So UD woke up this morning and, thinking how she might frame this second part of her account of her visit yesterday to the grave of a person she never met (see post immediately below this one for Part One), she decided to let her musical mind focus hard on the visit.

To what music would her consciousness, subconscious, unconscious, take her if she set all her pistons firing in the direction of Laurie’s grave, broad sunlight, the fallen city, forgiveness, suffering?

Well, here’s where she went, instantly.

And in particular to the song’s first verse:

All of the riverboat gamblers are losing their shirts
All of the brave union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
But you know and I know there never was reason to hurt
When all of our lives were entwined to begin with

Maybe it’s not surprising that she went to that song and that singer. Steve Goodman was, like Laurie, a brilliant Jew who suffered and died before his time. And the question the song poses – Why do people hurt each other so much when their lives after all are entwined to begin with? – is right on the money. Plus of course there’s the morbid business of the brave soldiers sleeping in the dirt…

UD found herself thinking also about the “mystery” vs. “muddle” business in E M Forster’s Passage to India. If you don’t visit the grave, if you settle on all that personal history being a muddle and not a mystery, you are enabled to avoid, all your life, confrontations with that past and your part in it, and the question of whether you’ve made any progress beyond hurting and being hurt. After all, who knows. It’s all a muddle.

But if one hot summer afternoon you find yourself actually standing at the grave, reading aloud the two things that your Israeli friend Janet suggested you read, and placing on top of the gravestone one of your prized calcite-lined beach stones on which you’ve taped a thin piece of paper with these words on it —

One evening she surprised us by belting out “Amazing Grace,” every note pitch perfect.

— taken from a memorial essay two old friends of hers wrote… If you find yourself doing all of that, trying to puzzle out not only the story of this brilliant and thwarted life, this over-richness lying in a plot for the poor, but also your weird feeling that you are somehow implicated in the story (when the only thing that ever happened between me and Laurie was her replacing me in the affections of David Kosofsky), things have obviously progressed from muddle to mystery.

It wouldn’t be a pilgrimage without obstacles,
mysteries and wrong turns, and my sister and I
had all of these today in our search for this grave.

The trip from the Beltway to Capitol Heights
in Prince George’s County Maryland was without
incident, but we missed the turn into the cemetery,
so hidden and overgrown was its entrance.

We didn’t know about the several adjacent Jewish
cemeteries in this rather forsaken corner of the
metro region, so when we took a few more turns and
came upon the National Capitol Hebrew Cemetery,
we thought this might be the place.

The layout was all wrong, though, and after
a short walk in the blazing sun we began piling
back into the car. As we left, we photographed
the back of a gravestone:

One of the caretakers there –
very nice guy in a red pickup –
asked if we needed help.

“Is there another cemetery near
here?” UD asked. “For indigents?”

He said yes and told us to follow his truck.

Seconds later, he escorted us through the gates.

*****************

Immediately the place jibed with the instructions
Phil Goldman had given me:
A hill on one side, flat land on the other, and
Laurie was buried on the left, on flat land.

This cemetery was much prettier and better kept
than the first one we saw. The ugly urban streetscape
outside its gates unsettled one, but this secluded
little space, with its rows of identical headstones
framed by oaks whose rounded crowns mirrored the
tops of the stones, instantly created a hush within and without.

*******************

All photographs Frances Eby.

On its fiftieth anniversary, everyone’s talking about Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue. (Go here.) UD, who listened obsessively to the thing throughout her unhappy freshman year at Goucher College, hasn’t much to add – beyond random unhappy personal things – to all the superannuated hippie nostalgia out there.

As in – her roommate that year, Marian Dillon, was lively, beautiful and came from a wealthy, private school background (UD, remarkably clueless for someone from Bethesda, didn’t know what a private school was until Marian explained it to her). Marian hadn’t brought her horse to college, but Courtney down the hall had (can’t remember her last name, but she was closely related to Philip Roth and looked a lot like him), and UD should have been tipped off from the campus stables and horses and Courtney’s horse scrapbooks that Goucher really wasn’t a good UD fit… But I digress. The sad personal thing is that UD idly searched Marian’s name a few months ago and she died at 52.

That year was also sad because David Kosofsky and I were tumultuously on and off; he’d show up from College Park, we’d thrash around trying to make sense of our hopeless relationship, and then he’d drive back to school. Laurie Fleischman, his true love, was somehow (too long ago to remember) in the background of all of this. And that’s two other sad personal things: Both Laurie and David also died young. “WHAT LIVES ARE IN STORE FOR 2 SUCH AS US!” she wrote him from the Bronx High School of Science. Bizarrely, I ended up with her love letters/sketches/pressed flowers to David.

In one of them, she nastily alluded to wee UD as (yes) “Joni Mitchell.” (David had attended performances I’d given, in high school and synagogue, of Joni Mitchell songs.) For Laurie, Joni Mitchell was short for Not Charlie Parker, Not Hip, Not Jazz, Not… Blues. Joni Mitchell was short for Sylvia Plath – a suburban pipsqueak with the pseudoblues.

UD wonders if, over the years of Mitchell’s artistic development, Laurie felt more generous toward her.

*********************

So picture ol’ UD, years later, tears welling up as she reads Laurie’s letters to David and thinks on the bitter reversal of all that beautiful passionate arrogant youth.

I guess the Blue song for this is The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Not an old friend.

Never met her in fact.

She was a (triumphant) rival for an old boyfriend’s love. Wee UD spent some years feeling hatred for her.

And then all that youthful passion and rivalrous intensity was over and we both grew up and married (neither of us married the old boyfriend) and she became a scientist at NIH and ol’ UD, well, you know…

But though she was a golden girl with everything going for her – blistering beauty, intellectual as well as artistic brilliance, Bronx-bred cockiness – she got only half a life, and she suffered a lot. Family and health woes beset her, she died barely into her sixties, and her end was seen to by the Hebrew Free Burial Society.

It has gradually become important for UD to make a pilgrimage to her grave.

To – I suppose – make amends for the hatred UD felt for her, and to honor her exuberance and her suffering.

The man who runs her obscure resting place responded to UD‘s email and gave her directions to the place, and to her old rival’s gravestone. So that is what UD will try to do tomorrow (try, because the place is open only on Sundays for a few hours and UD suspects no one ever goes there and so maybe although it says it’s open it won’t be open) and she will write about it here.