Montifiore

 

I stub my toe on a stone and curse. “AT REST,” it says, coolly.

“Aunt Sid, where are you?”

I feel her response, her voice, her sensibility more than I hear it. I’m certainly not here, Tootsie.

“But,” I say, out loud, not at all concerned about being judged by the 150,000 dead planted here. “But, I have rocks for you. Rocks from Utah and Massachusetts and from the creek behind my house in Virginia.” I wave the rocks over my head, a fist full of orange and gray and shimmering white, held tight to keep the tiniest pebbles from escaping. These rocks have been clanging around in my car for years, clicking in the armrest when I take a turn, avoiding the vacuum when I infrequently clean. When I see a stone and I think of her, when I’m thinking of her and I see a stone, I collect it. “It’s been two decades since I came to this place and I can’t find you.”

Not here! she sings.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply. Surely, my connection with my great aunt, my heart, the deepest well of love I was ever lucky enough to be dropped in, would lead me to the spot. Breathe. Send out an energetic request. Breathe. “Siddie?”

And… Nope.

Distracted, I hear my sons stomping around in another block of the cemetery. I think of my friends at the assisted living telling me the whole place gets excited when children visit. I wonder about these folks. Are they excited to have children stomping around up here?

Shhh! Try again. Open your heart.

Nothing.

I remember the burial, my mother’s sister’s moans and my strong desire to push her into an open grave. I remember the grave’s location, in relation to the Shomrim Obelisk, the marker of the Jewish detectives’ plot, where my grandfather is buried and where my grandmother’s ashes may or may not have been secretly deposited by my mother and her siblings years ago. I am not, in this moment, concerned about my grandfather, long gone before I arrived, leaving trauma, guilt, and a mixed bag of stories of adoration and abuse for me to sort through. My sons spend time looking for Max but I am fairly singularly focused.

I find Sid’s mother and father, Sarah and Samuel. They were listed on the website as being interred together but I found them separated by ten or so graves. Par for the course when one outlives one’s spouse by almost ten years. I take photos of both graves.

“Sarah! She had a heart like a hotel,” Aunt Sid would say about her mother, “There was room in it for everyone.” I know so little about her otherwise. Sid adored her compassion and her sense of humor. “She was beautiful. I look just like her.” She also told me the story of throwing a cat-of-nine-tails down the ash shoot in their New York City apartment, a rebellion of tremendous proportions! I wonder if Sarah with the Hotel Heart hit her children with that seemingly-standard-issue-for-the-era implement or if the threat of its presence was enough to maintain order in the house with three children, two born in Belarus and the American-born youngest, my grandfather. There are stories of other babies, stillborn twins. Somebody told me that Aunt Sid was in the room for her mother’s labor with those lost babies, for the birth/death and decided, then, never to have children of her own.

Of Samuel, I was told that he came to America first, to get established, sending for the rest of the family around 1910. There’s a photo of Sid and her older brother, Ben, standing side by side in boots and heavy clothing. She holds a doll and both of them look stern. She remembered arriving in New York and looking for her father, who had red hair and stood “even taller than the wardrobe.” I grasp at years’ worth of stories to recall more about them. A heart like a hotel, a cat of nine tails, and as tall as the armoire.

Sid told me stores of her baby brother’s arrival. My grandfather, Max. She was so jealous that she took his bottle to torment him and dropped milk in his eye. She was convinced that she had killed him because he cried so loudly, for so long. “As if I had drowned him in a lake.”

Later they became best friends. Six years older, she would defend him from bullies in the street and he would bet his friends that she could outrun, outjump, outfight any challenger.

In her nineties, she would still weep for him, gone for half a century.

Old cemeteries are interesting, when a person is not frustrated, grieving, and nursing a stubbed toe. There was an era, in the early twentieth century, when graves were marked with headstones shaped to look like a stump or log, engraved with a sentiment, “A Life Cut Short” and an age at death. Vast sections of old cemeteries have veritable concrete forests, erected between now-hard-to-read, faded stones, shiny black stone with curly cursive and tiny, photos mounted on the stones. And there are newer, top-notch, twenty-first century stones with laser-etched photos. I pass a stone shaped like a book with “Book of Life” carved on its “spine”, in case the visitor isn’t sure of the genre/title/destination.

But I can’t find Sid.

I get mad. Did my uncle ever get her a headstone?  Did her favorite nephew leave her here in an unmarked grave?  After all she did for him? After loans turned gifts and international travel and unwavering support?  Now, I’m pissed. Maybe that is why I am crying.

Or maybe it’s because she abandoned me without her laughter and her wisdom and her forgiveness, her long hugs and elaborate stories. “Look at me, Sid. I brought you my boys, these babies of mine you pressured me to fill your arms with.” In the last years that she lived in New York, she clipped photos of babies from magazines, shamelessly tore pages out right in the middle of medical waiting rooms and taped them to her wall. When I arrived in her apartment, with bagels and cottage cheese, instant coffee and grapes, she would introduce me to another of my beautiful children-to-be. “You could have a baby with a nice afro. And see this one’s green eyes?” Then she would tell me, again, a story of my penchant for nudity as a toddler. “Those blonde ringlets and the little fat cheeks. Like a renaissance cherub.”

She would tell me the story of my best tantrum ever, or at least the best one she was fortunate enough to witness - and photograph. No one remembers the reason for the tantrum but I was done with my family, the bossy parents, the crying baby, never, ever, ever, getting my way. “You went to your room, stripped off all of the trappings of this world, emptied a dresser drawer, and curled up for a nap. Nude! Curled up in a dresser drawer, as if you could return to the womb.” Then she would pull out the photo of a little, naked me, balled up in a dresser drawer on the floor of my room at the farm house. That photo was always nearby. She carried it in her purse until her very last days. “My Jenn-ella. My Tootsie girl.” More than once, as a teenager, I met her friends or spoke to them on the phone. “Oh,” they would say, “Is this THE Jennifer? The NAKED baby, Jennifer?”

I see my oldest, tallest son scanning headstones near the obelisk. Currently obsessed with The Wire and Sopranos reruns, he’s interested in my grandfather’s life and history. Sid knows, without me telling her, that I am every day thankful to her for this young man.

After delivering my first child, my own stillborn daughter, I was terrified that I would never be a mother. Every month without a pregnancy was utter failure. One night, in bed, I gave up on prayers to an old man god, some anonymous deity who had already failed me. If any love in the Universe was strong enough to move the stars for us, it would be my Sidonie. I felt she was connected with the first wild child, her namesake, Thistle Sidonie, that baby who arrived wrapped, again and again, in her umbilical cord.  

In the dark, some seventeen years ago, I opened my heart to Aunt Sid, and invited her to intervene for us, to send us a baby, to protect the pregnancy and the baby with her love. And then I felt her. I felt her hand on my face, that familiar softness.

And I knew that we would be okay.

A week later, I had a positive pregnancy test.

“See, Sid?  You sent us a good one.”

Tall and with a good sense of humor. I laugh. Her standards were high. “I could never respond to anyone who was under six feet tall,” she would say before regaling me with stories of the two great loves of her life, how she got them and how profound their love. She met Bob on Christmas Eve, while on a date with another man who she found terribly dull. The moment their eyes locked, they fell into a passionate kiss and Mr. Dull was history. Bob went off to serve in the war and misunderstood one of her telegrams as a breakup note. He returned, heartbroken, and married someone else, later to discover that Sid had been waiting for him. While she never said as much, I believe they stayed in touch, friends or more, for the rest of his life.

Her next great love was Ric. On vacation in Portofino, she had “dropped” her handbag and spilled its contents onto the floor in front of him as he walked by. He graciously bent to pick them up and offered to show her around. She got into his car and spent the rest of her trip in the passenger seat. Later he would propose and she accept, returning the ring after her brother’s death. She had to be close to his children, in New York, should they need her.

My middle son comes over and asks if I’m okay. I burst into tears. “I can’t find her. Maybe we should just go.” He insists we continue to look, kisses my forehead, returns to the search, to the gate, to check the number and the rows.

“Sid, this one is like you. Smart. A little judgey. Self-assured.” Beautiful, like his twice-great aunt.

I think of taking the boys, when they were small, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I did it to extend her legacy, to make sure they understood the importance of art, that they respected perspective and light, and even Andy Worhol. Mostly, that they saw her favorites, the Impressionists. My middle man would stride by Degas’ nudes, his dancer girl and the small sculptures, horses and horses and more horses. “Why doesn’t this lady have a baby bump like you do, Momma?” he asked when I was eight months along with his little brother. I could feel her delight at this. This comment, and so many others, would have gone into her notebook of fabulous quotes from little people. It would be there with my brother’s inquiry, while gazing at the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There’s a lot of mummies here but where are all the daddies?” A hundred times, at least, she told me that story. Of Jonathan’s sweetness and his gentle soul, of his concern that the mummies had traipsed off to the afterworld and left all the daddies behind, a story he understood too well.

At last, I surrender and head to the cemetery office. They give me a map, assure me that Sidonie Eisenstadt is in the area I remembered, on the other end of the row. Hebrew cemeteries are, apparently, numbered right to left. No wonder I flunked Hebrew School!

When I see the stone, her name, it feels…not enough. No monument could mark the wonder of that human, her compassion, her love, her loyalty. No physical marker could show how she convinced me that I was beautiful and smart and able to do anything, to be anything. She convinced me that I could make the world a better place. I choke as I speak to the stone, as if it is a conduit to the place she is now, as if she will hear me now, in this place, more than when I speak to her while I’m driving, dancing, cooking, laughing at myself. The boys hold onto me and I tell her how I miss her every day. I thank her for all that she taught me, how she taught me to love and to forgive. I tell the boys that Aunt Sid taught me to laugh and to cry, sometimes in the same moment, and that those things are the very most important things.

And then we leave that place. But we don’t leave her.

Because I wasn’t there, Tootsie.

“She’s with us. Part of us,” says the youngest. And he’s not wrong.