A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  Someone wanted to build a two-story restaurant on Palm Beach. Its roof would break the pure sweep of Pacific he could see from his sun deck. It would also go bust and stand vacant or become a disco. The roads out here weren’t built for that sort of traffic. They were not built for young men to drive on fueled with grog (he used the old-fashioned, convict-naval term) while showing off to some tanned girl passenger.

  The strain of all this activism just about made him sound pompous. But little ironies in his manner kept saving him.

  Murray Stannard: an old-fashioned honorable man of the Anglo-Australian tradition, the way Jim Gaffney was an old-fashioned man in the Celtic vein. Two very different kinds of creatures nonetheless. He was never as funny as Jim. He had values, and she quite rightly thought the day he first visited to get her signature that he was bemused, that there was an intensity to his desire for petitions which perhaps his stated cause itself didn’t justify. That he was trying to preserve more than he said he was trying to preserve.

  There were rumors his marriage was going wrong. The conventional wisdom was that it had happened because he was a man who typified the values of the early 1950s. His young wife, a seventies child, more of a freebooter in sex and culture, in reading and opinion, originally attracted by his quaintness, now couldn’t stand it.

  —Of course (he said) people think it’s only because of my view I’m tramping round like this. It’s more than that. People come here from all over the world just because the view isn’t broken by structures. The building itself, Mrs. Kozinski, is—I admit—inoffensive by comparison with other buildings elsewhere. But that’s not the point. This is nothing else but Sydney’s last chance. If this view goes, then the whole coastline’s brutalized for the whole community. We have a concrete coast from Wollongong to Palm Beach!

  She signed, yet she was sure he would take the list of signatories home and bore his wife with it.

  There were plenty of people to tell her what was happening between Perdita Krinkovich and Paul Kozinski. Some did so with malice and some with concern. Krinkovich was—by report—delighted. He had a girlfriend of his own. He wanted to get out cheaply too, and he was most likely to do that if his wife married another of the group known as “Big Developers.”

  Her mother, Kate O’Brien-Gaffney, demanded that she do something tough about Paul. Her mother-in-law advised her to be kinder and to go to more parties with him.

  In the summer before the cataclysm, people could sometimes sit on Palm Beach and see with one sweep of the eye the parties to the three drowning marriages—the Krinkoviches, the Kozinskis and the Stannards (Murray and his wife). Not that people talked excessively about or were amazed by such things in Sydney.

  If Reg Krinkovich however was said to take love easy, Paul Kozinski only pretended to.

  Someone at the coordination clinic had mentioned that dance classes might be good for little Bernard. Dance appealed to Bernard temperamentally, Kate could tell, and might even unleash in him the athleticism looked for in antipodean males.

  The classes begun, Siobhan managed in no time robust pliés and arabesques. Bernard achieved a more intense form of balance.

  Attending a Christmas concert at the dance school Mrs. Maria Kozinski, always alert for signs of a malign destiny for her grandson, said, But there is only one other little boy in the class.

  The curse inherent in the improper baptism and the Jewish first name continued to display its omens to Paul’s mother.

  —I want you to speak to her, Kate told Paul. When we see them on Christmas Day.

  —Why don’t you? She listens to you.

  —No. You tell her to leave him alone. None of this, Wouldn’t you like to play a game that other boys play?

  —Come on. You haven’t actually heard her say that to him, have you?

  —She’s come close to it.

  —And you say she misjudges you?

  —She’ll be influenced by you, Paul. For God’s sake, just warn her off. Bernard may never keep wickets for Australia, but he’s got a greater strength than that. He takes things as they come. He’s practically the only boy in the dance class, but he doesn’t see it in those terms. They’re all just other dancers to him. His sister’s just another dancer. He sees her do some lairy grand jeté, but he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do that because it’s a girl doing it. And he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do it because I can’t. He just rejoices, that’s all. And I don’t want her messing him up, Paul.

  She could tell Paul thought all this was only a matter of making an adjustment in the balance of rivalries between his wife and his mother.

  He was in any case already bored with Kate and the tussle for Bernard’s unimpaired soul.

  There was a thin freckled girl called Denise who had been coming for the past two years into the Gaffney-Kozinski household to help with the children. She was gentle. She had trekked in the Himalayas again and again. The Himalayan journey had become one of the rites of passage of the Australian young in the 1980s. They helped pollute the slopes of the mountains, even of Everest itself, but they also learned from the Nepalese to be vegetarian and studiously gentle. Denise was a vegetarian and intended to go on periodically trekking until she was thirty-five. She lived with her parents, who were bemused by her, her penitence, her lack of concern over real estate and career and all the rest. She had a special feeling for Bernard, and her Zen sense of the priority of all acts, human and animal, drove Siobhan to paroxysms of somersaults and jetés. She never drank, and for an ascetic, she drove well. It became an established pattern that she drove the children to their Tuesday dance classes.

  Arriving home early during the summer one Tuesday afternoon, Paul found Kate sitting sun-dazed in an armchair, sipping a substantial glass of vodka and reading the Bulletin.

  Kate felt bound to explain herself.

  —The days Denise takes them to dance classes, I indulge myself.

  She couldn’t help sounding defensive.

  —Drinking to the overthrow of old mother Kozinski, said Paul, and poured himself a drink, and sat and looked out to sea.

  There were a few such Tuesdays, when he got home early to sit with her and join in her hour-and-a-half party. Usually, he would be traveling or would not get home until late, drugged with fatigue, complaining about the long drive from the city.

  He woke one night as she was returning from the bathroom with a bottle of sedatives in her hands.

  —You’re taking too many of those, he complained, his side of the story for their cold bed. And she was. She was taking plenty. Probably twenty milligrams too much per night, and she was drinking extra vodka too. Marriage was a state of such rigidity. All the other people’s marriages seemed flexible and escapable. It was well known that people went for the bottle or the dalliance before they went for the lawyer. Another banal rule whose force had fallen on the Gaffney-Kozinski household.

  —I hope you’re clearheaded when you’re driving the kids, he said.

  Paul on his own could be happy for her to go on being mother to his children when the marriage ended. But Mrs. Kozinski might inflame her son, calling on his pride with the idea of extricating her grandchildren from the frightful ambience of the not-so-Reverend, from the flawed sacraments. Evidence such as the use of liquor and drugs were a gift to his case.

  Preparing for unconsciousness at last, Kate envisaged some court scene, and a brief astringent sweat broke on the surface of her skin.

  —Mr. Kozinski, did you ever remonstrate with your wife over the use of sedatives?

  —I remember one night, when I saw her returning from the bathroom with a pill bottle in her hands. I complained then. I was worried about her competence to drive the children …

  Kate took the interior oath to live in Guatemala with them if she had to. Or on the beaches of Costa Rica. She had a nightmare in which they went driving blithely away in a black car at whose wheel sat smiling Burnside, Kozinski Constructions’ heavy and enforcer.

  She though
t of asking Paul if the sight of her taking sedatives made it easier for him to sleep with Perdita. And then she thought that she was too tired to sustain the loudness this would generate.

  That counting of small costs was a sign. They were near an end.

  And then the features of a pleasant man, a man who would never be vengeful over children, broke with that random sort of clarity. The man who had come for the petition. Murray. A man who didn’t simulate.

  Uncle Frank used sometimes to come to see her and the children on Mondays. Most of his confreres played golf that day, but he was already not so much a pariah but a sign of contradiction amongst his fellow priests, even though his cardinal archbishop had not yet—to use his own whimsical phrase—pulled his plug.

  He was always restless on Mondays. Jim Gaffney said, Monday’s Frank’s black sabbath. He’s got to wait for the midweek race meetings before he can have another bet!

  But the not-so-Reverend Frank had by now become more abstemious with liquor than he once was. Cronies in the police force and the magistracy who would have protected him had he driven boozed in the past were now retired or else facing charges. At Kate’s place, he sipped white wine on the sun deck and discussed politics. Cuchulain between cattle raids.

  —If your poor grandmother could see us here in the sun, drinking this golden wine, she’d understand what all the suffering was for. Just the same, Kate darling, things aren’t good with your man, that bloody Pole …

  —Not good, Uncle Frank, she admitted, against all the urgings of her passion for privacy.

  —Oh, Jesus, he said. Marriage is a bugger, you see. It can aggrandize ordinary people. It can make extraordinary ones miserable. Do you love him still, this Paul Kozinski?

  She had no answer. He had been easy to love in the celebratory sweetness of the first six or so years. Could he be said to be loved in the cunning warfare of the present?

  —Dear Kate, breathed Uncle Frank. I suppose your parents will want you to undergo the entire canonical circus of annulment. All that stuff’s easier these days. To have a contract, according to little canonical weasels like Monsignor Slattery, you need material appropriate to a contract, suitable persons, mutual consent, and full knowledge. Now anyone can prove that one of those was missing. And I suppose you’ll want to go through all that. After all, it’s tradition. And tradition’s worth something. If the faithful realized how easy it was—and if they could afford it—half of them would be divorced right now.

  —We’ll just see. The marriage can be retrieved, Uncle Frank.

  But he had obviously heard differently. Everyone was hearing differently. Paul Kozinski bore all the marks of a man far gone.

  —Do you ever wonder about Mrs. Kearney and myself? Uncle Frank asked, to show the extent to which he was willing to raise his questions above the level of domestic gossip.

  Mrs. Kearney, widow of Alderman Pat Kearney. Mrs. Fiona Kearney—the name you were better not to utter in the presence of the Reverend Frank’s volatile sister, Kate O’Brien.

  —I put this woman’s name in safe deposit with you, Kate, so you’ll know I’m not kidding around. I could always talk to you. By the time you were two years we were coconspirators. And you used to tell me anything when you were a kid—fourteen years old and so on. Remember I took you to a bloody awful Kiss concert, and we saw those rock hoodlums with paint on their faces, and the sound was coming up through the cement stand into my spine, Kate. But you looked at me and you were seraphic, and I thought, To hell with it all, if it makes her happy. That’s why I bring up Mrs. Kearney, Kate, to show we’re soul mates. I would surely do anything for you. And that’s why I bring up that name. Whatever complexion your sainted mother puts on it, darling Kate.

  He waited for her to bring her eyes back to him, and she rushed to do it. She smiled to signify that Uncle Frank had safely mentioned and exorcised the name of his woman.

  —Now I don’t want to make a meal out of mea culpas. The Irish are so buggered up with Manichaeanism and self-hate that all that comes without effort. But I would have to say I’m a profoundly flawed man. At the archdiocesan chancellery, they’re queuing up to say that’s what I am. Profoundly flawed. I mean, you’re looking at a fellow who, though breathed upon by the Holy Spirit, can barely get through today without a flutter on a horse. In my case, I admit, it’s not exactly a flutter. It’s more like a fooking myocardial infarction.

  —Now other men in my situation have given up and renounced the collar, and got a bit of paper from the Vatican that says they’re all square and fit for gambling and matrimony. But I’m too bloody proud and rebellious, Kate, and I won’t let a load of Dago gobshites in some congregation in Rome force me out of my chosen path.

  He drank on that, and then continued.

  —I am, Kate, a priest according to the order of Aaron and Melchizedech. When I was a little feller in Ireland of the sorrows, they used to tell this story about the eternity of the thing. How a priest chased women and became a drunk and had been stripped of his powers by his bishop. But still one night, when he came to a bakery window full of bread, he had the power to consecrate the lot, every ounce within reach of his voice. For this is my body … Pausing by a bakery window in some miserable little lace-curtained town in the Bogs, he transformed an entire windowful of bread into mysterium fidei.

  —Now see, that’s how I see the value of what I’ve taken on. In those terms. What you’d call inescapability. And no little gang of Italian monsignors is going to cast me out on the street like that poor feller in the story. I’m just letting you know, Kate, because you must wonder where I stand and what keeps me going in this stubborn way. You must look at a feller like me and often wonder. Even when you were a kiddie you must have looked at me and found it all mystifying. So I wanted to set the story straight for you, Kate darling. I keep to what I’m doing out of bloodymindedness. I’m blasphemous enough to think that even I might know more about love than they do in the joyless chambers of the Vatican.

  Though Kate found it hard for some reason to control her tears at the end of these confessions, Uncle Frank was beaming and exalted.

  —And let me tell you something else … Well, maybe after I pour myself another glass of this golden wine from the Hunter Valley …

  And, holding up his glass, he burst into a parenthesis of song:

  —Oh I wish I was in sweet Dunlow

  And seated on the grass.

  And by my hand a bottle of wine.

  And on my knee a glass …

  He sipped a mouthful and gasped and said that life was grand beyond our deserts! And then he composed himself and was ready to go on.

  —What I’m telling you, Kate, is that I know you’re unhappy. I grieve for your sake. There are two people on earth I’d go to hell for. One of them is not—I’m sad to say—my good sister, your mother. It embarrasses me that I’m on her go-to-hell list, and she’s not on mine. She’d do anything for me. Blind to my faults, etc., etc. But the two people I’d go to hell for are you and Fiona Kearney. There it is. The story of Frank O’Brien, priest of the order of Melchizedech and living bloody shame. So it comes down to this. What can I do for you, Kate?

  But of course, he knew and she knew that as soothing as it was to be told that the not-so-Reverend Frank would die for you, there was nothing he could do. Avuncular love, even unto hell, availed nothing when set up against Paul Kozinski’s absorption in Perdita Krinkovich.

  His speech was not futile, though. She found to her surprise that she too had a list she had not been aware of owning, and that without even thinking of it she had fantastically considered Uncle Frank a possible parent for her children if, for example, as loving partners on a holiday, she and Paul fell from the sky in a helicopter or were lost sailing the Vistula to Tahiti. Bernard would grow up to be a bookmaker. Siobhan would own pubs, as Uncle Frank and Mrs. Kearney did, and none of that seemed such a bad thing.

  The rumor was that Frank and Fiona owned eight pubs between them. Even more, that he
had a share of a funeral parlor owned by his friend O’Toole, where on the positive side he spent a lot of evenings consoling the bereaved in the comfortable front parlors.

  Uncle Frank said, Just watch him. He’s an intense sort of lad.

  —What do you mean?

  —Those Slavs are sort of emotionally concentrated.

  —But his father’s always saying they’re just like you.

  —Well, they’re not. We’re intense, sure. But in a different way. We drink to bleed the pressure off. They drink so they’ll never forget. You ought to watch them, and call on me in any circumstances.

  Six

  APRIL IS A SWEET MONTH on the beaches north of Sydney. It is considered autumn, but would pass for summer in another place. There is a public holiday then—Anzac Day—the celebration of the sacrifice of young Australians and New Zealanders on the shores of the Hellespont in 1915. The day was generally so benign in disposition that the Gaffney-Kozinskis could spend it on the sand as if high summer still prevailed.

  In that year, the holiday came on a Monday. Bernard walked the water line looking for mussels to inspect. Siobhan did her faultless fouettés en tournant on firm sand below the tide line. Paul Kozinski was strangely compliant that morning. He claimed he had to fly to Melbourne later, so the day would be foreshortened. But he smiled. He was not abstracted.

  Just the same, he brought with him not so much the musk of other women. It was the musk of another preoccupation, the way he played politely at being the husband and the father.

  —Two years ago we would have had a barbecue, and thirty or forty people would have come out here.

  —It’s nicer en famille.

  They had moved into this phase of guarded pleasantries. It was a brittle state, thinner than a filament.

  Sometimes at this time of year the Pacific grew still and earned its name. That day it was the sort of sea in which you could imagine yourself swimming all the way from Palm Beach south along the ramparts of sandstone cliff to the next beach south, which was named Whale. That afternoon she even thought in a random way of getting Denise to stay with the children on the shore, and of heading out on a surf-ski to paddle miles down the coast. A modest adventure was open to a mother on such a day, with the slightest utterance of a southerly breeze still two hundred miles away. If she only had Paul to pick her up at, say, Newport.