring at the hallway of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It was originally built on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota for the Little family, and a full section had been moved into the museum.

I gave him a quick hug.

“Look at this,” he said, wonder in his voice. “The Met in New York had acquired the house but couldn’t afford the upkeep. So, they kept part of it in New York and sold the hallway to MIA. This is the actual hallway. Amazing!”

I nodded. “Honey, the Gatsby exhibit was fascinating. You were right.”

He grinned. He always likes to hear that. I guess we all do.

I continued. Which I sometimes do.

“I was thinking about Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. She was a great love of his life, but she suffered from mental illness. It seems so sad. Was she broken and couldn’t move forward? Or was she a victim of the time?”

“Hmm,” he replied. “Maybe both? And he was too, in a way. It’s really a tragic story. You probably remember she was a patient in a Highland Hospital in Asheville for years. She died there in a fire.”

The room noise dimmed. Why did Zelda’s story resonate with me? She was a free spirit yet tethered by a chaotic mind.

You can’t go home again.

Maybe it’s enough to remember what was there, and as my husband does, savor it, understand it, and then look up to what’s next.

As we left the museum, I donned my broad-brimmed fedora. Like Monet’s tracking light across haystacks, the sun brushed my SPF 50+ lotioned cheeks as it marked the passing of another day.

“Honey?”

“Yes?” Richard answered, adjusting his new denim Yooper baseball cap.

“We need to go to Asheville.”