Free We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas Page A

he whipped his racket across his chest, dismissing offerings with sudden ferocity. He tucked the ball into corners and movedit 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 pointedat 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
    E d’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,