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Al Jolson's
gravesite is impossible to miss. It sits at the top of Hillside
Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery in the Los Angeles suburb
of Culver City. In fact, it's plainly visible from across
the perpetually bustling 405 freeway. I'd seen it literally
thousands of times in the past, yet I hadn't even known it
was a grave. Even after reading Amy Hempel's most celebrated
short story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,"
I hadn't thought much of which cemetery she meant.
Technically,
Jolson is not even buried; he is interred in a sarcophagus
above the ground, in a tall, white circular canopy. A blue
tiled waterfall cascades down its front, and a bronze statue
of Jolson on bended knee with arms splayed—his famous
"Mammy" pose from The Jazz Singer—stands behind
it and to the side. The entire display is large but tasteful
rather than ostentatious.
When
I arrived at the gravesite, I sat on a bench across from the
statue and pulled out a copy of The Collected Stories of
Amy Hempel to reread the story that bears Jolson's name.
"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" is a heartbreaking
story about a young woman visiting her terminally ill best
friend in the hospital.
Inconsequential
details came flooding back into memory, just as the story's
narrator says they do for her. In particular, I remembered
the quip about drinking Canada Dry. What I couldn't remember,
though, were the moments that seemed too real to be fiction:
the girls lining the beach outside the hospital, the Good
Doctor flirting with his patient, the dying friend's calm
during earthquakes. Strangely, I couldn't even remember whether
or not I even liked the story the first time around.
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One major
detail I did remember, however, was that the cemetery was
only mentioned in passing near the end of the story. Literature
students the world over are taught that Jolson himself is
the significant one. In the ICU, the narrator and her friend
wear masks both literally and figuratively to hide their fears
of death and abandonment. Both try to put up tough acts for
each other's sake; but like Jolson's infamous blackface makeup,
it is an obvious façade. Hempel never comes close to making
this connection for her readers, but this is indicative of
her style: She is an expert at using a few well-chosen, descriptive
words to convey volumes about setting, mood, and theme.
But the
kicker is this: many of those details may not be fiction at
all. The story is semi-autobiographical, based on the death
of the woman to whom the story is dedicated, Jessica Wolfson.
Hempel has said that they never spoke any of the things the
characters say in the story, but I wondered if any of the
details were true. Thus, I paid a visit to the mortuary's
front desk. I inquired about Wolfson and discovered that,
yes, she was buried in the same cemetery—and not too
far from Jolson, either. In fact, the only thing separating
them is the mausoleum where Jack Benny is interred. Like most
of the cemetery's grass plots, her grave was marked only by
a plaque. Reading the epitaph, I realized that she was in
her twenties when she died—a year younger than I am currently.
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The discovery
of Wolfson's grave called to question the metaphors that literature
experts find in the story's title. Can one truly call Al Jolson's
role in the story symbolic if the woman really is buried in
the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried? Quite possibly, Hempel
picked Al Jolson because his is the only grave in Hillside
Memorial Park that stands out, serving as a centerpiece for
the entire cemetery.
Of course,
one could argue that Hempel is revealing that the truth is
sometimes stranger and more profound than fiction. Through
her story, Hempel may be commenting on the ironies imbedded
in real life. Perhaps it is as Oscar Wilde said: "Those who
read the symbol do so at their own peril. It is the spectator,
and not life, that art really mirrors." How, then, does this
story mirror its readers? How did it reflect me, a young woman
who was only affected by the tale eight years after reading
it for the first time?
I thought
about this, and I went to see my father.
My father's
ashes are interred in a niche a few short miles away, in the
cemetery where Ella Fitzgerald is interred. Cesar Romero,
who played the Joker on the "Batman" television series, resides
in a mausoleum near my father. There is no metaphor in this.
Dad probably didn't know who either of them was, anyway.
As I
made the short drive to the cemetery, I compared my own experiences
to that of Hempel's narrator. On the surface, they seem nothing
alike. In "Al Jolson," the dying friend was able to talk,
joke, and even tear off her mask to hide in a closet and sob.
My dad hadn't been able to walk in years, and even if he could,
he would have been trapped under all of the tubes criss-crossing
his ICU bed. The worst was the one that went down his throat.
He wanted it removed because it hurt—even more so when
he tried to talk—but we couldn't help him. He couldn't
breathe without it.
Like
Wolfson's grave, my father's is simple: Little more shows
than a plaque and a place to lay flowers. Unlike the simplicity
and serenity of Hillside Memorial, however, this cemetery
is peppered with large, elaborate tombstones and towering
statues of weeping angels. Just after I arrived at the cemetery,
a mariachi band began to play for a small family of mourners
near my father's niche. However, they played no funeral dirges.
Instead, the music reverberating off the walls was bright
and soulful, and I could appreciate the implication: They
were celebrating life.
By contrast,
the narrator of "Al Jolson" thinks about death and tries in
vain to cope with her grief. I had years to come to terms
with my father's death because he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's
Disease when I was twelve. Still, nothing prepares someone
for the actual event. In the days before Dad's death, my mother,
brothers, and I all were afflicted with terrible colds: our
bodies' way of dealing with the stress of the situation.
Where
my and Hempel's stories converge, however, is in writing.
Hempel's grief over Jessica Wolfson's death was channeled
into one of her finest works of literature, helping to establish
her as one of the best short story writers alive. I did not
turn to fiction, but rather to fact. When Dad was taken to
the hospital, my family spent an entire evening in the hallway
of the emergency room. They passed the time by sitting, worrying,
and waiting. I, on the other hand, brought my journal and
wrote. Following his death, I utilized my writing talents—talents
I had inherited from him—by writing in my journal, my
LiveJournal, or my notebooks of creative writing nearly every
day. My mind was full of so many thoughts, writing was the
only way I could faithfully process my feelings. Through writing,
I was able to cope with my father's death far better than
my other family members.
Writing
is cathartic; it purges the soul of emotions so deep, one
may not even have known they existed. As a writer, I know
that it is first and foremost why many writers can never stop.
But the amazing thing about literature is that it also reminds
readers of who they are and how deep their own emotions run.
Even when we read the words of others, we are reading aspects
of ourselves; sometimes, they are the selves we recognize
at present, and sometimes, they are the selves we know from
the past. On certain occasions, when we read carefully, we
discover that they are our future selves telling us who we
will be later in life.
I suppose
this is why I couldn't remember much about "In the Cemetery
Where Al Jolson is Buried." Though I could sympathize with
Hempel's characters, I couldn't yet recognize myself in that
story. But I see now that the story isn't so much about the
symbols literature professors have taught me to find, nor
is it about Hempel's trademark minimalism. The story is first
and foremost about the conveyance of sorrow—Hempel's
true life sorrow and hers alone. And the story's power resides
not in how well we readers sympathize with her pain, but in
how starkly similar it is to our own—how we are, as she
says, "fluent now in the language of grief."
(March,
2007)
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