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The Crossley Baby
Jacqueline Carey
Ballantine Books
Published by the Random House Publishing Group
ISBN 0-345-45990-3
The Crossley girls are Irish Catholics from Long Island who have succeeded in traveling from their tough-territory home town to sophisticated big city life in Manhattan during the era of the greedy eighties. For generations the Crossleys have had a history of major family quarrels, but the energy of the conflict between the sisters is motivated by more than sibling rivalry. Underlying the battle is a barely articulated but genuine moral disagreement. Bridget, the eldest, is the closest to a mother the two younger girls have ever had, but she dies unexpectedly in a botched operation leaving behind legal implications of malpractice and a fatherless baby girl. Jean and Sunny, the two younger sisters are confronted with the issue— who will leap into the vacuum created by Bridget's death and become mother to the orphan? Who deserves the baby? Who will make the better mother? These questions that lead the sisters into battle for the right to adopt baby Jade are really explorations of a deeper question. What is a moral life? How should women live?
The lightness of Carey's narrative touch does not diminish the seriousness of the question for both . Jean, the hard driving sister who has always been determined to succeed in the corporate world, instantly decides to sue the hospital for causing Bridget's inexplicable death. Almost as quickly, without even bothering to discuss the matter with her husband, she decides to adopt the baby. Sunny is Jean's opposite and perpetual rival, thrown into this role more by Jean's temperament than by her own choice. Jean disapproves of Sunny's life. In spite of her expensive education she has never held down any job more demanding than working as a tutor. Money has always traveled from men to Sunny in the form of gifts or loans from her many affluent boyfriends. In high school Jean called her sister a slut, since traveling from bed to bed has never been difficult for Sunny. Now Sunny is married to Leon, an altruistic slum lord trying to maintain decent conditions in apartment buildings in Harlem. She has become a stay-at-home mom with two young children, juggling maxed-out credit cards to keep family's finances from collapse. From Jean's point of view, Sunny's life has been one of profligacy and fecklessness.
When the competition to adopt baby Jade enters the courts, the question arises-- are Sunny and Leon, who already have two children, interested in Jade, or the enormous settlement expected from the malpractice case against the hospital? But-- and in Jean's mind it is a big but- can Jean, the workaholic executive win a case for adoption against a full-time mother who is also married to the community do-gooder in her upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood?
Jean and Sunny are poster pin-ups for the conflicts our culture sends out to middle class women as they try to create their identities from work, wifehood and motherhood. But in Jacqueline Carey's dry voice, the devil is in the details, and the conflict is not confined to the middle class. There are illuminating moments in Leon's Harlem office, when one of his foster mother employees talks about her foster child Alba, born positive for both heroine and cocaine. Luisa wants Alba to have the best life she can have, and she cannot afford to give up her income as a foster parent in order to adopt Alba. Alba has been transferred to another foster home, but the child has other ideas.
"She walked all the way from her new foster home to mine, eighteen blocks, mind you. She took a route I believe that went across on Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Street, and down on Park. Not straight across. She kept looking. The child went in neighborhoods that are not safe. A lady asked where she was going., and Alba told her, I'm going to Mama Luisa's. That's what she called me, Mama Luisa. I didn't see her for six weeks, a month and this is what she says, ‘Hi.’ I thought she wouldn't remember me someday, but no. Hi."
“You have to count.” Luisa continues, talking of Alba's history. "One, her birth mother. Two, her foster mother that did not show up after her vacation. Three, that was me. And four, the new foster mother. I cannot send the child to number five. That is too many. She will end up in therapeutic. She has to go back to number three, me. I cannot do the good stuff for her that I am supposed to. But I decided she is going to go with me because I want to make a home for her even though it will not be the best."
"You mean you're going to keep her? How wonderful! " Sunny is happy, restraining the impulse to hug Luisa, who is formidable. But Carey's cool, unsentimental eye leaves us with a disconcerting moment. Once Luisa has adopted Alba, she does not have enough money to pay for her heart medicine.
In Sunny's mind, Jean, who never gets home before nine o'clock, and thinks the duties of motherhood are easily managed by hiring the most expensive nanny she can find, is an impossible candidate for motherhood. But when the social worker investigating the case interviews Jean, in an uncharacteristic moment of weakness she bursts into tears, establishing herself as yearning mother-material.
The characters of Jean and Sunny and the motives for their pursuit of Jade illuminate cultural themes of identity that transcend class and race, as well as moral issues that are still alive for today's women. The intriguing outcome of this case and its aftermath in the lives of Jean and Sunny turn out to be as much a consequence of character as of fate. This a refreshing, honest book and a fun to read.
Phyllis Ehrenfeld has received the Arnold Gingrich Award in prose for the most highly evaluated fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has been Editor of the American Anorexia Bulima Associaton for many years. Several of her plays have been presented as staged readings in the Bergen County area. She is presently representative to the united Nations for the National Service Conference of the American Ethical Union.
The Crossley Baby
Jacqueline Carey
Ballantine Books
Published by the Random House Publishing Group
ISBN 0-345-45990-3
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