The Sweetness of Forgetting Read online

  “Well, it just so happens that Jacob Levy’s will leaves everything to your grandmother, or to her direct descendants,” Thom continues. “He apparently always believed she had lived and that he’d find her. That’s what his attorney said.”

  “Wait, so . . .” My voice trails off as I try to piece together what he’s telling me.

  “You’re the next direct descendant of Rose Durand McKenna, who we now, of course, know was initially Rose Picard,” Thom goes on. “Jacob’s estate is yours.”

  “Wait,” I say again, struggling to understand. “You’re telling me Jacob had three and a half million dollars?”

  Thom nods. “And now I’m telling you that you have three and a half million. After a lot of paperwork, of course.” He peers at the papers again. “It seems that after he came to the United States, he worked his way up from being a busboy in a hotel kitchen, to managing a hotel, to eventually becoming a partial investor in a hotel. That’s what his lawyer explained. Apparently, he was a millionaire by 1975 and started a charity for Holocaust survivors at that point. He turned that first hotel into seven successful properties, and he sold his shares three years ago. Part of his fortune is going into an annuity to fund the charity. The remainder—three and a half million—has been earmarked for you.”

  “But he never said anything,” I say.

  Thom shrugs. “His attorney said he was very modest. Always lived well below his means. Used his money to hire private detectives to try to find your grandmother. But he never knew the assumed name she’d taken on. He was never able to find her.”

  “My God,” I murmur. The news is still sinking in.

  Thom nods. “There’s more,” he says. “Your grandmother also leaves behind a small estate. Of course the assisted living home drained most of her funds, as you know, but there’s a little left. About seventy-five thousand after everything. Enough to pay off the remainder of the loan for your mother’s house.”

  I shake my head. “Unbelievable,” I murmur.

  “And,” Thom adds. “There’s a letter. Your grandmother sent it to me back in September. The letter’s sealed,” he continues. “In the note your grandmother sent to me, she asked me to give it to you on New Year’s Eve at the end of the year she died.”

  The lump in my throat is preventing me from replying. I blink back tears as Thom slides a narrow envelope across the desk to me.

  “Do you know what it says?” I ask after I find my voice.

  Thom shakes his head. “Why don’t you head home and read it? I just need your signature on a few things here, and I’ll get your grandmother’s money routed into your account. Jacob Levy’s attorney is already working to get his money to you too. You should have it soon. In the meantime, I’ll talk to Matt at the bank, if you want me to.”

  I nod. “Let him know I’m buying the bakery outright,” I say. “No more payments to the bank. I want it to belong to my family forever.”

  “Ten-four,” Thom says. He pauses. “Hope?” he asks tentatively.

  “Yeah?”

  He sighs and looks out the window. “Your mom would be proud of you, you know.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “I was always a disappointment to her. I think she wished she’d never had me.”

  I’ve never said those words before, and I’m not sure why I’m saying them now, to Thom Evans.

  “That’s not true, Hope,” Thom says softly. “Your mom was a tough woman to deal with. You know that. But you were the center of her life, whether you knew it or not.”

  “No I wasn’t,” I say. “You were. And all the men who came in and out of her life. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Thom says.

  “It was like she was always looking for something she couldn’t find,” I say.

  “At the end of her life, I think she found it,” he says. “It may have been too late for her to communicate that to you properly, though.”

  I look up. “What do you mean?”

  He sighs. “She was always talking about how she was too cold to care about anyone.”

  “She said that to you?” My mother hadn’t seemed that self-aware. And in fact, I hadn’t known she was communicating with Thom at all. I thought that once people were out of her life, they were gone forever. It startles me to realize that she’d let him back in.

  He shrugs. “We talked about a lot of things. Especially at the end. I think that with your mother slipping away, she had a lot of regrets. It wasn’t until the end of her life, Hope, that she realized what she’d been looking for had been right in front of her.”

  I blink. “What do you mean?”

  “She loved you,” he says. “More than she’d been able to truly understand as a young woman. I think that she spent her life searching for love, doubting her own ability to love, and at the end, she realized it had been there all along. In you. And if she’d recognized that sooner, maybe everything could have been different.”

  I just stare at him. I don’t know what to say.

  “Go read your grandma’s letter, Hope,” Thom says gently. “And if you learn anything from your mom, let it be that you don’t have to search as far as you think for what’s already there, right in front of you.”

  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?

  It is the cruelest thing I have ever done. Your grandfather never knew that Jacob and I had been married in secret, just months before I left Paris. He never knew that your mother had been conceived on our wedding night. When your grandfather asked me to marry him, he did not understand that if Jacob had returned, it would annul our marriage. I was prepared to do that to him, to your grandfather, and that is something I must always live with. I would have left him in a heartbeat if Jacob had come back, and that, of course, was terribly unfair to him. But marrying Ted before I gave birth to your mother meant that she would be born an American. She would have freedom. No one could take her away to a concentration camp. And this, above all else, was my greatest responsibility. I did not have the luxury to say no to a proposal from an American. I had to save your mother, both because she was my child, and because she was the last piece of Jacob I had left.

  Your grandfather and I had a good life together, and I loved him deeply, although in a different way than I loved Jacob. I loved him most of all for the kind of father he was to Josephine, and later, for the kind of grandfather he was to you. He showed both of you the kind of love I was incapable of. I believe that my heart would have broken each time I saw him with you, had my heart not frozen solid so many years ago. Without meaning to, I withheld my love from him, and from your mother, and from you, and from Annie.

  And that, I am afraid, is the legacy I will leave behind—that of a cold heart.

  I know that is the only way you have ever known me. But I want you to know that I was not always that way. There was once a time when I was happy and free, a time when I loved without reservation, because I didn’t know how much love could hurt. I wish you had known me then. And I wish you had known Jacob, for he would have loved you with that sort of depth too. He would be very proud of you. Instead, I made all the mistakes I could have made, and in the end, I leave this world with nothing.

  My deepest wish for you is a fate different from mine. I wish that you learn to open your heart. I kept mine closed for all these years, because I was frightened, and that was a mistake. Life is a series of chances, and you have to have the courage to seize them, before the years pass you by and leave you with nothing but regrets.

  Your life still lies before you, as does Annie’s. Learn to let people love you, my Hope, for you deserve that love. Learn to love freely. Love is so much more powerful than you realize. I know that now, but it is too late for me.

  What I wish for you, dear Hope, is a life lived fully. A life lived freely in this country that lets you be what you are. A life lived knowing that God exists everywhere you are; he lives among the stars. And I wish you a life lived happily ever after, just like in the fairy tales I told you when you were a little girl. But you must go after that kind of life with all the strength of your heart. For it is only by loving, and having the courage to be loved in return, that you can find God, who exists most of all in your heart.

  I will love you always,

  Mamie

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I’m crying by the time I finish reading the letter. I put it down, and with the blanket still wrapped around me, I pad to the back door and walk out onto the deck, breathing in the cold night air. I pull Mamie’s blanket tighter around my shoulders and imagine that it’s her arms, enveloping me in one last hug.

  “Are you up there?” I murmur into the nothingness. In the distance, perhaps carried across the bay a block away, I can hear the faint sounds of people celebrating the last hour of the year that’s about to end. I think about all the things that can be started over, and all the things that can never be undone.

  I look up at the sky and try to locate the stars, the ones Mamie was always looking for. I find them now—the stars of the Big Dipper—and follow the line formed by two stars in the bowl, just like she’d taught me, until I see the North Star, Polaris, glimmering overhead, due north. I wonder whether that’s the direction to heaven. I wonder what she was searching for all those years.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve been looking at the sky when I notice a tiny motion somewhere between the Dipper and the North Star. I squint and blink a few times, and that’s when I see them.

  Against the inky backdrop, so faint I can barely make them out, two stars are moving across the sky, just past Polaris, making their way deeper into the heavens. I’ve seen shooting stars before; after all, the nights on the Cape are black and deep enough that you can see farther into the darkness than most people along the East Coast. I spent many nights during my teenage years counting stars and wishing on the ones that fell from the sky.

  But these stars are different. They’re not falling. They’re making their way across the blanket of night, shimmering and brilliant as they dance side by side across the darkness.

  My jaw falls as I follow their flight. The sounds of the earth—the distant laughter, the faint babble of a far-off television, the lapping of the waves on the beach—fall away, and I watch in a bubble of silence as the stars grow smaller and smaller, and finally disappear.

  “Good-bye, Mamie,” I whisper whe
n they’re gone. “Good-bye, Jacob.” And I believe somehow that the wind, which is whistling around me now, is taking my words up to them.

  I search the sky for another minute, until the cold begins to seep into my bones, then I go back inside the house, where I pick my cell phone up from the kitchen table. I dial Annie first and smile when she answers.

  “Everything okay, Mom?” she asks, and in the background, I can hear the sounds of celebration in Chatham. There’s music, laughter, happiness.

  “Everything’s fine,” I say. “I just wanted you to know I love you.”

  She’s silent for a moment. “I know,” she says finally. “I love you too, Mom. I’ll call you later.”

  I tell her to have fun, and after I hang up, I stare at the phone for thirty seconds before scrolling through my phone book and hitting Send again.

  “Hope?” Gavin’s voice is deep and warm when he answers.

  I take a breath. “My grandmother left me a letter,” I say without preamble. “I just read it.”

  He’s quiet for a minute, and I curse myself for not being better at this.

  “Are you okay?” he finally asks.

  “I’m okay,” I say, and I know it’s the truth. I’m okay now, and I know I’ll be okay. But there’s still something missing. I don’t want to wait a lifetime to put the pieces back together, the way Mamie did, the way my mother never had a chance to. “I’m sorry,” I say in a rush. “I’m sorry about everything. For pushing you away. For pretending you didn’t mean something to me.”

  He doesn’t say anything, and in the silence, my eyes fill with tears.

  “Gavin,” I say. I take a deep breath. “I want to see you.”

  I can hear him breathing. In the pause that stretches between us, I’m sure that I’ve lost him.

  “I’m sorry,” I say finally. I look at the clock: 11:42 p.m. “It’s late.”