It’s not just the cuddly kids and parents stuff either (though that is very important). It’s tying families together across time and space, in hopes that someday all mankind will have the choice to be linked together.

That’s what temples are for.

But for my grandmother and her siblings, that was an impossible dream. Their father, Mormon apostle John Whitaker Taylor, was famously excommunicated back in 1911 (for marrying too many women). Thus he was barred from claiming his wives and children (36 of them) in the eternities.

It has caused untolled sorrow in this group of believing, faithful folks. The later wives, the ones who “caused” the schism between John W. Taylor and the church, wore shame like a brand. They never dared attend the temple together, lest the name Taylor alert suspicion. And yet they deeply loved their husband and refused to permit anything to stand between them and the possibility of eternal reunion with their husband.

Five of the wives were barred by US law from inheriting any of their husband’s estate when he died in 1916. Despite the resultant poverty and their large families, each of John’s widows received offers of marriage.

If they had remarried, John’s children might have come to love a living stepfather. The children might have decided they preferred to be linked eternally to some man other than John.

John’s wives never gave their children that possibility. Every one of these six beautiful (and they were beautiful) women went to their graves mourning their decades dead husband, poverty and loneliness notwithstanding.

As recently as 2009 descendants of John Whitaker Taylor and his brides were requesting permission to “seal” the family together, to no avail.

Then, suddenly, almost magically, a change took place. The church-owned database (available via new.familysearch.org to church members) was quietly updated just 100 years after John Whitaker Taylor disobediently married his last wife.

The record now shows John and his wives eternally and uniquely bound together (assuming, as always, that they so choose and God agrees). Not only that, but the sealing dates for two of the wives has been updated to reflect the day on which they were married in 1901, and their children are now shown as “born in the covenant.”

All thirty-six are gone now, the last one gone to her grave in 2004. But those who comforted John’s children and heard their cries know how much this means.

We who remain are left to contemplate this scripture, given to Joseph Smith in March of 1830, before the Church itself was even founded:
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Woes shall go forth, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth…

Nevertheless, it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment, but it is written endless torment… that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men, altogether for my name’s glory.

Behold, I am endless, and the punishment which is given from my hand is endless punishment, for Endless is my name.
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For the descendants of John Whitaker Taylor the torment of separation is now over. All is knit back together. The family can be at peace.

As a half-white child of the 1960s (back when such things were illegal in many states), I recall the hatred and torment I received from my peers (though my peers never physically beat me). The pain a Chinese-Japanese child would have endured during the 1940s is mind boggling.

Even as late as 1963, my Chinese aunt was driven from her marriage, her church, and her adopted country because of inter-racial hatred (daring, as she had, marry a white man).

My aunt even attempted suicide, as Jaime Ford’s characters never do.

But in real life, as in fiction, time heals much.

My aunt and her first husband are remarried Death and time have freed them from pain, bigotry, and the second marriages that followed their 1963 divorce.

They are happy now, and I am glad of it.

Alas. We are a group of Mormon ladies. And Kate Atkinson’s engaging tale involved quite a bit of sordid gore and guilty sex.

So I suggested a last minute selection switch, recommending Jamie Ford’s bestselling “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.”

“Hotel” is the 1942 story of star-crossed lovers who, unfortunately for them, are younger (12) than Romeo and Juliet and not merely from warring families, but warring nations (Keiko is Japanese and Henry is Chinese).

To complicate matters further, Keiko and Henry live in Seattle, a city whose citizens of Japanese origin are about to be rounded up and shipped off to internment camps.
Keiko is a child of American-born parents, making the internment that much more confusing and senseless in the eyes of the reader.

Henry’s father wages his own one-man battle against the Japanese – raising money to help the Chinese fight Japan abroad and peddling away local Japanese properties at pennies to the dollar. When he discovers the perfidy of his son (loving a Japanese girl), he disowns the child.

Unlike Romeo and Juliet, no one commits suicide in this tale of forbidden love. And the love is about as innocent as forbidden love gets.

For those of us who lived prior to 1980, however, the tale is clearly fantasy. We remember when marriage between whites and asians was forbidden. The state didn’t have to forbid marriage between Japanese and Chinese because the animosity ran too deep, particularly for Chinese children orphaned by Japanese aggression, as was the case for the father of our fictional Henry.

But even though I knew it was impossible for Henry and Keiko to be together, I still wanted to know how he lost Keiko and ended up with the Chinese Ethel. I was surprised how Jaime Ford kept the story and tension going long after Keiko has been taken from Seattle, and how successfully he weaves together the WW II story with the 1986 life of the widowed Henry, searching Japanese artifacts left in the basement of the Panama Hotel hoping to find something Keiko left behind.

My older book group fellows found anachronisms I overlooked (e.g., online support groups in 1986?), but I enjoyed the book.

My only irritation was when Jaime’s afterward claimed he was had not imputed his own values to the tale. Alas, I knew I was in the hands of an author who decried the US actions against residents and citizens of Japanese descent and who believes all races are valuable.

So, Jaime, your biases are showing. But they are beautiful biases, so perhaps I shouldn’t point them out, lest you hitch them up out of sight.