Bloodhound (2 page)

For a while I thought Dad's story of the hole in the ground and drinking and hangovers and feeling better later in the day was original. But I heard Dean Martin tell the same joke on TV in the 1960s, and I understood that Dad would've had no problem with lifting the joke and putting it there in the same hole he was occupying, with no regard for time and place and history. For him, jokes were more important than mere history: they were his lingua franca.

It was my regard for time and place and history that set me off on a journey which had begun with the ambiguity and secrecy surrounding my dear dead Mama. In fact, for as long as I can remember I had wondered how I could be related to Dad.

My Real Father, I figured, must have been someone who Mama loved, but for some reason he was unable to live with us. That is why we had Dad. Mama was a mysterious woman whose own survival story, of which I knew scant details, involved her assuming a false identity and narrowly avoiding death, thanks to her fine acting skills. It was never easy to ask her something directly and get a clear answer. She outwitted Hitler's plans for her, so how could I hope to carry out a successful interrogation? Anyway, as you know, she died two decades before Dad's eightieth-birthday party and the chain of events it set in motion.

Ten years before the birthday lunch, Mama's close friend Bernadette had called me at work. It was a surprise to hear from her, as the last time we'd spoken was a week after Mama's death. I'd asked her then if she could tell me anything about Mama's life and my conception. I knew in my bones that things were not straightforward, and now that Mama was no longer around to moderate my inquisitiveness I thought I could raise the topic with her best friend. But Bern was not for turning: if my mother had wanted me to know something, she would have told me herself. And if Mama had told her a secret, Bern couldn't possibly tell me.

I was twenty-three, a mother with a two-year-old child and pregnant with my second, and she was forty-three. I had no way of arguing with her and, besides, what did I know of the complexities of their friendship and sworn secrets?

After that conversation, Bern disappeared from my life. I imagine she thought that I might be too curious and too persuasive and not willing to let things lie, including my dead Mama's wishes. She might well have been right.

And then, out of the blue, a decade after Mama's death, Bern was on the phone telling me that a man had asked after me at a house auction in a suburb near where I lived, asking Bern if I was married and if I had children and what kind of work I did. He wanted to know if I was happy.

The man was a stranger to me, but not to her. Bern said that if I still had any interest in finding out the circumstances of my birth, I might like to start with him. She gave me his last name, Dunne, and told me that he was one of two brothers who used to own a clothing factory in which Mama worked as a finisher, sewing on buttons and embroidering collars, before I was born.

Why would a stranger want to know if I was happy? If I had children? Dad had never asked if I was happy.

I looked up the name in the phone book and rang the number for a home near where the auction was held, but there was no answer. I tried to imagine the conversation that might ensue.
Hello? I was wondering if you're the man who was recently at an auction and asked a woman named Bernadette if I was married and had children and was happy—and if you are that man, are you also my Real Father?
You need a certain inner strength or a well-honed sense of the absurd to go through with something like that, neither of which I was blessed with at the time. I didn't call again.

What was it about Dad's eightieth birthday, then, that spurred me to follow up on the clue, many years after the opportunity first presented itself? The possibility that this might be his last birthday, and that I could finally investigate my suspicions without hurting him? That would be a noble answer.

In truth, I was so angry with Dad for guzzling the wine—the way he undermined my careful instruction of his grandson, the way he wanted to upstage the boy, the infantile and disrespectful display of wilfulness at the table—that I left the restaurant with an overwhelming urge to make the connection long severed. I telephoned Bern that afternoon.

I asked her to repeat the story of the man at the auction. And when she did, more or less word for word, I said that I thought Mama had been wrong. She had gone to her grave with a secret that wasn't hers to keep. I had spent some years and much money on the psychoanalyst's couch, trying to understand my estrangement from Dad. I was now in my forties, a few years younger than Mama was when she died at forty-nine. It was time to make some sense of all this.

Bern told me that she had first met the man Dunne when Mama took her to buy men's suits at wholesale prices from the shop at the factory where Mama had worked for two brothers in the early 1950s.

‘The older brother was shorter, and he was terribly kind to your mother,' Bern said. ‘The younger one glared at her, and never spoke. But I could feel the tension between them. He ate her up with his eyes. I knew that there had been something between them, but your mother never said.'

I liked the idea of the man eating my mother up with his eyes. She was a lovely woman, though not emotionally open, and she was terribly unhappy with Dad. They fought constantly, and I cannot remember a single act of affection between them. Never a kiss, never a warm touch.

Bern's story of the younger brother immediately assumed great significance. Why did he glare at Mama—why didn't they speak? And why did she take her friend to the factory, anyway: was she hoping to irritate or inflame him? Or just to get Bern a bargain suit?

I see Mama preparing for the venture, making sure her stockings are straight, applying lipstick, spraying Amour Amour by Jean Patou behind her ears, between her breasts and on each wrist. She holds her head high, but who knows what goes on in her mind on the way to the factory? Once there, she doesn't speak to the man, her eyes haughty, looking straight through him, not looking down, no eyelid batting. No batting whatsoever.

I've tried to buy Amour Amour in all the airports I've passed through, even in Paris, but it's no longer produced. I once bought a stash from a website offering rare fragrances, but when it arrived I could smell a bad counterfeit. Jean Patou invented Joy, ‘the costliest perfume in the world', in 1925. His Amour Amour, ‘a floral scent for brunettes', was released in the same year. How did Mama get hold of her first bottle? I can only afford to buy perfume duty free: how could a poor factory worker develop such expensive taste?

Until the second conversation with Bern I'd never thought about it. A child accepts that this is how things are and that they are like this in all families, until she finds out otherwise.

Mama and Dad didn't share a bedroom. I assumed this was normal until one of their survivor friends noticed that our master bedroom contained two single beds. ‘How can you do anything in a single bed?' he shouted at the assembled guests, including us kids. I was puzzled. What did you need to do in a bed but sleep? Then he saw me getting a toy or a book from the room, and he understood that the beds were for my mother and me. He exploded with derision. Single beds were bad enough, but separate rooms—that was pathological.

Having gleaned what I could from Bern, I scoured the telephone directory. There were several Dunnes, a name that was strangely non-European and unlike those of Mama and Dad's friends. At first I assumed it had been anglicised, as happened to some who arrived here bearing Polish or Russian or Hungarian names with unfamiliar letters and combinations of consonants that troubled the local authorities. Then it dawned on me that he could have been an Englishman.
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman
.

My sister and I had been brought up as the daughters of Polish Jews. This meant cabbage rolls and poppy-seed cake, bargaining and Yiddish melodies. Now I was toying with the idea that I was half English.
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun
. Being English meant being tight-lipped (my ungenerous interpretation of stiff-upper-lippedness), drabness (was this impression just from films like
Mrs. Miniver
, set during the London Blitz?), and using only one egg to make a cake. I always used at least eight. I scoured my character for latent Englishness.

But of course! My middle name is Alice: an utterly English name. How did Mama, who called me Ramona on my birth certificate (so that, come the next oppressive time, people wouldn't assume I was Jewish) and Rivkele at home, come up with my second name? I dismissed the evidence: that my Spanish first name had come about through my mother looking for something non-Jewish starting with ‘R', and had heard the popular song ‘Ramona' on the radio. I imagined a less prosaic reason for my second name, perhaps that Mr Dunne's mother was called Alice and I was named for her. This was the secret sign between them that I was his daughter. My heart pounded—already, it seemed, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

I tried to think of good Englishness. Garden beds and hollyhocks and cream teas and Jane Austen. I had tried to like Austen, and I was a fan of irony, but I was completely uninterested in marrying well and the affairs of the landed gentry in the southern counties of Regency England. But that was when I wasn't English. Maybe now I could admit Jane Austen into my being.

I rang the number for the Dunne in the suburb near the auction all those years before, and a middle-aged man answered the phone. I asked him if he was related to the brothers who'd owned a clothing factory in the 1950s and he said: ‘Who wants to know?' He sounded like a character from
The Sopranos
, but without the New Jersey accent.

I explained that my mother used to work for the Dunne brothers, and I was researching her life and hoping to speak to anyone who might be able to tell me something about the time when she worked at the factory. The man told me that his father was living with him, but he was now deaf and not so good at seeing either. I took a breath and asked if his father was the older or the younger brother.

The older one. Joseph. The younger one had died some years before. Max Dunne—in the original Polish, Majlech Adunaj. Melech in Hebrew, meaning ‘king'. He used to eat my mother up with his eyes. Now those eyes were closed forever.

If Max was my father, I was certainly not half English. But was he my father? I'm not sure why I decided to tell the whole story to a stranger on the phone, but I did. He must have sounded open. And to his credit, he didn't hang up. He was intrigued partly because he recognised my name from my newspaper articles and radio shows, he said; and partly, as I was shortly to learn, because he hated his uncle Max. Perhaps he hoped to hear something scandalous about him. For his uncle had been a married man, and had a son who, we established, was four years old when I was born.

‘What does he look like?' I ventured.

‘Blond, blue eyes, curly hair.'

‘And what do you look like?'

‘Like Paul Newman, only better-looking. But there is something you should know about my uncle. He spent years as a slave labourer in Auschwitz, and he was made into a beast. He was a twisted, difficult man who was cruel to his family and to my father. His son had to run away from him. The war ruined him. Maybe it's best you never met him.'

He offered to mail me a photograph of his uncle, and rang off.

2

A shame and a disgrace

I'M asking you to imagine her as I remember her, but not in those last months as she seemed to shrink before me, her hair thinning, her body disappearing, the breasts I used to rest my head against reversing to flatness like a time-lapse film played backwards. In those last months she was light enough for me to carry to the bathroom and back, and soon getting in and out of the bath was too much for her, and I washed her frail body in bed.

No, I'm thinking of her a few years before that, getting ready for an evening at the theatre with Bern, a beautiful woman, a former model who we once saw in a television commercial for toilet paper. Toilet
tissue
, it was called. Clothes always looked great on Bern, and she was taller and slimmer than Mama, but as far as I knew she was a Catholic virgin when she married and she didn't seem entirely comfortable in the body she'd been blessed with. Mama had a different quality, which I now recognise as sex appeal. Before she fell ill, she said that if I had breasts as good as hers when I got to her age, I'd be very lucky. She had seen a lot, and she probably radiated a woman-of-the-world ambience. It was hard for me to pick up on it then, as a teenage daughter called in to zip up the back of her dress.

Amour Amour wafted from her neck as usual, and I could see the small depression in the skin of her upper back, just over the shoulder blade. She once told me it was a bullet hole from the time she was arrested by the Gestapo. If I had the chance now, I would ask her to elaborate. Back then, I was horrified. I knew that the mothers of other kids at school probably didn't have bullet wounds in their backs. I was forever trying to smooth over the differences between their white-bread families and my dark-rye one, so I avoided difficult subjects.

Why, I would wonder, did I find it so hard to ask Mama the questions that came to me again and again? Why did she have this force field around her?

I knew little about her life before me. I did know she was from a deeply religious Orthodox family where the men prayed and worked the fields, and the women in their wigs ran the bakery. For generations the family had lived and farmed in Wyrozęby, a tiny hamlet in eastern Poland. Her parents had been childhood sweethearts, if such a thing was possible, and both sets of grandparents were next-door neighbours in the village. Her father died when she was two months old—he'd developed a fatal case of pneumonia after swimming across an almost frozen river to be home for her birth—and she was brought up in her extended family.