The Crossley Baby - Hardcover

The Crossley Baby looks at first to be a novel about a family, but it's really a portrait of a (very difficult) lady. The Crossley sisters grow up poor and smart in a small town on Long Island. Later, they disperse over 1980s Manhattan, inhabiting very different corners. Bridget, the oldest, arrives from her travels in Nepal with a hippie wardrobe and a spaced-out attitude. Fresh from Columbia, acerbic Jean becomes a successful corporate headhunter. And the youngest, Sunny, Harvard-educated and pursued by glamorous men, marries an idealistic Harlem landlord and becomes a stay-at-home mom. When Bridget dies during a routine surgery, Jean-in-a-suit and Sunny-in-a-minivan are left to duke it out over the custody of Bridget's baby daughter Jade. The family dynamics catch fire nicely, but the book belongs to Jean. Witty, brittle, married to a secretive man and almost pathologically incapable of any show of emotion, Jean is an unlikely--but very likable--protagonist. Its a surprising pleasure to navigate throught the world with her. Author Jacqueline Carey has a disjointed, clever, often funny voice perfectly suited to Jean's off-kilter view of the world. Here she is at church: "Because Catholics have to attend mass every week, they value efficiency above all. The challenge is to speed up the ceremony without letting a fast walk break into a run." In short, Jean gets all the good lines. Without compromising Jean's dignity or slipping into sentiment, Carey reveals the emotional core of a woman with all the warmth of an ice cube. This is tricky work, beautifully done. --Claire Dederer

The Cork Line

The feuds were such a joke. The Crossley girls had laughed about them for years. Once upon a time their father had mentioned certain "disputes" shamefacedly, but later even he joined in the merriment. It certainly didn't matter to these three free-thinking, dope-smoking, miniskirted girls that a quarrel between heirs had broken up the original "Crossley's," one of the biggest jewelry businesses in Boston. Early photos made it look like a ratty old cigar box, anyway. And the girls relished details of other fights: Two maiden aunts had had a brick wall built down the center of their Victorian house in Dorchester, the better to avoid each other; back in County Cork, one Crossley and his widowed sister hadn't spoken for the last twenty years of their lives, although they slept in the same cottage and sat across the kitchen table from each other three times a day. There was actually a line drawn down the center of the table. Can you imagine!

When the two younger sisters, Jean and Sunny, shared a bedroom back in high school, Jean laid a strip of masking tape across the middle of the floorboards and called it the "Cork Line," as in "I don't care if you do open the window as long as the air doesn't venture over the Cork Line," or, about a guy Sunny had met at the Paw Valley Post Office, "Just keep Mr. Dick on your side of the Cork Line."

"I could swear I heard something just then," Sunny would say, turning the pages of a magazine with ostentatious languor. "But such a screechy sound couldn't have been human."

Even oddball Bridget, the oldest, picked up on the term. As an adult, Jean would occasionally mention the fact that Bridget's bedroom had not only been hers alone, but had also been the biggest in the house. Bridget was generally too distracted to notice, but once she said, "I have a Cork Line running down the center of my soul!" Jean snickered, but Sunny grabbed Bridget and hugged her and cooed at her and tickled her ribs until Jean finally said, "Yuck. Let's keep this PG," and Sunny said, "Oh, you just can't stand it that I'm so much nicer than you are."

The call, when it came, was between Jean and Sunny. It took place on December 18, 1990, shortly after lunch. Sunny wasn't planning to answer the phone; she was trying to figure out which cardboard carton held the bulk of the Christmas ornaments. She could find only a few of the most fragile, which had their own four-inch-square boxes tucked in among the holiday books and tapes. This was going to be the first Christmas since Sunny and her family had left the city. Bridget, who was scheduled to have a fibroid removed, would be coming up with her ten-month-old daughter, Jade, in a couple of days to recuperate a little before the twenty-fifth, and Sunny wanted to have put up as many decorations as possible beforehand.

It helped that Sunny's new house looked like an old Christmas tin: lit-up mullioned windows, a wreath on the door, a dusting of snow, an embrace of spruce. Because the rooms were still nearly bare of furniture, nothing commonplace interfered with the holiday setting. The pungent, sappy odor of evergreen drifted upstairs and down, thanks to the Scotch pine branches tacked over the arch to the dining room, the Doug fir Sunny's husband had cut on their own property, the basket of pinecones by the fireplace. That afternoon the kids were going to help decorate a gingerbread house she'd made from a kit. Three different sets of friends were expected up from the city around the day itself. Lists in her little loopy handwriting were scattered everywhere: Presents still to buy. Tips to be handed out. And lots of food. Ingredients for the marinade, ingredients for the pie crust, ingredients for the cookie dough. Eggnog, Burgundy, and a cheap champagne for the mimosas on Christmas morning. Already in a corner of the kitchen next to some stripped paneling (the house was a real fixer-upper) stood a large pile of holiday cakes and breads, olives and nuts, truffles and candy canes.

The ornaments were key--so important that an obscure hierarchy had evolved over the years. If Linc, who was five, got to put on the shiny fabric fish Bridget had brought back from Beijing one year, then Ruth, who was almost four, got to hang the butterfly. If Linc got the gingerbread boy, Ruth got the girl. There were also more complicated equivalences. The nutcracker, for instance, equaled both the pipe-cleaner bear and either the red-and-green-striped metal sled or Leon's white menorah, a nod to his cultural past. Then there were those ornaments the kids left for Sunny, including the red and silver glass balls from an ancient Woolworth's and a small, lacy brass frame that Jean had given them. Inside was a picture of Jean herself, eating a sandwich. In the hierarchy of relatives, it was weirdo Bridget who was on the top.

When the call came that December 18, the person at the other end claimed to be Sunny's sister Jean, but the voice sounded put-on. That is, Sunny could tell it was Jean, but Jean had the sort of strained tone she used to affect when she'd leave messages pretending to be a Hollywood agent or the president of the United States. It was as if Jean were calling up pretending to be Jean. Which was annoying, but odd enough that Sunny put down the manger scene she was unwrapping from its tissue paper and picked up the phone.

"Jean?" she said, implying by the confusion in her voice that she hadn't just been deciding whether to answer.

Jean said that something had gone wrong with Bridget's operation.

"Someday, Jean, you are going to go too far," said Sunny.

"I'm just telling you what happened," said Jean.

Something on the back of Sunny's neck began to rise. "What was it?" she said.

"They're being kind of cagey. But I think she's, well, dead."

"There's obviously some mistake," Sunny said.

"Really?"

"Nothing could have gone wrong with the operation," said Sunny. "It was very routine. She was supposed to be home in a few hours."

"Oh," said Jean. "I thought you knew something."

"Just tell me how someone could have died of such a routine operation. Bridget's been all over the world. She stumbled into a civil war, and she was fine."

"If you don't know anything . . ."

"I suppose she could have been in a car accident on the way to the hospital," Sunny mused. "It's possible."

There was a silence.

"Did they get her confused with someone else?" said Sunny in a sudden panic. She heard the intercom squawk in Jean's office.

Jean said, "Tell him I'll call him back."

Sunny struggled to remain civil. "You're at work?" she said.

"It's Tuesday. Of course I'm at work."

Sunny could have cut Jean open on an operating table right then and there, but the image that accompanied this desire--an everyday, real-life figure superimposed on a Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory--made her double up, and she found herself crouching on her knees, her face six inches from a cracked black diamond in the kitchen floor. "I have to go," she said into the phone, and hit the hang-up button.

Still doubled over, intently examining the gray curve of the receiver, she punched the memory button for her husband's office. "And how are you, Mrs. Dane?" said Brianna brightly. The receptionist. Sunny thought she'd been laid off.

"Connect me, connect me," said Sunny. And to her husband she said, "Jean thinks something happened to Bridget."

"Thinks?"

"The operation," she said.

"I'll be right there."

The drive up from Harlem would take more than an hour. Sunny hit the second button, which was for Bridget. There was her voice on the announcement, the same as always. "Bridget!" cried Sunny. "Call me immediately! You won't believe what just happened!"

One of the last few buttons was for Jean's office, but Sunny couldn't place which. She couldn't remember the last time she'd called her. Sunny hit the "9" and got a man's voice: "Poison Control. May I have the name of the child involved?"

On the second try, she got a double hello, first from Jean's receptionist, then from Jean herself, who had a way of speaking sometimes--holding the words way back in her throat--that drove Sunny nuts.

"Where did you hear this nonsense?" she asked.

"The hospital called me," said Jean.

"Where is Jade?"

"She's with the upstairs neighbor. Stew."

"I'm coming," said Sunny. "I'll pick her up. I'll call you back." She rested her forehead against the cool tile. "In a few minutes."

If Jean was angry--and she was, actually; incredibly so--it was at Bridget for not letting her find her a real job. Because Jean could have done it; no one in her family appreciated what power she held. She had wooed an executive away from his firm by reading a bird book that cost her $11.95. She had filled a six-figure PR job one summer day without leaving the Adirondacks. She had herself led a team that ended up recommending the new CEO of OxCon--a position that, with stock options, commanded millions of dollars. She never pretended to be surprised at her success. She had a vision. She could find previously unimagined fits between positions and people because she never saw square pegs and round holes, or even round pegs and round holes. Every element was more complex, with odd juts and indentations, yet more elastic, more vibrant, more erotic.

Bridget was not exactly at the level Jean was used to dealing with, but Jean knew lots of human resources people, had actually recommended many of them for their positions. She could have gotten Bridget anything she ...