1. On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gat*****y’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
What does the world's mistress refer to?
2. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Does this mean Mr. Chrystie's wife is a widow?
3. I hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter” was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss Mr. Jay Gat*****y. I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gat*****y's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge,' I thought; 'anything at all . . . '" (69)
This passage contains the nostalgia, the romanticism, and the underlying anxiety that permeates Gat*****y. Nick drinks in the view of New York City while safely tucked into Gat*****y's car, and the crowded, congested city appears more pristine than if he were walking the sidewalks or driving down a busy street. However, even looking at the city from a distance does not mean that the Anglo-Saxon crowd is safe from those who are infiltrating New York. Nick encounters a car of Southeastern Europeans who with their "tragic eyes and short upper lips" serve as a depressing reminder of their presence.
Unlike the immigrants, the African Americans who notice Nick act as competition to the Gat*****y car. "When, during the Twenties, black empowerment threatened white privilege, nationalists readily abandoned their nativist attack on non-Nordic Europeans and reasserted the need for black/white separation through appeals to (among other things) intra-white brotherhood" (Decker, 58). Yes, the African Americans are a threat to whites because the race is emerging into mainstream society as a powerful minority group; but Decker fails to realize that as African Americans do this they, too, are cultivating an American Dream - one that grants them access into previously predominantly white realms like education, the arts, and the workplace. The economic threat African Americans pose is evident in the limousine that rivals Gat*****y's Rolls Royce, and the African Americans have an edge over Gat*****y by having a chauffeur, and a white one at that. The white chauffeur is a haunting reminder of the changing times. The word choice of "buck" makes the African American men sound threatening in a physical sense, yet it is a demeaning term and helps Nick believe he has the upper hand. Nick is safe in the Rolls and "Beyond the obvious racial stereotyping of the happy darkies aping white ways, note the pleasure Nick takes in observing the high-spirited Negroes, an amusement indebted to the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the United States" (Decker, 57-8). By laughing at them, Nick is keeping them at a distance and assures himself that these African Americans are just an exception or some kind of farce. As the car slides over the bridge and Nick thinks that "anything can happen now" the romantic faade of the city slowly crumbles away.
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