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