West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.
Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim
Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago
friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid
them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning
from Miss This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands
waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the
matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'?
the Schultzes'?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved
hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St.
Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside
the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,
began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the
dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came
suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back
from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our
identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted
indistinguishably into it again.
That's my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede
towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street
lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly
wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a
little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent
from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are
still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has
been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan
and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in
common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.