The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  Rose knew to expect the question, for Hope always asked it. Hope was being raised in a country that believed in happily ever after. And five years old was far too young to learn that happily ever after existed only in fairy tales. But this was a fairy tale, Rose reminded herself. And so she answered the question the only way she knew how, because every now and then, she needed to believe in fairy tales too.

  “Yes, my dear,” Rose said as she blinked back tears and pulled her granddaughter close. “The prince is coming. Someday, the princess will see him again.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Where are we going?” Gavin asks as he follows me out onto the street. I break into a run down Whitehall, attracting curious stares from passersby. One couple, tourists with “I Love New York” T-shirts on and cameras slung over their necks, point and begin taking photos. I ignore them all and dart right on State Street. Gavin comes up alongside me. “Hope, what are you doing?”

  “Jacob’s in Battery Park,” I say without slowing. We pass a brick colonial building on the right, and I notice that it’s a Catholic church. I wonder fleetingly whether Jacob could have imagined that Mamie took on a Muslim skin, and then a Catholic one, that all her images of God had become wrapped together in one beautiful entanglement.

  “How do you know that’s where he is?” Gavin asks. We stop and let traffic pass before we dart across State into the brilliant green space of Battery Park.

  “It was in my grandmother’s stories,” I say. I’m itching to run across the street, but Gavin, perhaps sensing this, puts a hand on my arm until there’s a gap in the flow of cars.

  He looks confused, but he leads me across the street, and then he slows to follow me as we jog past strolling tourists, sketch artists, and food vendors, toward the thick black guardrail that separates the edge of the island from the water. I put my hands on the cool metal and stare across the choppy harbor to the Statue of Liberty, who faces southeast toward the entrance to New York Harbor. Hers would have been the first face immigrants saw as the island of Manhattan came into view.

  “Jacob was in my grandmother’s stories all along,” I murmur, staring out at the queen with her torch, the one I’d stared at so many afternoons during my summer in New York, never once realizing that I should recognize her from Mamie’s tales.

  I tear my eyes away from the Statue of Liberty and scan the length of the railing, first to the left and then to the right. The sidewalk is filled with a sea of tourists, even on this chilly autumn day with the wind whipping in from the water. For a moment, my heart begins to sink. Perhaps it will be impossible to find him in the midst of all these people.

  Gavin isn’t saying anything; he seems to realize that I’m lost in my own world. As I begin to panic, though, to think that I might be wrong, I feel his hand fold gently over mine, and I hold tight with a fierceness that surprises me. I don’t want him to let go.

  I’m just about to say “Maybe I’m wrong” when I see him. Without releasing Gavin’s hand, I begin moving to the right, down the row of benches, down the gleaming rail. I don’t know how I’m suddenly so confident that it’s him, that it’s Jacob, but I’m sure of it even before I can see his face. There’s a cane propped beside him, and he’s drumming the fingers on his left hand rhythmically against the rail, just like my daughter often absentmindedly does. “That’s him,” I say to Gavin.

  The man is facing the Statue of Liberty, staring out at her as if he can’t look away. His hair is snow white, balding on the top, and he’s in a long, dark overcoat that somehow looks regal to me. “The prince,” I murmur, more to myself than to Gavin. When we’re just a few feet away from him, he turns suddenly and looks right at me, and in that instant, any remaining doubt disappears. It’s him.

  He freezes, his mouth falling open just a little. I freeze too, and we stare at each other. He looks just like Annie; all of her features whose origin Rob once questioned are displayed on his face. Same narrow, beaked nose. Same dimpled chin. Same high, regal forehead. And as we stare at each other, I recognize something else: behind his dark-rimmed glasses, he has my eyes, the sea-green eyes flecked with gold that Mamie always used to tell me were her favorite thing in the world to look at.

  “Jacob Levy,” I say softly, and it’s a statement, not a question, for I already know. Beside me, I can feel Gavin’s hand tighten around mine, and I know he’s realizing, a minute later than I have, how much Jacob looks like my daughter and what this means.

  Jacob nods slowly, still staring at me.

  “I’m Hope,” I tell him gently. I take a step closer. “Rose’s granddaughter.”

  Tears fill his eyes. “She lived,” he murmurs. I nod slowly, and Jacob steps closer, his eyes locked on mine. I pull my hand away from Gavin and step toward Jacob, until we’re just a foot away from each other. He reaches out and slowly, tentatively, reaches for my face. I step closer until I feel his hand on my cheek, rough and gnarled, but as gentle as anything I’ve ever felt. “She lived,” he repeats.

  And then his arms are around me, and I can feel him shaking as he begins to sob. I hug him back, and I can feel my tears coming too. I feel like I’m holding on to a piece of the past, the one piece that makes everything complete. I’m holding on to the love of my grandmother’s life, seventy years too late. And unless I’m crazy, unless I’ve imagined my daughter’s features and my own eyes on this man, I’m holding on to the grandfather I never knew I had.

  “Is she still alive?” he asks, finally pulling away from the embrace. “Is Rose alive?” There are traces of a French accent in his words; he sounds a lot like Mamie. He continues to hold tightly to my arms, as if he’s afraid of falling if he lets go. There are tears streaming down his face now. My own cheeks are damp too.

  I nod. “She had a stroke. She’s in a coma. But she’s alive.”

  He gasps and blinks a few times. “Hope,” he says. “You must take me to her. You must take me to my Rose.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Jacob won’t let us stop at his apartment to pack him a bag; he insists we get to Cape Cod as soon as possible, without wasting another moment.

  “I must see her,” he says, looking urgently back and forth from Gavin to me. “I must see her as soon as I can.”

  I wait with him while Gavin jogs away to go retrieve the Jeep; with his reconstructed hip, Jacob can’t walk very quickly. As we wait on the northern end of Battery Park, along the street, Jacob stares at me as if he’s seen a ghost. There are so many things I want to ask him, but Gavin should be here to hear the answers too.

  “You are my granddaughter,” Jacob says softly as we wait. “Are you not?”

  I nod slowly. “I think I am.” This all feels so strange; I can’t help but think of the man I spent my life calling Grandpa. This is all so unfair to him. Then again, he obviously knew all along; he had to have made a conscious choice to take my mother in as his own flesh and blood, even though she wasn’t. “You look so much like my daughter,” I admit.

  “You have a daughter?”

  I nod. “Annie. She’s twelve.”

  Jacob reaches for my hand and looks into my eyes. “And your mother or father? The child Rose had? Was the child a boy or a girl?”

  It hits me for the first time how tragic it is that my mother died before meeting Jacob, probably without even knowing that he existed. It breaks my heart to realize that Jacob, in turn, will never see the child he lost everything to save.

  “A girl,” I say softly. “Josephine.”

  The child of Jacob, who had to be saved in order to carry on. I think back to the sign at the church off I-95, and I shudder. The truth was there all along.

  “Josephine,” Jacob repeats slowly.

  “She died two years ago,” I add after a moment. “Of breast cancer. I’m so sorry.”

  Jacob makes a sound like a wounded animal and hunches forward a little, as if something invisible has punched him in the gut. “Oh dear,” he murmurs after a moment, straightening up again. “I am so
sorry for your loss.”

  My eyes fill. “I am so sorry for yours,” I say. “I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am.” The seventy years lost. The fact that he never got to meet his child. The fact that until this moment, he hadn’t even known she’d lived.

  Gavin pulls up then and hops out of the car. We exchange looks as we help Jacob into the backseat. I climb in beside Gavin, and after checking his mirrors, he pulls quickly away from the curb.

  “We’re going to get you back to the Cape as soon as possible, sir,” Gavin says, glancing in the rearview at Jacob, who looks up to meet his eye.

  “Thank you, young man,” Jacob says. “And who are you, exactly?”

  I laugh then, a release of tension, as I realize I haven’t even introduced Gavin. I do so quickly, explaining how he was the one who set all of this in motion in the first place and helped me find Jacob today.

  “Thank you, Gavin, for everything,” Jacob says after I finish explaining. “You are Hope’s husband?”

  Gavin and I exchange awkward looks, and I can feel myself blushing. “Um, no sir,” I say. “Just a good friend.” I glance back at Gavin, but he’s staring straight ahead, focusing on the road.

  We ride in silence until we’ve made our way up the West Side Highway, through the north side of Harlem on I-95, and across the bridge to the mainland.

  “Can I ask you something, Mr. Levy?” I ask, turning around.

  “Please, call me Jacob,” he says. “Or, of course, you may also call me Grandfather. But it is likely too soon for that.”

  I swallow hard. I ache for the man I spent a lifetime calling Grandpa. I wish I’d known the truth while he was still alive. I wish I could have thanked him for whatever it was he did to save my grandmother and my mother. I wish I’d understood earlier how much he had probably lost in the process.

  “Jacob,” I say after a pause. “What happened in France? During the war? My grandmother has never spoken of any of this; we didn’t know until just a few weeks ago that she was even Jewish.”

  Jacob looks startled. “How is this possible? What did you believe?”

  “When she came over from France,” I tell him, “she came under the name Rose Durand. For my entire life, she’s gone to Catholic church.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Jacob murmurs.

  “I never knew about what happened to her in the Holocaust,” I continue. “About her family. About you. She kept it all a secret, until a few weeks ago, when she gave me a list of names and asked me to go to Paris.”

  I tell him briefly about my visit to Paris, about finding Alain, about bringing him back with me. His eyes light up.

  “Alain is here?” he asks. “In the United States?”

  I nod. “He’s probably with my grandmother right now.” It occurs to me that I need to call him and Annie, that I need to tell them we’ve found Jacob. But for now, I’m desperate to hear his story. “Please, can you tell us what happened? There’s so much I don’t know.”

  Jacob nods, but instead of speaking, he turns to look out the window. He’s silent for a long moment, and I stay twisted around in my seat, staring at him. Gavin glances over at me.

  “You okay?” he asks softly.

  I nod and smile, then I return my attention to the backseat. “Jacob?” I say softly.

  He seems to snap out of a trance. “Yes, I am sorry. I am just overwhelmed.” He clears his throat. “What do you wish to know, dear Hope?”

  The way he looks at me is so warm that it floods me with sadness and happiness at the same time.

  “Everything,” I murmur.

  And so Jacob begins to tell his story. He tells us how he met my grandmother and Alain in the Jardin du Luxembourg on Christmas Eve 1940, and that he knew at first sight that my grandmother was the love of his life. He tells us that he became involved with the resistance early, because his father was involved, and because he believed that it was up to the Jews to begin to save themselves. He tells us that he and my grandmother used to speak of a future together in America, where they could be safe and free, where people were not persecuted due to religion.

  “It seemed a magical land,” he says, looking out the window. “I know that now, in the world today, young people take freedom for granted. All of the things you have, all of the freedoms you enjoy, they are things you were born with. But during the Second World War, we had no rights. Under the German occupation, those of us who were Jewish were considered the lowest of the low, vermin to the Germans and to many French too. Rose and I dreamed of living in a place where that would never happen, and to us, America was the place. America was the dream. We planned to come here together, to raise a family.

  “But then that terrible night happened. Rose’s family would not believe us, would not believe the roundup was taking place. I insisted she must come with me, that she must keep our child safe. She was two and a half months pregnant. The doctor had confirmed it. She knew then, as I did, that the most important thing was to save our child, our future. And so Rose made the most difficult choice of all, but it was, in truth, the only choice she could make. She went into hiding.”

  I can feel myself beginning to tremble, for in Jacob’s words, in the French lilt of his voice, and in the emotion of the story, I can almost see it playing out before me like a movie. “At the Grand Mosque of Paris?”

  Jacob looks surprised. “You have done your research.” He pauses. “It was the idea of my friend Jean Michel, who worked alongside me in the resistance. He had already helped several orphaned children escape through the mosque, after their parents had been deported. He knew that the Muslims were saving Jews, although it was mostly children they were taking in. But Rose was pregnant, and she was still very young herself. So when Jean Michel approached the leaders there and asked them to help her, they agreed.

  “The plan was to deliver her to the mosque, where they would conceal her as a Muslim for a time, maybe a few weeks, or a month, until it was safe to move her out of Paris. Then, she would be smuggled, with money I had given to Jean Michel, to Lyon, where l’Amitié Chrétienne, the Christian Fellowship, would provide false papers and send her farther south, possibly to a group called the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the Children’s Relief Effort. They mainly helped Jewish children get to neutral countries, but we knew it was likely they would accept Rose and assist her, because she was only seventeen, and she was with child. But beyond that, I do not know what happened, or how she escaped, exactly. Do you know how she got out?”

  “No,” I tell him. “But I believe she met my grandfather when he was in the army, in Europe. I believe he brought her back to the United States.”

  Jacob looks wounded. “She married someone else,” he says softly. He clears his throat. “Well, she would have believed me dead by then. I told her that no matter what, she needed to survive and protect the baby.” He pauses and asks, “He is a nice man? The man she married?”

  “He was a very nice man,” I say softly. “He died a long time ago.”

  Jacob nods and looks down. “I’m very sorry.”

  “And what happened to you?” I ask after a long pause.

  Jacob looks out the window for a long time. “I went back for Rose’s family. She had asked me to do it, but in truth, I would have gone anyhow. I dreamed of a day when we could all be together, without the shadow of the Nazis. I believed that I could save them, Hope. I was young and naive.

  “When I arrived, it was the middle of the night. The children were all asleep. I knocked softly on the door, and Rose’s father answered. He took one look at me, and he knew. ‘She is gone already, isn’t she?’ he asked me. I said yes, that I had taken her somewhere safe. He looked so disappointed in me. I can still remember his face as he said, ‘Jacob, you are a fool. If you have led her to her death, I will never forgive you.’

  “I tried in vain, for the next hour, to tell him what I knew. I told him that the roundup was to begin in just a few hours. I told him that the l’Université Libre newspaper had reported tha
t records of some thirty thousand Jewish residents of Paris had been handed over to the Germans a few weeks earlier. I told him about the warnings issued by the Jewish Communists, who spoke of the exterminations, and how we needed to avoid capture at all costs.

  “He shook his head and told me again that I was foolish. Even if the rumors were true, he said, it was only men who would be taken away. And likely only immigrant men. Thus, his family was not really in danger, he said. I told him that I had heard it was not just men this time, and not just immigrants. And besides, because Rose’s mother had been born in Poland, some authorities would consider her children non-French too. We could not take that chance. But he would not listen.”

  Jacob sighs and pauses in his story. I look at Gavin, and as he glances over at me, his face is pale and sad. I can see tears in his eyes too. Before I can think about what I’m doing, I reach over and take his right hand, which is resting on his thigh. He looks surprised for an instant, but then he smiles, threads his fingers through mine, and squeezes gently. I blink a few times and turn back to Jacob in the backseat.

  “You couldn’t have done anything more,” I tell him. “I’m sure my grandmother knew you’d try. And you did.”

  “I did,” Jacob agrees. “But I did not do enough. I believed that the roundups would happen, but I was not so confident that I was able to convince Rose’s father. I was only eighteen, you see. I was a boy. And in those times, a boy could not make an older man see his point of view. I often think that if I had tried harder, I could have saved them all. But the truth was, I knew there was a chance that the rumors were wrong, and so I did not speak with the conviction I should have. I will never forgive myself for not trying harder.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I murmur.

  Jacob shakes his head and looks down. “But it is, dear Hope. I told her I would keep them safe. And I did not.”

  He makes a choked sound then, and turns to look out the window again.