A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  Yet Kate feared, a bubble of panic rising in her throat, pricking the roof of her mouth, that Teece spoke as if he would soon switch gear and render a different picture of Uncle Frank.

  The prosecutor asked, Did the Reverend Frank O’Brien seek any special favors from you?

  Teece took pale thought.

  —One day Father O’Brien called and wanted to see me. I said I was available. He came in and asked if he could open a bank account in the name of Edith Timms. He said it was an unregistered trust, and there were problems in using his regular accounts. I didn’t ask him too many questions about this. I had no reason to. I thought he might be just wanting to open an account for a widow or for someone injured …

  There was indulgent laughter from the press and, Kate was comforted to see, the women in the jury in particular.

  —And you know, he didn’t want to go through the legal fuss with founding a trust. And then I asked him what address this Edith Timms account should be in. He hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t want it to be his address. He was looking perplexed. So I said that if he wanted he could use my address for a time.

  The prosecution acknowledged that this was very generous of Mr. Teece and asked how much ultimately came through the account.

  Teece said, About thirty-seven thousand dollars.

  The prosecutor remarked tritely that this was something more than a widow’s mite. Mr. Teece said it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for a trust based on donations to raise as much money as this, if raffles and dinners were held.

  —But you never knew who this Edith Timms was?

  Teece said, No.

  —Even though the address of the account was yours?

  —I thought that was a technicality.

  —Did your superiors ultimately point out to you that it was more than a technicality?

  Teece admitted that they had. He did not seem utterly shamefaced about it. But he admitted he had been suspended.

  Would Mr. Teece have been surprised to know that a number of accounts under the name Edith Timms had been established at other branches of various banks, that they had been established by Mrs. Kearney and that all of them used his address?

  Teece shook his head. This is where he thought the Reverend Frank had let him down a little. He’d been ignorant of all this.

  So—in a way—was Kate. Ignorant of the style and cunning and scope of Uncle Frank’s operations. Astonished by it and overtaken by a kind of wonder.

  The chief question then:

  —And you say that the defendant O’Brien offered you no direct inducements for this service you had done him?

  A month after the account had been opened, Teece remarked, the Reverend Frank—who knew he was a keen punter—called him and gave him three telephone numbers. Father O’Brien said that if Teece called any of these numbers, he would discover that he had a credit of three thousand dollars.

  Did Mr. Teece think this was a bribe?

  No, said Teece. He knew the Reverend O’Brien was a wealthy man. It wasn’t such an astounding thing for him to give another punter a little credit.

  —So it wasn’t an inducement, Teece said. It was a gift.

  Through this, Fiona Kearney kept thin and composed, but she wrote no notes to Tandy Q.C. She was an old-fashioned woman and had taken her direction from Alderman Kearney and now from her spiritual director and lover, the not-so-Reverend Frank. It was Uncle Frank who held his head on the side, seeing at every step the trick behind the prosecution’s drift and firing off the notes to Tandy.

  —Are bank officers encouraged to accept gifts from wealthy clients? asked the prosecution.

  —Not in theory. But it happens.

  When it came to Mr. Tandy Q.C.’s turn, he seemed to understand Uncle Frank’s disposition as thoroughly as Kate herself did. He asked Teece the right questions, or at least the questions which Uncle Frank wanted asked.

  —When the Reverend Frank O’Brien told you of the three thousand dollars credit, did you consider it a reimbursement for your having let your address be used in this way?

  —No.

  For Teece as for Uncle Frank, it was all in the spirit of the premature burial and wake.

  —Did you consider the extension of credit as connected with your duties as a bank officer in any way at all?

  —No.

  —What did you consider it?

  —A gesture of friendship. From a generous sportsman.

  Happily Teece’s ignorance remained as invincible as Uncle Frank’s. The next witness called was however so likely to be damaging that Murray suggested they leave now.

  —Soon, said Kate. Soon, Murray.

  This witness was older, a former manager of a bank in Milperra. He had a jovial, beefy look, but was wearing an old-fashioned brown suit. For he was serving a sentence for embezzlement, a matter quite separate from the matter before this court. He had however received visits during his banking career from Mrs. Kearney and the Reverend Father O’Brien. He had opened accounts in the name of Edith Timms and Edmund Kelly.

  —Did you have any reason, the prosecutor asked, to believe the names were fictitious?

  —Well I wondered about Edmund Kelly. In view of the fact it’s the name of the bushranger.

  Ned Kelly, hanged in the Melbourne jail, in Uncle Frank’s worldview another victim of the lion and unicorn.

  —What address was used for these accounts?

  —There wasn’t any actual account. I kept the amounts informally for Father O’Brien and Mrs. Kearney.

  —What do you mean by informally?

  —Well sometimes—temporarily—I’d keep them in my bottom drawer, or else in my office safe.

  —Was bank interest paid on these amounts?

  —No, said the fallen manager. I was doing it as a favor.

  Kate noticed with a pulse of fear that when the witness said this, Uncle Frank had nodded. Good answer! Good lad! Judgment might come as a vast surprise to Uncle Frank, a terminal confirmation of the lack of civil good humor everywhere on the planet.

  Tandy Q.C. spoke to the witness.

  —How did you first meet the Reverend Frank O’Brien?

  —My wife approached him. She was worried about my gambling.

  —Did she have cause to be?

  —I wouldn’t be serving a sentence if not.

  —Why would your wife go to the Reverend Frank O’Brien, who was known to be something of a gambler himself?

  —My wife believed that Father O’Brien was the beau idéal of gamblers. He had his gambling under control.

  This caused the jury and the press to guffaw, and Kate was grateful that her mother was not there.

  For Tandy and the judge did not laugh.

  —Did Father O’Brien ever give you any advice?

  —Yes, said the fallen bank manager. The Reverend O’Brien sent me to Gamblers Anonymous. Just as an observer at first. To get the idea. Even though it was all meant to be anonymous, I didn’t want to declare myself in case word got back to Head Office. So Father O’Brien gave me three telephone numbers. He said I’d better ring those if I had to bet. He said that I would find that I had ten thousand dollars credit if I called those numbers.

  —At the time of your arrest, how much did the people who answered those telephone numbers tell you you owed them?

  —They told me I owed them $17,737. I spoke to Father Frank about it and that was the last I heard.

  Seeing the prosecution rise in a way she thought predatory, she asked Murray if she could go. After all it was an odd minute, when again the press might not be so watchful. But it was painful for Frank’s sake to be a witness to this—the drift of judgment. Even his friends were—with the greatest respect—condemning him, and he construed it as praise.

  Murray helped her as she struggled upright urgently.

  Waiting for the lift outside, he said, This is a remarkable family you belong to, Kate. You are yourself a remarkable woman.

  She said nothing. She was palpitat
ing for Uncle Frank.

  —I never thought I’d be mixed up with a family like this.

  He began to laugh.

  Two barristers appeared, talking secretly to each other and nodding at Murray. Murray too spoke as in a conspiracy when he turned to her.

  —Come and live with me, Kate. Now. I’ve been a negligent friend. But I’m very patient. If that’s what you like. My first wife couldn’t stand it.

  —I have to get out of the so-called sanatorium first.

  —Come and live with me when you do.

  As they were leaving the building, a press photographer in wait took their picture. As it appeared in the next morning’s Packer tabloid, they seemed designed for each other by their parallel thinness.

  Twenty-five

  WHEN THE SANATORIUM SEASON ended, it had to be either her parents’ place or Murray’s. Her mother had a surprisingly poor sense of how little a woman deprived of her children wanted to go back now to her childhood hearth. Jim Gaffney understood it though. He understood the obvious things: such as that her burns had had nothing to do with Murray.

  So she moved to Murray’s city apartment. She laid her few clothes out in a chest of drawers. She had begun to use simple cosmetics again, but only the most simple. She wanted to mask the harsh effect all the sedative had had upon her skin. She established a modest beachhead on a vanity table the former Mrs. Stannard had no doubt used more spaciously.

  She went to day therapy for a week, sat and listened to men tell how loneliness or ambition had unhinged them, to women speak of how a lust for possession had entrapped them. She listened to them talk each morning of such ordinary treacheries. As a means of convincing everyone that she was whole, she made up eminently sensible advice for all parties. She enjoyed creating these salutary little near-fictions about other patients, salting them with items from socio- and psycho jargon, frowning and hesitating before uttering each Californian cliché. The burden of her advice was: You mustn’t blame yourself. It seemed to satisfy everyone eminently, and she believed it was benign advice anyhow.

  And so the sanatorium let her go with a set of prescriptions and a list of emergency phone numbers.

  She had ambitions to work, and one Sunday afternoon she and Murray went to drinks at Bernard Astor’s.

  How her son’s godfather had aged!

  She went back to Bernard’s to do itineraries—the plain business of flights and hotel bookings—and to write press releases. She did not set up or attend press conferences, as she had when she was young, and she did not travel with actors and directors. Yet Bernard paid her as if she did. She chose not to argue about it. She would earn it all soon. She could foresee a time when she would appear at press previews and move amongst the reviewers with a casual skill.

  Soon she was able to call Murchison’s Railway Hotel. Jack seemed to be a man harried in a new way, a less comfortable one. He said that Connie had had a little time in hospital, but she was improving now. She was learning not to blame herself, he said.

  —What for?

  —You know. Her sister. Beats me to be honest.

  He changed direction then, and she heard his laugh.

  —Jesus, we had to keep a straight face telling lies about you the night you and Gus took off. We didn’t know what to say, so we said the least we could …

  Guthega was a town hero, said Jack. But men really spoke volumes of Jelly, and Jack was putting up a plaque for him in the bar. It was sad, Noel and his father had fallen out and Noel was off doing shearing exhibitions at country shows. It could be the making of the boy.

  Though of course he would always remember that through no fault of his own he had fallen on the plunger.

  —And have you seen Gus? she asked.

  —Gus’s engaged, said Jack, and this struck him as utterly hilarious. He’s traveling round New South Wales in his fiancée’s caravan, and they lecture and show slides on Australian wildlife to schoolkids.

  At night Kate reclined back against Murray’s body. He placed his cheek against her scarred shoulders. He said that she was beautiful. It was a preciously ordinary word. She was aware of hollowness, but her daily work was done and Murray enfolded her. She fulfilled responsibilities and observed herself doing it. She believed there would never be a connection between the observer and the task. She was sundered in two for good.

  The black onus of punishing Paul Kozinski never left her, and she was not delayed by anything as minor as reluctance to act. Even as she wrapped herself into Murray’s embrace, she was utterly willing to arrange a conference with Paul and to reach out in the midst of cool exchanges and plunge a knife into his abdomen. Everything she could devise failed to come up to weight however. As with all committers of unspeakable wrongs, the punishment should bring the culprit himself deliverance, but not too easily.

  Paul had bought himself a new house for the new marriage, not that the new marriage was achieved yet. But there would be a wedding as soon as the annulment was delivered, and Monsignor Pietecki—Kate knew—would officiate. She knew that this new place had been bought in part with the insurance money from the hecatomb at Palm Beach, her share of which waited for her somewhere, in some lawyer’s office. A charred reward she intended not to touch.

  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.