The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

certain about my mother’s side of the family—that actually rang true. I hoped they might even help fill in a few pieces of the larger puzzle.

When I was two years old, my mother had packed me up and left my father. For the next twenty-odd years, Augustus divided his time between his Pennsylvania estate and posh offices in New York that were home to the family mining and minerals empire, the legacy of Hieronymus Behn.

Jersey returned to her life performing throughout the glittering capitals of Europe. I was carried along in her turbulent wake for the next six years, until her subsequent marriage to Uncle Earnest. I rarely saw Augustus after the split. He’d never been much of a talker about family matters, so all my information about my parents’ marriage or my mother’s previous life had been filtered through Jersey’s ice-blue eyes.

Jersey was born in 1930, between the wars, to a French mother and an Irish father on the British Channel island for which she was named. The Channel Isles, just off the Normandy coast, became indefensible by the British once France surrendered to the Germans in 1940. Inhabitants were evacuated upon request, but many demurred—especially the residents of Jersey, of whose population more than eighty percent opted to stay on. These suffered the predictable deportations or depradations when Germany occupied and fortified the islands to create the “mailed fist of the western wall.” Those who’d refused evacuation wouldn’t be liberated by the British until near the end of the war. But by then, my mother was not among them.

Early in the invasion of France, so the story ran, Jersey’s mother went to the aid of her family and was trapped inside France. Jersey’s father, an Irish pilot who protected English skies in the Battle of Britain, was shot down by the Luftwaffe soon after. Ten-year-old Jersey, a virtual orphan, was forcibly evacuated by the British to London. Then, during the Blitz that rained German fire from the skies on the civilian population of England, she was sent for safety with other English children—“bundles from Britain”—to families in the United States until the war’s end. By that time Jersey’s mother, a member of the French Resistance, was reported “missing in action” in France.

The story, repeated these many years, always ended with a tearful Jersey avoiding further comment by reminding us of the bravery of her ill-fated parents, and of the pain it caused her to try to think back on those harsh, hard times.

In support of this picture was plenty of circumstantial evidence, including posters, playbills, and reviews detailing Jersey’s extremely early public life in America. At ten she was placed as the foster child of a New England family who recognized, when Jersey was about twelve—an age when many musical prodigies are discovered—that she had a most remarkable singing voice. In the summer of 1945 when the war was drawing to a close, Jersey lied about her age (which was fifteen) to try out for the lead part of Margot in The Desert Song, a Sigmund Romberg musical that had been touring the provinces since the dawn of history and was crying out for fresh blood. The tour de force role was ideal for a young coloratura like Jersey.

On opening night in the boondocks, our Cinderella was discovered by the proverbial New York scout, who understood the depth and range of those fresh, bell-like tones that would later make Jersey’s voice so easily differentiable from dozens of other young sopranos. The agent signed Jersey, assuring everyone that she would complete high school despite the brilliant career he foresaw. He got her a high-caliber professional voice coach. And the rest, as they say, was history.

What I needed to find out now was the secret history, as Volga Dragonoff might call it: the unknown story, if indeed there was one, behind the very public story of my mother. But in all honesty, taken fact for fact, there weren’t so many details of Jersey’s well-documented life that would actually contradict what Volga had claimed: that the sensational dancer and demimondaine Zoe Behn was really Jersey’s mother.

For instance, a quick calculation told me that if Laf was born at the turn of the century, and if Zoe was six years old when he was twelve, then when my mother was born on the isle of Jersey in 1930, Zoe would have been twenty-four, the perfect age to run off to an island with a handsome Irish pilot and make a baby. And hadn’t Wolfgang said she was a member of the French Resistance? It was also plausible that Zoe, who’d lived most of her own flamboyant and equally well documented life in France, might have left a ten-year-old daughter in the relative security of the Channel Islands, if she feared for someone else whose safety might be threatened by the German occupation. But just for starters on my lengthy list of questions—who might that someone be?

Furthermore, though thousands of families had certainly been separated by the war and many were unable to locate lost relatives for a period extending into decades, it had now been nearly fifty years since the described events took place. It was highly suspicious, if not impossible to imagine, that in all that time neither Jersey nor Zoe was aware that the other was alive and well, living glamorously in Vienna and Paris.

Add the significant fact that my mother had been married to two successive men named Behn, and had also lived with a third, my uncle Laf. Regardless of how little Jersey claimed to know, or actually might know, of her own roots, how could the detail have escaped her, these many years, that the three men she’d lived with were actually her mother’s brothers—hence, her own uncles? And if Volga and Laf knew this much of family affairs, what about Jersey’s two husbands, Uncle Earnest and my father Augustus?

I didn’t get much further with Volga on these questions, though. Either he didn’t know anything else or