The Sweetness of Forgetting (113)

That night, I call Annie to tell her about the inheritance from Jacob, which will be enough to cover the bakery and pay for her college costs—with plenty left over. As I listen to her whoop and holler on the other end of the line, I smile and promise myself that I’ll try harder with her. Things will be better. She’s a good kid, and I know that I need to keep trying to be a better mom. Maybe I can be better at this than I think.

I tell Annie to have fun at the First Night celebration, and she promises to call me after midnight, when Rob is driving her and her friends back to his house for a New Year’s Eve sleepover.

It’s just past eleven when I finally settle down in front of the fire with Mamie’s letter. My hands are trembling as I open it up; I’m aware that this is the last piece of her. It could be Alzheimer’s gibberish, for all I know, or it could be something I’ll treasure forever. Either way, she’s gone. Jacob is gone. My mother is gone. Annie will be grown up and out of the house within six years. I pull a blanket around me, a blanket my grandmother knit when I was a little girl, and try not to feel so very alone.

I pull the letter out. It’s dated September 29. The day we took Mamie to the beach. The day she gave me the list of names. The first night of Rosh Hashanah. The night everything began. My heart skips, and I take a deep breath.

Dearest Hope, the letter begins. For the next ten minutes, I read. I skim the letter once, and then, with tears in my eyes, I go back to read it again, more slowly this time, hearing Mamie’s voice in my head as she forms each of the words with her careful, lilting accent.





Chapter Thirty-two



Rose

Dearest Hope,

As I sit here today to write to you, I know this may be the last chance I have at clarity. I know my days are waning. You will receive this letter after I am gone, and I want you to know that I was ready. My life was long, and many parts of it were wonderful, but in my twilight, the past has returned to me, and I can bear it no more.

Tonight, if I can manage to stay lucid, I will give you the list of names that have been burned into my heart, and written on the sky. By the time you read this letter, then, you will know that most of my life was a lie. But it was a lie I had to tell, at first to protect your mother, and then, to protect myself.

I do not know if you will learn the truth on your own. I hope you do. You deserve to know it, and I should have told you long ago. I knew I had to keep the promise I made to your grandfather as long as he was alive, but after that, to have told you or your mother felt to me like it would have been a great betrayal of him. And he was a wonderful man, a good husband, a loving father and grandfather. I do not want to betray him. But in the last few months, as more of the past has come to visit me in the darkness of my memories, I know that I cannot take my secrets with me. You deserve to know who I am, and who you are.

I am a coward. That is the first thing you must know. I am a coward because I ran from the past. It took less courage to become a new person than to face the failings of the person I once was. I am a coward because I chose to lose myself in this new life.

If you went to Paris, you know by now that I am a Picard. That is my family. I was raised in a progressive Jewish home. My father was a doctor. My mother was a Polish immigrant whose parents ran a bakery, just like you do now. I had two sisters and three brothers. They all perished. All of them. I have come to terms with that, but I blame myself for not saving them. That blame is with me every day.

There is also a man you must know about, a man named Jacob Levy. I have not spoken that name since 1949, the year your grandfather returned to tell me that Jacob had died at Auschwitz. Every day since then, I have searched the sky for him. But I cannot find him.

Jacob, my dear Hope, was the love of my life. I loved your grandfather too; I do not want you to doubt that for a moment. But in life, I believe we can have but one great love, and Jacob was mine. Most people do not find even that. And I have realized, as I have gotten older, that by closing my own heart off, I have perhaps taken away your chance at finding that kind of love, as I took from your mother her chance. If one isn’t taught how to love, it’s hard to find the way on one’s own. Do not let that be my legacy to you.

I know I did everything wrong. I closed my heart after I learned Jacob was gone, and I did not know how to open it again. Perhaps I did not want to. But because of that, I did not love your mother the right way, and that changed the course of her life, and the course of yours. I can never fully tell you how sorry I am for that. I failed both of you. I only hope that it is not too late for you to correct those mistakes in your own life.

Jacob died before he had a chance to meet your mother or you or Annie, and in that, I believe we were all cheated by fate. Your mother, you see, was his daughter. You are his granddaughter. Ted, who you always knew as your grandfather, knew this all along and raised both of you as his own. He knew already when he met me that he could never have children of his own, because of an injury he had sustained in the war. He gave me a new life, and I gave him a family. It was a trade we both knew we were making, and I have never regretted it. He was a wonderful man, a better man than I ever deserved. Please do not let this revelation make him mean any less to you, because if that is the result, I will have failed at my last important task. He was, and will always be, your grandpa.

I did not know for sure until 1949 that Jacob had died, although I had been told by many people, before I married your grandfather, that he had been killed at Auschwitz. Still, I did not believe it. I refused to believe it. I believed I would have known in my soul, and I did not. So, you may wonder, how could I have married your grandfather, if I believed Jacob would still come back?