The Keeping New York, 1965

The Alexandra Mulvaney Chronicles · Book One · New York, 1965-1968

She crossed an ocean with eighteen dollars and a holy medal. What awaited her was a maple hairbrush on a folded square of linen, and a code that would shape the rest of her life.

June 1965. Eighteen years old and one month off the plane from Shannon, Alexandra "Sandy" Mulvaney is taken into the Yorkville brownstone of her aunt, Maura, a Sister of Mercy for twenty-six years, and no longer one. In that exacting house, she learns the keeping: the ritual, the silence, and the correction that transforms a frightened girl into a woman who can face a city with buildings "that stood up against the sky like teeth."

The discipline is severe, yet strangely tender, and it burns hottest precisely where Sandy is most alive. Then comes the last correction her aunt will ever give her: slower than all the rest, a blessing and a severance in one. When it is over, the hairbrush is no longer Maura's. It is hers.

Free in a Webster Apartments room of her own, Alexandra steps into the life she crossed an ocean to find, into a meticulous little flat on Cornelia Street, and the lopsided Belfast smile of Maeve Connolly, who will teach her that the code carved into her body can be something she chooses, given freely, woman to woman.

Lush, unhurried, and unashamedly sensual, The Keeping is the origin story of the Alexandra Mulvaney Chronicles, a mid-century tale of immigrant grit, Catholic severity, and a young woman learning that devotion and desire can be the same discipline.

The keeping is the binding. And on a bright cold morning in 1968, the hairbrush is now on Cornelia Street.