This is a story about a mysterious German immigrant to Australia, who almost certainly had Semitic ancestors. I have always felt a strong pull towards the Jewish persona, and I was inspired to hone my sleuthing skills on Ancestry.com, when confronted with the enigmatic figure of Karl Von Goldecker, who disappeared without a trace from the family tree. But it is the women in the family who feature largely here, and who suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, the lot of many women in their search for a loving mate even to this day.
The story is loosely based on ancestors and their shared stories, researched in part through Ancestry.com, with a good dose of fictional imagination thrown in. The narrator is an elderly woman looking back on her search for a mate during the nineteen thirties and coming to terms with the family history that has formed her. The title of this short story is inspired by a quote from Shakespeare’s tragic drama, ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
My name is Rose. Rose Thorn. What’s in a name? you may well ask. I ask myself this question now, in my dotage years. For Fate has given me, as the eldest of my family, the difficult task of finding the answer to a prickly family question: Whatever happened to Grandfather Karl Von Goldecker? Did he die in the Californian earthquake en route to Germany for a supposed visit? Was he, indeed, an aristocrat and a confidant of the Kaisers, or a plain scoundrel who abandoned his wife and young son and daughter when the going got tough? I am now determined to find out answers to these terrible questions.
I was baptised Rose for my grandmother, a runaway teenager herself. Grandma Rose Bullbrook was forced to marry the much older German Goldecker from Frankfurt who, I suspect, took her greedily in what was surely a “shotgun wedding”. She became Rose Goldecker for a decade at least, until her husband showed, perhaps, his true stripes and deserted her.
My dear parents, Sidney Thorn and his young wife Ione Goldecker, christened me Rose” in January 1916. What were they thinking? When placed together with “Thorn”, the moniker would become a burden for me to carry—a source of merciless teasing throughout my childhood years.
If marriage to a man of questionnable character had become a torture for Grandmother Rose, for me, getting married beckoned as a way out of my nomenclature dilemma. Having inherited my grandmother’s Taurean strength, I divorced my first husband after only ten days, as soon as I realised his name, “Von Cavorten”, reflected his shallow nature. Never one to suffer fools, I then married a sensible man whose sensible name, I willingly exchanged for my thorny one and kept it until he departed this life only two years later. Aged just 22, I met my third husband in Bondi Junction and took his name. Rose Gardener suited me perfectly and it was a case of third time lucky. We set up house together and tended our own garden, choosing to breed Persian cats, among other pursuits and remaining childless.
My ancestors, the Thorns from England, who gave me my surname, had a deadly side, which might explain in some strange way, my karma: to remain barren. Goodness knows that I spared no time and effort into trying to conceive a child, before giving up and settling on breeding feline creatures instead. Grandfather Henry Thorn was the Lancaster Gun Factory manager who invented the Dum Dum bullet, which was used in the Vietnam War. His son, George, was awarded an RAF flying cross, but his life ended at home when he was testing a new rifle, ran upstairs, slipped and shot himself through the throat, dying instantly. My father, Sidney, to his credit, ran away from home at fifteen and worked on a sailing ship that docked in Sydney. His father bought him out of the gun business, which allowed the son to settle as a gentleman “down under”.
Sidney met his future wife, Ione Goldecker, one cloudy Sunday on Bondi Beach, when large “dumpers” carried this exotic-looking young woman out in a rip. Sidney, quite the lifesaver in his funny costume, sprang into action, capturing and carrying the heavenly creature, named for a Greek sea nymph, gagging and spluttering from the arms of the raging seas: ‘I have rescued you from drowning,’ he said as he knelt beside her, breathing life into her lungs, ‘so I can now claim you as mine. That is if you will agree to marry me.’ My future mama barely had time to catch her breath before stammering something that might have been construed as either a yes or a no. ‘Thank you, Sir, and what is your name?’ she spluttered at last. ‘I’m Sidney Thorn, newly arrived from London and have found my journey’s end here on the sand next to you,’ he replied.
During their courtship, he learnt that Ione was the offspring of a first marriage between an under-aged young English woman and a German aristocrat or scoundrel, Karl Von Goldecker, from whom she had inherited her striking dark looks and charm. When Ione was eight years’ old and her brother twelve, Karl was recalled to Germany by the Kaiser: Karl’s very words and, supposedly, true. He was never heard of again. His distraught wife sold their fine linens and lace import business and tried to discover what had happened to him. In vain. Matriarch Rose never liked Catholics after that and married an upstanding Scotsman, who was always away at sea.
Even more distraught was an eight-year-old child with a romantic name in love with her papa, who had to bury memories of him, without recourse to grieving next to a body or to a gravestone. What I now find surprising is the studio photo that has come to light since twice married Grandmother’s death, of Karl and his young family. The four of them sit elegantly, dare I say lavishly, staring straight ahead in a neutral manner. Unsmiling. The mother and son who later took on the Scottish name are on the left of the portrait, and Ione, doe-eyed, perhaps half knowing and sad? leans towards her father with his dark Semitic looks and drooping moustache, on the right of the frame.
Rose, Alfred, Ione, Karl Goldecker 1906
What we suppress will come back to haunt us, and so it was for Ione Thorn. It may have been the loss of her father, or the subsequent death of a young child from diphtheria that had Ione succumbing to her love of sherry, then brandy, gin and finally any port in a storm. Her faithful husband and companion shared this failing with her, both dying not long apart from alcoholism in their later years. We may never know the true reason for this addiction to alcohol, but it might also have been the adult voices my Mama Goldecker-Thorn recalled and blocked out, telling her that her papa was never coming back. Had she, in fact, willed herself to drown in the comforting oblivion of alcohol, rather than hear those awful voices ever again? Not coming back…. never coming back…
I must now pass on to all of you, my burgeoning, dare I say blooming, Thorn descendants, to make of this family mystery, what you will. And to rattle more skeletons in the closet, or leave them to remain hidden and forever innocent.