I was testing some and from this string try to remove all ", but not \"

Code:

cat file
The quick brown fox "jumps", over  the 'lazy \"dog\"'

result requested: The quick brown fox jumps, over the 'lazy \"dog\"'

I have seen a working solution for sed, but I like awk

This code seem to work, but for some reason it does remove a blank space after the fox, why?

Code:

awk '{gsub(/[^\\]\"/,x)}1' file
The quick brown foxjump, over  the 'lazy \"dog\"'

As far as I understand this means not \ and ", so why is the space gone?

EDIT:
I found why
not \ can is any characters but not \, so space is gone and the s in jumps
Any Idea on how to fix this in awk?
gensub should work, but not very portable.

---------- Post updated at 13:26 ---------- Previous update was at 12:57 ----------

I found two working version.
Fist is not perfect, but is portable.
Second is less portable.

Code:

awk '{gsub(/\\\"/,"_#_");gsub(/\"/,x);gsub(/_#_/,"\\\"")}1'

Code:

awk '{print gensub(/([^\\])\"/, "\\1", "g")}'