Lost Children

by Willa Bergman

  Fitzgerald was my first literary crush, I’ve read everything he ever published, even his unfinished notes for the Last Tycoon. In the tragedies he wrote to the backdrop of 1920s glamour, and in his own troubled life too, I’ve felt some semblance of simpatico mirrored in my own family’s fall from grace. It’s Gatsby though, the book that first introduced me to him, that holds a special place in my heart.

  A couple of years ago I had to source a Gatsby first edition for a client, including the coveted dustjacket. It’s one of those oddities in the world of rare books where the dustjacket is prized more highly than the book itself. The few first edition jackets that are left, they’re all pieces of art in their own right now. They’re not even just prints, there’s actual handcraft in each of them. When they were printed, on the back of each of them there was a mistake: the name Jay Gatsby was printed with a lower case "j". So every one of the eighteen thousand first edition copies had to be corrected by hand to capitalise the letter.

  The image for the jacket was created by a Cuban-American artist called Francis Cugat, who did nothing else of any particular note except the Gatsby dustjacket. It’s a deep intense blue cover, with two hypnotic female eyes looming over Coney Island amusement park. In each eye there’s a nude reclining on the curve of the iris. The eyes are sad and tragic; a tear is rolling down the girl’s cheek, looking also like the sodium glare from one of the lights in the amusement park. The eyes are a reference to those of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg looking down from the billboard as Gatsby’s story plays out in the novel, but they’re also a nod to Daisy Buchanan, torn between her husband and Gatsby. Fitzgerald was still writing Gatsby when he first saw it, he wrote to his publisher, "For Christ's sake don't give anyone that jacket you're saving for me. I've written it into the book."

  As the elevator lifts me higher into the sky, I think of those eyes on the dustjacket looking out over the city. I step through the elevator doors onto the 86th floor observatory deck. A scattering of lonely souls are the only other ones that have found themselves up here at this hour. I head for the stairs to take me up and out into the night.

  Even this high up the night air is still warm. It’s strangely quiet, the only noise a constant gentle sound of the night air blowing against the tower above us.

  I walk to the edge and see all that lies beneath. It’s a beautiful, clear night. I look south down towards Time Square and see all of Manhattan and beyond lit up and laid before me. The lights of the city seem to flicker in the night like flames. I try to see every one of them. This is what I came here for.

  I think about the hundreds of thousands of lives in this city and try to imagine and feel every one of them playing out. There’s a line Fitzgerald wrote, not in The Great Gatsby, it’s from one of his short stories: “Go and see an amusement park. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place. You’ll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and everything will twinkle. But don’t get up close, because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” It’s a precursor to the line in Gatsby when Nick Carraway tells Gatsby his house looks like the World’s Fair. That’s why I wanted to come to the Empire State Building at night and look out at the city. New York is still the World’s Fair. And from here I can see it glitter and sparkle like a thousand diamonds and not feel the heat and the sweat and the life.

  The night is warm and a dense, dark blue. I look out into it and for a moment my mind is completely clear. I forget the painting, I forget my past, my present. I forget all the pain that rattles around inside me. I just look out at the beautiful world. I feel a kind of euphoria inside me and spontaneously burst into a broad grin and find myself laughing with joy. Everything feels okay. Geoffrey Webb has packed his bags and is heading home, the Lost Child and its dirty secrets are destined to stay buried, I’m in New York at the top of the Empire State Building and it’s a beautiful night. And even my date with Tom, I don’t know, something about that too. It made me feel… part of something. No longer with everyone and no one. I look out at the city and smile.

  A gust of wind blows across my face and makes me turn my gaze away from the city and back to the world of the 86th floor. I thought I was out here on my own, but as I turn I see there’s someone else out here too. I pay him no mind at first, but in the corner of my eye I can see he’s not looking out at the city, he seems to be staring at me. My first reaction is just to avoid eye contact and move on, but he’s standing in the middle of the deck almost forcing me to look at him. My eyes flick to his face and suddenly I realise that it’s Joseph Masoud who is standing there.

  When he sees I’ve recognised him he takes a few steps towards me. I’m confused. I didn’t even know he was in New York. What’s he doing here? Has he followed me here? How long has he been standing there?

  I stutter, unable to mask my confusion, “Mr. Masoud, what are you doing in New York?” He doesn’t immediately respond. His demeanour is different to when we’ve met before, it feels somehow knowing and unkind.

  “There’s someone who wants to see you.” He tells me.

  Something feels wrong.

  Masoud makes a gesture telling me to look to my right. I look down the eastern side of the deck and another man is standing there looking back at me. The ghostly spectre of my nightmares past and present stands in front of me.

  “Hello Eloise” it says.

  It is my father.

  8

  “Are you real?”

  The words hang in the air. He says nothing.

  I’m breathless. I’m paralysed where I stand. I don’t understand. How is he alive? It isn’t possible.

  The apparition walks slowly towards me. There is a cane in his right hand on which he leans heavily as he walks. As he nears me his face comes into sharper focus. The fifteen years that have passed since I last saw him are etched deeply into his ragged and withered face. His hair has greyed and thinned but he still carries his boxers build on him.

  He stands before me, Masoud behind him.

  “Of all my treasures lost, losing you was perhaps the hardest. It is so good to see you, my dear.”

  His words are cold and chill me to the bone.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Well we shall try to put that right. We have so much to talk about, but here is not the place for it. You’ll forgive me but I don’t find it very easy to stand for long periods any more. I have a place in mind for us. Masoud will show you the way.”

  His words are polite but there is no mistaking the threat beneath them. Without alternative I nod in acquiescence, something which I can see gives him no small amount of pleasure. I follow Masoud back to the elevators which will take us down and out of the building. Every fibre in my being wants to run but even as my mind races to try and work out what to do I know there’s nothing that I can do. If my father is alive and he’s found me in London, found me in New York, then there’s nowhere I can run to. I look at the faces of every security guard we walk past as we leave, I count over a dozen. I want to shout out to every one of them and tell them to save me. But I don’t call out, I can’t. There’s nothing they can do for me.

  The lifts take us back down to the ground. We walk out the Empire State Building like any other visitors to it. I follow Masoud down the sidewalk, my father behind me. We walk in silence, we don’t go far. Our dark procession comes to a stop at a small Korean bar less than a block away. A stocky Hispanic doorman stands at the entrance under a flickering neon sign, but he takes little interest in us as we enter. Inside it is all but deserted except for a couple of night hawks at the bar. The place is quiet, only some non-descript music playing lightly in the background. It’s dark and looks dirty, a seedy relic of old New York that somehow hasn’t been swept away.

  Masoud leads me to a small booth in a quiet corner. He knows we won’t be disturbed here. He sits at another table nearby, facing me, just within earshot. My father takes his seat opposite me. We sit in silence for a moment. He stares a
t me across the booth, his eyes transfixed. I can barely bring myself to look at him.

  “I confess it’s fascinating to see you. I’ve dreamt of this moment so many times, seeing you again. I’ve begged and screamed and prayed for it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fantasy of seeing you again has been, in my darkest moments, the only thing that has sustained me.”

  He reaches out his hand and brushes my cheek gently but I immediately recoil.

  “Fifteen years, how they’ve changed you. I daresay they’ve been kinder to you than they have to me, but then you’ve always been good at looking after yourself haven’t you. Not the most auspicious of venues for our little father daughter reunion but I suppose we must take what we can get.”

  “How are you…”

  “Alive? All in good time Eloise, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I want to talk about you, you’ve been a busy girl, which is more than I can say for the rest of your family. I see you trotting off to work every morning like a good little girl, earning your pennies, while your mother rots in that nursing home and your brother drinks and drugs himself to death on your sofa in that grotty hole of an apartment you live in.”

  He pauses as a waiter comes over to our table to take our order. I order a water I have no intention of drinking, my father orders a straight whisky, old habits dying hard.

  “How did you find me?” I say hoarsely, almost in a whisper.

  “Now that is a question. How did I find you? I searched for years, but your mother hid your tracks well, I’ll give her that. Detectives, private investigators, none of them came up with anything on you. After so many years of nothing I admit I had given up hope of ever finding you. But then last month something extraordinary happened, a miracle. My dear, loyal Masoud, who had never given up looking for you, but who by this point I hadn’t even spoken to in over a year, comes to me and shows me a copy of some magazine. I tell him to go away, but he makes me look, and when I do what do I see? To my eternal surprise, there you are smiling back at me. Oh, a little older yes, but you’re not nearly different enough from your younger self Eloise that I wouldn’t immediately recognise you. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “I’m not sure what I found more incredible, the fact that I’d found you after all these years, or that you were so arrogant, so stupid to think that you could now just live your life, doing as you pleased and publicise it all in a fucking magazine.”

  He slams his fist on the table and I jump. I’m worried he’s going to attack me right here in the bar but when I look at him I can see he’s actually smiling, laughing even.

  “When I saw you in that magazine it was like I was awakened, reborn with new purpose. I sent Masoud to London to meet you, and when he told me how you reacted at the mention of the painting, he confirmed what I already knew to be true, that I had found my Eloise. But I had to see you with my own eyes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? You already know what I want. I want my painting.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Bah, yes I know that, I want you to get it for me, that’s what you’re trying to do, no? It seems only right that you’re the one finding it seeing as you were the one who stole it from me.”

  Pause.

  “And that’s it?” I ask uncertainly.

  “Is it so little an ask? A painting that has been lost for over a decade despite the best efforts of all the major art recovery agencies to find it?”

  I know all too well how far from little an ask it is. But he’s holding something back, that can’t be all he wants.

  “Why reveal yourself to me now? I’m already looking for the painting for you. Why not just have Masoud keep checking on me?”

  “You looked like you needed a little more motivation. I had originally planned to reveal my resurrection to you back in London after Masoud had visited you. I assumed that if you were fool enough to think he was bringing you a genuine commission then you would naturally make no real efforts to recover the painting for fear of it uncovering your true identity. But then this Geoffrey Webb began sticking his nose into things and seemed to be doing a decent job at keeping you properly motivated, presumably because you wanted to find it before he did.”

  “What this confirmed to me though was that you didn’t actually know where the painting was. Part of me had wondered if your mother wasn’t just keeping it in some locked drawer like the philistine she is, but your trawling through all her old things told me you didn’t have it and your mother’s not very talkative these days is she, so I knew you weren’t going to get anything much out of her.”

  “Anyway I was happy enough to see you working away, trying to work it all out, however these latest events with you being attacked in the street by one of Webb’s thugs and him then being stupid enough to do it again changed things. Mr Webb was no longer useful to me and other distractions seem to be taking your eye off the prize too. I don’t need you running off getting distracted by the first American boy who takes an interest in you. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

  I’m shocked by his words. He knows everything, everything I’ve been doing, everyone I’ve been speaking to.

  “If I get you the painting, what happens then?”

  “Then you may go on living your sad little life as you did before. You can consider your debt repaid.”

  “You’ll leave my mother, my brother and me alone?”

  “If you return my painting I will be happy to never see you or your miserable family again. I say if, but what I really mean is when, because you are going to find the painting for me. In no more than ten days to be precise.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “An hour ago you would have said us talking as we are now would be impossible, yet here we are.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Oh don’t sell yourself short Eloise, I’m sure that big brain of yours can think of something. And when you do find it, I’m very curious to see how you plan to convince the current caretaker to part with it, because I will certainly not be paying for it.”

  “What? How?! I don’t have the money, you must know that.”

  “That’s not my problem now is it.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  He gets up and stands over me.

  “Well you had better find a way to do it, because if you don’t I’ll expose you, your drug-riddled brother and your whore of a mother for the thieves and murderers you all are.”

  He begins to walk away. He takes a few steps before stopping and turning his head to look back at me. For the first time I properly raise my eyes and look directly at him. A dark, crooked smile spreads across his face.

  “And no police of course. But I don’t need to tell you that do I. Their involvement would be far worse for you than it would be for me.”

  He walks outside, Masoud behind him, hails a cab and gets in. He doesn’t look back at me. The cab drives away, just another yellow taxi in the Big Apple. All I can tell is that he’s heading uptown, it’s as if the last hour never happened. Everything’s just the same as it was before, the car’s keep driving, the people keep walking and talking, the world keeps turning. For a moment I genuinely wonder if I’ve just imagined the whole thing, if it’s just been one long, terrible hallucination. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

  I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. How can he be alive? The man who has haunted my dreams for the last fifteen years. I’ve tried to stay ahead of this, plan for as many different scenarios as I could, but I’ve been playing against a stacked deck. He’s always been ahead of me, he’s thought it all through. He’s had fifteen years to think it through, what he would do if he ever found me, ever found my brother, ever found my mother. One thing is clear to me, he is here for revenge. I may be a useful means to an end for him to get his painting back, but if by some miracle I actually am able to get it back to him, he will not consider us to be all square. In his warped mind we owe him a deb
t, and I’m not sure if there is anything that can cover it.

  9

  I don’t confide, I don’t tell, I just remember.

  I don’t tell people what really happened that night fifteen years ago, I just remember it. I remember it. I remember it every day, seared into my mind. I remember the real reason we left my father’s house that night, under the cover of darkness.

  Arnaud had been gone since the previous morning. By this point we were so used to his erratic disappearances it was just part of daily life and our time without him was now always more pleasant so it suited all of us just fine.

  It was still early but winter’s long nights were coming in and it was already dark outside. Jack and my mother were upstairs and I was camped out in the grand salon reading, where a warm fire was still burning.

  Arnaud arrived with a bang. His car careered down the long driveway and skidded to a halt in front of the house showering the walls and windows in stones from the driveway. From where I was sitting I could see him through the window and even in the darkness it was clear enough to see he was drunk. As I’ve said before, he wasn’t a good drunk, but tonight he seemed different. He was singing some French drinking song and seemed pleased with something. He barged into the house and made straight for the room I was in, the only one on the ground floor that was lit.

  “Eloise, ma cherie!” he shouts, arms outstretched as he burst through the doors. He tells me it’s wonderful to see me and that tonight is a night for celebration. I had no clue what he was talking about but it was nice to see him in a good mood for once. For so long he’d only been depressed or angry, so I was happy enough to play along and let him have his moment.