“But witches kind of feel that way, don’t we?”
“Not the witches in this family,” Oliver said. “And yes, by that, I mean the four of us sitting here. We may be proud of who we are, proud of our skill with magic, proud of our heritage, but we really don’t think that we are somehow innately superior.”
“And that is coming from our selfish peacock of a bastard brother,” Iris said, a smirk on her lips, but pride showing in her eyes.
“Turn the page,” Ellen said and nodded at the book. I found another photo of Maria, this time sitting in a group of women. Beneath the photo my father’s script recorded their names: Maria, Traute, Sigrun. I gasped as my eyes shot back up to the picture. One of the faces had been burned into my mind long ago . . . I knew her without needing to read her name: Gudrun. Erik had added “die Vril-Gesellschaft” beneath the women’s names. I looked up at Ellen, and her expression of sympathy answered my unspoken question. I knew then that Maria had been the leader in an attempt to bring down the line.
I turned back to the album and flipped the page. The next one held two photos of the man I had come to think of as Careu. In the first, he stood next to an old prop-style plane. I felt my pulse thundering in my neck as the face I recognized fell into its familiar context. The next photo showed him, this great American hero, standing flanked on one side by two admiring women, while a man with adoring eyes looked on from the background. Standing before Careu, on the photograph’s right side, stood a man in the process of handing over a sword. He wore a lighter suit with a white kerchief in his pocket. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He had a double chin and wore his hair slicked back. I knew this man. I recognized him from history books. “That’s Hermann Goering,” I said, poking angrily at his face. “He was one of the Nazi leaders.” I felt ill.
Oliver came and squatted down next to me. “Yeah, Gingersnap, I’m afraid it is.” He put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me in for a kiss on the temple. “Do you need a little break?”
“No. I’ve got to know. How did my great-grandparents meet?”
“They never did,” Ellen said. I looked at her, confused. “Your paternal great-grandparents were both great supporters of eugenics and the goal of building, or as they would have it, rebuilding the master race. Goering and his friends created a special project with this aim. They called it Lebensborn, the ‘source of life.’?” My mind flashed back to the file I’d seen among my Grandfather Taylor’s papers. I realized his interest in the Lebensborn program wasn’t a study in historical curiosities, like Iris had told me. The file contained research on his son-in-law, my father.
“Your great-grandparents,” Ellen continued, “each of them donated their genetic materials to the cause for study and duplication. Technological schematics provided by the Aldebaran brothers provided the know-how for your great-grandfather to engineer a process similar to what we now know as in vitro fertilization. The Nazis sought to create a master race, but the Aldebarans wanted to create a thousand Marias. The doctors in the project planted Maria’s fertilized eggs in the wombs of several of the Lebensborn mothers. Erik’s father, your grandfather, was one of the children born from this process.”
I closed the book. My hands felt soiled from having touched it. I wanted to wash my hands. Wash myself. Wash away the filth of the source from which I’d sprung. Now I understood why Ellen and Iris had hidden the truth from me. Paul and Maisie and I, we were all somehow wrong. “We’re the children of monsters,” I said and pushed the book away.
THIRTY-FOUR