Lost and Found

Ridgecrest Estates, as its name suggested, straddled a high hill overlooking the town, and like some medieval stronghold, it was surrounded by high stone walls designed to discourage intruders.  A guard shack was situated at the one and only arched entrance to Ridgecrest Estates, and the hired security guards who worked there were responsible for stopping unfamiliar cars, querying their drivers, noting license plate numbers, and checking off names against lists of approved visitors.  Long time residents would coast through the checkpoint and wave, and the guard on duty generally recognized their automobiles long before he could distinguish their faces, and he would smile as they approached, and then press the button that raised the red-and-white striped wooden pike to allow them through.

The homes in Ridgecrest Estates were large, ostentatiously large, and nearly all of them had a swimming pool somewhere on the grounds, and many of them also had tennis courts, and all of them were immaculately maintained and landscaped.  On any warm June evening, the air was charged with the mingled scents of freshly mowed lawns, rose blossoms, and grilled tenderloin steaks.  Flower beds blazed under their artificial lighting.  Voices and laughter, mellifluous and rich, flowed over privacy hedges and into the street, and to listen to it you would think that the residents of Ridgecrest Estates hadn’t a care in the world.  And, at least as far as cares about money are concerned, you would be right.

Delivery vehicles entered and left Ridgecrest in a continuous procession almost around the clock, delivering anything the monied could buy.  From the first dairy truck in the wee hours of the morning to the last hurried delivery of Glenlivet or Dom Perignon in the wee hours of the night, a constant stream of caterers, furriers, landscapers, tree doctors, seafood purveyors and couturiers came and went.  They brought Mrs. J. Mumford Wiggins her English roses and Mr. Alfred J. Norton III his illegally imported Havana cigars.  They came laden with silks and minks and emeralds and lobsters and not infrequently, an expensive hooker.  They arrived, transporting not-so-expensive aliens to cut the grass and prune the trees.

James Preston McCall was a fifteen year resident of Ridgecrest Estates.  He had moved in the year after his wife, scion to a frozen food fortune, had left him, taking their five year old daughter, Carolyn, with her.  They had not lived in Ridgecrest at the time of their separation.  They had lived in a far more modest neighborhood, at James’ insistence and to his wife’s chagrin.  He was a proud man, and did not want his friends and associates to assume that he had married Amy for her money.  As, in truth, he hadn’t.  They’d fallen in love in college, and Amy never spoke about her net worth until a month after they were engaged.  It was Christmastime, and she had taken him home to meet her family.  “Home” had turned out to be a cozy sixty room bungalow on a twenty acre parcel on Long Island, and the gifts that year included such things as Maseratis and diamond tiaras, Rolexes and Renoirs.  But Amy was in love with James at the time, for he was handsome and smart, and the fact that he was struggling and poor didn’t seem to matter much.  Later, her good sense got the better of her hormones, and she began to tire of the arrangement.

They had separated only months before James’ faltering new business had suddenly taken a surprising, wholly unexpected upturn.  He’d awakened one morning an abandoned and rejected man, anguished, lonely and – belatedly rich.  Where was the justice in life?

Little Carolyn did not visit her father in his new home that year, or in any subsequent year.  He had been granted specific visitation rights, spelled out in unequivocal legalese – his lawyer had seen to that.  But Carolyn had been obdurate and cold, and James, wiser than the lawyer, knew that to press the issue, to insist on his rights,  would only make matters worse.  He’d already scandalized the local legal community by refusing a sizeable divorce settlement from Amy.

Back then, Carolyn would have told you that she hated her daddy.  She was only five, and she hated him because her mother hated him, and because he had, for the first precious years of her life, ignored her, devoting his energies to making his fortune.

Still, he loved her.  Still, he missed her.  Still, he grieved.

James had tried to call her on several occasions – on her birthday, at Christmas, sometimes for no special reason at all – but she steadfastly refused to talk to him.  He wrote to her, faithfully, every week, at her girls’ school address in Paris for a year or more, but she never wrote back.  Eventually, he quit trying.  He pasted his few treasured snapshots of her in his Morrocan leather bound album and sometimes he flipped through its leaves when he came home late at night tired and depressed,  and remembered her and loved her.  Things would never again be the same.  He had, he imagined, stupidly lost everything, everything …

Amy never really had understood his ambition.  What need had they of another fortune, anyway?  She had all the money they’d ever need.  She underestimated the power of the male ego.  She found her husband exasperatingly inaccessible most of the time.  Her idea of marriage, formed long before she got herself married, was to while away her years in Cannes, in Rio, in Paris, in Tahiti, and in their New York “apartment,” sleeping in the costliest hotels and enjoying the finest foods.  She would, she imagined, attend important parties and sip the rarest wines with dear, clever, handsome James doting on her – there would be an endless succession of lavish hotels and exotic cities and rich friends that would fill up and make interesting and pleasant the long months and years of idleness that plagued the fabulously wealthy, challenging them to find in art and in bottles of Mouton Rothschild, and in impulsive flights across the Atlantic on the Concorde the kind of stimulation and satisfaction that normal beings sought in their careers and jobs.

And so James had proven himself a failure as a husband and as a father.  It was as though he had wasted their best years trying to be a simple breadwinner when she, Amy, could have bought and sold a dozen commercial bakeries with her filthy pocket change.  And so, after a brief cry in the arms of her mother, who had always detested James (You married far beneath your station, dear), she’d pulled herself together, dragged Carolyn off to Paris, and shacked up with an Italian playboy noted throughout Europe for the generous, happy-go-lucky way in which he subsidized the casinos of Monte Carlo with a seemingly endless string of losing high stakes bets.  Not that it mattered.  He was so wealthy that he could hardly lose his money as fast as it multiplied, and besides, they were happy, weren’t they?  Carolyn was enrolled in a private school for girls and grew up speaking French.

James was now fifty-five years old, a success in business, and somewhat, although not incapacitatingly embittered by life.  He was seldom at home.  He had never remarried.  He lived alone, but his house, a three story, twelve bedroom, six bathroom affair with a three car garage, was vacant most hours of the day, except for the Tuesdays when the cleaning people came, and except for the nights when he, exhausted from a twenty hour marathon at the office, would return just long enough to shower and maybe sleep for an hour or two before shaving and changing clothes and going through the mail and speeding back to work.

It was late one Saturday night – actually early in the morning on a Sunday – that he  felt the first disturbing ripples of alarm after coming home.  He’d parked his Alfa Romeo in the circular driveway.  The summer evening air was laden with the heady perfume of honeysuckle  The house was ablaze with light, as it always was when he was away, especially when he was away.  He punched in the nine digit security code that disarmed the burglar alarm.  He plodded wearily upstairs, removing his necktie on the way, musing over the day’s transactions.  As he turned left at the landing to head for the master bedroom suite, he noticed that the corridor to the right, leading to some of the guest rooms, looked  oddly foreshortened.  He paced down the hallway, peering into each room.  Nothing looked out of place, but he could not shake away the peculiar feeling that something was – well, different.

As the ensuing days and weeks unfolded, James became convinced that he was losing his mind.  The house actually shrank a little bit more each day, losing whole rooms.  One evening, the three car garage had become a two car garage.  Another evening, the number of bedrooms had dwindled from six to five.  One day, the pool disappeared, and the property boundaries narrowed so that his house, now dwarfed in comparison to the neighboring properties, squatted incongruously on its undersized lot.

James’ neighbors, with whom he’d seldom  spoken in the fifteen years he’d lived there, would glower at him as he pulled into the now minuscule driveway and entered his ridiculous house.  He could read the contempt in their faces.  He was becoming an embarrassment to the entire community.  He no longer belonged there.

His mind flared and burned, consumed by the kerosene of his terror, and rather than do the sensible thing and call a shrink, he curled up in bed, now sometimes for whole days at a time, flipping idly through the pages of his old photo album, thinking of Carolyn, wondering what had become of her.  Was he going insane?  He couldn’t really tell.

As CEO of McCall Enterprises (his executive secretary began to refer to him in hushed whispers in the break room as the “Chief Executive Oddball”), James still had his position, his work, and his income.  When his house finally shrank to cottage size, squeezed like a toolshed between the Davis home and the Wallenstein home, he moved out, taking his clothes and a few of his personal things, including the cherished photo album, and began sleeping on the sofa in his office and showering and shaving in the private bathroom that adjoined it.

Until, one autumn day, he drove downtown to meet a business associate who ended up not appearing for the luncheon appointment, and returned to work only to discover that the sign on the lawn outside had been changed mysteriously in the space of only an hour and a half to “Douglas Enterprises.”  When he’d rushed inside, demanding to be let into his office, he was rudely shown to the door by a menacing security guard.  As he stood just outside the building, regarding his reflection in the plate glass door, he noticed that he’d aged tremendously.  He was unkempt and dishevelled.  He looked a mess.

Of course, by then, his car, too had vanished from the parking lot.

Downtown, in the park, he encountered a homeless old man sitting on a bench, drinking wine from a paper sack, and when the tortured face gazed up at him and broke into an evil grin of blackened and missing teeth, he’d emitted a frightened little shriek and fled, stumbling down the sidewalk with his coat snapping in the wind.  A woman pushing a baby stroller had recoiled in horror at the sight of him.

Now, three days without a roof over his head, he wandered aimlessly back and forth across the park, kicking angrily at the pigeons and muttering to himself.

Carolyn buried her face against David’s chest and he folded his arms tightly around her as the little spasms of anguish rose up from inside her, making her shoulders convulse.

“This is some neighborhood,” he noted.  “Are you sure he lived here?  He must be awfully rich.”

Carolyn pulled away from him.  She looked into his face with a bewildered expression.  “Rich?  Daddy rich?  Oh, no David, he wasn’t rich.  Mother was rich.  Why this,” and her arm swept in a broad arc as it compassed Ridgecrest Estates, “this is nothing.  Mother wouldn’t have put her servants in shacks like these!” And she suddenly regretted her silly outburst.

David stared at the rich masonry and landscaping and incomprehensible wealth that lay before his eyes, and at first he didn’t know what to say.

“I didn’t know …”

“Oh, David,” she wailed.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t want you to find out.  Not until later.  Maybe never. The money is nothing to me.  I love you, David, only you.”

Her face was anguished, contorted, and frightened.  David was overcome with feeling.  He leaned back against the hood of the car they’d rented at the airport and tried to catch his breath.

“I still want to become a geologist,” she went on.  “I want for us to live a normal life.  You don’t know what obsession with wealth can do to a family.  David, I’ll give it all away.  I’ll give it to some charity.  I’ll do anything, David.  My mother was a harridan – she took me away from him …”

Carolyn again began to sob uncontrollably.  When she had recovered enough to continue, she blubbered, “I hated him.  In my peevish little five year old brain, I hated him, because she taught me to hate him.  He wanted to work, to be somebody in his own right.  The same as you and I.  And now he’s gone, and I’ll never find him.  I don’t want to do that to you, David.  I want you to work.  I want to work.  We need that.  Really, we do.”

David nodded.  He took her tightly against his body and squeezed her.  He breathed “yes” and then, without thinking, asked her to marry him.  He was going to do it eventually, anyway.  And now was the time.  They both knew it and understood.

She would never find her father now, Carolyn realized.  The address she’d written down and kept – the same one he’d put on all his letters to her when she was only six or seven – was obviously a bogus one.  Her mother had probably been right in that regard.  He’d failed at his business and had tried to keep up the pretense of success, but none of that mattered now.  She only wanted to locate him, to tell him that … but, she reminded herself as consolation, she had found David, and he, her.  Her life was far from totally wrecked.

And so David, who had grown up mowing lawns in neighborhoods like this one to pay his way through school, found himself unexpectedly and implausibly engaged to an heiress.

James teetered on the curb, staring fixedly at the approaching car.  It rounded the corner from Eighth Street and picked up speed as it neared him. He braced himself.  Visions of Carolyn, snapshot memories flickered through his mind.  He could almost feel the onrush of heavy steel and death.  He closed his eyes, tightly, and stuck his right leg out over the gutter.  Just a step or two, a quick lunge, that’s all it will take.  Now.  NOW.

But he didn’t do it.  The car’s driver, a young college student driving himself and his new fiance back to the airport in their rental car, swerved when he saw the crazy old man who looked for all the world as though he intended to jump out into the street in front of him.  But his fiance was too distraught to notice.  She’d been bent over, her head cradled in her arms as she leaned forward against the tug of the seatbelt, sobbing softly.  The car’s driver clutched her shoulder affectionately and said, “Someday we’ll find him.  I know we will, Carolyn.  We won’t stop until we do.”

James stared after the car as it sped down the street.  He looked up at the scudding clouds, at the flurry of dead leaves that was suddenly torn from the tree overhead.  He squinted into the darkening October sky and saw that there was really nothing left to do.

His eyes stung, and struggling to see through the miasma of tears, it looked to him as though the whole town – indeed, the whole world – was shrivelling and collapsing before him, like a styrofoam cup tossed into a fire.  And in his last moments of consciousness, there was a feeling in his chest, a feeling of heavy pressure, as though someone were sitting on him, squeezing out his breath.  And then he saw her, he saw Carolyn, her lips smeared with her mother’s lipstick, her little arms outstretched, tottering toward him in Amy’s high heels, her lips beginning to part, as though she were about to call out to …