A Woman of the Inner Sea (3 page)

Just a little way from Pittwater where the
Vistula
was moored, just a little way across Sydney’s Northern Peninsula, was Palm Beach. This Palm Beach was named not in imitation of Miami but because cabbage-tree palms still grew there, the palms out of which convicts and settlers had once made their hats. It was one of those places that was characterized by rich people’s holiday homes and the not-quite-so-superb residences of the permanent population. The wealthy visited only on fashionable weekends and public festivals.

Kate and Paul agreed quite peaceably to break the pattern. They intended to live at Palm Beach all the time during their children’s first years. Paul argued he didn’t mind the long drive to town. It was compensated for by the short drive to the
Vistula
on weekends.
And their children would be sun-kissed, Australian
Herrenvolk
.

Convinced of the imminent idyll, they bought a three-story sandstone house facing north toward Barrenjoey lighthouse and the illimitable promise of the Pacific. The living room filled with winter sunshine and was the size of half a football field. The sun-deck was large enough for a child to ride a bike. Even indoors, the small Kozinskis would be as good as outdoors, looking out at an ocean which absorbed and humanized the sun itself. Out the back, in a natural amphitheater created by ledges of sandstone, a landscaped subtropic garden embowered an area of turf apt for child-play and exploration.

There is a trap in every milieu. Everyone knew that the trap here, on this paradisal strand, was the funnel-web spider, the earth’s most venomous. The beautiful peninsula was its native place. Kate, before proceeding to contract on the place, had an insect expert survey the garden and the foundations. There were, he reassured her at the end, no visible signs of large funnel-web infestation. She should take all the normal precautions—knocking shoes together before putting them on, inspecting sand pits, buckets and spades before children were allowed to handle them. But the Gaffney-Kozinskis, the expert implied, would have very little to fear. No black-carapaced arachnid would come ravening out of the bush to envenomate their happiness.

The marriage drew near in an air of exact accounting practice. A family trust was drawn up as a means of diminishing taxation. There were legal arrangements to be made and documents signed. These were drawn up by conscientious lawyers who seemed genially to desire nothing less than the young couple’s happiness. Years earlier Kate had signed similar but not so sweeping documents to do with her father’s corporation and her sleeping share in it. During this premarital signing, though, Kate becoming extremely paper-rich for the sake of tax-sharing, an accountant who knew Paul said. You just better not get bloody well divorced too soon, Paul. That’s all.

The idea of it caused laughter.

Her father had once said, making a speech at some family occasion, I distribute the mysteries of light, and Uncle Frank distributes
the mysteries of faith. Who is the luckier of the two? I think Uncle Frank is. Because the mysteries of faith survive when the light goes out.

Polite family applause.

For this was Australia, where no one trusted eloquence. Where the man of the aphorism had to be watched. The elevated wit of Europe was the chain which had bound a thousand felons and provoked a million emigrations. In Ireland, said the not-so-Rever-end Uncle Frank, you got a thousand years of oppression, and all that came out of it was a nancy boy called Oscar Wilde uttering a few epigrams.

Australians—the Gaffney and O’Brien relatives—knew in their blood that epigram wasn’t worth the price, since it was their heredity who’d paid the piper.

So it was her courtly father, Jim Gaffney, who was considered the fanciful one, the one given to excess of nicety and even oratory, and Uncle Frank was the
man’s man
, who knew horses and which referee kept a good five meters; who knew how to be utterly comfortable in company, who was in fact eloquent, but seamlessly. The not-so-Reverend Frank
did
speak in high color, but according to the idioms they were accustomed to.

Yet at some times in her childhood it seemed to Kate that all Uncle Frank’s most serious statements had been directed at her. There was a night—it was the start of the Australian Jockey Club’s spring season, in which a horse her father Jim had a share in had run second in the Doncaster Handicap—when she had gotten up from her fourteen-year-old bed and seen her father help Uncle Frank into a limousine, one from the company her father had an account with. And as Uncle Frank got in—so rarefied with booze that even his sister was moved to ask the next morning, Why do they say drunk as a lord when we have Frank to go by?—Uncle Frank had looked up at her window and yelled:

—Do you think the Pope is a higher being than the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia? It’s the processes, see. The processes are designed for gobshites. And they both oblige the processes by
being
gobshites!

She believed Uncle Frank was sure she was listening. Acquiring a very ordinary political and ecclesiastical education: not shattering news, but received a little earlier than most of her sister students at Loreto Convent were receiving it.

But before this ordinary heresy could escape too pervasively into the Eastern Suburbs air, her father had lovingly pushed Uncle Frank into the back of the limousine.

There had always been that nearly embarrassing feeling of personal communication. This scandalous priest, rumored to have investments in hotels and racehorses, would—often at the height of a binge, even at the point where incoherence threatened—raise his large prophetic jaw and utter a message which seemed to his niece to be meant for her.

Slowly she had gathered a portmanteau of usable Uncle Frankisms. Things barely worth saying in themselves but having force as said. All plain truths, or truisms. But there was something about the force of truisms when they’re uttered by certain mouths, and Uncle Frank’s mouth had that force for her. Uncle Frank was her
teller
in the furnace. The way lovers dealt in banal yet always refreshing praise, Uncle Frank dealt in banal but always refreshing truth. As essential as a lover is a
teller!
And the greater was the art of the teller, since with the right resonant dictum, you could understand even a loveless universe.

When she was quite young, even before she had identified Uncle Frank as her shaman, she noticed that other people, the parents of her schoolfriends, would sometimes denounce the not-so-Reverend Frank with a special fury. Their faces would close down. They talked about his imported cars, his alpaca suits, and his gambling and drinking as if he were the only priest guilty of such things. The Archdiocese of Sydney, whether Anglican or Roman Catholic, had never been intensely penitential. As in the brash city itself, the visionary or the mystic had never been encouraged. Generally a lower-middle-class virtuousness was counted more highly than searing faith.

Grafted on to these ambitions of low church respectability, which in Sydney were always breaking down anyhow into graft and saturnalia, was the tradition of the Irish working-class priesthood as perceived by someone of Jim Gaffney’s and of Uncle Frank’s generation. The priest was heterosexual (after all, how else was he to be conventionally tempted and proven?), a gambler, a drinker, a sporting man. He was even
entitled
to be. It was sufficient that he edify by being a eunuch for Christ’s sake. If you permitted him access to the bottle and the sporting field, then he
was less likely to look wistfully toward the marriage bed. He was not the great Bull of Coole. He was a steer for higher causes. So he was entitled to eat well and drive well, to put money on the backs of footballers and racehorses—yes, even though an ordinance of the Archdiocese of Sydney forbade priests to attend racecourses, since the possibility of obsession existed there. But after all, gambling was venial, and copulation was mortal.

The reason people muttered about the not-so-Reverend Frank O’Brien was, Kate would realize much later, that they thought he was getting the lot: the racing, the football, the whiskey, the alpaca coat, the Jaguar or the BMW, and the arms of a woman as well. The woman being his business partner, the widowed Mrs. Fiona Kearney.

This was an O’Brien-Gaffney scandal even before the action of this book begins. But the rumors about Mrs. Kearney and Uncle Frank were well suppressed in the household. Kate did not pick them up herself until she was in the first year of her degree at university. Perhaps Kate’s ignorance was a chosen one; it is astounding what people can fail to notice if it suits them. Hearing Uncle Frank put forward in some undergraduate debate as a far-gone example of institutional hypocrisy, she understood certain fights her tempestuous mother, Mrs. Kate Gaffney, had had at friends’ places.

Kate was pleased she hadn’t inherited the jawline of the O’Briens, but she would have liked to have inherited more of the O’Brien social fortitude, the principles of tribal loyalty and of sisterly decency which let, and
made
Kate Gaffney the elder stamp out of some prim Christmas party as soon as she heard any excessive or stupid word against the Reverend Frank; made her walk down through the garden amongst the clicking of Christmas beetles and the barking of cicadas, and drive away.

Honest Jim Gaffney had married an elemental force. Kate Gaffney the junior surmised that he might have been amply rewarded—her mother, she understood these days, was likely to have been a furious and rugged lover.

So Jim bore bravely too the weight of that other elemental force, his brother-in-law the not-so-Reverend Frank.

Just before her wedding to Paul Kozinski, Jim sat with his daughter, drinking a bottle of wine on the balcony of her flat. He looked out at the stupefying dazzle of the Harbour and said with
discreet daring, Of course, Frank should never have been a priest. He would have been a better trade unionist. And a marvelous politician. A football coach. His forwards would die for him! Or a trainer. God, his jockeys would pull any race for him. But maybe he shouldn’t have been a priest.

He’d looked at her directly.

—It was poverty and limited opportunity that put him in a Roman collar.

This was a rare and heretical outburst, and it was something Kate believed he would not in his right mind say to his wife.

In the end-state in which we first encountered her though, looking at Uncle Frank’s poster in the rain, Kate Gaffney believes that if Uncle Frank hadn’t been what Uncle Frank
was
, she might now be dead. It is not that at the end of everything she was delighted to be alive. But she recognizes her survival as a phenomenon, of equal value to other phenomena, as the continuance of sunlight, say, or the persistence of magnetism in some objects. She knows that if the Reverend Frank had been a Labor Party number-cruncher, or president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, or president of the Republic of Eire, or coach of Parramatta Rugby League, then she would not still be here. Some other poor bitch would have had to be levered into place as Uncle Frank’s Queen of Sorrows.

W
E ALL KNOW from our own histories or else from observation how a marriage between two families of different ethnic derivation generates clan rancor:

how Uncle Frank would say one Christmas at the Gaffney home in Double Bay, That old Polish harridan Kozinski doesn’t like me one bit. Straight out of the muck of some Polish cowyard, and she behaves like one of the fooking Hapsburgs;

how the two clans danced around each other at public festivals with a brittle joviality;

how Paul, enriched for now by love, entered into a plot with Kate to rise above, to take a mocking stance on all this, laughing equally at the peasant priest O’Brien as at his own peasant mother, Maria Kozinski;

how Mrs. Kozinski continued—with no theological basis—to mistrust the validity of sacraments as administered by the not-so-Reverend Frank, and so the validity of her son’s casual and self-assured happiness;

how Jim Gaffney crossed the vast Gaffney living room, traveling from one tribe to the other, pouring wine and offering soothing compliments;

how Kate O’Brien-Gaffney’s watchful and tigerish love of her brother ensured that everyone knew Frank was the Gaffney officiator; and how this fact needed to be balanced out against Mrs. Kozinski’s concern to have an impeccable Polish priest involved at all Kozinski rites;

how, as you know, the wedding vows between Paul and Kate Gaffney were administered by Uncle Frank, while a Polish monsignor stood by to co-administer, to put licit value into the pledging of troth.

A year later, at the baptism of Kate Gaffney-Kozinski’s first-born, a daughter named Siobhan, the ceremony was again performed by Uncle Frank, but a Polish priest, Monsignor Pietecki, assisted Frank in wresting Siobhan’s soul from Satan.

A similar arrangement was made for her son Bernard, named in honor of the great Carthusian mystic (at least, that is what Jim Gaffney would softly tell Mrs. Kozinski) and of Bernie Astor, the publicist.