Epilogue: Michelle, Autumn, 1995
It was not until the end of my aunt, Reina’s, stay here that the three Davidson sisters dared to visit the cemetery where their mother was buried. There had been the most interesting lunch before that. My mother picked out a restaurant in the city, which she claimed was similar to the one that my grandmother, Gerdie, had taken her to when she was a child; neither Deborah nor Reina had had this experience, so they could not vouch for it either way. Over soup and sandwiches, Aunt Deborah was telling us ecstatically about this new book a friend lent her—it was called “On Being a Jewish Feminist” by Susannah Herschel, and I hid my smile behind my hands as my mother pretended to know what she was talking about, and my other aunt pretended not to be offended.
My mother had not attempted to seek me out directly, and I had elected to sit between my two aunts, going back and forth between their barter. It was easy to focus on my hope for the Davidson family, the way that everything around the three sisters seemed so tense—yet hopeful, as they were all here, after all, together, after traveling such a long way both physically and psychologically. It was more difficult for me to confront—my own parents, or what I knew of them, personal hollowness disrupting the ability I had honed in Israel when it came to understanding other peoples’ thoughts and emotions. I could not yet put my own into coherent—anything, so I merely placed it aside, and focused on the broader issues.
The three sisters split the bill, and I paid for my portion with babysitting money I had earned. Time was moving slower now, resisting the pull to the graveyard and confronting Gerdie directly. But in 12 hours, Reina would be back on her plane to Ben Gurion Airport, and Deborah and Donna would be expected at work, and to slight their mother, and their matriarch and guide, in this final hour, was unthinkable to any of them.
So we all piled into two cars (Aunt Reina with my mother, and me with Aunt Deborah,) and made our slow ascent to her place of burial, inching along the thick traffic of the city. My aunt Deborah was playing Nat King Cole—she explained to me that years ago, when she was 13, their mother liked to listen to him as she worked around the house. I turned to the window and felt the coldness on my cheek. I was trying to make myself think about my grandmother—and about the 30s and what New York City must have seemed like to her after getting off of that boat from Germany. I did not want to think about my father. I did not want to wonder where he was, what he was doing… or if he had any inkling of a clue… I shut my mind down fast.
Outside in the graveyard, the weather was blustery. We were all wearing coats and scarves around our frames; we were not close enough to huddle together, but we walked in roughly a single formation to Gerdie’s name. I stood beside my aunts as the three daughters read her inscription: “Gerdie Schrieber Davidson: Beloved mother and wife.” It seemed to small a description to encapsulate the grandmother that I knew, instinctively, was so much more. I glanced up at Deborah, wondering if she protested this particular epitaph, but I was surprised to find that my oldest aunt’s eyes had averted; her hand brushed deftly over her father’s tombstone, which was right beside us. Sighing deeply, she turned to my other aunt.
“Do you know that I am going to celebrate Passover this year?” she asked cheerfully. “My Rosh Chodesh group performs this feminist seder every year.”
“Oh really,” Reina laughed, sounding strained, and I rolled my eyes. They moved off, the oldest and the youngest, the two most religious of the sisters, though their paths had taken them in such different directions. I sighed, looking at my grandmother’s smooth tombstone. I knew, after all, what was coming.
My mother’s shadow eclipsed me, and I could hear her clear her breath nervously, or the spastic twisting of her hands. I closed my eyes, not yet ready to face her.
“Are you ready to move back in with me?” she asked.
I licked my dry lips, and my heart was pounding. “No,” I said.
She sighed. “You must admit how unorthodox—no pun intended, of course—it is for me to pay for your needs while you live with your aunt?”
I chuckled; it was a low and sardonic noise in my throat. “I would assume that you know all about unorthodox ways of living, Mother.”
To my surprise, Donna Davidson laughed, not loudly, but a laugh all the same. “I suppose you have a point there.” She paused. “I just… need you to know this. I made a mistake, yes, but I was… I was trying to do what was best for you. I… still want to do what is best for you, Michelle.”
A lump rose in my throat, and I watched dried leaves scuttle across the graves. “It might be too late,” I said in a low and defeated voice. “I want… I want to know him.”
Her silence was hard and painful. I inclined my head slightly, and I could see the slope of her body behind me, the wind picking at her clothes. Finally, she spoke. “I… I could see about finding him,” she said thickly.
I turned completely. Tears dotted my eyes—I was not sure if I was happy or sad or mad or all three. She looked so vulnerable, bundled under her blue coat and scarf; for the first time since I knew her, my mother looked… human. I almost wanted to touch her, I almost wanted to… forgive her. I swallowed hard in order to keep the tears at bay. “T-thank you,” was all that I said.
Leaves rustled behind us, signifying Deborah and Reina’s return. “We will probably go to the kibbutz to spend Pesach with Doran’s family,” my younger aunt was saying, “but it is a long time from now. And… we will have a baby to contend with.” She patted her belly softly.
My mother turned away from me, and addressed her younger sister. “And you have finally taken the sonogram?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Reina’s face flushed happily. “I can now say, with your scientific certainty, that we are having a son.” Her hands cupped the growing bulge protectively. “We have decided to name him… Tamir.”
“Tamir Hadar…” Deborah said, amused with herself. “I never thought I would have a niece named Michelle Davidson and a nephew named Tamir Hadar.” She reached over and ruffled my hair playfully, and I allowed her to, understanding the action as something—lost from my aunt, something belonging to her young adulthood, when she felt more confident in the world. I prayed—a habit I learned from Reina—I prayed that she may perhaps find it again.
The four of us turned back to Gerdie’s grave, somberness settling over the din again. “Ten years…” Deborah said softly. “And I can almost remember her, like it was yesterday, bustling around that kitchen in the suburbs.”
“To say nothing of the Holocaust,” my mother chimed in, “and climbing off of that boat in the 30s. She led a full life, Gerdie did. And look at how far her seeds have been sown.”
“You almost sound like a poet, Donna,” Reina giggled in her little girl’s voice.
My mother turned to her. “I suppose I have learned that… our personas are not so stoic in their attributes.” She took a deep breath and said the next word for the very first time, “Reina.”
As if we thought we had reached our threshold in theatrics, we all balked under the implications of my mother calling Reina by her chosen name for the first time, of my aunt, Deborah, finding her way back to the feminists, of my cousin, Tamir’s birth, of my own quest to find my father, all under the legacy of Gerdie’s name, and Gerdie’s yahrzeit, on that one day in October of 1995. Slowly, the three sisters picked up rocks from the ground and placed them on her tombstone—a custom they remembered from Jack’s funeral, so long ago. They turned from their mother, then, perhaps more whole and more counseled than they had ever been in their whole lives. I kept my back to them, hearing the fading crunch of the leaves where their feet hit. I sunk to the ground, feeling it’s firm coldness underneath of my jeans. I traced her name with my pinky, trying to feel her like I felt the others… and knowing that the way I did feel her was through the others. Her living daughters, and the diverse lives they set out to lead.My cousin, Tamir, not yet born to this world. And yes… I chuckled at the self awareness, yes even me. Even I, Michelle Davidson, could perpetrate Gerdie’s legacy.
“Michelle! We are leaving!” Deborah’s voice carried out to me from afar. Taking in one last gust of breath, I rose from the ground, fingered the three rocks on the tombstone, and turned in order to descend towards my family.
