Audrey’s Door (24 page)

Dear jerk,

Thanks for leaving me in a motel room. You probably should have kicked in a few bucks for the bill.

Saraub,

I was very surprised by your departure, but trust you know what you’re doing. Good luck with your film, and all future endeavors.

In 1857, fifteen coal tycoons had an idea. Instead of traveling to faraway summer homes on Long Island and the Adirondacks, they’d build their own, self-contained community in the hills of Harlem. A grand apartment building sequestered far away from the sewaged streets of Washington Square, and close enough to the bucolic Hudson River for daily swims. They’d have no need to send for kith and kin: they would bring the party with them.

They commissioned the popular architect Edgar Schermerhorn to design the building, and he rendered it with his trademark Chaotic Naturalist details, though the building itself was not affiliated with that religion. The Breviary took five years to erect, and its two-degree slant from perpendicular remains a feat of engineering to this day.

In the absence of an Episcopalian place of worship, the fifteen requested that a church be built in The Breviary’s lobby, and a rectory constructed out of its basement. The Irish immigrants who laid the stones, resentful of a Protestant God, named their creation “The Dark Church.” The name stuck, but its true origin has been forgotten, which is why locals misguidedly claim that the building is haunted.

The Breviary was born in turmoil. The “Great
Panic of 1857” had led to a decade-long economic depression. The dollar’s value dropped. Collapsed land speculation, grain prices, and the manipulation of gold’s value drove banks into failure. New York shouldered the brunt of the crisis. Riots, most notably between Bayard Street’s Bowery Boys and Five Points’ Dead Rabbits, plunged the city into chaos. For weeks, the dead were buried along dirt roads in unmarked graves. Violence spread as far north as the Astor Slums of the Upper West Side. Local and state police could not rout the violent tide. Finally, our dear President Lincoln recalled the nearest Civil War regiment from Bull Run to occupy the city and restore order.

Like all storms, the crisis passed, and the city recovered, much like we will recover from our own black Tuesday. When Manhattan yawned, stretched, and awoke from its nightmare, it cast its gaze on the dazzling Breviary.

By far the most regal edifice of its era, if you walk by it, you’ll see that it does not face forward but turns slightly to the west, as if posing coyly for passersby. Its limestone is now gray with soot, but its unevenly distributed gargoyles are still sharp as cut glass. Like the city which it inhabits, its strength is a miracle.

Perhaps the most defining aspect of The Breviary is its occupants. Those same fifteen original investors who commissioned the property raised their families on each of its fifteen floors, and it is now their children and grandchildren who reside there. They are members of a genteel and endangered class who still leave calling cards and equip their doormen with top hats. They throw parties each Monday evening, hopping from floor to floor in the small town that
is their building. Many of them attended Yale, Harvard, Radcliffe, or Bowdoin before returning home and wedding each other. Each year at their annual New Year’s Eve Ball, they raise money for the neighbourhood homeless, and on winter Sundays, they set out a pot of spiced rum, which they serve to the needy.

Reflective of the city in which it resides, The Breviary has not only survived the precarious environment of its birth, but thrived. We are New Yorkers, after all; we will always endure. So if you’re in the neighbourhood, you ought to say hello to the residents of the Dark Church of Harlem, and remember that you are one of them!

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 113
^th
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 fre
quently 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.