A Woman of the Inner Sea (40 page)

The new Kozinski house stood in Woollahra. No more commuting from great distances for Paul. Woollahra was ten minutes from the city. The house was hidden behind a high ocher-painted wall, in the midst of it a heavy gate faced with burnished brass. A small bell to the side was marked with a brass plate which said
KOZINSKI
.

Murray used to broach, tenderly, the idea that the case might not go well for Uncle Frank. Having never been near a jail, he tried just the same to convince her that things would be pleasant for Uncle Frank there.

—Nobody wants to go to prison, of course, he conceded. But he’ll be respected both by the screws and the cons. No one will touch him or assault him. He’ll have a better time of it than Paul will. Besides, a lot of the prisoners will have had Catholic childhoods.

Beside the Kozinskis’ crimes, she cherished Murray’s unheeding and homely bias. She was charmed by the certainty that he could be depended on to utter the mild, unfashionable prejudice.

But she was disturbed by the thought of Uncle Frank constrained.
Immured
was the word which filled her head. Uncle Frank socketed amidst walls.

A relentless dreamer still, she woke from images of immurement, and she yelled and grabbed for air in the way Murray was familiar with, and he would wake and switch the light on and stroke her scarred shoulders. She would gently test her recovered breath. At that hour the idea of Uncle Frank’s locking away and of her mother’s shame seemed hard to tolerate.

She went to court the final day, and Tandy was eloquent. He had little to go on though except Uncle Frank’s services to the community, a claim the prosecutor could undo by referring to His Eminence Fogarty’s suspension. A cardinal does not suspend eminent priests!

Uncle Frank wore his white jacket, however, just like an eminent priest. Mrs. Kearney wore a floral dress. They were a handsome enough middle-aged couple. She could not understand why they were so composed. Did they know something the judge and counsel didn’t? Were they safer than anyone thought? Or did they have the calm of martyrs?

The jury went out and did not return that day. Leaving the court holding Murray’s hand, Kate waded in a surf of journalists. Murray made the comments for her, an arrangement she was not fully happy with—since Murray could not be expected to understand a phenomenon like Frank—but which on balance she chose.

Then she and Murray took Kate Gaffney and Jim for dinner, they felt so sorry for them.

The jury comes in just before lunch the next day. At the utterance of guilt, Kate’s face contorts in the same pulse as her mother’s. They have become the one woman for a second. They rise hand in hand, and Uncle Frank who is standing looks across the court at them, raises his eyes, makes a whimsical bunch of his mouth and lifts both arms. Robert Emmet did not go to the scaffold in Dublin with greater grace or more certainty of a kind of immortality. And Kate realizes that what has brought its own reward to Uncle Frank is not virtue but style: his idea of style, which is not removed by more than a whisper from a kind of lawlessness and subversion. The style of all this will keep him alive under judgment.

For example, and as if to demonstrate, he kisses Fiona’s hand before he is led away.

Again it is Mrs. Kate Gaffney
née
O’Brien who lacks something like that to fall back on.

Sentencing will be within nine days. We all know that it will not be a suspended sentence. The judge however will say that in no construction of justice can Uncle Frank’s sentence be greater than that of an ordinary violator. The one thing the prosecution had not successfully argued, the judge will say, is that Uncle Frank had violated the expectations of society in some way that was extra to
his violation of the New South Wales Gaming Act. In any case the Reverend O’Brien still had many admirers amongst the wide community and amongst members of his denomination. It was society at large which he had offended.

In another place and under another jurisdiction, said the judge, his illegal earnings would be estimated, action would be taken for confiscation, for payment of fines.

Five years in prison.

Uncle Frank’s sentence drove her to take up a kind of surveillance. From a given parking space in a laneway facing onto Ocean Street, she could see the house. For as long as an hour and a half after work each day, she could watch it from her car. One early evening she saw Paul’s Jaguar, KOZCON, pull up before the garage which was at one end of the long ocher wall. The sight of this wall somehow returned her to the red dust road outside Bourke, where Chifley slept in the back of the sister-in-law’s truck beside the tarpaulin-wrapped Burnside.

As Paul drove into his garage, she lost and refound herself again in the accustomed way, gasping for a while in the front seat of her new car, a modest little Japanese thing to match the modesty of her survival. In it, on the bridge where people crazily changed lanes, she achieved an almost pleasing sense of fragility.

Bring the Sydney spring to us, with its bright, effervescent air. Safe in their knowledge of who Uncle Frank really was, sharing the secret, Kate Gaffney and her daughter began to meet more frequently. They became familiar with cappuccino bars around Bernard Astor’s office in Woolloomooloo. The ceremonies of being a good daughter pleased Kate.

Send Kate to David Jones’s department store on the corner of Elizabeth and King Streets to buy a present, at an end of a frightful year, for Mrs. Kate Gaffney’s fifty-seventh birthday.

Follow her as she ascends the escalator, making for the gallery on the top floor. She steps off at the second, amongst the couturier clothing, and comes close to colliding with Perdita Krinkovich.

With all else to distract her, this was the first time that it struck Kate: Perdita coveted her name. Kozinski. Kate was surprised to find herself loath to give it up. There was flesh invested in that name. She had paid for the stretch of desert it stood for.

A terrible meeting, both in the same instant coming eye to eye, both parties bereft of a moment to prepare themselves.

Kate saw Perdita’s mouth open and the lower lip draw back ferally. She saw too that Perdita was well pregnant, in the phase they called
showing
.

That is my child, she thought. She has captured my child.

She staggered sideways, in the direction of the handbag counter. If she got her balance back she might flee. But there was a chance she would attack Perdita.

—Oh Jesus! she heard Perdita murmur.

Paul Kozinski’s lover turned and began to hobble away amongst the counters. Slotting herself in athletically between the shoppers, women older and younger, she wanted to lose herself behind their average flesh and the padded shoulders of their coats.

Kate was startled enough not to pursue. Besides, humanity and a sense of sisterhood asserted itself. Behind her stood the down escalator. Briskly she excused her way past the plump companionable women who wanted to descend two by two, talking as they went. Women with the spaciousness of their achieved motherhoods.

Downstairs was a doorman the store still used, even in hard times, in imitation of Harrod’s. She told the man she needed a taxi at once.

—They’ve just taken my mother to hospital.

He took her through the melee of other women awaiting taxis.

—Excuse us, ladies. I’m sure you don’t mind … this woman has an emergency.

She was fortunate that the cab driver was a Korean. He understood enough to know there was an urgency, but not enough to hear the doorman’s lackey blather about hospitals. He forced his way through the traffic of Elizabeth Street, driving in the swashbuckling mode of his race. He jousted his way up Parramatta Road, making for the address in Abbotsford which she had given him. Uncle Frank’s place.

Mrs. Prendergast opened the door to Kate. She had been the not-so-Reverend Frank’s housekeeper for seventeen years, this thin woman who shared none of her employer’s vices.

She knew Kate at once, and went on calling her Miss Gaffney.

As she led her down the hallway, she turned to Kate and her eyes filled with tears.

—It’s dreadful what has happened to Father Frank.

—He’s taken it well. He says he’s very comfortable.

—I know. He
says
it.

Kate could see that she would have to talk to the woman for a time, to console her.

Mrs. Prendergast said, If they seize his property to pay tax, this house will go and I’ll be on the street.

She had a memory of being destitute, after her husband’s death in 1959. A repeat episode was the dread of her life, and Uncle Frank her only guarantee against it.

—It won’t happen. My father says that if they sell, he’ll buy.

Though she had not heard her father say this, she must remind him that it should be so.

—He’ll buy it for Uncle Frank.

Mrs. Prendergast was rendered ecstatic so easily.

—Oh, everyone knows Mr. Gaffney is a saint.

—That’s right. A very loyal man. Could I see Uncle Frank’s study? My father is handling Uncle Frank’s affairs. He’s given me a list of documents he’ll need …

Mrs Prendergast would open any door as long as it was for Jim Gaffney, the saint, the deus ex machina of her life’s history.

Kate entered Uncle Frank’s study alone.

There was a long ovoid mirror inset above Uncle Frank’s mantelpiece. It was familiar to her from her childhood, from the days Uncle Frank had the Gaffney family here to his off-duty house, where he could operate free of the scrutiny of his parishioners. To the side of its beading sat a little block of varnished wood which seemed like a small blemish in the general carpentry. She knew from having pressed it in childhood that something as magical as a small compartment lay behind the mirror. She had been so delighted to find it at the age of eleven. A secret compartment. Even in Abbotsford, New South Wales. It had meant that the real world and the world of secret places encountered only in film and television were continuous at Uncle Frank’s house and that drama, which at that age she thought was confined to another hemisphere, was therefore everywhere.

This slight nodule of wood was still easy to find, and locating it she pressed it, and the mirror swung as if on gimbals just as it had
twenty years past. There was revealed—as there had been that day in her childhood—a clutter of dusty papers. Perhaps they were precisely the same papers which had been there when she was eleven. And at one end, at the corner of the cavity, a large revolver lying upside down along its barrel, butt against the wall. Beside it was a dusty little box which said .32
caliber
and she picked the box up and rattled it and found it was near full.

She knows by instinct that there is no documentation for this weapon. No means that it can be—as the cop shows have it—
traced
to Uncle Frank.

It was very likely that Uncle Frank had acquired this weapon from some sergeant of detectives whom he had consoled in bereavement.

Kate tried to pick the gray-blue weapon up by its brown-hatched handle. She lifted delicately at first, and failed to move it. She tried it again with a greater firmness of grip. It was terribly heavy in the hand. She walked up and down the study, training with it, so that it would come to feel a more accustomed weight. As she had been taught to do by the cinema, she opened the weapon and inspected the chambers. Four of them were full. Surely, she thought, this could not mean that Uncle Frank has used two?

Though very dusty, a fact which strangely consoled Kate, the weapon seemed well oiled. It had the efficient look of something that would work.

Uncle Frank’s revolver fits precisely into her office handbag, though it makes the sides bulge and may stain the satin lining.

There is nowhere in a city that one can test-fire a revolver without drawing attention. But she has emptied the chambers and fired the mechanism. Six authoritative, businesslike cracks. The mechanics of it sound and feel very heavy, suitably potent. She has been satisfied and she is confident therefore at this hour.

An evening hour.

She sits in a cappuccino bar opposite Paul’s ocher-walled villa. She intends to wait in the street if the coffee bar closes. It does not prove necessary. A little after seven Paul comes home to the mother of his potential third child. From within the Jaguar he opens the ocher garage door, and it slides up with a ceremonial obeisance.

He does not move the car on and under cover until the door has risen with robotic slowness out of sight and into its socket beneath the ceiling.

This is the point at which to greet him. Seeing her coming he would not wind down the window, or at least could not be depended on to. She would shoot him through the window. She would load all the chambers. It would be frightful for Perdita, but people lived beyond the frightful. Not as frightful as his way with children. And even if grief consumed you, it was still a lifetime’s work to attend to all that must be attended to.

Her excuse to Murray, to cover this vigil as earlier ones she has maintained into the meat of the evening, is that she has been to a screening. Murray never displays narrative curiosity: What was it about? He only wants to know was it good or bad? A cricketer’s question. In or out? Won or drawn?

She was sleeping very soundly now, with confused dreams but without medication.

The evening she intended to finish Paul, he was late home. They closed down the coffee shop around her and she was reduced to sauntering up and down the block. She studied the pictures in the window of the real estate agent and had it confirmed to herself that Sydney was an expensive city. She read news posters. Her devices were those one uses when waiting on the other party to an assignation. Sheltering in the shadow of spotted gums, she smelt the tang of dog’s piss from around the base of the trunks. She waited like a lover for the unutterable second, the instant of encounter which would never but inevitably come.

From shadows she sees the Jaguar come home toward its ocher walls. It halts at the curb, its burgundy hindquarters still stuck out in the stream of traffic which would never dare strike anything so impeccable.