The Sweetness of Forgetting (48 page)

On the sixth night after Mamie died, Alain takes Annie out for a walk, and I sit by the fire with Jacob, listening as he talks haltingly of the years after the war.

“I am so sorry, Hope, that I was not there to see you grow up,” he tells me as he squeezes my hands. I can feel his hands shaking. “I would give anything to have been there. But you are a fine woman, a good woman. You remind me so much of Rose, of the woman I always knew she would grow to be. And you too have raised a fine daughter with a fine heart.”

I thank him and stare into the fire, wondering how to ask him the question that has been gnawing at the edges of my mind since I’d met Jacob. “What about my grandfather?” I finally ask softly. “Ted.”

Jacob bows his head and looks into the fire for a long time.
“Your grandfather must have been a wonderful man,” he says finally. “He raised a fine family, Hope. I wish I had gotten a chance to thank him for that.”

“None of this is fair to him,” I say softly. “I’m sorry,” I add after a pause. “I don’t mean to offend you.”

“Of course not,” Jacob says quickly. “And you are right.” He pauses and stares into the fire for a long time. “He will always be your grandfather, Hope. I know that. I know you will never love me the way you love him, for you have known him your whole life.”

I open my mouth to protest, for this isn’t fair to Jacob either. But he holds up a hand to stop me. “I will always regret that I was not here for the things he was here to see. But that is the hand that life has dealt us. And we must accept it. You can only look forward in life. You can change the future, but not the past.”

I hesitate and nod. “I’m sorry,” I say, but the words feel lame and ineffectual. “Did my grandmother say anything about him?” I ask. “To you? Before she died?”

He nods and looks away. “She explained everything as best she could,” he says. “I think she believed she had to make me understand, but the truth is, I have always understood, Hope. War tears us apart, and there are some things that cannot be put back together.”

“What did she tell you?”

He turns to look at me. “She made it to Spain in the late autumn of 1942. It was there that she met your grandfather. He had been in a U.S. military plane shot down over France, and like your grandmother, he had been smuggled into Spain, through channels in France that helped the Allies. He and your grandmother were hidden in the same home, and that is how they met. He fell in love with your grandmother, who was due to give birth soon. It was around that time that there was an influx of Jewish people who escaped from Paris, people Rose had known in her former life, and they told her I was dead. She did not believe it at first, but some of them claimed to have seen me die in the streets
of Paris. Another said he had seen me taken to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.”

“My God,” I murmur, not knowing what else to say.

Jacob looks out the window, where ice has begun to creep over the pane, obscuring our view into the darkness outside. “She did not believe it at first,” he says again. “She said she did not feel it in her soul. But the more people who told her I was gone, the more convinced she became that I had, in fact, died, and what she was feeling was due to the fact that I lived on through the child growing inside her. She knew then that she had to protect our daughter at all costs. And so when Ted proposed to her and told her he would bring her back to the United States before the baby came, she knew it would give our child the chance to be born an American, which is what we had always dreamed of together. It would give our child a chance to grow up in a land where she could always be free.

“She went back to the United States with your grandfather, who married her,” Jacob continues slowly. “They listed him on the birth certificate as Josephine’s father, so there would be no complications. Later, they paid to have the year changed so that no one would do the math and doubt the story. Your grandfather asked just one thing of your grandmother: that she permit him to raise Josephine as his own, that Josephine never be told of my existence.”

“So she never told my mother about you?”

Jacob shakes his head. “It was, she said, one of the greatest regrets of her life. But Ted was a wonderful father, and she felt she must keep the promise she made to him. She had traded one life for another, and she never forgot the bargain she had made. But Rose said she tried to keep me alive for Josephine in other ways.”

“In her fairy tales,” I murmur. “You were there all along in the stories she told my mom and me.” I pause and suddenly remember something Mamie told me. “But my grandfather went
to Paris in 1949, didn’t he? To find out what happened to you and my grandmother’s family?”

Jacob takes a deep breath and nods. “That is the one part of the story your grandmother could not explain,” he says. “And I did not have the heart to tell her that Ted may have known all along. I was listed in the records then. I had not yet moved to the United States. Not until 1952. I was doing everything in my power to make sure I would be found, because I did not believe that Rose had perished. I believed she survived and that we would find each other again.

“I suppose we will never know what happened,” he continues. “But if your grandfather came home and told your grandmother I was dead, I assume he knew he was telling a lie.”

“To protect the life he’d begun with her,” I say, feeling a sudden chill. I lean closer to the fire.

Jacob nods. “Yes. I believe so. But can I blame him? He loved Rose and loved Josephine, who had become his daughter. He had built a good life with them. If Rose had known I had survived, perhaps he would have lost everything. He did what he could to protect his family. And I cannot fault him for that. In fact, I did the same, did I not? I made choices to protect the people I loved most. We all make choices, sacrifices, for what we believe to be the greater good.”

I swallow the lump in my throat. “But if that’s what happened, he prevented you and my grandmother from being together. He kept you apart for seventy years.”

“No, my dear,” Jacob says. “It was the war that kept us apart. The world went mad, and your grandfather was no more responsible for the outcome than I was, or than Rose was. We all made our choices. We all had to live with our regrets.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. I feel I’m apologizing to Jacob for what my grandfather did, and for the terribly unfair hand he was dealt. But he merely shakes his head.

“Do not be,” he says. “Your grandmother asked me, just
before she passed, to forgive her; she felt she had betrayed me by marrying Ted. But I told her there was no need for forgiveness, for she had done nothing wrong. Nothing. She acted as she did because she believed it to be the right thing for our daughter. The important thing is that Rose lived. As did Josephine. As did you and Annie. Regardless of what happened, Rose saved the child we had created together, the greatest declaration of our love, and gave her the life we had always dreamed of, a life of freedom.”

“But you spent your life waiting for her,” I say.

He smiles. “And now I have found her. I am at peace.” He reaches for my hands again and looks into my eyes for a long time. “You are our legacy. You and Annie. You must honor where you came from, now that you know.”

“But how?”

“By following your heart,” Jacob says. “Life gets complicated. Circumstance tears us apart. Decisions guide our fate. But your heart will always show you true north. Your grandmother, she knew this always.”

I hang my head. “But how do I know what I’m supposed to do?” I don’t know how to explain that my heart has never led me into anything more than trouble.

“You will know,” Jacob says. “Just listen. The answers lie inside you.”

The next morning, as I’m getting ready to leave for the bakery, I come into the living room to find Jacob staring out the window, just where I’d left him the night before. I wonder whether he’s looking at the stars, the way Mamie always did.

“Hey, Jacob,” I say as I grab my keys from the kitchen table. “I’m headed out. If you feel like it, come by the bakery later. I’ll bake you a Star Pie.”

When he doesn’t respond, I go over to the chair and kneel beside him. “Jacob?”

His eyes are closed, and there’s a small, peaceful smile on his
face, as if he’s in the midst of a dream he doesn’t wish to leave. I wonder whether he’s thinking about my grandmother.

“Jacob?” I say again. I touch his arm lightly, and that’s when I know. “Jacob,” I murmur softly, tears beginning to run down my face. His arm is cold, and so too is his cheek, when I reach up to touch it gently. He’s gone. And somehow, I’m not surprised at all. He has spent a lifetime trying to find Mamie. And now he has eternity to make up for all those lost years.

I don’t disturb him. I don’t wake Annie or Alain. I don’t leave for the bakery. I just sit beside him, this man whose courage gave me life so many years ago, long before I was ever born, and I cry. I cry for everything lost and everything found. I cry for my grandmother, and for my mother, who never knew the story of her birth. I cry for Annie, because she’s had to endure far more loss than one should have to at such a young age. And I cry for myself, for I don’t know the way. I don’t know how to find the answers Jacob seems to believe I carry in my heart.

After much careful thought, Alain and I decide to bury Jacob beside my grandmother. After all, he has no family left elsewhere, and we can’t imagine anywhere in the world he’d rather be than beside the love of his life.
I have found her,
he told me on his last night.
I am at peace
.

Elida White and her grandmother drive down from Pembroke for the funeral, and we all stand together—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and listen to the words of the rabbi at the grave site. I look east, in the direction Jacob’s tombstone will face, once it’s delivered. Mamie’s will face that way too. In a few hours, the first stars of evening will begin to poke through the sky, just like they always have, just like they always will. For as long as there are stars in the sky, I realize, Jacob’s promise to love Mamie will live on. The stars she once looked for will keep watch silently over her, and over the love of her life, who has, at long last, returned to her side.

Chapter
Thirty-one