It’s mid-fall. The leaves are somewhere between dull brown and brutally orange on the last afternoon that it is not too crisp to walk by the river. We wile our way down past Darwin’s, the coffee shop we have yet to discover; across the crosswalk with the lights that never change to walk; and next to an unending row of fencing and hedges. The cemetery is still open for an hour this late in the day…is it six or seven?
The end of our aimlessness is the tower tucked in what seems like the far corner of the old graveyard—Mount Auburn Cemetery. The paths have names like Cowslip and Eglantine, and the up and down of the walk hides one grouping of stones from the next. To the left, some family has paid thousands for a granite snowman of three stacked boulders with names engraved. Is it modern art or just ugly? To the right, an angel kneels on a limestone column, and we never figure out if a dog is buried in the next monument or just a dog-lover: why else is there a statue of a retriever?
But Mount Auburn is above all expensive and old, not the sort of place that condescends to bury a pet. You don’t have to read the crimson sign at the entrance to know that this is the first landscaped graveyard in the country. You can feel its age and importance in the thickness of the trees that block our vision, that lead us to and then away and then towards the tower. Leisure and death mingle here. A stone sphinx sits passively next to a chapel ornate enough to belong in St. Petersburg. In this picturesque vision of death, we are for the moment unbothered by the morbid truth: we have become tourists of tombstones.
And finally, the rook-like structure emerges from behind half a dozen trees and an artfully sloped hill. Two-tiered with thickly framed windows, Washington Tower is sort of place that you might expect to meet the Rapunzel leaning into the view, her braid cascading down its rounded side. For the moment, with the terrors of midterms on hold, we are more than willing to imagine her there and to join in revelry. Giddily exhilarated, we, too, are determined to climb to the top, to see the whole of Boston and Cambridge spread out before us, to have our own insignificance by comparison reinforced.
But we are never given the chance. The tower door is locked, as is the cemetery and its gate by the time we finally figure our way to it almost an hour later. A hefty padlock mocks us from around the barred entrance, clamping down on the only way out we recognize. I blame the landscaping and Apple Maps, which could not tell us where we were, or get us out once we had lost sight of the exit in the trees. There is a lesson to be had here, but there is no one in the office, and there is not time for it. A sign by the door reads that there are still plots for sale. Great. The gate in front of us is several times my height, and I am not a short woman: it will not be climbable.
So we walk, creeping along the edge of the fence in hopes of finding the next gate, which we do. 20 minutes and two wrong turns later, it’s locked. There are pikes on top of the fence, which is still too high to make it over. I do not want to die impaling myself on decorative wrought iron, and refuse an attempt to climb over.
We find our way to the back of a white marble monument, looking for places to slip under or through the bars. There are none: we are both too fat.
The cemetery office has been called twice. No one picks up, and no messages are left. If we make it out of here alive, it’s better that the people in charge never know where we are—would this be considered trespassing? Better not risk it. We aren’t yet beyond the age that the natural assumption must be that we have chickened out of some prank or snuck off to smoke, though we have done neither. Besides, this is a police report that anyone might laugh at. How would one even begin to explain such an arrest to future employers? I’m sorry, sir; I have no sense of direction. I got lost among the gravestones, you see. There is quite a lot of American history to be found there, wouldn’t you agree? Oh, no, you don’t understand? I’m an upstanding citizen, honest!
The debate continues behind the looming mausoleum as the sky turns an eerie shade of blue and the time of day can no longer be called afternoon or evening.
Five minutes ago, I did not believe in ghosts, spirits, or the inferi from Harry Potter. It all seems pretty plausible now. I curse every friend who made me attend horror movie Sundays in high school, the dead landscape artist who designed this haunt, the inventor of fake blood, and every S.O.B. who worked on Apple Maps, which still won’t offer up a way out or an accurate location.
Ahead, a menacing bunny rabbit rustles a pile of half-decaying leaves. I begin to identify with knights in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in a way I never wished nor intended to. The wind yowls. Fallen twigs become grasping, pale fingers, reaching for what? At every turn in the path, another wave of gravestones confronts us, and hundreds more unseen markers snarl at us from the looming blackness. An over-active imagination fills in the rest. What arrogance induced us to take a pleasure stroll in a burial ground?
Cold, desperate, and scared witless, we give in—wrought iron be damned. At the next available break in the fence, the leaves are pushed away, and I scrape my nose rolling under. Miraculously, we make it through, brush away the dirt, and cross the street.
As if following our flight, the headlights of a patrol car veer up from within the cemetery, pausing questioningly for a moment where we stand gaping back, not quite managing to maintain the no-no-of-course-we’re-not-trespassing-just-respectable-youngsters -enjoying-a-nippy-late-night-walk charade. A heartbeat and a half later, the sedan turns languorously towards the tombstones. By then, we are already skedaddling our sorry selves back to campus.
Behind us, peacefully undisturbed once more, the dead are having the last laugh.
