Something about that rang a bell.
“You said Earnest Behn bought property in America before the Second World War,” I said. “When exactly was that?”
“It was in 1923,” said Dark Bear.
The date had unarguable significance—though after a quick calculation, it didn’t make sense.
“But Earnest was born in 1901,” I said. “By 1923, that would make him only twenty-two. Why would his father entrust such a young man with buying and managing so much land in a foreign—”
But Olivier and Bambi were looking at me with wide eyes.
“My God,” I said.
So this was the “pollution” our family never spoke of, clearly with good cause—as if bigamy, kidnapping, incest, fascism, and murder weren’t enough. By the end of our two-hour ride through the Bitter-root Range of the Rockies, supplementing my own knowledge with Dark Bear’s and Bambi’s, I’d pieced together a good deal. And I realized I owed both my grandmothers an apology—especially Zoe.
Hitler’s Munich putsch took place on November 9, 1923. At the time, no war was in sight—but Hieronymus Behn knew there would always be war. And he also knew which side he planned to be on. He sent Earnest to America to establish a mining presence there. Ten years later, in 1933—the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany—Hieronymus sent his other son, by then twenty-one years old: my father Augustus. These two young men were planted like moles, burrowing into the mountains and caves of the New World, stockpiling important minerals against a time when the world would enter another war.
One flew east: my father to Pennsylvania. And one flew west: Earnest to Idaho. And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. That was Zoe.
Though Zoe might have deserted her parents to run off with the Gypsies, it seems that by the time she was grown, Hieronymus Behn wanted his daughter and only true blood descendant to “breed with good blood.” It was he who sent his colleague and friend Hillmann von Hauser to Paris to seduce her. Whatever the circumstances of their relationship from Zoe’s viewpoint, her daughter Halle was taken from her and raised by the father and his dutiful if barren Germanic wife. Zoe married a wild Irishman and had another child: my mother Jersey.
So if Hieronymus Behn essentially kidnapped my father Augustus from Pandora, he also appropriated the two sons his sister-bride Hermione had conceived with Christian Alexander: Laf by adoption, and Earnest by changing his birth certificate to name Hieronymus as the real father. This meant that Zoe’s two daughters, my mother Jersey and her sister Halle, were Hieronymus Behn’s only true grandchildren. It therefore made sense, as the story unfolded, that Hieronymus plotted to marry them off to these two appropriated “sons”—Halle to Earnest, and Jersey to Augustus. Through this manipulation, Hieronymus hoped to ensure that any future recipients of his fortune and power would be tied to his own bloodline, through Zoe.
The biggest fly in the ointment, of course, was that he’d married the wrong sisters off to the wrong brothers. My prestige- and power-oriented father Augustus would have been the perfect match for Halle, who had been given the finest Aryan preparation that a beautiful blond girl with Nazi parentage might ask. The product of that liaison was Bambi. Then Earnest and my mother Jersey, when they got together in later life, were as happy as two such exploited and emotionally traumatized people might hope to be.
So the pollution Earnest could never wash himself clean of was something he only understood fully after he’d married Halle von Hauser. Not just what her daddy had done in the war as an armaments manufacturer—which she was quite proud of—but also where all the minerals had gone that Earnest himself had placed, all those years, in the hands of his own “neutral” Dutch father, Hieronymus Behn.
Earnest started pulling together, slowly and painfully, the family background that no one fully knew. When it became clear to Earnest that he, Augustus, and Hieronymus had built their enormous fortune on the suffering of others—in Hieronymus’s case, in full awareness of what he was doing—that was bad enough. But when he learned that he’d been used as a tool by the man he’d always regarded as his father—not only to breed a superior race, but to control the world—that knowledge was almost impossible for Earnest to live with.
The girls’ mother, Zoe, on the other hand, had gone into occupied France to try to persuade her former seducer to let her take her daughter Halle out of German-occupied territory, and had been trapped there, as Pandora and Laf had in Vienna. It must have seemed ironic to Zoe to be sitting across a table from me in Paris beside my own gorgeous Nazi seducer, replaying a version of her life between the wars.
The true irony, for all these people, was that their connections with Hieronymus Behn and Hillmann von Hauser and Adolf Hitler had, according to Bambi, enabled them not only to survive the war themselves but, in the cases of Pandora and Zoe, to protect or rescue hundreds of people with impunity. This included Pandora’s husband Dacian Bassarides, who’d run a Gypsy shuttle of escapees—with Zoe’s help from Paris—out through southern France.
“Does Wolfgang know anything of this story—or the fact that Sam is really his brother?” I asked Bambi.
She was silent for a moment, regarding me seriously with her speckled golden eyes.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “But I do know he has been heavily influenced by my mother—the essential reason why Lafcadio has despised him, though he’s been reluctant to discuss it. I have pieced together some of the story from Lafcadio, who must have learned it from Earnest, many years ago, when Earnest came from Idaho to Vienna to confront Pandora. It seems all along Pandora had known the entire story.”
Of course!
I remembered Wolfgang’s
