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.”
“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?”