We Are Not Ourselves
Eileen Leary wants more. Raised in a downtrodden area of new York by hard-drinking, Irish immigrant parents, she dreams of another life: a better job, a bigger house, more respectable friends, a happy family. When she meets Ed Leary, a brilliant young scientist, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to pursue and share her American Dream with. An indefatigable love enters Eileen’s life – but so too does a pervasive darkness and a loss that will last a lifetime.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Thomas
Matthew Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
The Author and Publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement, within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the Author and Publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.
“Touch me.” Copyright © 1995 by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Cover photographs © Kim Sohee/Getty Images (houses); Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (sky).
Cover design by Christopher Lin
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Source ISBN: 9780007548217
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007548224
Version: 2015-02-20
To Joy
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
—Stanley Kunitz
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
—King Lear
Table of Contents
Part I: Days under Sun and Rain 1951–1982
Part II: The Salad Days Thursday, October 23, 1986
Part III: Breathe the Rich Air 1991
Part IV: Level, Solid, Square and True 1991–1995
Part V: Desire Is Full of Endless Distances 1996
His father was watching the line in the water. The boy caught a frog and stuck a hook in its stomach to see what it would look like going through. Slick guts clung to the hook, and a queasy guilt grabbed him. He tried to sound innocent when he asked if you could fish with frogs. His father glanced over, flared his nostrils, and shook the teeming coffee can at him. Worms spilled out and wriggled away. He told him he’d done an evil thing and that his youth was no excuse for his cruelty. He made him remove the hook and hold the twitching creature until it died. Then he passed him the bait knife and had him dig a little grave. He spoke with a terrifying lack of familiarity, as if they were simply two people on earth now and an invisible tether between them had been severed.
When he was done burying the frog, the boy took his time patting down the dirt, to avoid looking up. His father told him to think awhile about what he’d done and walked off. The boy crouched listening to the receding footsteps as tears came on and the loamy smell of rotting leaves invaded his nose. He stood and looked at the river. Dusk stole quickly through the valley. After a while, he understood he’d been there longer than his father had intended, but he couldn’t bring himself to head to the car, because he feared that when he got there he’d see that his father no longer recognized him as his own. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than that, so he tossed rocks into the river and waited for his father to come get him. When one of his throws gave none of the splashing sound he’d gotten used to hearing, and a loud croak rose up suddenly behind him, he ran, spooked, to find his father leaning against the hood with a foot up on the fender, looking as if he would’ve waited all night for him, now adjusting his cap and opening the door to drive them home. He wasn’t lost to him yet.
