Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  UP IN THE OLD BREVIARY: ONE WRITER’S ENDING

  I’ve read these personal histories before. They’re pretentious and self-indulgent. My avid readers have come to expect more from me than droll hat tricks, so it was with some reluctance that I agreed to write this article. Let’s hope I do a better job than my illustrious predecessors. The bar, at least, warrants no high jump. I’ll try not to mention my ethnic peculiarities, cold father, or first sexual experience—disastrous, incestuous, or otherwise.

  I was born in Wilton, Connecticut, in 1961, and educated locally, then attended Brown University before moving to my final resting place, Manhattan. Though not a native New Yorker, I’ve been here long enough to act like one. I can’t drive a car; my license elapsed long ago. I can’t countenance waiting for anything; even my dry cleaning has to be delivered. I like my lattes with extra foam and 2% milk, but not skim, and I prefer Indian cuisine to Thai and Senegalese. In short, I’m an ass. But there are worse fates for mice and men.

  I don’t visit Wilton often. Its wide-open spaces exacerbate my agoraphobia. I’m unaccustomed to big blue skies and streets without numbers. Old family friends and neighbors, barely recognizable now, walk with canes and stumped gaits that remind me too much of the passage of time. I’m told that the Wilton I write about bears little resemblance to the genuine item. In my books, kids wear bell bottoms, movie ushers check identification to prevent fifteen-year-olds from entering R-rated movies, mothers stay at home to raise their children, and fathers commute on the 7:08 express to Grand Central Station to earn their families’ daily bread. It’s not an ideal place to live, but it’s predictable, and its values and taboos are clearly defined.

  Between my dream Wilton and the real thing are the embellishments of nostalgia. I cannot say which details are true any longer and which are suspect. Perhaps, retroactively, I’m constructing my ideal childhood and tacking it over the one that did not measure up. Together, they are a new fabric. Both visible. And like the boy on the rocking horse who wishes hard enough, both true.

  I’d go back to that dream place if I could, just to poke around. But it seems that’s impossible. And so, instead, I live on 113th Street in Manhattan. My nine-and eleven-year-old girls share a cramped bedroom, attend Columbia Prep, and quote the Reader’s Digest versions of Heidegger printed in their English textbooks. I doubt they understand it, but I’m assured by their teachers that comprehension is not the point. They don’t understand their favorite pop star’s mental breakdown either, do they? But they still discuss it, and her heroin tracks, as if she is one of their friends. I’m often astounded when I hear their dinner-table chatter about one boy’s father, who is in jail for tax evasion, the girl who removed her shirt in front of two male schoolmates for a fee of $5, and how they’ve given up butter, because it’s too fattening, even though, ringing wet, neither of them comes close to a buck. They are small adults in children’s bodies. Who would have guessed that the democratization of information would also democratize maturity? We’re not in Wilton, anymore, Toto.

  In my idealized family life, my wife and I would dress for dinner, discuss lofty intellectual quandaries with our children, and after tucking them into bed, would sit quietly while listening to Wagner and nursing a scotch. The scotch part being essential. Instead, I spend most evenings at the computer while my wife returns phone calls. She wears one of those phones that plugs into her ear, so when she talks, I sometimes forget, and wonder if she’s having a schizophrenic break. Who could blame her? She’s an event planner and answers at least two hundred e-mails a day.

  We don’t use our kitchen to cook. We reheat. Last night, after the kids went to sleep, we watched television. The program was not Masterpiece Theatre, but a reality celebrity drug rehabilitation show starring washed-up has-beens in all their drug-addled glory, their problems neatly resolved in one-half hour. We learned that the comedian from an 00’s sitcom enjoyed his crack from a pipe, while the child star from that same show preferred her self-destruction via sex trade. Was a love connection in the cards between these crazy kids? Would they live happily ever after and drug-free, or, more likely, when the camera faded, and the limelight to which they are addicted ceased to shine, would they crawl back to their former slop heaps, only to make the news once more, this time with the story of their overdoses. Who can resist such titillation!

  Bradbury and Debord alike admonished us not to spy on our neighbors, but to learn their names. And yet, we’ve installed cameras in practically every room of our homes, voluntarily. I cannot help but wonder if Warhol’s fifteen minutes, now truncated to fifteen seconds, signals the death knell of the human mind. Where once, it interpreted and recognized patterns, now it regurgitates without comprehension.

  The modern world is defined by absence. Religion, family, work, and even our American nationality have lost currency. Instead of finding suitable replacements for the vacuum their loss has created, we deny that they are ailing and cling to their rotting remains, quite aware of the paradox, the hypocrisy, the inevitable corruption. In 1966, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” Now the question is reassuringly quaint: it assumes God once existed.

  It is the nature of a vacuum to be filled. Our government drops more bombs on more countries every year. Our friends, undependable and temporary, make poor substitutes for our broken families. We are taught that it is our patriotic duty to consume, and so we fill our leisure time with the pursuit of more and better leisure. Our malls have become our churches.

  And so I return to the apocalyptic social critics of the 1930s, who’ve fallen into obscurity over the last few decades, and wonder if their prognostications might have been correct, after all. Perhaps there is a reason for the obesity, and the lawsuits, and the war-waging that erodes our Roman walls. Easy gratification has stunted our development and rendered us eternal adolescents. We find the old and sick distasteful, and so sequester them from our sight. In their absence, we’ve become so accustomed to having our way that we cannot even perceive our own deaths.

  Our wealth has prevented us from having to sacrifice, or even choose. And in the end, what separates us from animals, save choice?

  It is with these cheering thoughts that, like Joseph Mitchell before me (though I flatter myself by the comparison), I lie awake some nights and ponder my mortal coil. The bells of St. John the Divine attend my thoughts, chiming the hour, and I examine the unexamined until it frightens me so dearly that I must surrender to my insomnia, and rouse. My perambulations lead me always to the same place. First the church, and then, The Breviary.

  For those who’ve never seen it, The Breviary is a marvel of gargoyles and hand-carved stone. Among the rest of the modern glass condominiums on the block, its sooty façade and westward orientation appear like a twisted, blackened tooth along a gleaming white smile. Even the inside of the place, though its windows are high and massive, is dark.

  On more than one occasion, its kind, white-gloved doorman has permitted me entrance to its lobby, and I’ve sat in one of its red velvet chairs and read a book until dawn. I can’t explain why, but its splendor has always made me feel a little closer to the world I wish I inhabited. A fork in the road forty years ago, that would have led to a life, a world, quite different.

  It was with a heavy heart that I greeted the news of the Clara DeLea tragedy. I am no innocent to history or human nature. Still, that monstrous act unmoored me. We live in civilized times. We say please and thank you and wipe our faces and asses. Not even our household pets can stand the sight of their own excrement, and yet this woman murdered her own blood. I wanted to know under what circumstances she could do such a thing. I began looking at my wife and daughters differently, at the very notion.

  I researched DeLea and found few answers. A history of alcoholism and depression, but I’m in no position to cast stones on either account. She’d never been committed, voluntarily or otherwise. I ran out of things to investigate, so I turned my gaze to the gargoyled creature that had greeted me twice a day
, and often in the late evening, for thirteen years.

  There are so many remarkable buildings in New York that The Breviary is often overlooked. Few guidebooks mention it, and almost no one but an art history major could identify its design as Chaotic Naturalism. Nonetheless, it is surprising that it has not achieved a cult following, if not for its design, then for its history.

  Completed in 1861 in the farmland of what was once Harlem Hills, The Breviary was commissioned by a group of nascent coal prospectors with money to burn. Their incomes increased exponentially during the Civil War, when coal was the only available power source. They provided it to both sides, and though they were charged with treason, the allegations never stuck. By the 1870s, most of them had shown the good sense to start digging for Texas black gold.

  The Breviary’s architect, Edgar Schermerhorn, led an infamous career. He designed eighteen buildings. All but one were unsound and eventually condemned. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, his training ground was eastern Europe, and when he returned to Boston and New York, he brought the new school of Chaotic Naturalism back with him. After designing his one success, The Breviary, he went on to construct plans for several slaughterhouses in lower Manhattan that would later be proven inhumane. Under his tutelage, the animals were disemboweled. Screaming, they circled the small stables until they bled to death.

  Schermerhorn was quoted saying that The Breviary’s design did not come from him, but rather, through him. He dreamed it, and when he woke, on his bedside table, were its plans, already drawn. Every effort to reproduce those plans, aside from The Breviary, resulted in disaster.

  The building got its name Dark Church, not, as some would believe, because the Irish Catholics, who hauled its mortar resented that its main floor was an Episcopalian Church, but because of what happened after that. In 1886, Edgar Schermerhorn hanged himself from a rafter above the church altar. The noose didn’t hold, and he descended thirty feet. The blood from his cracked skull flowed west along the building’s two-degree slant. A year later, his wife was quoted in the New York Tribune saying that whenever she looked inside The Breviary’s stained-glass eyes, the madness of its maker peered back at her. “Like a mollusk trading shells,” she’d said, “He fell so in love with his own creation that he climbed inside it.”

  For those unschooled in backwoods superstition, such acts render a church unsanctified. Though I’m not a religious man, it does bear noting that the church was never blessed after Schermerhorn’s death, though it continued to host Chaotic Naturalist masses, a religion its tenants converted to, through the 1970s. It now serves as the lobby in which I now sit and write this article.

  Over the years, scandal has plagued the building. In 1916, a doorman who lived in the basement went missing. Two weeks later his body was dug up by a stray dog foraging for food on the grounds that are now St. John the Divine. The original owners of the building did not fare much better. Of the fifteen men and their families occupying its corresponding fifteen floors, only seven survived the Great Depression. The stock market collapse was partly to blame for the suicides, which were a monthly event. The mode most frequently employed was flights out windows, but there were also medicinal overdoses, drownings (DeLea was not the first to engage a tub for her deeds), hangings, slit wrists, and fatal gunshot wounds (two to the head, and one, improbably, to the groin). The vacancies these deaths created allowed those who remained to spread like mold and take over the rest of the building.

  On average, 1 in 125 people commit suicide. That number varies by year, but has essentially remained the same over the last century. In New York, the odds are slightly higher: 1:86. In The Breviary, that average is 1:10. Think about that. Since its erection, 2,320 people have lived there. Many moved away. Some stayed. 232 killed themselves. Another 109 were murdered.

  There are theories that suicide is genetic. It carries like hemophilia through families. William Carlos’ article in Popular Science cites two specific genes for self-harm, and his research is currently under consideration at universities across the country. The families who erected The Breviary still own it. Save for the occasional rentals, the same blood lives there now as has always lived there, and it is possible, given their lineage, that they are all distantly related to each other and carry the suicide gene.

  My own family, for example, is thick with the blight. In 1968, my grandfather, Thomas Spalding, shot himself with his own revolver like a coward. My mother, who adored him, discovered his gore. In 1973, my sister Carrie, a high-school freshman and gold-medal high jumper, walked in front of a Metro North train on its way to Manhattan. I made oblique reference to it in my third novel, and some critics have postulated that her death is the impetus behind all my fiction. I should correct that here by saying, it’s not the act that motivates me, but the mundaneness with which she drank her pulpless orange juice that morning and slung her backpack over one shoulder. In my memory, she turned back after she smiled good-bye, as if she’d changed her mind, and wanted to say more, but had no means by which to express herself. She’d looked to me, the writer, to express it for her.

  It is the empty coffin that haunts me, because her remains were washed off the third rail with a fire hose. It is the life she could have led that haunts me, and the possibility, like Clara DeLea, that she knew something I did not. There is a secret there, unfathomable. Possibly divine. I see it every time I pass The Breviary’s thick walls, or think of September 1973, when the world was new, and the siren call of train whistles made me think of travel and not tragedy.

  When the New Yorker requested that I write my personal history, it started me wondering about the trajectory of my life, real and imagined. I have offspring; ten books and two girls. My third wife I are well matched. But still, I wish Carrie had never taken that graceless leap. If she’d lived, I might have stayed in Wilton and lived a different, more contented life. Instead, I try to tell her story, an endeavor doomed from inception that has made me a restless man, unable to make his own peace. If I’m to be honest, none of my dreams turned out like I expected, and my greatest disappointment is myself.

  It occurs to me that my sister and the tragic inhabitants of The Breviary had the gift of sight. They saw that fork in the road forty years ago that the rest of us missed, and the paradise lost. They perceived the end of mankind and grew weary of waiting.

  I’ve been walking past The Breviary more and more lately. I’m drawn to it. Given all that has happened there, I entertain fancies that it is haunted. Maybe it returns what it’s been given, and humanity has made for substandard clay. Or maybe we humans blame ourselves too much, when in truth we should look to our stars. Perhaps there are worse things than man can imagine, and they beg our audience through the gaps in our memories, and paths not taken, and old apartment buildings that appear to have grown souls.

  I spend my nights now at the building’s lobby, and forgo sleep. A restlessness has invaded my gut—a cold, slithering thing that gnaws without cease and calls itself The Breviary. You reading this can visit me, if you’d like. I’m looking for my personal history here. I’m trying to discover the secret. I’m listening to the bells chime, and wondering if they toll for me.

  *Agnew Spalding is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels, two collections of essays, and a memoir: THINGS THAT FILL THE VOID: A DRINKING MAN’S STORY (1984); MIMIC: SENTINEL (1987); CHASING THE DRAGON (1988); DARK PLACES (1991); DUST OF WONDERLAND (1994); THE DARIEN GAP OF CONNECTICUT (1994); THE PERRY-WELLINGTON ADVENTURES (2002); THE DIVINE DEVOE (2002); A TWISTED LADDER (2009); PETRUCHA’S HUNCH (2012); and HOW NOT TO BUILD YOUR OWN ATOMIC BOMB (2012). His death two days after the completion of this article was a profound loss to the literary community. He is survived by his wife Melinda, and daughters Danielle and Dominique.

  Audrey read the article, then reread it, then searched “Agnew Spalding” and found his obituary. Suicide. In his apartment, after his daughters left for school, but before the maid came, so that it was she who found his body hanging from a ce
iling beam in the kitchen and not his wife. The article noted that his apartment had a view of The Breviary, and his corpse had pointed toward it. Stranger still, he’d shredded the manuscript he was working on, Generation Vain, then pulped it into a single upright rectangle with a hole in it. Since he’d deleted all his files, the work was irretrievably lost.

  She wanted to stop, but there was no turning back. She clicked the next few links in the queue for Breviary, and found headlines like, “Murder-suicide in Tony Manhattan Apartment” dated just two years ago, “Woman Hurls to Own Death” September 4, 2009. Finally, the most recent article, “Bizarre Construction During Final Days.” The caption next to the photo read:

  DeLea apartment, July 4: DeLea made a pile of her worldly belongings in this sitting room. All were chopped into small pieces. The weapon has not yet been found. The apartment also suffered from a serious infestation, which authorities believe may have degraded much of the evidence.