The Sweetness of Forgetting (108)

“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.”