would be a cruel, inhuman place. Forgive my sentimentality, but without consequences to our actions, there is no love. And without love, man has no echo or memory. He can never be immortal or transcend his own coil. He returns to the slop with the swine.
Happily, few of Schermerhorn’s buildings still stand. Each pile of rubble tells the same wretched story. In Dubrovnik, a woman refused to abandon her seaside, Schermerhorn house with her family, despite the likelihood that it would crumble. She insisted that the walls spoke to her and that she had work yet to do. Her husband, recognizing that she’d lost her wits, removed all the sharp objects from the house and stranded her there, hoping that without food or the means to cook it, she’d eventually surrender to the city where he’d moved with the children. When he visited two days later, a plume of black smoke frothed from the lopsided chimney. Inside, he found the coal-fire stove burning blue flames, and her head stuffed inside it. He was not at first able to determine how she’d written her epigraph across the side of the house until he saw her right index finger, which was broken and raw. In the absence of a knife or kindling, she’d carved her last words with her own, still attached index finger bone: “Gol deschis în sfâr°it.” Translated from Romanian: The void opens at last.
In Krakow, the Pigeon sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily bludgeoned—
Audrey stopped reading. Something squirmed in her stomach. It felt like a worm. She scrolled past the rest of the text and moved on to the lithographs and black-and-white photos at the end. The first depicted a mansion with its slate roof caved in. The spike of a four-poster bed poked out from the rubble. The caption read: “While They Were Sleeping at The Orphanage, Boston, 1887.” There were houses in Romania, Croatia, Poland, Boston, and finally, the last photo: The Breviary.
Her mouth went dry, and her heart double-beat inside her chest. Its limestone was white, and its gargoyles sharply carved. 1900, she guessed, when the world had still been new. The caption read:
Schermerhorn’s Iniquitous Darling. Its foundation is embedded in Harlem’s subterranean granite mountain, so despite its slant and impossible geometry, it is the only Chaotic Naturalist structure expected to stand.
She sat back. Oh, boy. She wasn’t sure what “iniquitous” meant, but she didn’t like the sound. On the television, crazy Carrie Bradshaw decided that some men like freckles, and some don’t. But she wasn’t going to bother with the men with freckles, because that would be self-destructive, wouldn’t it? Except, she couldn’t help but bother. Really, she was so depressed about it that she couldn’t get out of bed. Why, oh why, didn’t the man she kind-of-almost-loved, like freckles?
Audrey scrolled. In next the photo, a crew of blue bloods posed outside The Breviary, all dressed in three-piece suits and Gibson Girl swan-bill corsets. They smiled for the camera without a care in the world. New York’s party elite. The caption read:
Once the most lavish address in all Manhattan, by the turn of the century, a total of thirty people who’d lived within The Breviary’s walls were committed to insane asylums. They fared better than the seven who were murdered, by their own hands or otherwise.
“Bees knees,” Audrey moaned, then looked left, right, left, right. Okay, one more time: left-right! left-right! On the television, Carrie the idiot called her redheaded friend to commiserate about how they both had freckles, which clearly made them lepers.
Just then, the buzzer rang. She jumped. The buzzer rang again. Saraub?
She looked like crap! Her hair was a mess. The buzzer rang a third time. Zzzzt-zzzzt! It sounded like an outdoor bug killer. She smelled under her arms: musky. Good grief, had she even showered today?
Now he wasn’t buzzing. He was knocking. Polite little taps. She jumped up. “Coming!” Then she looked through the peephole, and stopped shivering. “Oh,” she mumbled.
A petite redhead in her early thirties grinned up at her, like she could see Audrey’s blinking eye through the backward telescope.
Audrey swung the door wide. Immediately, awkwardly, the woman stuck out her hand for a shake, and poked Audrey in the stomach. It didn’t even slow her down. “Hi! I’m Jayne! I live across the hall!”
Audrey didn’t know what to say. Except at cheap motels, where she’d known better than to answer the door, neighbors had never dropped by. Was this a joke? Was this woman a Jew for Jesus?