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

“Her father?” I interrupted. “You mean your sister’s father wasn’t the same as your father, the Irish pilot?” But why should that be surprising, given Zoe’s reputation?

“My mother was married, or I should say, she had a child—my sister—by another man. With fathers on opposite sides in wartime, Halle was understandably raised apart from me, we had separate lives. But when you said just now you’d recently been in Vienna, I thought your uncle Lafcadio had introduced you to her—”

“To her?” I said, as I felt the blood clotting in my chest. The two girls’ fathers were on opposite sides in the war? But if Jersey’s sister was dead now, who could be the her whom Laf might have introduced me to in Vienna? Then Jersey delivered that right cross I’d been expecting.

“I can never forgive your father Augustus, nor my sister, for their betrayal,” she said. “But the child they had together—your sister—has become a truly beautiful girl, and exceptionally talented too. These past ten years, Lafcadio has been her guardian and a kind of Svengali. That’s why I thought you might have met. They travel everywhere together.”

I clutched the phone to my chest, hyperventilating, praying the airport would collapse on me or something. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I slowly brought the phone back to my ear just as Jersey said, “Ariel, your sister’s name is Bettina von Hauser.”

“I hope you will be like sisters,” Laf had said—hadn’t he?—when Bettina Braunhilde von Hauser and I first met. Then the same night, when she came to my room in the Lodge, Bambi spoke of her brother Wolfgang’s “dangerous involvement” with me—though at the time, as I recall, she’d said it might endanger us all. Good lord, did this mean Wolfgang was my brother too?

Luckily, no. Wolfgang’s mother Halle was married to an Austrian who died sometime after Wolfgang was born—but mercifully before she’d made her intimate acquaintance of my father, Augustus. But that didn’t simplify the family complexity.

By the time I rang off the phone with my mother, some twenty minutes later, I was immeasurably wiser about family matters. To my shopworn line “My family relations are rather complex” I thought I might now be justified in adding the tag line “Little did she know.” But this time as the stew bubbled—thanks to a little heat applied to Jersey’s feet by me—more than hot air floated to the surface.

According to Jersey, her mother Zoe Behn, youngest child and only daughter of Hieronymus and Hermione, had run off with Pandora and, by the age of fifteen, had developed into an excellent dancer. Like the generation-older Isadora Duncan, who’d become her friend, tutor, and patroness, Zoe soon created her own unique style of performance. By the time of Isadora’s tragic death in 1927, when Zoe was only twenty, my young grandmother was already a star of the Folies Bergère, Opéra Comique, and numerous other venues. It was the year she met Hillmann von Hauser.

Hillmann von Hauser was in his late thirties, rich, powerful, a knight of the Teutonic Order, a member of several underground Germanic nationalist groups like the Thule Society and the Armanenschaft—and already, in 1927, a strong financial backer of the National Socialist Party and of Adolf Hitler. He was blond like Zoe, handsome, strapping, and for the past ten years had been married into an old, respected noble family like his own back in Germany—a marriage that had yet to produce a child.

Young Zoe was a wild exhibitionist of easy virtue, who for five years had danced nude onstage before the public each night—all attested to in her own memoirs, the scandalous exposé of an already scandal-riddled Roaring Twenties. Apparently Zoe was only too happy to provide empirical proof that the von Hauser’s barren marriage could not be the result of his own sterility. My mother’s older sister, Halle von Hauser, was born to Zoe in 1928.

In the decade after the First World War, Hillmann von Hauser and his kind experienced few of the depredations suffered by most Germans. Rather, a group that weathered the storm between the wars very well was a certain set of industrialists and armaments manufacturers like the Krupps, Thyssens, and—why, yes—the Ritter von Hauser himself. Zoe’s daughter Halle was taken to Germany, adopted by her father and his legitimate wife, and sent for much of her education to elite schools in France. As Jersey understood the story, her mother Zoe soon fled to the isle of Jersey, where she met and impetuously married a successful young sheep rancher engaged in the production of Irish wool, and they remained there with their own daughter, Jersey, until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he became a heroic pilot and Zoe returned to France.

Though this missing “pastoral” portion of Zoe’s past didn’t jibe too well with her self-perpetuated legend, it did coincide with something of historical import that sent chills up my spine. I hadn’t forgotten what was going on in 1940, the very week Jersey told me Zoe had made her unexpected jaunt back to France: it was the week of the German occupation. Not only was the Ritter von Hauser in Paris—as Jersey said he was, collecting their twelve-year-old daughter Halle—but an even older acquaintance of Zoe’s would also have been present there.

Nor had I forgotten my afternoon with Laf in the hot tub at Sun Valley, when he’d told me Zoe was “never the queen of the night as she liked to portray herself,” that it was all propaganda designed by “the cleverest salesman of our century”—Zoe’s Austrian compatriot Adolf Hitler, who’d come to Paris that same week to have his mug snapped, smiling like a tourist before the Eiffel Tower, as the long-awaited conqueror of the descendants of those Salic-Burgundian Franks of the Nibelungenlied.

Whether my grandmother Zoe turned out to be a demimondaine or simply a dancer—whether she’d served with the OSS or French Resistance in the war as Wolfgang claimed, or was