"MOBY DICK" AT GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY

A WHALE OF A TALE | September 15th 2008

Cara Spitalewitz heads to Green-Wood Cemetery in search of "Moby Dick", and finds herself negotiating an odd adventure ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Paging through the New Yorker's culture listings, I noticed "MOBY-DICK: THE SERMON." It was a reading of the Jonah-and-the-Whale sermon from Herman Melville's masterpiece, held in the chapel in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. "Extended indefinitely."

I had never seen the words "extended indefinitely" after a culture listing.

Of course I would go. With my outdated student ID, I called the number at the bottom of the listing and bought a discounted $10 ticket. "Good that you're buying it ahead of time," the ticket-seller said. "It's been sold out lately."

At 7pm, I set out for the cemetery. I got off the bus a few blocks too early--maybe in Sunset Park, maybe in Greenwood Heights. Stumbling over the uneven concrete, I passed a remarkable number of barbershops and beauty parlours, all with their rusty metal grates pulled down. The sound of my feet unnerved me. Even over the drone of the traffic on the Prospect Expressway, my own footsteps just seemed too loud. At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 25th Street stood the iron gates of the 19th-century cemetery.

Filled with something like anticipation and something like dread, I pushed on the gates. They were locked. An old woman got out of a car idling a few yards away. I grew nervous, and instinctively held my house-keys in a defensive way. I pretended to read a magazine page I pulled from my pocket. "You're here for the performance? The gates are locked!" she called over. I was reassured by her gray hair. "Do you have a cell phone? There's an emergency number posted here."

"But this isn't an emergency," I said.

"We might as well call," she said. I called and got an answering machine. Then I dialed the second number, which instructed me to call 911 instead. I hung up, to the old woman's dismay. Determined, she looked at the map posted near the emergency numbers. "It looks like there's another entrance down this way, let's go."

We walked all the way down one side of the cemetery. She was awfully spry. "What brings you here?" she asked.

"'Moby-Dick'. I love 'Moby-Dick'. And I saw it in the New Yorker. How about you?"

"I thought it sounded like something different," she said with a shrug.

After ten minutes, we were amid warehouses and auto repair shops. The streetlights weren't as bright as I would have liked. "We should probably turn around", I said. Then the Oldsmobile that had dropped off my impromptu companion pulled up beside us. It was full of more old women. Someone in the passenger seat cranked down the window. "Barbara, I could kill you. Why'd you drag us here?"

"Get in," Barbara instructed me. I got in. I took a deep breath of fake pine.

"Hello," I said to the woman sitting next to me. She silently moved her cane over to make room.

We drove back to the gate, everyone talking over one another, and parked directly in front of it. I looked out the foggy window and said nothing. No one had asked Barbara why I was in the car, and I wasn't sure why I was in the car. "You can't just park here," one of the women piped in. "You're going to get towed."

"No, I have my pass." The woman who was driving put a laminated, handicapped pass on the dashboard.

"Why don't you just park across the street?" Barbara said.

"Don't tell me what to do."

Barbara's husband had been waiting at the main gate and had attracted the attention of a security guard, who went to get permission from a cemetery warden to unlock the gate. We stood there waiting. "Barbara," her husband said, "this is unorganised."

"What's your name?" she whispered to me.

"Cara," I said.

"Well, Carol here read about it in the New Yorker." He didn't seem to care. The security guard came back and opened the gate, but the chapel was still a long walk away. Barbara's friends couldn't walk that far, so they got into the security car. No one invited me in this time.

I walked down a winding gravel path, past mausoleums, gravestones, lit up almost comically by the moonlight. Did I fall into a gothic cliché? I never liked "Northanger Abbey". I looked back at some other patrons trailing through the now unlocked gates, and then up ahead at the chapel. There was a man at the door dressed in what I imagined to be "Moby Dick" garb. A linty hat with earlaps, a brown woollen coat, a long beard. "I hope you'll join us in song." He handed me a photocopied sheet of hymns.

I sat down in the front pew. It smelled damp and old. Barbara and her friends arrived. The next time I turned around, the chapel was practically full. "Extended indefinitely" echoed in my mind. It was starting.

A man in an old-fashioned three-piece suit and a woman in a bonnet began to sing. I half sang, half mumbled some words about Jesus. Then the preacher climbed up to the podium and began his sermon. He left the door behind him slightly ajar, revealing a storage space for sugar packets and styrofoam cups.

About halfway through, I realised that the sermon came with special effects: fake lightning and rain noise. "Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like two sea-shells, still multi, multitude, multitudinously murmuring of, of the, of the ocean." The preacher was flubbing his lines.

Half an hour passed. Then the lights went on. Everyone sat there, confused. People started getting up. I guess it was over? No one was really sure. No one clapped. I got up and walked out the way I came. I stood in front of the cemetery waiting for the bus to come take me home.

Picture Credits: Pro-Zak/flickr, Randy Son of Robert/flickr

(Cara Spitalewitz is a writer based in New York and a fan of "Moby Dick")