Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS

  OF JEANINE CUMMINS

  THE CROOKED BRANCH

  “Even before you come to care about Jeanine Cummins’s rich and intricately drawn characters, before you become enmeshed in her skillfully tangled plotlines about the hard and wondrous task of mothering children in times both catastrophic and ordinary . . . before any of that, this is what you have to look forward to: the first page, Ms. Cummins’s luminous prose, and that feeling that we’re all hoping to find when we sit down to read: ‘This is it—a book I’m going to love.’”

  —Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel and The Nobodies Album

  “The Crooked Branch explores motherhood, holding on to sanity as life adjusts with a new baby, tilling into that always rich ground of mothers and daughters. Beginning in the famine of Ireland and ending in present-day New York, the story gathers momentum and weight as it unfolds, like watching a freight train thunder along the rails filled with the priceless things of life. As heartbreaking as it is heartening, the story of mothers and what they will do for their babies, touches all the tender places with exquisite timing. Jeanine Cummins is such a good writer. Can’t wait to read what she writes next!”

  —Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Bad Girl Creek and Finding Casey

  “What an entertaining and moving novel! Though I’ve long known my own ancestors left Ireland because of the devastating potato famine, I never knew much about the history until now. Cummins begins with the utterly relatable Majella, a witty New Yorker struggling with new motherhood and its secret isolation, and sweeps us across the ocean and through time to Ginny, a desperate Irish mother doing her best to support her family. Cummins weaves an exploration of the fierce, primal love of motherhood that connects us all through generations.”

  —Margaret Dilloway, author of How to Be an American Housewife

  “Exploring the effect of a secret from the past on a woman who is truly on the edge—of motherhood, of her future, of sanity, of happiness—Jeanine Cummins has written a story that truly resonates. Insightful, suspenseful, and sometimes bitingly funny, with characters the reader will think about for weeks, this bittersweet novel is emotional and immensely satisfying.”

  —Simone St. James, author of An Inquiry into Love and Death

  “The Crooked Branch is a gorgeous, sweeping novel, equal parts harrowing and hilarious, that grips you from the first page and keeps you in its thrall. Two wildly different stories—a new mother in present-day Queens, a woman struggling to survive and feed her children during the Irish famine—are beautifully woven together, bound by a ferocious mother’s love that echoes across generations.”

  —Carolyn Turgeon, author of Godmother

  “Jeanine Cummins knows that there are stories beneath the stories, and she uses this brilliant knowing to weave a tale that is lyrical, emotional, and often funny. This extraordinary novel reminds us how motherhood can make us feel as though we are coming undone while also being remade. Majella and Ginny navigate motherhood with a fierce love that propels the story forward with intense strength. Brilliant, vulnerable, and intense, The Crooked Branch pierced my heart and paused my breath.”

  —Patti Callahan Henry, author of Coming Up for Air and Driftwood Summer

  “The Crooked Branch is a haunting tale of motherhood and the ways in which it can ravage—and resurrect. Cummins’s vivid prose and compelling story are burned in my heart.”

  —Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott and In Need of a Good Wife

  THE OUTSIDE BOY

  “[A] deeply moving and elegiac look at a vanishing culture . . . gorgeously written and an implicit celebration of Irish storytelling.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “In Hibernian society, there’s hardly a creature lower than the Irish tinker, a nomadic group ’tis said was driven into a barren country by the fundamentalist Cromwell to starve. Regardless, the modern diminutive hero Christy, in Jeanine Cummins’s gloriously poetic novel, will burrow his way into your heart. It’s not often I hug a book, but with moist eyes and beginnings of a song in my heart, I followed Christy’s journey from a death to hopeful life. Read this lovely book and you will hug yourself.”

  —Malachy McCourt, bestselling author of Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland

  “The Outside Boy is a poignant and magical tale about the travelling people in Ireland, a way of life all but vanished. Cummins captures that world in pitch-perfect prose, charming and beguiling till the story nearly breaks your heart.”

  —Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child

  “The Outside Boy is such a powerful read. I identified so strongly with this story of a strange and gorgeous and vanishing way of life. It’s an adventure and, yes, a eulogy, but it’s also a full-throated song of praise. I loved it.”

  —Sherman Alexie, National Book Award–winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

  “A lyrical journey along the twisting path of Gypsy life, The Outside Boy is part coming-of-age novel, part mystery, and all heart.”

  —Jennie Shortridge, author of When She Flew

  “The Outside Boy will charm you, fascinate you, delight you, snake into your heart, and bust it wide open. . . . What a graceful, perfect book.”

  —Carolyn Turgeon, author of Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story

  “[Jeanine Cummins’s] dynamic tale unfurls through the singular lens of the clever and charming Christopher Hurley, a wise-beyond-his-years boy coming of age in a tiny corner of history, but trying to answer the most universal of questions: Who am I and where did I come from?”

  —T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

  “You do not need to love Ireland to love The Outside Boy. You only need to love life and to have once been as young and fresh of heart as the book’s marvelous narrator.”

  —Michael Daly, author of The Book of Mychal

  “The Outside Boy has found a permanent home in my head and heart . . . with authors like J. M. Barrie, Roddy Doyle, and Sue Monk Kidd. A flawless coming-of-rage story.”

  —Jennifer Belle, author of Going Down and High Maintenance

  ALSO BY JEANINE CUMMINS

  A Rip in Heaven

  The Outside Boy

  The

  Crooked

  Branch

  JEANINE CUMMINS

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March
2013

  Copyright © Jeanine Cummins, 2013

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Cummins, Jeanine.

  The crooked branch/Jeanine Cummins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-61507-2

  1. New mothers—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Family—Ireland—Fiction. 4. Murder—Ireland—Fiction. 5. Ireland—History—Famine, 1845–1852—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.U663C76 2013

  813'.6—dc22 2012021595

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For my mama

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank: Claire Zion, Doug Stewart, and Carolyn Turgeon for making me a better writer. Everyone at Penguin, especially Norman Lidofsky’s phenomenal sales team. Dr. Mary Daly at University College Dublin for her historical expertise and generosity. My invaluable mama-friends: Brenna Tinkel Sniderman, Nikki Stapleton, Evelyne Faye-Horak, and Charlotte Jack, who lived a couple of hairy scenes from this book with me. E.C.—I have come to depend on your brilliant levity as a potent antidote to any frustration I might encounter.

  I wrote about half of this novel in the Theatre Café on Metropolitan Avenue in Queens. They have excellent turkey wraps, and didn’t make me buy extra stuff while I sat there for hours, writing.

  I thank my parents, Gene and Kay; my brother, Tom; my sister, Kathy; and all manner of Kennedy, Matthews, and Cummins for their unfailing support. Especially, my unspeakably beautiful baby daughters, Aoife and Clodagh, who patiently teach me every single day how to be their mama. And my outstanding husband, Joe, who, despite all of his pragmatic and sensible inclinations, chose to marry a writer. I’m so lucky he did.

  Contents

  Praise for Jeanine Cummins

  Also by Jeanine Cummins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  About the Autor

  Readers Guide

  Prologue

  IRELAND, AUGUST 1846

  It all happened in one night. One wicked, godforsaken night in August, and they couldn’t believe it. The way they took to their beds in the evening, and everything was grand and ordinary. Hungry, yes, but ordinary. They’d already been hungry for a year; they were getting by, hanging on for the coming crop. So that whole doomed island of people, they slept, naive in their myriad dreams. Their limbs tangled around lovers, their sleeping children twitching and murmuring nearby, the dying turf-fire shadows stretching along the thatching above. They slept.

  For no one could imagine the horror they would waken to. Not a one of them could have foretold that noxious, murderous fog that came in the night, and strangled the light from their moon-bright skies. It rolled in from the sea, from God knows whence it came, but it was the Atlantic waves that heaved that fog up onto the western shores of Ireland. From there it crept and slithered, low to the ground like a vaporous serpent. All along the soil, up hills and ridges and mountains it climbed, breathing itself into every hollow. And then down again it rolled, into the slopes and glens and valleys, staying low, low, all the time, clinging to the ground, hugging to the knobby roots of trees, skulking across the lifeless skins of lochs.

  They didn’t notice that pungent bitterness in the dark, beyond their walls, and turf fires, beyond the milky breath of their sleeping children. They slept, while that mortal fog stole into their bright, green country, and grew like a merciless stain across the darkened land. It killed every verdant thing it touched.

  It was silent when Ginny wakened in the morning. No cock crowed. No dog barked. Most of the country’s sheep and cattle had already been slaughtered or sold for food, but those skinny specimens who remained were silent in the fields. Even the birds were struck mute. She stirred herself from sleep, startled by the lateness of the daylight. She arose without waking the others.

  Now look: there she is, standing in her doorway, the golden thatch drooping low above her in the moist morning light. Her red petticoat hangs down her legs; her bare feet are pressing into the cold flagstone beneath. She’s gazing out. There’s a lone magpie in the blackthorn tree, speechless with terror.

  The first sound is a strangled cry that escapes her throat. It’s not a word—just a simple, unadorned cry, an anguish-sound. And then her babbies are stirring behind her, still innocent for these few moments. But Raymond is on his feet now, untangling himself from the blanket. He is beside his wife, his hand on her shoulder, his voice a terrible gasp in her ear. “God help us.”

  And there they are, their fingers roped fiercely together, their bare feet leaving the flagstone, stepping out, their weight sinking slightly, the leftover dew from that lethal fog licking their toes and ankles, until they are in the middle of their slaughtered field.

  They are decimated. The black and broken, reeking stalks of their potatoes are all around, as far as they can see, up to the ridge and down through the sloping glen. Ginny turns in circles, looking for any trace of life, a single green leaf, a purple blossom, a breath of prayer. But there is nothing, only the stench of death now, rising up from the soil, clinging to the thick air like a fetid warning. Everything, everything is rot.

  She looks back at her children, the four of them gathering now in the doorway, already hungry for their breakfast. They are stretching sleep from their warm little bodies, they are shaking the dreams from their eyelids.

  She might have closed their blameless eyes that very moment, might’ve saved and sealed those lingering dreams inside their heads, for sustenance, for nourishment.

  But she didn’t know, even in that moment of bottomless panic. She could never conceive of the kind of suffering that would follow.

  Chapter One

  NEW YORK, NOW

  “I think I should go see someone, try again,” I whisper in the dark.

  Leo and I have our best conversations when he’s asleep.

  “Maybe you’re right, that it just wasn’t the right fit,” I say. “It would be good to get some things off my chest.”

  “That’s great,” Leo says, rolling over to face me.

  “Oh. You’re awake.”

  He props up on one elbow. “Well, yes. Did you think I was asleep?”

  I don’t answer him. He leans in toward me until our foreheads are touching. His skin g
leams in the faint moonlight from the window. Okay, it’s not moonlight—it’s our backyard neighbor’s motion-sensing, super-megawatt back-porch spotlight, and it blinks on and off incessantly throughout the night, whenever a cat or a raccoon wanders by. Which is often. It’s like trying to sleep in a lighthouse.

  “Majella?” Leo whispers.

  “Yeah?”

  He squeezes my hand. “I think it’s a good idea. I’ll even go with you, if you want me to.”

  I squeeze back. “No,” I say. “No, I think I have to go by myself.”

  He kisses me, and then flumps back down on his pillow.

  “You’ll feel so much better,” he says. “You’ll see.”

  And then he is snoring again, because he really believes it; he’s not that worried. He believes I can get better.

  • • •

  “So what brings you in today?” Dr. Zimmer asks.

  There is a desk, but she doesn’t sit behind it. Instead, she chooses a red leather chair, and gestures for me to sit down on the couch opposite her. It’s a dark brown faux-suede couch, and I perch on its edge.

  “Am I supposed to lie down?” I ask.

  “However you’re comfortable,” she says, and then waits, but I will never be comfortable in this room, on this couch.

  I pick up one of the tawny pillows and hold it in my lap. The lamplight is nice, at least. The fluorescent overheads are turned off, and the tasteful standing lamps give a much warmer glow to the small office. It could feel cozy, with all its dark wood built-ins and its well-trimmed windows, if it weren’t for Dr. Zimmer with her notepad and her patent-leather shoes.

  “Majella?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why did you decide to come see me today?”

  “Oh,” I say, picking at the gold rope edging of the cushion. “I don’t know, really.”

  Dr. Zimmer waits some more.