perfected the art of the ball. Then one morning over coffee and sodium bicarbonate to soothe the barking dogs that had bitten them the night before, they read about the unfathomable Great Depression. Companies were sold. Family names lost luster. Patriarchs jumped out windows or sold heirloom jewels. They married each other, no longer because the outside world was not good enough but because no one else would understand the humbled majesty of their roots.
Sixth generation. The Harlem address lost its bucolic luster. The tenants talked fondly of the golden years and mourned their lost comforts: summer houses, ski lodges, years abroad in Rome. They saved their pennies, Ziplocked leftovers, hemmed their clothes and passed them down to their children. At night, they imagined the disappointed ghosts of their ancestors whispering abuse in their slumbering ears. They avoided sunlight; it burned their fair skin. They didn’t like the jarring sound of street traffic, either. Or the sight of poverty because they knew it was contagious.
Marty remembered the parties back then. His kid-sized double-breasted suit; peeking out from behind his mother’s legs to watch dapper men and women trade barbs and cocktails like the last sophisticates hiding from a barbaric world. Monday nights, a rotating group of families had served spirits in their apartments, gatherings that had ended in lamp shades on heads, shared bedmates, words of unforgivable cruelty, and children of unknown paternity. By the arrival of the seventh generation, the place had echoed with emptiness, and the laughter was resentful. The tenants had turned on one another, because there was no one left to blame.
It happened so slowly that at first, none of them noticed. The walls hummed. The stained-glass birds and mosaics sometimes took flight. The hallways constricted like throats. Hinges creaked. Nightmares flew loose from their authors and inhabited the building like cold air.
Finally, the last of The Breviary’s line ascended: the seventh generation. The building emptied. By then, more had died within its walls than lived there. The ghosts, echoes of the past, Breviary tricks, even a few genuine trapped souls, walked the halls. Tenants auctioned off the last trappings of their legacies: diamond broaches, Chanel suits, and Tiffany lamps. No longer just a home, The Breviary became their sanctuary. They loved it the way men born to captivity love their masters: reluctantly and with self-loathing. With their last pennies, they paid doctors to score their faces.
For a short time, Marty got out. He sublet a studio in the West Village that he hoped to make permanent. But the rents were raised, and striking out on his own in a new city would have opened too much possibility for failure. He moved back to The Breve, and the elevator doors as they shut had sounded like those of a cage.
Benjamin Borrell in 3A was the first to build a door. Francis Galton came next. After that, 11E. He painted the turret window cadmium red, then tried to walk through it, and fell to his death. 9B followed. Then 8C. Soon, all of them built doors. Even Martin tried his hand at it: he ground all the notes he’d taken researching The Breviary’s history into mash and added paste, but without a frame, it hadn’t held. In the comfort of their fading privilege, the tenants had lost the knowledge of how to build. It was lost on most of them, save Martin Hearst, that even the blackbirds trapped in glass were sometimes free.
At its height, The Breviary had housed 742 occupants. By the time Audrey Lucas signed her lease, there were fifty-three people living there, and two-thirds of the apartments were vacant. It had been Marty’s idea to rent out the fourteenth floor to single women and see what developed. Clara had come closest—for a brief time, at least, something had peered back at them through the cracks. Just as quickly, her door had crumbled. It was then that the red ants arrived. They’d broken out from beneath the floor and swarmed the felled door, gnawing all the evidence that remained. Those ants had infested the building ever since. He’d regretted the drowned children and had wanted to call off the whole thing, but by then Loretta had been calling the shots.
Next was Jayne. A flighty, nervous thing. Bursting with life. He’d assumed she’d agreed to spend time with him out of pity, or because she needed money. Not that he had any. Two weeks ago she’d taken him on his first walk through Riverside Park. The