We Are Not Ourselves

“I need to move. I can’t be cooped up.” He snubbed out his cigarette and folded his hands behind his head.

“You’ll have plenty of chances to move in Vietnam,” she said bitterly. “Until you’re in the ground, that is.”

He turned eighteen that February, 1964, and she tried to get him to marry the girl he was dating, but he wouldn’t do it. When he graduated in June and received the notice to report for his physical, she was terrified, because he was a perfect specimen, big and strong and almost impossibly hale, with 20/10 vision, practically, and great knees despite the family curse, so there was zero chance of his getting declared 4F. She tried to get him to enlist in the National Guard to avoid a dangerous posting, and then after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August she was sure he’d find some college to enroll in, but instead a couple of weeks later he went to the recruiter for the Marines.

He’d been on the winning side of every fistfight he’d ever been in, so he might’ve thought he could simply stare down whatever trouble was to come. He went to Parris Island for basic, got further training as an antitank assaultman, and was assigned to Camp Lejeune, where he stayed until June of 1965, when he volunteered to go over after the first waves of the ground war had landed in South Vietnam.

He called before he left. She couldn’t picture him in a crew cut at the other end of the phone, wearing that one outfit they all seemed to wear, a polo shirt and chinos, as if they all shopped in the same store. All she could see in her mind’s eye was him standing in his St. Sebastian’s blazer, five grades behind her, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while she fixed his tie. He was the closest she’d ever had to a brother.

“You’d better stay alive,” she said.

“There are some scared-looking fellas I could hand the phone to if you want to give them a little pep talk. This is Pat you’re talking to. Pat Tumulty. I’ll see you in a while.”

“Fine.”

“Tell your father I’ll make him proud,” he said.

Her father had filled her cousin’s head with so much patriotic rhetoric that he thought he was embarking on a noble adventure.

“Don’t you even think about trying to impress him,” she said. “He’d never say so, but he’s scared to death that something’s going to happen to you.”

“He told you that?”

“He doesn’t have to say it for it to be obvious. He just wants you home in one piece. The bullshit around that man is piled so high you can’t even see him past it.”

“He’d take my place if they’d let him.”

“Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing. The only thing he’s ever been afraid of is regular life. Come home and live a regular life and impress me. Forget about my father.”

She could almost hear him straighten up.

“Tell him I’ll make him proud,” he said.

She sighed. “Tell him yourself. He’ll be where you left him, in that damned recliner. He doesn’t go anywhere. Everybody comes to him.”

“I will.”

“Good-bye, Pat,” she said, and then she thought, Good-bye, Pat, in case she was really saying it. She waited to hear him hang up.

7

She began to look forward to the day when she would take another man’s name. It was the thoroughgoing Irishness of Tumulty that bothered her, the redolence of peat bogs and sloppy rebel songs and an uproar in the blood, of a defeat that ran so deep it reemerged as a treacherous conviviality.

She’d grown up around so many Irish people that she’d never had to think much about the fact that she was Irish. On St. Patrick’s Day, when the city buzzed like a family reunion, she felt a tribal pride, and whenever she heard the plaintive whine of bagpipes, she was summoned to an ancient loyalty.

When she got to college, though, and saw that there was a world in which her father didn’t hold much currency, she began to grasp the crucial role the opinions of others played in the settling of one’s own prospects. “Eileen” she couldn’t get rid of, but if she could join it to something altogether different, she might be able to enjoy her Irishness again, even feel safe enough to take a defensive pride in it, the way she did now only on those rare occasions when her soul was stirred to its origins, like the day just before her nineteenth birthday when President Kennedy was elected and she wept for joy.

She wanted a name that sounded like no name at all, one of those decorous placeholders that suggested an unbroken line of WASP restraint. If the name came with a pedigree to match it, she wasn’t going to complain.

It was mid-December 1965. She was in a master’s program in nursing administration at NYU after getting college done in three years, as she’d planned. Between classes, she met her friend Ruth, who worked nearby, under the arch in Washington Square, to head to lunch together. It was an unusually mild day for December; some young men had on only a sweater and no jacket.

“Well, it’s not that he needs a date, necessarily,” Ruth was saying as they walked toward the luncheonette on Broadway. “He just doesn’t have one.”

Eileen sighed; it was happening again. Everyone always believed they’d found her man for her, but more often than not he was a blarneying, blustering playboy who’d charmed her friends and the rest of the bar and whom she couldn’t ditch fast enough.

“I’m sure one will turn up,” she said. “Tell him good things come to those who wait.”

The men that stirred her—reliable ones, predictable ones—were boring by other girls’ standards. She didn’t meet enough of these men. Maybe they couldn’t get past the guys who crowded around her at bars. If they couldn’t at least get to her, though, they weren’t for her. She’d rather be alone than end up with a man who was afraid.

“You are impossible!” Ruth said. “I am trying to look out for you here. No—you know what? Fine. That’s just fine.” Ruth fastened the buttons on her coat.

Eileen could feel Ruth burning. In front of the luncheonette, Ruth stopped her. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Frank asked me to do this favor, and we just started, so I want to come through for him. I don’t care what you do on New Year’s. You want to miss the fun, that’s fine by me. You want to be alone the rest of your life, that’s fine too. I’ve tried. I even set you up with Tommy Delaney, and look what you did with that.”

“You think you’re safe with a West Point man,” Eileen said, as though to herself. “You think he’ll have a bit of class.” She watched a cab stop at the corner and a man with a newspaper tucked under his arm pay his fare.

“Tommy’s a fine man,” Ruth said.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s swell,” Eileen said. “I have no way of knowing. He couldn’t sit still long enough to say two words to me. He spent the whole time making sure every back in the place got slapped.”

“Tommy has a lot of friends.”

“He bought everyone a round and said I didn’t know it yet, but he was my future husband. There was a big cheer. The nerve!”

The man with the newspaper got out of the cab. He was tall and handsome, with dark cropped hair and striking eyeglasses. She imagined he was a visiting professor, Italian or Greek. She took her eyes from him before he turned in her direction.

“He liked you. He wanted to make an impression.”

“An impression!”

“Look, this one is different,” Ruth said lamely. “He won’t be trying to win you over. He doesn’t want to be there any more than you do.”

“What’s the problem with him? Is he queer?”

Eileen didn’t know why she was still resisting. She would normally have done her friend Ruth this small favor, but she wasn’t in the mood for disappointment, not on New Year’s Eve. She watched the taxi launch off from the curb, only to stop again up the block to let a young couple pile in. The sun came back out from behind a cloud. Ruth unbuttoned her coat.

“He’s a grad student at NYU. A scientist. Frank’s in an anatomy class with him. He’s obsessed with his research. He never leaves the library. Frank is worried about him. He wants to get him out.”

Eileen didn’t say anything. She was trying not to believe in the promising picture she was forming in her mind, for fear of disappointment.

“So what Frank told him is that I was nagging him to find a date for my friend for New Year’s.”

“Absolutely not!” Eileen said. “I will not pretend to be somebody’s charity case.”

“He’s a gentleman. He couldn’t resist a woman in need. It’s the only thing that would have worked.”

“Ruth!”

A pair of girls pushed past them into the luncheonette. Eileen could see the counter seats filling up and could make out only one empty booth.

“Would it help if I told you he’s handsome? Frank even said it himself. He said all the girls they know think he’s very handsome.”

“Let them have him,” she said, not meaning it. She couldn’t believe she was feeling defensive about this man.

“Just do this for me and I’ll never bother you again,” Ruth said, putting her hand on the door to open it. “You can go become an old maid after this.”

“Fine. But I’m not going to pretend to be grateful he went out with me.”

In the interval between the setup and the date, she’d convinced herself that this was nothing more than a good deed she was doing. When the bell rang at Ruth’s, though, she was seized by nerves. She ran to the bedroom and locked the door.

“Come on! I have to answer the door.”

“I’m not going. Tell him I got sick or something.”

“Come out and say hello!” Ruth whispered forcefully as the bell rang again.

She heard Ruth invite them in. She liked his voice: it was soft, but there was strength in it. She decided to open the door, but not before resolving to give him the hardest time she could. She wasn’t going to have any man thinking she needed him there, certainly not some spastic recluse she’d have to lead around the room by the sleeve.

Before she had a chance to say anything sarcastic, Ed rose to his feet. He was indeed handsome, but not too pretty; neat and lean, with clean lines everywhere, including those in his face that gave him an appealing gravity when he smiled.

He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “I realize you didn’t have to do this, and I promise to try to make it worth your time.”

Her heart kicked once like an engine turning over on a wintry afternoon.

He could dance like a dream. When he pressed her close, his substantiality surprised her. The glasses, the neatly combed hair, the chivalry on the sidewalk and at doors made an impression, but the back and shoulders let her relax. The girls at their table thought him the most polite man they’d ever met. When she first heard him speak in his articulate way that was oddly devoid of accent, she thought he was like the movie version of a professor, but without the zaniness that emasculated those characters. Still, he was refined in a way that might have raised eyebrows among the men of her set. He could discuss things they didn’t understand. He didn’t so much drink a beer as warm it in his hand as an offering to the gods of conversation. She fretted over how he’d get along with her father, and so she brought him around earlier than she would have otherwise, in case she had to cut him loose, but something in Ed’s carriage disarmed the big man. Eventually she had to feign annoyance at how well they got along. She shouldn’t have been entirely surprised. He’d been a neighborhood kid, the kind who knew how to throw a punch when a friend was in trouble and could talk everybody’s way out of it before it started—the kind men listened to because the way he spoke suggested he wasn’t telling them anything he thought they didn’t know already.

He was a natural athlete. They went to the driving range with her old friend Cindy and her husband Jack, who was into golf. Ed teed up and smacked the ball so soundly that when she saw it next it was a tiny pea at the end of its parabolic journey.

They headed out to Forest Hills one weekend to see her friends Marie and Tom Cudahy. There was a tennis court near the Cudahys’ townhouse. They borrowed tennis whites from their hosts and the four of them hit the ball around in doubles, no keeping score or serving, just volleying. Ed returned shots he shouldn’t have been able to get to in time. At the end, Tom asked him to play him solo, and Eileen turned and saw the embarrassed look on Marie’s face. They both knew what was coming. Tom had been a letterman at Fordham and had a powerful serve, and though he mostly kept his competitiveness in check during mixed doubles, he liked to throttle his counterpart for a while afterward.

The two men took their positions and Tom fired a blistering smash. The ball raced up Ed’s body off the bounce, as if it was trying to hit him more than once. The second serve came in on Ed’s hands. He flicked his wrist at the last second and deposited the ball just over the net. Tom hustled but the ball died, bouncing again before he got to it. They traded points and games. Ed’s serve was careful and reliable, his returns determined and vigorous. She liked the way he whipped his racket across his chest, dismissing offerings with sudden ferocity. He tucked the ball into corners and moved it around the court. Tom won the set, but Ed made the contest closer than anyone in their circle had.

They walked back to the Cudahys’ to shower and change. She had one hand in Ed’s, while the other held down the hem of Marie’s mod minidress. On the court she’d felt protected by all the activity, but off the court she felt almost naked in it. Ed looked terrific in Tom’s spare whites, as if he was born to wear them.

“When did you get so good at tennis?”

“I’m not that good.”

“You looked pretty good to me.”

He bounced a ball as he walked. “I cleaned up trash one summer in Prospect Park. I stuck around after work a few times and played at the Tennis House. I was always running after shots, trying to catch up to them. There was a pro who gave me some free advice. ‘Go where you think the ball’s going,’ he said. ‘Beat it there.’”

“I have a good strategy too,” she said. “I don’t move at all. I let it go past me to you.”

He laughed. “I noticed.”

“I’m flat-footed.”

The smell of honeysuckle wafted up at them from a garden. Ed put the ball in his pocket. “Well, we can’t exactly have you sweating through this white dress.” He pulled her to him and gave her hip a squeeze. “This little white dress.” They took a few stumbling steps together. “It just wouldn’t be decent.”

“The term is tennis whites, Tarzan,” she said, shoving him playfully. “And they’re very proper. So behave yourself.”

Tom was walking ahead with Marie, his racket slung at his shoulder like a foxhunter’s spent rifle. His clothes were casually disheveled, his shirttail hanging out in a way that suggested he’d never had to worry about money, but Eileen knew he was wearing a costume, trying to blend in. He worked for J. P. Morgan, but he was from Sunnyside, his father was a laborer like hers, and Fordham was Fordham, but it wasn’t Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.

When the waiter came over, Tom wrinkled his nose up and pointed at something on the wine list, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to mispronounce the name. He ordered for the table without asking what anyone wanted to eat. Ed gave her hand a little squeeze, and it felt like a pulse passed between them. For a moment she knew exactly what he was thinking, not just about Tom, but about her, and himself, and all of life, and she liked the way he saw things. She could spend her life tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts.

He wasn’t a stiff, and he wasn’t a weakling either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.

His name was Leary, as Irish as anything, but she decided she could marry him anyway.

8

Ed’s family had been in New York since just before the Civil War, but their sole claim to distinction was that his great-great-grandfather had had a hand in building the USS Monitor. Ed said his father liked to suggest by a looseness in his wording that his ancestor had been some sort of naval architect, but the truth was he’d punched the clock with the grunts at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, where they fashioned the hull.

Ed’s mother, Cora, had a soothing voice and a velvety laugh. Friday nights, Eileen sat with her and Ed, drinking tea and eating oatmeal cookies in the kitchen Ed grew up in, in a railroad flat on Luquer Street in Carroll Gardens, near the elevated F tracks. Cora kept the window open on even the coldest days, to drive off the steam heat. Eileen liked to watch the lacy curtains kick up in the breeze. Cats stalked the adjacent lot, curling into old tires. When they hopped onto the windowsill, Cora swished them away with a dish towel. Trains rumbled by at intervals, marking the passage of time. Whenever she rose to leave, Eileen found herself pulled into Cora’s bosom for a hug. She never got over her surprise at receiving maternal affection, and she returned the hugs awkwardly, with an abstracted curiosity, though she welcomed them all the same.

Ed’s father, Hugh, had been dead for a few years. Eileen knew little about him; Ed released that information in a trickle, and Cora never brought him up. The only evidence of him in the apartment was a framed picture, on one of the end tables, of him wearing a hat, an overcoat, and a slightly furtive half smile. Eileen knew he’d played the piano to accompany silent movies; that he’d sealed up paint cans in the Sapolin factory, once earning a small bonus when he suggested they paint a giant can on the water tank on the roof; that he’d worked as a liability evaluator at Chubb; and that World War II had given him his only real feeling of purpose.

Ed seemed to feel safest talking about his father’s experience during the war years, though he had no memory of that time. It was all just stories he’d heard.

“You could get him going for hours if you asked about the war,” Ed said.

The government had urged civilians to pursue activities essential to the war effort, and Hugh landed on the docks, in Todd Shipyard, sticking bolts in steel plates in the bulkheads and hulls of damaged ships. The work itself wasn’t stimulating, save for the mild danger of hanging out over the water, but he liked toiling under the sun alongside other men, breathing in the salt air and thinking of what his labor led to—never mind the irony that after three generations in America, the Leary line was still working on ships.

Ed said his father and the other men modified ships from regular freighters into tankers, adding a second layer to the hull. They converted luxury liners to barracks for troop transport. The peak of their activity, in terms of both industry and importance, was working on the Queen Mary. They stripped her of her furniture and wood paneling, replaced her bars and restaurants with hospitals, painted her a dull gray to confuse rising submarines, and gave her smoke suppression. She could go as fast as a destroyer, reaching speeds of thirty knots where an average submarine could only go ten. At the height of the conflict, in 1943, she carried sixteen thousand men from London to Sydney without a gunboat escort.

One night, Eileen stayed late at Ed’s house. Cora had gone to sleep. They were sitting on the couch, which was worn along the seam by its skirt, some of the filling rupturing through. Eileen picked the picture of Hugh up off the end table.

“What was he like?”

“I suppose he was like a lot of fathers,” Ed said. “He went to work and stayed out late. He wasn’t around a lot.”

“What about as a man? All I see when I try to picture him is this coat and hat.”

A pair of end table lamps provided the only illumination in the room, which was like a parlor in a shabby club. Cora had installed cute statuettes in every corner, but personality only went so far in making an apartment feel like a home. Eileen had a new appreciation for how her mother had kept things neat and in working order, how her father had paid to replace the furniture whenever it got run down. Ed had grown up with less.

“He liked to laugh,” Ed said. “He told raunchy jokes. He always had a cigar dangling from his mouth. It made him look like a dog hanging its tongue out on a hot day. He was always hustling, working angles.”

“What else?” she asked, putting the photo down. She sensed he was on the verge of candor. “Tell me more.”

“He liked to drink,” Ed said. “It wasn’t pretty when he did.”

“I know a little about that,” she said, and they shared a moment of quiet understanding.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better.”

She felt her emotions catching in her throat. “You can tell me anything, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know how to say it if there were anything to say.”

“Just say what comes to mind.”

He was silent, and she worried she’d pushed him too hard. In her nervous state she had picked off the material that covered the sofa’s arm, and now she tried to fit it back into place with one hand while keeping her eyes on Ed. She should have left him alone, rather than risk angering him and making him shut down, but she didn’t want to revert to the surface-level interactions she’d had with other men. She had never wanted to talk to anyone more than she wanted to talk to Ed. She wanted to tell him things she’d never told anyone, and to learn more about him than she’d learned about anyone else. She used to think a bit of mystery was a prerequisite to her feeling attracted to a man. For the first time, her attraction didn’t diminish the more she knew, but actually grew.

“You remember Charlie McCarthy?” Ed said after a while. “Edgar Bergen’s dummy? My father used to say I looked like him.”

Eileen folded her hands in her lap and held her breath, trying not to look too eager to hear what he had to say.

“I figured out early on I could make him laugh if I did a Charlie McCarthy impression. So I practiced. I got to the point where I could do the voice pretty well. When my father got in from the bar, I’d hop up on the couch and twist up my mug for him.” Ed showed her, forming a rictus and opening his eyes wide, looking from side to side with an eerie, doll-like blankness. “Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he told me to cut it out and said I looked nothing like that doll. I never knew which it was going to be. I remember the last time I did it. He laughed and laughed. Then he smacked me in the mouth, whack!”—Ed brought his hand down on the coffee table—“and told me to stop embarrassing myself.”

Their hands migrated toward each other on the couch. After their fingers sat intertwined for a bit, she clasped his hand in both of hers, pulled it to her, and gave it a little kiss, then shifted closer to him.

Ed said he and his mother had never discussed his father’s drinking, but it was his understanding that his father hadn’t been a drinker before the war. “If the war had gone on forever, or if he’d been a park ranger or done something outdoors, maybe things would have been different.”

When peacetime returned, Hugh went back to Chubb and sat at a desk all day. He didn’t have any hobbies. “I think the only way he knew how to drive off the anxiety in him was to go to Molloy’s,” Ed said. “Everybody raised a glass when he walked in. They laughed at his jokes. They let him buy rounds.”

By the time Ed was nine, he said, his mother was sending him by train on pay Fridays to pick up his father’s check. If he didn’t get there in time, they were stuck for the week. If he did, his father wasn’t necessarily stuck. With his beautiful singing voice, he could make twenty-five dollars, or two-thirds of his weekly salary, as the cantor at a single funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea. Ed only knew his father did this because he served funerals during the school day as an altar boy.