A Dog's Life(31)

The cemetery more than lived up to (if that’s the appropriate term) our anticipation of the comic possibilities ahead. The first thing we discovered was that words like ‘undertaker’ and ‘mortician’ had been replaced with ‘before need counselor’. The founder of Forest Lawn, Dr Hubert Eaton, had paid for the acres of barren land in 1917 by selling plots on a hire purchase system. Hence those ‘before need counselors’. We parked the car, and began our tour by visiting the Little Church of the Flowers, modelled on the church in Stoke Poges that inspired Thomas Gray to write his ‘Elegy’. From there, we went on to the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather (that o’ was cause for a smile), a replica of the kirk in Glencairn where Annie Laurie worshipped. We entered, and left, to the accompaniment of bagpipes. We gave the Church of the Recessional (a reproduction of St Margaret’s in Rottingdean, which Rudyard Kipling attended) a miss and made our way to God’s Garden, in which is enshrined another replica – that of a statue of Christ by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. We were in the Court of the Christus within God’s Garden, staring at the bearded Christ, when a recorded voice came out of a tree. ‘You are standing before the Son of God’ it boomed. ‘If you wish to look into his eyes, you must go down on your knees.’ We did as instructed, and duly caught His bland expression.

‘You are standing in the Westminster Abbey of the New World’ another booming voice announced as we stepped into the Memorial Court of Honor. That same sepulchral voice instructed us – there was one other person present, a woman with a nervous tic – to take our seats if we wished to see, and learn the history of, the Last Supper Window. The lights dimmed and a pair of curtains parted to the strains of the waltz from The Merry Widow. On the screen was Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in its frail state of preservation. Then the voice explained that Dr Hubert Eaton had visited Milan in the 1920s and had been awestruck by the sight of the painting. It grieved Dr Hubert Eaton that Leonardo’s masterwork was so faint, due to the ravages of time. The doctor had an inspiration. He contacted ‘famed artist’ Rosa Moretti and asked what she would give to make a stained-glass replica of the Last Supper. ‘I would give my life, Dr Eaton,’ she replied.

We began to laugh, Vanni and I, as the voice droned on, imparting the news that Rosa Moretti produced her stained-glass window only to have it crack. And where did it crack? With the figure of Judas. She telephoned Dr Hubert Eaton, who encouraged her to try again. She finished a second window and a crack appeared in exactly the same place. A third window cracked, and so did the fourth and fifth. It was as though Judas, the betrayer of Our Lord, had put a curse on it. Rosa Moretti was very unhappy. Dr Hubert Eaton telephoned ‘famed artist’ (hearing that phrase once more, we collapsed with laughter) Rosa Moretti and advised her to pray. He would pray, too, for the window he had commissioned. Their joint prayers might save the day. So Dr Hubert Eaton in California and Rosa Moretti in Perugia offered up their prayers for a perfect window. Their prayers were answered, and Dr Hubert Eaton and Rosa Moretti were overjoyed. They had won their battle with the wicked spirit of Judas Iscariot.

The brightly coloured Last Supper Window was revealed to us, to the accompaniment of the Blue Danube.

‘Do you guys come here just to break up?’ the woman asked, as we were overcome with giggling. ‘Have either of you been to Italy?’ she enquired, pointing to a copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s.

I said that my friend was Italian.

‘Have you seen the original Pietà (she pronounced it pee-ay-ter) in Rome?’

We both answered that we had.

‘Doesn’t the Virgin Mary have a sort of strip across her body?’

‘Yes, she does,’ we replied.

‘It’s not here,’ she shrieked. ‘Look.’ We looked. The strip wasn’t there. ‘It’s a fake. This is not a real replica. I shall write to the Los Angeles Times. I shall write to the Pope.’ And thus shrieking, she stormed out of the Westminster Abbey of the New World.

We were on the verge of hysteria. The Blue Danube faded away. There was a moment’s silence before The Ride of the Valkyries began. The Ride of the Valkyries? Was there a humourist lurking in the recesses of the Memorial Court of Honor?

Later that day, we inspected the replica of Ghiberti’s bronze doors from the Baptistery of San Giovanni, saw Michelangelo’s newly fig-leafed David, and took in Jan Styka’s huge painting The Crucifixion (complete with recorded comments from the hecklers in the crowd) and The Resurrection by Robert Clark, which is almost as huge and just as dire. We chanced on a sculpture depicting several generations of men, women and children entitled The Mystery of Life and were hysterical once more when the song