muddy in the process, which she knew she would pay for later when the governess spanked her with a hairbrush. She ran over to her beloved grandfather and presented him with her catch. He woke from dozing and looked at her, resigned, but with a glow of pride in his eyes.
“You’re a very smart girl. This is exactly the weight of the diamonds I carried to this country from Algeria.” He reached for the pail, which he set on his knee, and then, to Madeleine’s great shock, he proceeded to swallow all five frogs, one after the other. Madeleine scarcely breathed as she watched. He wasn’t a monster, but now she was convinced he knew magic. “If you cannot protect yourself, you are at their mercy,” her grandfather said. He burped up all five frogs, each alive and perfect, then he returned the bucket to Madeleine so that she could replace the creatures into the mud at the edge of the pond. As they went back to the house, they held hands. Each felt fortunate to be in the company of the other. The rest of the world and its cruelties didn’t matter as much when they were together.
Everything was covered with ice that winter and the last time Madeleine saw her grandfather he couldn’t get out of bed. He hadn’t eaten for weeks, though Madeleine had brought him sugar cookies every day. She sat beside him, pale and unassuming, her face pinched with worry.
“I think I made a mistake,” he told her one day when they were together. The old man found Madeleine quietly endearing. He patted her head, for he had come to care deeply for her, and he knew that she cared for him in return; he had also come to see his past quite differently and had regrets that he hadn’t expected to have. He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth. “You cannot hide who you are without doing great damage. Just remember that you’re my granddaughter. Think about others before you think of yourself.”
They said the wrong prayers when he was buried, but he would likely not have minded. The meaning was the same.
God our Father, Your power brings us to birth, Your providence guides our lives, and by Your command we return to dust.
He left Madeleine everything, but because she was a minor, her aunt took charge and sent her to a convent school. She was sad at first, for she was in mourning, but she soon came to love the rigor of her classes. She studied Latin and Greek and was a natural student, a favorite of the sisters. She was told early on that she should consider joining the order, and it had always given her great pleasure to succeed as a teacher who was known for her kind heart and her extraordinary patience, learned, perhaps, from the time she had spent with her grandfather.
She had been thinking of him more often of late, now that the world seemed as heartless as he’d warned it might be. She could have sworn her grandfather was there on the iron bench, in his fine clothes, with his beautiful head of hair, his one true vanity. In her own time she had studied Hebrew, which she could read perfectly so that she could know the prayers her grandfather had known as a boy in Algeria. She closed her eyes and prayed for his soul and then she said the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, which he had taught her so that when he died there would be someone to mourn properly.
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chirutei.
May His great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which He created according to His will.
When the baker, Monsieur Favre, arrived at the convent, the mother superior was waiting for him in the garden. He had always believed she thought she was too good to deal with him, but now she went so far as to invite him into her office.
“Is there a problem, Sister?” he asked as they walked inside. His hands were sweating. Once before there had been weevils in the wheat and it had nearly ruined him. “The wheat is not what you expected?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” the mother superior said. She was still thinking of frogs. She thought she had spied one in the garden and the memory now brought a smile to