A Woman of the Inner Sea (2 page)

People found Mrs. Gaffney (née O’Brien) abrasive, and in uttering that opinion of her always balanced it by saying that Jimmy Gaffney was so diplomatic. Kate O’Brien—mother to the Kate of our story—is a fury. Her brother is a wild Druid, and her daughter Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Some people, the daughter Kate Gaffney herself, the woman who has just stopped crying in time to buy coffee and ice cream, have been known to wonder what sort of children Kate senior and her brother Frank O’Brien were together. Even those who love them know they might have been monstrous, furious children.

So there it is: Mrs. O’Brien-Gaffney, Kate Gaffney-Kozinski’s mother, is a known difficult woman, and the difficulties her brother has had are written large in feature articles composed by one girl-hack after another.

Mrs. Kate Gaffney and the barely Reverend Frank O’Brien had grown up together in a dismal town in Limerick where anything might be going on behind the stucco shopfronts and the blinded
windows. Whereas Jimmy Gaffney—
our
Kate’s father—grew up in working-class Leichhardt in the honest Australian sun.

The barely Reverend Frank had to travel some counties away from home before he found a seminary willing to half-educate him, and then he volunteered to serve in a remote bush diocese, and next in the archdiocese of Sydney (to be close, he argued, to the Randwick and Rose Hill races). His sister Kate O’Brien followed him to Sydney from Ireland and met Jimmy Gaffney at a Children of Mary picnic.

Our Kate, born just short of nine months after her parents’ marriage in 1958, is on the night of her tears thirty-two years of age. She is close to average height, and her fairness of complexion and light brown hair come from Jim Gaffney’s side. She inherits her figure from her ardent mother, and older women have occasionally—at her wedding, for example, where these conversations are customary—spent time discussing whether her fine-drawn features qualify her to be called pretty or beautiful. She has been married once, to Paul Kozinski, the son of Polish refugees. Her marriage I can tell you at once has been annulled both by the archdiocesan court and by civil divorce.

Old Mr. Kozinski, Paul Kozinzki’s father, used to boast with what Kate once saw as reasonable pride that he began in Australia with a wheelbarrow, and built that wheelbarrow—load of cement by load of cement—into one of the nation’s five largest construction companies.

Even during Paul’s courtship of her, Kate Gaffney had suspected the regularity with which old Mr. Kozinski said that—
one of the five largest
. It wasn’t that it wasn’t the truth. It was that Mr. Kozinski was honest enough to say
one of the five largest
, but not honest enough to say
the fifth largest
. It was probably too extreme though to see this simple vanity as an unheeded early warning.

Paul Kozinski had been educated by the Jesuits. He worked part time as a rigger while acquiring a degree in economics. He was lanky, had brown hair with a cowlick, and a philosophic grin. There was something in his family’s peasant background which
fitted in perfectly with his Australian upbringing. Something to do with egalitarian impulse and lands of opportunity.
That
was Australia. Only peasants need apply.

He founded and managed the real estate development side of Kozinski Constructions. He carried his power with an easy charm. He was athletic. He could make loving jokes about his parents. That is, he seemed to observe the Kozinskis’ wheelbarrow dynasty from outside itself.

This night when Kate sees her uncle’s dog-collared head-and-shoulders, the enterprises of the Kozinskis are ailing. The Kozinskis’ whereabouts are such as we cannot divulge so early in the story. But in the boom times of the 1980s, Paul took the development arm of Kozinski Constructions into California malls, borrowing up junk-bond money for expansion. In that mad decade he was praised for it in the business sections of magazines. He has not been the only prince of industry caught in a squeeze. If what had turned foul between Kate and himself had been nothing more than an average marital breakdown, she might have been happy—in a rancorous way—about his sufferings, or companionably distressed for him, as some ex-wives were for former adventurous spouses.

As it happens she finds either attitude an irrelevance. The photographs she has seen of him more recently in journals like the
Financial Review
are chosen for the shadowiness of his face, the suggestion of stubble, the shiftiness of the eyes. The snide captions of the past year, the ones that indicated he was in a mess, the reports that the National Securities Commission had interviewed him, that the Commission of Inquiry into the Building Industry had gathered anecdotal evidence of him from those who once received his favors—all that is so incidental to reality it has sometimes made her furious, made her crumple the pages in her fists. Not out of anger at
him
, but because the issues are such pallid ones.

The real question has always been his guilt in matters the National Securities Commission doesn’t even inquire into. Matters beyond the purview too of the Commission of Inquiry into the Building Industry.

Paul Kozinski and Kate Gaffney were married by Uncle Frank, whose own crimes had not at that stage been established and who
charmed all Kate’s and Paul’s friends so thoroughly that people asked, in those days before his faults had been catalogued in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, Why isn’t he a monsignor?

Mrs. Kozinski regretted that boozy Reverend Frank had been the officiating priest. Her husband was such a good friend of young Monsignor Pietecki, who was reduced at the Gaffney-Kozinski wedding to the stature of mere concelebrant of the Wedding Mass.

Loreto Girls and Saint Ignatius boys! Marriages made in heaven and consummated in mutual ignorance.
Omnes ethnici sunt periculosi
, as Uncle Frank had said in the garden on the day of the wedding. All foreigners are dangerous. Said as a fancy clerical joke, but of course she remembers it as a warning now. What it meant roughly was that just because a boy goes to the Jesuits doesn’t mean you have anything in common with him. History is everything. People will not in the end forgive you for not having shared theirs.

H
ERE ARE THE BACKGROUNDS:

1. Kate Gaffney graduated in a staid time for students and with a Distinction in the unexceptional area of Pacific History. This was a favorite subject of radicals, since it had to do with all the inroads of cruel European culture and all the plunderings of Poly-, Mela- and Micronesia. Just the same, she did not have the makings of a student radical. For a start, she had not suffered any alienations from her parents. An enchantment with Uncle Frank and regard for her parents kept her fairly observant of what Uncle Frank called—almost with a wink—
the Faith
.

2. Adolescent, she saw that the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank’s Faith was connected not only to mysteries of religion but to certain cultural mysteries such as SP bookmaking, liquor, irreverence for government. Whereas the Kozinskis’ “Faith” was different from Uncle Frank’s. One of the Kozinski mysteries was that Jewish property developers—many of whom had come in the same ship as the Kozinskis—played all games by secret and preferential rules, hammered out in the Sinai Desert in Moses’ day and employed to kill the Son of God and make things hard for ambitious Catholics. Veneration of the Virgin, which had somehow diminished in the Gaffney household since Kate’s childhood, flourished in the Kozinski household. The Black Virgin of Czestochowa, the easternmost great Madonna, the last before the Muscovites began,
and
—Paul once remarked with an engaging Polish slyness—the Madonna who had the honor of being closest to Auschwitz, was something of a familiar of Mrs. Kozinski’s.

Czestochowa’s smoke-stained Virgin will later have reason to visit Kate frequently enough in sleep. But we are ahead of ourselves.

3. Before marrying Paul Kozinski, Kate worked for a film publicity
company. She had met its principal, a man called Bernie Astor, at a cocktail party her father had given to representatives of the film distribution business. At it she had seen a fellow feeling easily exercised between Jim Gaffney and Bernard Astor. Bernard’s presence seemed to free Jim Gaffney to be a little loud and risqué. Her mother, Kate Gaffney née O’Brien, had worried about Bernie, about his intentions, since he had had a reputation and been recently divorced when she had first met him in the fifties, a decade when no one but libertines got divorced. Kate O’Brien’s motherly suspicion annoyed Kate Gaffney the younger—mothers who mistrusted their daughters’ talents always seemed to attribute their girl children’s small successes to intentions of lechery harbored by bosses. In fact Bernie became a good friend. He was cozily married, observed Shabbat, read widely, had the wryness to prove it, was loved in his profession, and delighted in films.

4. At the time Kate got her job with Bernie, the glamorous American word
gopher
had not come into common use except in businesses like Bernie’s, ones to do with the film industry. These were the terms on which Bernie employed her, as his office gopher. The word wasn’t just a pun to Kate Gaffney. It carried undertones of unsung cleverness and hidden energy. The older women in Bernie’s office, some of whom were rumored to have had affairs on tour with directors and actors, began by resenting her, misjudging her as a rich girl filling in time before marriage. It was delicious to disprove—through
gophering
—all their prejudice.

Kate took to profaning with the same dry, antipodean energy the others showed. She worked long hours for which Bernie did not pay her overtime. But then he and she had an unspoken agreement—he would teach her everything in return for her ill-paid but willing labor. Sometimes he would ask her to stay behind and join himself and a number of the city’s more artistically inclined lawyers and businessmen, in watching some new film from France or Czechoslovakia or Brazil, and devising means to save it from the oblivion the distributors had planned for it.

5. Bernie’s more senior people, sometimes Bernie himself, began to give her itineraries to prepare for the startling names and faces she’d met only in her father’s darkened picture houses. She found herself deciding what time Meryl Streep or Kevin Kline, Dennis Hopper or Robert Duvall should appear on a lunchtime television show in Sydney and still be in to Melbourne in time for a rest, the
premiere, the subsequent cocktail party. She decided which directors would talk at the Film and Television School, which didn’t have the time. She brought new-wave directors up from Melbourne, literate, tentative, spiky young men and women who would, within a few years, find their names in Academy Awards nominations. She got to know and respect the physical and mental duty under which
soi-disant
stars lived.

6. She received sexual offers from four famous men and two famous women, generally late at night after mellow, heartfelt conversations. She knew it was pride or self-esteem as much as virtue which kept her out of their arms. (There was of course the question, and she recognized it, of whether virtue and pride were the one beast.) Perhaps if she could have believed that on their return the famous, particularly the men, would call her from Los Angeles and New York and say, I cannot forget you …!

7. She received overtures too from a young but berserkly successful Australian director of Italian descent, yielded thoroughly to them, and—through the erotic momentum of events—was educated by her helplessness. The director’s name was Pellegrino: Pilgrim.

Pellegrino called a halt, went back to America and wrote twice. They were moist, regretful letters. He was already engaged to a girl from New York. Enjoying all the radiance of a kindly affair, she had known he would soon be engrossed by someone else.

Kate already had in mind anyhow the Slavic darkling, Paul Kozinski, with whom she was soon making love at every chance. She had a life plan, a fine thing to have in a nation which allows you to have one. Her life’s plan was: once she knew Bernie Astor’s business, she would marry Paul. She would give some five to seven years to motherhood, an exalted form of gophering. And then she would return to the industry.

Paul Kozinski had not been raised to like the idea of his wife going back to anything which was chimerical in fact yet had the arrogance to call itself
the industry
. A woman should if possible be kept at home amongst the domestic icons, seated contentedly with other madonnas over coffee at some long cedar table. But his opposition never got beyond a snide joviality.

For her desire for children validated him as his parents’ son. He knew he was safe with his parents in marrying a woman who had
sworn off the idea of going straight from the labor ward back to some supposed profession.

She spoke a little vainly of her
mothering phase
, the half-decade or so of raising infants. She used the word
sabbatical
. And—thinking of it in those terms—she looked for a place of retreat. She did not want to wait for motherhood in Paul’s apartment looking out on the harbor. She sensed there was sterility to that. She desired a beach. The sea would mother her children as well.

Imagine such resources. The beloved to the lover: I think the beach is the place. The lover to the beloved: I like beaches myself. A beach was an
Australian place
, he said, to raise children.

Kozinski Constructions owned a seventy-two-foot cruising yacht called
Vistula
, named after the river which flowed through the Kozinski parents’ home city. The
Vistula
could have sailed to Tahiti, the Kozinskis boasted, and then on to San Diego. None of them would ever have the time to make such a voyage. The
Vistula
—aboard which Paul once took Kate for a weekend at anchor—was moored at Pittwater, a delicious arm of water north of Sydney: green-blue water, the banks bushclad, along whose terraces of sandstone wallabies and kangaroos still rested and bounded, across the faces of whose eucalypts the most brilliant white and yellow, black and red cockatoos flitted; and rainbow lorikeets.