A Woman of the Inner Sea (6 page)

—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:

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.

A
PRIL 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.

But she understood that she had no one but Denise to call on. She would be humiliated to ask her father or Uncle Frank, and even though—if he hadn’t been going to Melbourne—Paul might in fact willingly do it, she did not want, aglow with the energy of her rowing, to encounter the mute Perdita-dazzlement in his eyes as he asked for the sake of form, How was it?

Thus, after Paul left to pack and go to Melbourne, she went exploring ledges of rock left bare only once or twice a year by rare, low, tranquil seas like this one. Siobhan and Bernard were such consummate beach folk now. They knew to the nearest square meter of stone what rocks generally lay below the sea. They got a thrill from walking on surfaces usually deep beneath a growing surf. If you wanted shells not normally encountered, and strange sea animals left behind in isolated pockets of lenslike water, then both were available to you when the Pacific was low and imitated its tranquil name.

On a great sandstone boulder above where Siobhan and Bernard and she were fossicking she saw a man holding binoculars. His head and shoulders were completely covered with a large beach towel. Under the beach towel he wore the sort of floppy white hat favored by aesthetes or pedophiles in British films about the Mediterranean in the Edwardian era. He was wearing long white trousers too; either careful of the sun even as late as now, when it was on its way back north, or else wanting to show he didn’t intend to take part in water sports. He was in fact taken up entirely with what he could see through the binoculars. Kate idly followed the line his lenses were aimed along and saw a little way out what looked like porpoises or oily flaps of seaweed. The shapes, however, then defined themselves as two divers in wet suits, lying with their backs and their calves breaking the surface, their airtanks discernible but their heads under, fixed on the subaqueous planet. They moved barely but both at once, browsing.

They must have wanted simultaneously to see more closely what was there, because in unison they kicked up two sets of flippers in the air, and went—communally fascinated—for the bottom. Now they were utterly out of sight.

The man dropped his binoculars for a second, though his eyes kept to the point the two had disappeared from. It was Murray,
the seeker of signatures for petitions. And now—it seemed from all of the protective clothing he wore—the sun hater.

She drew level with him and called out hello.

—Kate Kozinski. I’m sorry you didn’t stop the restaurant.

—Hello, he said. I’m sorry too.

Then he returned his glance to the point where the flippers had risen above the surface of the sea and vanished in harmony.

She was shocked and annoyed. He had been urbane enough when he’d wanted her to sign his petition. And it was known that he was supposed to have charm and was so obviously a different kind of man from the rough-edged media and law barons who populated Palm Beach on weekends. They would have given you that sort of answer: Hello. I’m sorry too. Go to hell.

Murray’s young wife spoke freely to people. That was how it was known that she considered her husband almost grotesquely well bred. He was from some supposedly elegant British family—again according to his wife’s free conversation. His mother, a hand-reared but unmarried English girl, had flown to Australia especially to have him and had raised him for a potential return to the motherland. He had gone to the imitation English grammar schools the Australians ran to knock the rough edges off themselves, and was such a good cricketer that he was first selected for the New South Wales Sheffield Shield team at the age of twenty. His mother’s hope was that he’d return to England in an Australian test cricket team, and that the relatives who had wanted his mother to raise him in uncouth Australia would meet him at Lord’s in the tea break and write to her and say, You’ve done a wonderful job after all. He’s just like one of us.

Is it worthwhile making him talk? she wondered. It would have been natural to her to do that—but what was the value of it now? However, the impulse to try was almost habitual. To test this man who had rabbited on to get her signature to a petition which in the world’s scales meant damnall. To jostle up against the surface of his hand-rearing, and see what it was worth.

—I wouldn’t mind being out there with them, she called up to him.

He did not take his eyes away from the line which connected him to the last certain sight he’d had of the divers. She could see that his face, from which he now dropped the towel, had gone a vivid red. Straight away Kate repented of the game. Because it was
his wife out there gamboling in the water with someone else. Possibly going for that extreme act of subsurface communion, sucking oxygen from the same face mask and the same tank and blowing it into each other’s mouth.

So he too was in the same old stupid torment. And he didn’t have the divine relief of Siobhan the flash swimmer or Bernard and his new gifts as a catcher. He was stuck solitary on his sandstone slab.

If she climbed up to him what would she say?

—Listen, put the glasses down. Turning the focus knob won’t make anything better. My husband is out of sight, on his way to talk to Hungarian property people and city officials and trade unionists, and I can’t see him. But I know Perdita’s there too.
Perdita:
the Lost One. Certainly lost to Mr. Krinkovich. Gone a million. And your wife is a cricket ball’s throw away, a shorter distance than from deep fine leg to the stumps, but you can’t see her either. She and her diver, who could be called anything. What’s his name? What smiling name is carried by your grief?

But in his state of brusqueness, in his heavily clothed denial of the sun, Murray wouldn’t like to be visited. He was foolish enough to think he was going to learn something when his wife and the unnamed resurfaced.

Her own weariness, her own inexpectancy of finding out anything whenever Paul resurfaced, made her feel unstrung. To be restored, she chose to forget Murray and to go chasing after Bernard.

Knowing she was spending lonely evenings, Jim Gaffney thought she might want to attend one of his political dinners with him.

—But why?

—It’s a distraction. It’s a sport. They’ll put us at the same table as a cabinet minister. You can ask a few polite questions and feel close to the power. It’s a night out. I’ll send a car out for you.