The Sweetness of Forgetting (107)

“Yes, ma’am,” Annie mumbles.

“You are . . . good girl,” Mamie says. “I am proud . . . You have . . . spirit in you. It reminds me of . . . something I lost. Never let go . . . of that.”

Annie nods hastily. “Okay, Mamie.”

Finally, Mamie turns back to Jacob, who is still bent over her. “My love,” she says softly. “Do not cry.”

I realize that Jacob’s body is shaking with sobs, and that tears are streaming down his cheeks.

“We are together now,” Mamie continues. “I have . . . waited for you.” They stare at each other in silence, and it takes me a while to realize I’m holding my breath.

I watch as Jacob leans forward, slowly, gently, and kisses Mamie on the lips, pausing there with his eyes closed, as if he wishes never to move again. In that frozen moment, I’m powerfully reminded of yet another fairy tale. He looks very much like the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty, awakening her after a hundred years of slumber. I realize with a start that in a way, she’s been asleep for nearly that long; for seventy years, she’s lived a sort of half life.

“Forever, my love,” Jacob says.

Mamie smiles at him and stares into his eyes. “Forever,” she murmurs.





Chapter Thirty



Just past three in the morning, just a few hours after Annie, Alain, Gavin, and I left her alone with Jacob, Mamie slipped away peacefully in her sleep.

Jacob sat by Mamie’s bedside for the next few hours, and just after dawn, when he stepped out of a cab outside the front door of the bakery Mamie had founded so many years ago, he seemed a different man. I had expected that he would be sad, defeated, for he’d waited seventy years only to watch the love of his life slip away. But instead, his eyes shone differently than they had when we’d first seen him in New York, and he seemed a decade younger.

The nurses told me afterward that Jacob had talked to Mamie long into the night and that when they finally came to check on her, and realized she had died, she was smiling, and Jacob was still holding her hand, whispering to her in a language they didn’t know.

Gavin called his rabbi, who came to meet with Jacob, Alain, and me, and together, we planned a burial according to Jewish customs. I understood now that Mamie had always been Jewish; that had never changed. Perhaps, as she’d said, she’d been Catholic and Muslim too. But if one could find God everywhere, as Mamie had once told me, it seemed to make the most sense to send her home along the same road she’d entered upon.

We took turns sitting with Mamie—Gavin explained to me that in the Jewish faith, one is not supposed to leave the deceased alone—and a day later, she was buried in a wooden casket beside my mother and grandfather. I had struggled with what to do about that, having just learned that her marriage to Jacob in effect annulled Mamie’s marriage to my grandfather. But Jacob had wrapped his hands around mine and said gently, “God does not mind where you are put to rest. I think Rose would want to be buried here, where she lived her life, alongside the man who gave her a new life, and alongside her daughter. Our daughter.”

For the next several days, I went through the motions of running the bakery, but my heart wasn’t in it. It felt like a great hole had opened in my life. It was just me now, against the world: me responsible for this bakery; me responsible for my daughter; me responsible for carrying on a family tradition I was only beginning to understand.



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.”