The Matchmaker of Kenmare (20 page)

After the bombshell of what was, in essence, a proposal of marriage, driven by her, completed by him, Captain Miller smiled a kind smile at Miss Begley, followed by a laugh.

“Kate,” he said. “You’re some woman.”

“I’m halfway to Kenmare,” she said, “and I want to get home. So we might as well get started,” and the three of us walked back down the jetty to join the others.

Dr. Manfred Hortig—
that
was his name—and his wife, Elisabeth, sat with Mr. Seefeld in Captain Miller’s car. I joined two of the silent marines in one of the other military vehicles, and we convoyed to the Hortigs’ house overlooking the sea near Castlemaine. When we arrived, Miss Begley jumped out and held open the door for Mr. Seefeld; Captain Miller stood back and watched; Dr. Hortig and his wife trotted to their doorstep, where they turned around and welcomed us all. For me, the Seefeld incident, keenly real and yet preposterous, had ended. For now.

How things happen. Next time I picked up my letters, James Clare had written, saying that he wanted to meet me in Donegal sometime, where he’d heard that “somebody has a great old story about a wolf and we’ve been trying to get it for aeons.” Therefore, I mulled the subject of wolves for days. I didn’t know then what a theme they would become in my life, and yet I must have had some inkling, because I couldn’t banish wolfish images from my mind.

I dwelt on Dr. Hortig’s face, on Captain Miller’s face, and the bearded chops on one of his men, and I wonder now if that whole wolf thing wasn’t a kind of pre-haunting—by a man more ravenous than even the most rabid wolf, though with none of the kindness wolves are said to possess, a man who, had there not been a war, would probably have mutated into a serial killer, a man whose trademark was the slicing of flesh from female bodies before he poisoned them over a period of several days.

He was born in Templehof, Berlin, on the twentieth of December, 1915, to an educated Prussian named Otto Volunder and a woman named Sophia Lieberstoldt.

This Otto Volunder had a proud background. He claimed that his family went back to the Teutonic Knights and the Hanseatic League. These were the men who had most felt the sting of Germany’s Great War
defeat; Otto, a cavalryman, had been “von” Volunder, but he dropped the nobleman’s identifier in shame at Prussian failure. Sophia came of minor nobility, and she broke all the ranks of aristocratic German young women in her day by studying medicine. The couple met at a military soiree, fell for each other that night, married within six months, and had three children, two daughters and one adored son, Sebastian.

The boy was educated in Berlin, at the Goethe Oberrealschule, but he didn’t, as the school and his parents expected, go on to become a scientist or a mathematician—he wanted to be a soldier. In fact he wanted to be a cavalryman like his father, and he took riding lessons early.

When he was eighteen, despite a modicum of parental reluctance—they were “old” Germany, after all—he joined the Hitler Youth. That was in March 1933; and six months later, on the seventeenth of October, 1933, there’s his name, Sebastian Volunder, on the list of men at the very foundation of the SS cavalry. He had amber eyes—amber like a timber wolf’s.

Sebastian Volunder had put his foot on a golden ladder. From that early cavalry intake, his superiors selected him and one other to join a company known as Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler—the Führer’s personal bodyguard. He and his comrade (who later became his commanding officer) received their second lieutenant commissions on 20 April 1936, a day of added joy for them: It was Hitler’s forty-seventh birthday.

Die Kreme des Korps
, Sebastian Volunder called them. “We were the most superb of the elite,” he said to his sister, and they had to conform to dictates laid down in Hitler’s own handwriting: exceptional health and fitness; at least five feet nine inches tall; no teeth fillings. The body at the hip had to measure as close as possible to halfway; the leg had to measure “with equal felicity,” he said, between thigh and knee—in other words, no physical disproportion anywhere. As to the essential “racial purity”—for officers, they required proof of ancestry going back to 1750; for soldiers, the year 1800.

Though something of a bantam cock, and thus barely making the five feet nine inches, Sebastian met all the other requirements. And more: He had become a profound admirer of Adolf Hitler and the German High Command, and when drinking with his comrades or his father, he continued to weep for the humiliations of the previous war.

The other young man chosen with him to join the Hitler elite became
more famous than Sebastian—infamous, rather—and he was the reason I went to Dachau. You’ll hear more of these two gentlemen later, because Sebastian Volunder was the German equivalent of Charles Miller, his actual opposite number. The first time I met him, Volunder reached up, caught my nose between thumb and forefinger, and tweaked until tears came to my eyes.

I wasn’t privy to the conversations that began when Captain Miller “debriefed,” as he called it, Mr. Seefeld. Miss Begley sat in, and indeed typed the notes, which then became classified as Top Secret. Day after day, they huddled in the small back study usually occupied by Mrs. Hortig, a renowned botanist specializing in ferns.

From my occasional glance as I walked by the window of their room, it seemed that Mr. Seefeld just talked and talked, for hours and hours—to Captain Miller’s delight, I assumed.

With nothing to do, I went away the next day. In Killarney, I retrieved my bicycle and stayed a couple of nights at Mrs. Cooper’s, so that I might gather myself and work out my immediate future. I had no idea what would happen next. As I was leaving, to be driven by Dr. Hortig, they all said good-bye to me. Mr. Seefeld told me that I must come and stay with him in Kenmare; and Captain Miller thanked me.

“When we’ve won this war, Ben,” he murmured, “I’ll see to it that your courage is acknowledged.”

Courage? I hadn’t even known what I’d been doing.

Miss Begley took my arm and walked me to the car.

“I’ll write to you at the post office in Tralee. Or is Limerick better?” And I said Limerick, because I wanted to visit my parents in Goldenfields, thirty miles from there.

And then Miss Begley tugged hard on my arm and hissed, in one of the fastest sentences I had yet heard her speak: “There wasn’t any sin,
there was only comfort, body to body. Comfort and warmth. I did the same for you, remember.”

What could I say? What should I have said? My mind yelled,
No, you didn’t do it for me
—because, whatever she thought, that night in Saint-Omer when she slept in my bed had been for her and her alone.

During the time of the interrogation, Mr. Seefeld, furtive and anxious, looked to Miss Begley for more “comfort and warmth.” She, fearing that Captain Miller might see, kept his desire as surreptitious as a conspiracy.

With equal discretion, she now pursued her own interest in Captain Miller as though she were the man and he the girl. Her clincher, her closer of the deal, took the form of a letter that she wrote, on the Hortigs’ typewriter, one night late, many days into what Captain Miller called “the softest interrogation in the history of military intelligence.” I have the letter in my possession.

She made Miller read it while she stood there. She made him handwrite the letter to the “girl back home.” She sent it to the U.S.A. herself.

In some bizarre corner of my mind where warnings hang like shrouds, I think I knew that her pledge to him would be tested to the hilt. I think I knew that she was entering a risk of which she understood nothing. And I think I grasped that she would have to pay some price for commandeering his life in such a ruthless fashion—but I could never have guessed at how much she’d have to pay.

Let me tell you about my parents, your grandparents. In the decade after Venetia’s disappearance I rarely went to see them. Cruel of me, I know, their only child, but I included them in the wide spread of my blame. I knew too that my father harbored a jealousy against me. To put it simply, when he ran away with Venetia, he jeopardizing my mother’s life unthinkably, and even though he had come back to Goldenfields and become even more attentive to her than before, he never forgave me for shattering his dream.

And that’s what I did. I went after him and brought him home, as Mother had implored me to do. Falling in love with Venetia had not been in my plan, nor had anybody anticipated that she would cleave so passionately to me and not my father.

Every visit to them had this cloud hanging over it. I’d never told them that Venetia and I had married, and they only learned of her disappearance from the newspaper reports of the police inquiries. When I did
manage to go back for the first time, I found my spirit freaked with the black jet of bitterness, and I left earlier than I had intended. Subsequent visits dimmed this resentment only a little; at any moment I felt likely to lash out.

Now, though, and it must have been Kate Begley’s influence, or perhaps the bizarre Seefeld experience, I found myself mellower toward them. For the first time, I even brought them gifts.

My father had sprained his ankle and was walking with a stick. I’d sent a telegram, they’d been expecting me, and he was leaning on the gate. After a flicker of initial awkwardness, he took my arm. We paced in step along the avenue, across the gravel, and into the porch.

I asked myself,
Is he older?
He didn’t seem to be aging, and yet I could see that he wasn’t as young as in the days when I’d followed him from venue to venue across the countryside and he’d been so embarrassed to see me.

The colors thrown on the floor by the stained-glass panels in the porch brighten my day often. I can enumerate many of my childhood’s light patterns: the shadows of clouds on sunny mountains; that sudden candid gleam of a far-off lake; the dappling of leaves on my mother’s face under the big beech tree when I was little and looking up at her; the evening sun turning all our western windows into flat panels of opaque gold; the yellow of the flames in our parlor when the fire has been lit but no lights have yet been turned on.

“Louise,” my father called, effusive as ever, “come-come-come out and look at us. Harry MacCarthy and Ben MacCarthy. Get outa the way, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.”

He began to croon, “Toor-aloora-loora, that’s an Irish lullaby,” and since he had the worst voice in the Western Hemisphere, a larynx like a cracked plate, Mother came running.

“Anything to stop that noise,” she said. “Oh, Ben. Look at you.”

She took my hand. Her hair, never longer than a boy’s, had more gray in it; the eyes had never lost that watchfulness that hadn’t been there before what she used to call the Catastrophe. I loved, though, that she’d never lost her austerity, her lean efficiency, her reserve.

This time, I stayed two days and watched how they were in their lives about the place, toward each other, and toward me. Mother told me the
stories she knew would entertain, such as the latest high jinks by our farmhand, Billy Moloney.

“He came into the yard,” she said, “one day last week, back from the creamery, with a wheel on the cart leaning like the Tower of Pisa.”

We had long referred to him as Billy Flock, because we couldn’t quote him without using some form of euphemism, so profane was his language.

“So I see him coming, and out I go and I say to him, ‘What happened, Billy?’ and he said [Mother began to laugh, and almost couldn’t finish]—he said, ‘Ma’am, the flockin’ flocker’s flocked.’ And I had to leave the yard and find your father.”

I found them less tentative with me than before because, of course, I was less tentative with them. My father, as ever, wanted to talk politics and the war. I longed to tell him of the exploits in France, but knew I couldn’t—I might as well have put it in the papers. I could see the headlines:
HARRY MACCARTHY’S SON IS SPY HERO
.

Mother, for most of the time, confined her inquiries to my folklore work, asking for stories, whether I had called upon So-and-So or Such-and-Such, did I have any great new tunes in my head, how were James Clare and Miss Dora Fay?

I hadn’t been home in a year. By the fire one night as we sat talking, I reflected on these two people who had known such foolishly induced pain. In local gossip, he was still the farmer who had left his wife and run off with a young actress. That was how the world would always tell the story, an actress whose family had tried to swindle him, rob him of his farm, an actress whom Harry MacCarthy’s son, his only child, had then married at the age of eighteen, “ousting his father,” they said.