The Sweetness of Forgetting Read online

  A tear runs down his cheek. Before I can even consider what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room to hug him. He stiffens for a moment, and then I feel his arms encircle my shoulders. His whole body is shaking. “You were eleven,” I murmur. “You are not to blame.”

  I pull away, and he sighs. “No matter who holds the blame, my family was all murdered, and I am still here, seventy years later. I have lived with that all my life. It is heavy in my heart.”

  I can feel tears in my own eyes as I sit back down. “How did this Jacob know? How did he know to tell you to run?”

  “He was part of an underground movement against the Nazis,” Alain says. “He believed the rumors of the death camps. He believed they were exterminating us systematically. He was in the minority. But Rose believed him. And Jacob was my hero, so I believed him too. He must have saved her.”

  “How?” I ask softly.

  Alain looks at me for a long moment. “I do not know. But she was the love of his life. He would have done anything to protect her. Anything.”

  I blink. “She loved him too?”

  He nods. “With a strength I’d never known she had,” he says. He looks off into the distance for a long time. “That is why, for all these years, I’ve always firmly believed that she died. For if she had lived, I know she would have come back for him.”

  “She must have believed that he was dead too,” I murmur. “Was his name at the Hôtel Lutetia?”

  Alain looks perplexed. “Yes, it was,” he says. “He was hoping beyond hope that she had made it out, that she had survived, despite the rumors we had heard. His name was always there, so if she came back, she would find him.”

  “But my grandfather came back,” I tell him. “In 1949. To find out what happened to her family. That’s what my grandmother said.”

  “There were no records of me,” Alain says. “That is surely why he did not find me. But Jacob did everything to be listed, just in case Rose had somehow survived.”

  I swallow hard and wonder what this means. Had Mamie not given Jacob’s name to my grandpa? Or had my grandfather found Jacob’s name on survivor lists after all and told Mamie otherwise, because he realized how much she apparently loved him and wanted to protect the life he’d already begun with her? I shudder involuntarily.

  “Did this Jacob escape, like you and my grandmother did?” I ask Alain. “Before the roundup?”

  Alain shakes his head and draws a deep breath. “Jacob was at Auschwitz,” he says simply. “He survived because he was so sure Rose was safe somewhere, and he had vowed he would find her. He told me, when I last saw him, that he could not believe she was dead, because he would have felt it in his soul. It was that hope of reuniting with her that kept him alive in that hell on earth.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lemon-Grape Cheesecake

  INGREDIENTS

  1 1/2 cups ground graham cracker crumbs

  1 cup granulated sugar, divided

  1 tsp. cinnamon

  6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

  2 eight-ounce blocks of cream cheese

  1/4 cup white grape juice

  Juice and zest of one lemon

  2 eggs

  DIRECTIONS

  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix graham cracker crumbs, 1/2 cup sugar, cinnamon, and melted butter until well blended. Press evenly into an 8-inch pie pan.

  2. Bake for 6 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

  3. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees.

  4. In a medium bowl beat cream cheese until smooth using an electric mixer. Gradually beat in remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Gradually add grape juice, lemon juice, lemon zest, and eggs, and beat until just smooth and lump-free.

  5. Place cooled crust on a cookie sheet. Pour cream cheese mixture into crust.

  6. Bake for 40 minutes, or until center of crust no longer jiggles.

  Rose

  Annie had been to see Rose earlier that day; Rose was sure of it. But she couldn’t quite make sense of what the girl had said.

  “Mom’s in Paris right now,” Annie had declared, her gray eyes flashing with excitement. “She left me a message! She said she might have, like, found something!”

  “How nice, my dear,” Rose had replied. But she couldn’t quite place who Annie’s mother was. Was she a relative of Rose’s? Or maybe one of her customers at the bakery? But she couldn’t tell the girl that she didn’t remember her mother. So instead, she said, “Did your mother find something nice at a boutique? A scarf or some shoes, perhaps?” Paris was, after all, known for its shopping.

  Annie had laughed then, a bright sound that reminded Rose of the birds that used to sing outside her window on the rue du Général Camou, so very long ago. “No, Mamie!” she had exclaimed. “She went to the Holocaust museum! You know, to find out what happened to those people you told us about!”

  “Oh,” Rose had murmured, all of the breath suddenly gone from her lungs.

  Annie had departed soon after, and Rose had been left alone with her thoughts, which were closing in on her. The girl’s words had triggered a tornado of memories that threatened to lift Rose off her feet and take her away, into the past, where she found herself dwelling more and more frequently now. Most days, the memories rolled in uninvited, but this day, it was the mentions of Paris and the Holocaust, the Shoah, that sent Rose spinning backward to that terrible day in 1949 her dear Ted had come home and confirmed her worst fears.

  She loved her husband. And because she loved her husband, she had told him about Jacob, because she knew she was supposed to be honest with the people she loved. And she had been honest—to a point. She had told Ted that there was a man she had loved very much in Paris. It had hardly needed to be said; she knew it was already clear.

  But when he’d asked her if she loved the man in Paris more than she loved him, she hadn’t been able to meet his eye. And so he had known. He had always known.

  She wished she felt differently. Ted was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful father to Josephine. He was trustworthy and loyal. He had built her a life she never could have dreamed of all those years ago in the land of her birth.

  But he wasn’t Jacob. And that was his only flaw.

  For the first few years after the war, she hadn’t wanted to know. Not officially, anyhow. When she’d first been married to Ted and they’d been living in New York, in an apartment not far from the Statue of Liberty, there had been bits and pieces of news from other immigrants who drifted in from France. Survivors, they called themselves. Rose thought that, instead, they looked like ghosts, already dead. Pale, washed out, hollowed eyes, floating through rooms like they didn’t quite belong there.

  I knew your mother, one of the ghosts would say. I watched her die at Auschwitz.

  I saw sweet little Danielle at Drancy, another would say. I don’t know if she made it to the transport.

  And the bit of news that shattered her soul, from a ghost named Monsieur Pinusiewicz, whom she’d known in a former life. He was the butcher whose shop was just down the street from her grandparents’ bakery.

  That boy you were running around with? Jacob?

  Rose had stared at him. She hadn’t wanted him to go on, because she could see the truth written in his eyes. She couldn’t bear to hear it. She made a muffled sound, for it was all she could muster, and he took it as a signal to go on.

  He was at Auschwitz. I saw him there. And I saw him the day they led him to the gas chamber.

  And that was it. He was gone. The ghost of Monsieur Pinusiewicz, as well as the last shred of hope she had that she could somehow find her past again.

  By the time she left New York, she knew they were all gone. The ghosts had told her. One had watched her father get sick while working at Auschwitz’s crematorium. One had held her mother’s hand as she died. Another had worked alongside Helene and had one day returned from the field, a day that Helene had been too sick to rise from her bed, to find her on the floor, beaten to death by the guards, her lovely brown h
air matted with blood. The fates of the others were less clear, and Rose didn’t ask questions. What mattered was that they were all dead. All of them.

  And so, when Ted had promised her a life far away from these hollow-eyed ghosts, far away from New York, in a magical place called Cape Cod, where he said the waves washed up on sandy beaches, and cranberry bogs grew, she said yes. Because she loved him. And because she needed to finish becoming someone else. She needed to concentrate on building a family, because the one she’d had was gone forever.

  But by 1949, seven years after she’d left Paris, she had needed to know for sure. She knew she could not bury Rose Picard without the certainty that could only come from the official records. What if one of the ghosts was wrong? What if little Danielle had survived and was in an orphanage somewhere, believing there was no one in the world who loved her? What if Helene hadn’t died on that floor but had escaped and was waiting for her, wondering where she was? What if the ghost who said she’d held Rose’s mother’s hand had been mistaken about the identity of the woman she’d watched die?

  But Rose couldn’t go. It had been nothing short of miraculous that her falsified papers had gotten her into the United States in the first place. She knew it was likely that the immigration people had looked the other way only because she had married Ted, a war hero. She had made her bargains; now her life was here, and she had a little girl who needed her. She didn’t trust France. She didn’t trust that she could get out again. And she feared her heart wouldn’t be able to bear going back anyhow.

  And so she asked Ted to go. And because he loved her, and because he was a good man, he said yes.

  He left on a shining summer Monday. She waited, the seconds ticking by like minutes, the minutes feeling like hours. Time stretched like the taffy she, Ted, and little Josephine had eaten on their trip to Atlantic City the summer before.

  When he finally came home, very late that Friday, he sat her down in the still, damp heat of the Cape Cod night and told her everything.

  He had been to the synagogue Rose had grown up in. It pained her deeply when he told her the synagogue had been destroyed during the war, but that they had rebuilt it, as good as new. She knew then that he didn’t understand that when things were rebuilt, they weren’t the same. You could never get back the things that had been destroyed.

  “They all died, Rose,” he told her gently, looking into her eyes and holding her hands tightly, as if he were afraid she’d float away, like a helium balloon bound for the heavens. “Your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers. All of them. I am so sorry.”

  “Oh,” was all she could muster.

  “I spoke to the rabbi there,” Ted said softly. “He showed me where to find the records. I am so sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Do you want to know what happened to them, Rose?” Ted asked.

  “No.” She shook her head, looked away. She could not hear it. She feared it would break her heart in a million pieces. Would she die right here, in front of her husband, with her daughter upstairs, when it shattered? “It is my fault,” she whispered.

  “No, Rose!” Ted exclaimed. “You can’t feel that way. None of this is your fault.” He took her in his arms, but her body was stiff, unwilling.

  She shook her head slowly against his chest. “I knew,” she whispered. “I knew they were coming for us. And I did not try hard enough to save them.”

  She knew she would have to live with that forever. But she didn’t know how. It was why she couldn’t be herself anymore. It was why she had found solace in Rose Durand, and then Rose McKenna. It was impossible to be Rose Picard. Rose Picard had died in Europe with her family long ago.

  “It’s not your fault,” Ted said again. “You have to stop blaming yourself.”

  She nodded, because she knew it was what was expected of her. She pulled away from him. “And Jacob Levy?” she asked in a flat voice, looking up at long last to meet Ted’s eye.

  This time, it was he who looked away. “My dear Rose,” he said. “Your friend Jacob died at Auschwitz. Just before the liberation of the camp.”

  Rose blinked a few times. It was as if someone had pushed her head underwater. All of a sudden, she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She gasped for breath. “You are certain?” she asked after a very long while, when air filled her lungs again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ted said.

  And that had been that. The world became very cold for Rose that day. She nodded and looked away from her husband. She would not cry. She could not cry. She had already died inside, and to cry would be to live. And how could she live without Jacob?

  Jacob had always told her that love would save them. And she had believed him. But he’d been wrong. She had been saved, but what good was she without him? What meaning did her life have?

  It was at that moment that Josephine appeared from around the corner, wearing the long pink cotton nightgown Rose had sewn for her, clutching her Cynthia doll.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?” Josephine asked from the doorway, blinking sleepily at her parents.

  “Nothing, my dear,” Rose said, standing and crossing the room to kneel beside her daughter. She looked at the little girl and reminded herself that this was her family now, that the past was in the past, that she owed it to this life to keep going.

  But she felt nothing.

  After she’d tucked Josephine back into bed, singing her a lullaby her own mother had sung to her so many years before, she had lain beside Ted in the dark until his chest rose and fell in slumber and she could feel him slipping away into his dreams.

  She rose softly, silently, and moved toward the hall. She climbed the narrow staircase to the small widow’s walk atop their house, and she emerged into the still night.

  The moon was full, and it hung heavy over Cape Cod Bay, which Rose could see over the rooftops. The pale lunar light reflected on the water, and if Rose looked down, she could almost believe that the sea was lit from within. But she wasn’t looking down. Tonight, she was searching the heavens for the stars she had named. Mama. Papa. Helene. Claude. Alain. David. Danielle.

  “I am sorry,” she whispered to the sky. “I am so sorry.”

  There was no answer. She could hear, in the near distance, the waves lapping at the shore. The sky was silent.

  She searched the sky, murmuring apologies, until dawn began to break on the eastern horizon. Still, she could not find him. Was this her fate? Was he lost to her forever?

  “Jacob, where are you?” she cried out to the sky.

  But there was no reply.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The air in Paris becomes very still as darkness falls. First, the sky begins to deepen, from the pale, hazy periwinkle of late afternoon to the deepening cerulean of evening, streaked with tangerine and gold at the horizon. As the stars begin to poke holes in the blanket of dusk, the wispy clouds hold on to the disappearing sunset, turning shades of ruby and rose. Finally, as sapphire fades to night, the lights of Paris come on, as twinkling and endless as stars. I stand on the Pont des Arts with Alain, watching in awe as the Eiffel Tower begins to sparkle with a million tiny white lights against the velvet sky.

  “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” I murmur. Alain had suggested a walk, because he needed a break from speaking about the past. I’m eager to hear the story of Jacob, but I don’t want to push him. I have to keep reminding myself that Alain is eighty, and these must be painful, long-buried memories.

  We’re leaning against the railing of the bridge, looking west, and as he folds his hand gently over mine, I can feel it trembling. “Your grandmother used to say the same thing,” he says softly. “She would take me here when I was a boy, before the occupation, and tell me that the sunset over the Seine was God’s show, put on just for us.”

  I feel tears in my eyes and shake my head, trying to rid myself of them, for they blur the perfect view.

  “Whenever I feel alone,” Alain says, “I come here. I’ve s
pent years dreaming that Rose was with God, lighting the sky for me. I never imagined that all this time, she’s been alive.”

  “We have to try to call her again,” I say. We had tried her number before leaving for a walk, but there’d been no answer; she was likely napping, something she seemed to be doing more of lately. “We have to tell her that I’ve found you. Even though she might not understand or remember.”

  “Of course,” Alain says. “And then I will come with you. Back to Cape Cod.”

  I turn and stare at him. “Really? You’ll come with me?”

  He smiles. “I’ve spent seventy years without a family,” he says. “I do not want to waste another moment. I must see Rose.”

  I smile into the darkness.

  When the last rays of the sun have seeped into the horizon and the stars are all out, Alain loops his arm through mine and we begin to walk slowly back the way we came, toward the palatial Louvre, which is aglow in muted light, reflecting on the river beneath us.

  “I will tell you about Jacob now,” Alain says softly as we begin to cross through the courtyard of the Louvre, toward the rue de Rivoli.

  I look at him and nod. I realize I’m holding my breath.

  Alain takes a deep breath and begins, his voice slow and halting. “I was with Rose when she met him. It was the end of 1940, and although Paris had already fallen to the Germans, life was still normal enough that we could believe it would all be okay. Things were beginning to get bad, but we never could have imagined what was in store.”

  We turn right on the rue de Rivoli, which is still crowded with people although the stores have closed. Couples stroll through the darkness, holding hands, whispering to each other, and for a moment, I can imagine Mamie and this Jacob walking the same street seventy years ago. I shiver.