those weird gargoyles and creatures climbing up and down between the windows!”
Hutch, surprisingly, tried to talk them out of it, on the grounds that the Bramford was a “danger zone.”
When Rosemary had first come to New York in June of 1962 she had joined another Omaha girl and two girls from Atlanta in an apartment on lower Lexington Avenue. Hutch lived next door, and though he declined to be the full-time father-substitute the girls would have made of him-he had raised two daughters of his own and that was quite enough, thank you-he was nonetheless on hand in emergencies, such as The Night Someone Was on The Fire Escape and The Time Jeanne Almost Choked to Death. His name was Edward Hutchins, he was English, he was fifty-four. Under three different pen names he wrote three different series of boys’ adventure books.
To Rosemary he gave another sort of emergency assistance. She was the youngest of six children, the other five of whom had married early and made homes close to their parents; behind her in Omaha she had left an angry, suspicious father, a silent mother, and four resenting brothers and sisters. (Only the next-to-the-oldest, Brian, who had a drink problem, had said, “Go on, Rosie, do what you want to do,” and had slipped her a plastic handbag with eighty-five dollars in it.) In New York Rosemary felt guilty and selfish, and Hutch bucked her up with strong tea and talks about parents and children and one’s duty to oneself. She asked him questions that had been unspeakable in Catholic High; he sent her to a night course in philosophy at NYU. “I’ll make a duchess out of this cockney flower girl yet,” he said, and Rosemary had had wit enough to say “Garn!”
Now, every month or so, Rosemary and Guy had dinner with Hutch, either in their apartment or, when it was his turn, in a restaurant. Guy found Hutch a bit boring but always treated him cordially; his wife had been a cousin of Terence Rattigan, the playwright, and Rattigan and Hutch corresponded. Connections often proved crucial in the theater, Guy knew, even connections at second hand.
On the Thursday after they saw the apartment, Rosemary and Guy had dinner with Hutch at Klube’s, a small German restaurant on Twenty-third Street. They had given his name to Mrs. Cortez on Tuesday afternoon as one of three references she had asked for, and he had already received and answered her letter of inquiry.
“I was tempted to say that you were drug addicts or litterbugs,” he said, “or something equally repellent to managers of apartment houses.”
They asked why.
“I don’t know whether or not you know it,” he said, buttering a roll, “but the Bramford had rather an unpleasant reputation early in the century.” He looked up, saw that they didn’t know and went on. (He had a broad shiny face, blue eyes that darted enthusiastically, and a few strands of wetted-down black hair combed crossways over his scalp.) “Along with the Isadora Duncans and Theodore Dreisers,” he said, “the Bramford has housed a considerable number of less attractive personages. It’s where the Trench sisters performed their little dietary experiments, and where Keith Kennedy held his parties. Adrian Marcato lived there too; and so did Pearl Ames.”
“Who were the Trench sisters?” Guy asked, and Rosemary asked, “Who was Adrian Marcato?”
“The Trench sisters,” Hutch said, “were two proper Victorian ladies who were occasional cannibals. They cooked and ate several young children, including a niece.”
“Lovely,” Guy said.
Hutch turned to Rosemary. “Adrian Marcato practiced witchcraft,” he said. “He made quite a splash in the eighteen-nineties by announcing that he had succeeded in conjuring up the living Satan. He showed off a handful of hair and some claw-parings, and apparently people believed him; enough of them, at least, to form a mob that attacked and nearly killed him in the Bramford lobby.”
“You’re joking,” Rosemary said.
“I’m quite serious. A few years later the Keith Kennedy business began, and by the twenties the house was half empty.”
Guy said, “I knew about Keith Kennedy and about Pearl Ames, but I didn’t know Adrian Marcato lived there.”
“And those sisters,” Rosemary said with a shudder.
“It was only World War Two and the housing shortage,” Hutch said, “that filled the place up again, and now it’s acquired a bit of Grand-Old-Apartment House prestige; but in the twenties it was called Black Bramford and sensible people stayed away. The melon is for the lady, isn’t it, Rosemary?”
The waiter placed their appetizers. Rosemary looked questioningly at Guy; he pursed his brow and gave a quick headshake: It’s nothing, don’t let him scare you.
The waiter left. “Over the years,” Hutch said, “the Bramford has had far more than its share of ugly and unsavory happenings. Nor have all of them been in the distant past. In 1959 a dead infant was found wrapped in newspaper in the basement.”
Rosemary said, “But-awful things probably happen in every apartment house now and then.”
“Now and then,” Hutch said. “The point is, though, that at the Bramford awful things happen a good deal more frequently than ‘now and then.’ There are less spectacular irregularities too. There’ve been more suicides there, for instance, than in houses of comparable size and age.”
“What’s the answer, Hutch?” Guy said, playing serious-and-concerned. “There must be some kind of explanation.”
Hutch looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps it’s simply that the notoriety of a pair of Trench sisters attracts an Adrian Marcato, and his notoriety attracts a Keith Kennedy, and eventually a house becomes a-a kind of rallying place for people who are more prone than others to certain types of behavior. Or perhaps there are things we don’t know yet -about magnetic fields or electrons or whatever-ways in which a place can quite literally be malign. I do know this, though: the Bramford is by no means unique. There was a house in London, on Praed Street, in which five separate brutal murders took place within sixty years. None of the five was in any way connected with any of the others; the murderers weren’t related nor were the victims, nor were all the murders committed for the same moonstone or Maltese falcon. Yet five separate brutal murders took place within sixty years. In a small house with a shop on the street and an apartment overhead. It was demolished in 1954-for no especially pressing purpose, since as far as I know the plot was left empty.”
Rosemary worked her spoon in melon. “Maybe there are good houses too,” she said; “houses where people keep falling in love and getting married and having babies.”
“And becoming stars,” Guy said.
“Probably there are,” Hutch said. “Only one never hears of them. It’s the stinkers that get the publicity.” He smiled at Rosemary and Guy. “I wish you two would look for a good house instead of the Bramford,” he said.
Rosemary’s spoon of melon stopped halfway to her mouth. “Are you honestly trying to talk us out of it?” she asked.
“My dear girl,” Hutch said, “I had a perfectly good date with a charming woman this evening and broke it solely to see you and say my say. I am honestly trying to talk you out of it.”
“Well, Jesus, Hutch-“ Guy began.
“I am not saying,” Hutch said, “that you will walk into the Bramford and
be hit on the head with a piano or eaten by spinsters or turned to stone. I am simply saying that the record is there and ought to be considered along with the reasonable rent and the working fireplace: the house has a high incidence of unpleasant happenings. Why deliberately enter a danger zone? Go to the Dakota or the Osborne if you’re dead set on nineteenth-century splendor.”
“The Dakota is co-op,” Rosemary said, “and the Osborne’s going to be torn down.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a little bit, Hutch?” Guy said. “Have there been any other ‘unpleasant happenings’ in the past few years? Besides that baby in the basement?”
“An elevator man was killed last winter,” Hutch said. “In a not-at-the dinner-table kind of accident. I was at the library this afternoon with the Times Index and three hours of microfilm; would you care to hear more?”
Rosemary looked at Guy. He put down his fork and wiped his mouth. “It’s silly,” he said. “All right, a lot of unpleasant things have happened there. That doesn’t mean that more of them are going to happen. I don’t see why the Bramford is any more of a ‘danger zone’ than any other house in the city. You can flip a coin and get five heads in a row; that doesn’t mean that the next five flips are going to be heads too, and it doesn’t mean that the coin is any different from any other coin. It’s coincidence, that’s all.”
“If there were really something wrong,” Rosemary said, “wouldn’t it have been demolished? Like the house in London?”
“The house in London,” Hutch said, “was owned by the family of the last chap murdered there. The Bramford
