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!
Reading that, Audrey sighed with relief. So, “dark” meant “Protestant.” She could live with that. It made sense that The Breviary’s inhabitants were weird. All native New Yorkers are weird. Lock them in the same apartment building for 150 years, and weird easily turns inbred and crazy.
It was late. The pills had worn off and left her exhausted and depressed. She’d gone a little bananas. Not so surprising given the stress and self-medicating, but nothing twelve hours of sleep couldn’t cure. She almost closed the link and went home to 14B. But she’d already clicked on the first link, and there were nine left on the page. She didn’t like leaving things undone. It was the same as leaving things open. She clicked the second link and her smile drowned.
The article was a personal history piece from the New Yorker magazine, written by an author whose name sounded familiar: Agnew Spalding. He’d been involved in some kind of scandal, she thought, but couldn’t remember the details. She didn’t want to read it, but she knew that if she closed the application on her screen, her imagination would invent something even worse.
The article read:
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,