Cross Keys

Cross Keys is a new gated community on the North Side of Baltimore, a self-contained village within the city that functions throughout the novel as a symbol of upward mobility, modern aspiration, and the pivotal turning points in Maddie Schwartz's life. It is a place of curving pathways, apartments, and town houses, a planned enclave that represents a future of sleekness and streamlined living. For Maddie, Cross Keys is both a destination she covets and the site where the trajectory of her marriage and her identity begins to shift irreversibly.

A Village Within Baltimore

Cross Keys is described as a new gated community on the North Side, "sort of a village within Baltimore." It is a planned residential development with curving pathways, apartments, and town houses, distinct from the older, more established neighborhoods of the city. The community is home to the Store Ltd., a boutique that sells cutting-edge Marimekko prints and jewelry made by Betty Cooke, whose simple, deft curves of silver and striking shapes Maddie admires but cannot afford. Maddie likes Cross Keys and imagines she might live there once she and Milton finally settle everything, a fantasy of a clean, modern life divorced from her current circumstances. The community represents a particular kind of postwar American aspiration: gated, orderly, and aesthetically refined, a world away from the cramped apartment on Gist Avenue where she lives after leaving her husband.

The Tennis Barn and the Chain of Events

Cross Keys is also the site of the tennis barn where Milton Schwartz takes up playing singles with Wallace Wright, the television personality known as the Midday Fog. Milton, a bit of a name-dropper, is impressed by playing tennis with a television personality, and this connection brings Wally Weiss into the Schwartz home. Maddie later reflects on this chain of causation while walking the curving pathways of Cross Keys: had Milton not taken up tennis and brought Wally Weiss to their home, she probably would not have moved out when she did. And if she had not moved out, she would not have been harangued by her mother that day and would not have found the body of Tessie Fine. The tennis barn at Cross Keys thus becomes the unlikely origin point for the entire sequence of events that transforms Maddie from a housewife into a woman who discovers a body and begins to matter. She knows it is a logical fallacy to think Tessie never would have been found, but she would not have been found that day, and Maddie had done something important.

The Store Ltd. and the Future Maddie Craves

At the Store Ltd., Maddie studies the Marimekko prints wistfully, noting that Jackie Kennedy had been photographed wearing the label's clothes years ago, early in her husband's presidency, but the new patterns are bolder and bigger. The fabric is not the only thing to covet; the owner makes amazing jewelry, so simple and yet so expensive. Looking at that jewelry, Maddie wants to cut her hair as short as possible, though she knows Ferdie would object. She buys six yards of a blue floral with black tones, perfect for her coloring, along with a pattern for a simple halter dress, though she has no machine to sew it and hates to ask Milton for the one she left behind. She buys an apple at the little grocery across from the Store and walks the curving pathways, studying the apartments and town houses. The Store Ltd. and its jewelry represent the future she wants, sleek and streamlined, a world of taste and refinement that she is reaching toward even as she remains tethered to her past.

A Place of Contrast and Yearning

Cross Keys stands in sharp contrast to the other spaces Maddie inhabits. It is the opposite of the apartment on Gist Avenue, with its little furniture, snubbing neighbors, and radiators set too high by a stingy landlord. It is also distinct from the world of Pennsylvania Avenue and the segregated neighborhoods where Ferdie Platt, a black policeman, must move carefully. At Cross Keys, Maddie can imagine a life of gated order and aesthetic pleasure, a life she might have had if she had stayed with Milton. Yet even as she covets this future, she recognizes that her yearning for importance cannot be satisfied by a town house or a halter dress. Being Seth's mother is not enough, and neither is a life at Cross Keys. The community thus becomes a symbol of the comfortable, conventional life she has rejected, a life that is beautiful but ultimately insufficient for her terrible yearning to matter, to make the world different because she had been born.