Epilogue
The morning sun rose high enough to warm the roofs of the buildings, the glossy glass towers that bounced awake with reflective shine and the tarry black roofs that absorbed it as if to beg for five more minutes.
The sun yawned its golden arms up and out to reach farther down each block, its fingers combing through treetops, rousing the birds to sing in a new day.
This early in the morning was the only time when the city was quiet enough to hear birdsong, before the rumble of traffic and the din of people.
Light filtered through the leaves, dappling the lush dark foliage in luminescent lime.
Most of Bank Street still slept under its shady canopy, or slept elsewhere, having decamped to fashionable beach towns from the Hamptons to Mallorca.
Only the early dog walkers and the most committed runners were out, and they were barely awake themselves.
The super said that in his thirty-two years working in the city, he had never seen anything like it.
When at first he couldn’t get the front door open, he got a ladder to peer inside the windows, and he saw the water inside was four feet high.
All of Rapacine’s beautiful, curated belongings were either drowned or bobbing on the surface.
The cognac leather Eames chair, only visible at the very top, was submerged, the once shiny patina on its leather cushions now matte black, waterlogged, and ruined.
The television on the bar stand peeked out of the water, short-circuited, the Baccarat tumblers clinking against its dark screen.
There were sunken books whose pages fanned out like anemones, same for the Moleskine journals whose secret recipes were blurred forever.
A large wicker basket drifted like a life raft among a flurry of skinny white test strips of card stock soaked to a pulp.
And then there were the bottles. Bottles, bottles everywhere.
An abundance of brown glass apothecary bottles whose fragrant oils and essences had spilled and scented the water and whose handwritten labels had bled beyond legibility.
A vast collection of vintage crystal perfume bottles bobbed on the surface like floating gemstones. Her entire home—shipwrecked.
They would find out how it happened only after the door had been pried open and the apartment emptied itself in a rush of water that sloshed into the hallway.
Every faucet in the first-floor apartment had been turned on at full force, with every sink drain plugged, and an exterior hose had been snaked inside a back window and left on for days.
Every crack and seam to the exterior had been stuffed, blocked, or otherwise sealed shut, from the back door to the windowsills, which had allowed the water to rise and rise.
The kitchen floor had begun to sink into the basement, and the water had seeped deep into the walls, where mold would soon take its place.
The building’s very foundation was likely compromised.
It was said the property was unsalvageable.
Neighbors with even a passing acquaintance of Mireille Rapacine refused to believe that the glamorous older lady who had lived there for longer than any of them could remember was the source of the vandalism; they couldn’t believe she would destroy the home she had so dearly loved.
The building’s new owners had been harassing her, neighbors told reporters, they had driven out a beloved and elderly rent-controlled tenant, a city tale as old as time.
The landlords had only themselves to blame for no one being home at the time of their final prank gone wrong; their avarice and heartlessness had destroyed their own asset.
The drowned brownstone became a symbol of capitalistic greed and inhumanity in New York real estate.
What they didn’t know was that it was Rapacine’s garden hose.
The drain of every sink and the tub in her apartment had been intentionally caulked shut, including the drain of the darling antique toilet, its valve turned open to run and run.
The wallpaper in the powder room that Iris had once admired had come to life, the sirens now dragging the sailors under real water, and the scenes themselves peeling at the corners, breaking free.
When, months later, it was reported by less scrupulous tabloids that Mireille Rapacine likely was behind the flooding, the New York Post headline read Hurricane Granny , and she became a folk hero. But she and her cats had left and were never found.
When Iris stood with Hugo on the sidewalk regarding 23 Bank, that most precious jewel of New York real estate—the brownstone—with its neoclassical details, leaded glass windows, and elegant molding as intricately carved as Lalique crystal, she saw things differently.
She saw it through Rapacine’s eyes. If Madame Rapacine had taught her anything, it was that if you wanted to capture a time, a place, a feeling, you needed to make it into a perfume.
Iris understood, Rapacine hadn’t destroyed the home she loved—she had bottled it.
But for those few passersby who resist the dissociation the city begs of its residents, those who are more in touch with their bodies, or sensitive to whimsy, or at the very least not in a terrible rush, they had a surreal experience.
A Pilates instructor and former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey company walked by and smelled the water and was reminded of the glamorous patrons at her first professional dance gig, opening a new club called Studio 54.
A Japanese chef on holiday passed by and thought it smelled like the yuzu and rosewater cake he once baked for his sister’s wedding.
And a small child simply thought it smelled like her mother when she was going out for the evening.
The perfume that poured from the brownstone could evoke a different memory for every person in New York. But all of them were beautiful.