A Woman of the Inner Sea

One

AWOMAN IN HER EARLY THIRTIES, our traveler, the handsome but slightly frowning Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, running across the rain-glossed pavement in Potts Point, saw from a poster in front of the closed newsagent’s that her defrocked uncle had given another interview to one of those smooth-paged magazines.

She stopped in front of this poster. As an artifact she found it hard and sad to believe in. Her hand sought—beneath the neck of her dress—the scar tissue behind her left shoulder. She had no time—the delicatessen was about to close and she had no coffee for Murray—but she stopped, shuddered, let her breath go in large gasps of steam and began to weep.

She knew it was the wrong block to start crying so openly. Two blocks further up the road, where the elegance gave way to backpackers’ hostels, to brown houses with opaque windows where men went to have their groins massaged by bored Maori girls from over the Tasman Sea … there people wept and laughed and made the sort of big, loud, mad-city speeches you heard only in big, loud, mad cities.

But art deco flats and nineteenth-century mansions reserved this end of the street for more orderly emotions than these that were rocking her.

Weeping Kate could not understand why her uncle should piss away his gifts like that, into the ear of some uncomprehending girl journalist, some popsy who came of Latvian or Greek or—worst of all—North Shore Protestant parents. Some little tart who knew sweet nothing about Uncle Frank’s godhead, or his astounding view of government and the universe.

Kate could imagine him even with the weight of accusation around him twinkling away at some two-dimensional little hack. Some little hoyden who believed in nothing yet still wanted to ask him the big, vulgar question. Father O’Brien, why don’t you stand for the same prissy Christ all those cops and Legislative Assembly backbenchers make a gesture toward at Sunday Mass? Why aren’t you like His Eminence Fogarty?

This Celtic city—named Sydney by accidents of history and displaced to the Southwest Pacific—really worshiped scoundrel gods and tart goddesses and gave only token nods to the Other, the Dressed-up One. This city’s true deities were Cuchulain the cattle-duffer and divine horse-thief, or the Fianna his bagmen and party machine followers, and the great bullshitter and cocksman Finn MacCool, who once built a causeway from Antrim to Scotland to enable him to go and seduce a Scots goddess, and who ultimately sailed into this Pacific city in the company of arse-out-of-the-trousers Scots and Irish convicts or immigrants.

Anyone who knew the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank knew he came from one of these other more dualist gods, from a god with warts. A Celtic-mist god who counted cunning more important than virtue. As Uncle not-so-Reverend Frank himself would say, a fooking scoundrel.

Uncle Frank had a very inexact knowledge of folklore, of course. But by this stage of Kate’s history he had said regularly that Kate was a queen of the Sorrows. Sometimes he would use the name of what he saw as a prototype of Kate’s condition. He would advance the name Deirdre. Deirdre of the capital S Sorrows. The royal daughter of Ulster. When she was born, it was predicted she would bring nothing but grief to Ulster. Uncle Frank didn’t know the details of the story, so he used the term sloppily. A glib phrase. Deirdre of the Sorrows because—as Uncle Frank said during a prison visit—some poor bitch has to be.

Her Uncle Frank was the only person in the world who knew what he was talking about in matters to do with grief. At funerals and in the mortuary parlor of his friend O’Toole the mortician, he had given people essential clues to their loss and they had never forgotten it. And he had given his niece Kate Gaffney-Kozinski the clue that someone had, breath by breath, to find the universe too massive to support; someone, transfixed by it, had thereby to hold it in place. It was she who was appointed to contribute so often the mute rain with her own unbidden tears. That was the rule.

Except that he, himself, the old fraud, the family shaman, in jail for violations of the New South Wales Gaming Act, for fraud and bribery and tax evasion, still somehow a glamour puss to the press, was the one to do it to her this time. He had caused her unbidden tears.

The Queen of Sorrows as envisaged by Uncle Frank:

Never less than fatedly and palely beautiful, yet fatally touched by love.

Nice bone structure, high cheekbones.

Even when the sun shone, always a woman of rain.

The Queen of Sorrows’s shoulders still itched with the burn of suns other people have forgotten.

Through the front glass of the news agency, she could see Uncle Frank grin out of the poster inset. The silly old bugger had always insisted on wearing his Roman collar everywhere. He might even wear it under his overalls in the Central Industrial Prison. With criminal charges proven, his photographed jaw sat supported by that buttress of white celluloid. Hardly any licit priests wore the damn thing anymore. He did it for the sake of the old days. When for instance men of the cloth were let into the Sydney Cricket Ground for free by sentimental gatemen called Hogan and Clancy. In the postindustrial, cybernetic, space and nuclear age, the not-so-Reverend Frank still loved all that antediluvian clerical stuff.

—And how are you today, Father?

—I’ll be all right so long as the fellers get their defense organized.

—Oh, I think they might miss Lyons at five-eighth, Father. I’ve got my money on the others.

—Well, it’s not in our hands. We’ll see, we’ll see.

He really believed he still lived in a world where that white celluloid meant something.

Cardinal Fogarty might and did say, even in the Sydney Morning Herald, that Uncle Frank no longer had faculties. But there were men who’d worked for the Cricket Ground Trust for years who knew Uncle Frank and believed him still a priest—in Uncle Frank’s pompous terms—of the order of Aaron and Melchizedech.

The last-mentioned two Hebrews were as shady yet powerful in his imagination as Deirdre.

Uncle Frank was therefore no scholar; went to a lesser diocesan seminary in Cavan and never got the prize for canon law. But he doesn’t let any of that stop him from uttering such suggestive phrases as Deirdre of the Sorrows and According to the order of Aaron and Melchizedech.

Her tears stopped at last. She had torn her eyes from the magazine poster and was walking again. Soon she had bought the coffee for Murray and some ice cream to honor him for his careful way of life and his gentleness of method. She knew she wanted a third of a liter of scotch and some brutish sex, a universal rut to answer the universe of tears momentarily imposed on her by the poster of the silly old bugger, the not-so-Reverend Uncle Frank.

Happily, it did not take too much to turn Murray into that species of lover. Seemly in his public demeanor, he could become someone furious who carried off the memory of rain. Kate remembered how it had been managed before this, first by a lagoon in Fiji, after the tragedy this story will concern itself with. She had for a start dictated his moves, but in the end he’d gone screaming like a hurricane through all the doors and windows.

Good old Murray who did not and never would inhabit one of Uncle Frank’s myths. She meant to marry him for that reason. There was mileage in him, and nothing strange and nothing cursed. Even the wreck of his marriage had been an average wreck. Though he’d taken it as if it was a fearsome grief. To Kate, his innocence was of an erotic scale.

Two

THIS KATE is daughter of James Gaffney, owner of a cinema chain and builder of the city’s first hypercinema, a complex of hotels and shops arranged around a series of cinemas: venue above all for film festivals all held under the one roof. And of Katherine O’Brien, a woman of deep yet primitive compassion, a virago, and sister to Uncle Frank.

Thus to head off any whingeing about mother and daughter having the same name:

James Gaffney m. Kate O’Brien—sister of Frank O’Brien

                             |

              Kate Gaffney-Kozinski

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.

Andrew Kozinski m. Maria Kozinski

|

Paul Kozinski

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.

Three

HERE 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.

The lorikeet, indecent bright,

Compels the homage of my sight …

Just a little way from Pittwater where the Vistula was moored, just a little way across Sydney’s Northern Peninsula, was Palm Beach. This Palm Beach was named not in imitation of Miami but because cabbage-tree palms still grew there, the palms out of which convicts and settlers had once made their hats. It was one of those places that was characterized by rich people’s holiday homes and the not-quite-so-superb residences of the permanent population. The wealthy visited only on fashionable weekends and public festivals.

Kate and Paul agreed quite peaceably to break the pattern. They intended to live at Palm Beach all the time during their children’s first years. Paul argued he didn’t mind the long drive to town. It was compensated for by the short drive to the Vistula on weekends. And their children would be sun-kissed, Australian Herrenvolk.

Convinced of the imminent idyll, they bought a three-story sandstone house facing north toward Barrenjoey lighthouse and the illimitable promise of the Pacific. The living room filled with winter sunshine and was the size of half a football field. The sun-deck was large enough for a child to ride a bike. Even indoors, the small Kozinskis would be as good as outdoors, looking out at an ocean which absorbed and humanized the sun itself. Out the back, in a natural amphitheater created by ledges of sandstone, a landscaped subtropic garden embowered an area of turf apt for child-play and exploration.

There is a trap in every milieu. Everyone knew that the trap here, on this paradisal strand, was the funnel-web spider, the earth’s most venomous. The beautiful peninsula was its native place. Kate, before proceeding to contract on the place, had an insect expert survey the garden and the foundations. There were, he reassured her at the end, no visible signs of large funnel-web infestation. She should take all the normal precautions—knocking shoes together before putting them on, inspecting sand pits, buckets and spades before children were allowed to handle them. But the Gaffney-Kozinskis, the expert implied, would have very little to fear. No black-carapaced arachnid would come ravening out of the bush to envenomate their happiness.

The marriage drew near in an air of exact accounting practice. A family trust was drawn up as a means of diminishing taxation. There were legal arrangements to be made and documents signed. These were drawn up by conscientious lawyers who seemed genially to desire nothing less than the young couple’s happiness. Years earlier Kate had signed similar but not so sweeping documents to do with her father’s corporation and her sleeping share in it. During this premarital signing, though, Kate becoming extremely paper-rich for the sake of tax-sharing, an accountant who knew Paul said. You just better not get bloody well divorced too soon, Paul. That’s all.

The idea of it caused laughter.

Her father had once said, making a speech at some family occasion, I distribute the mysteries of light, and Uncle Frank distributes the mysteries of faith. Who is the luckier of the two? I think Uncle Frank is. Because the mysteries of faith survive when the light goes out.

Polite family applause.

For this was Australia, where no one trusted eloquence. Where the man of the aphorism had to be watched. The elevated wit of Europe was the chain which had bound a thousand felons and provoked a million emigrations. In Ireland, said the not-so-Rever-end Uncle Frank, you got a thousand years of oppression, and all that came out of it was a nancy boy called Oscar Wilde uttering a few epigrams.

Australians—the Gaffney and O’Brien relatives—knew in their blood that epigram wasn’t worth the price, since it was their heredity who’d paid the piper.

So it was her courtly father, Jim Gaffney, who was considered the fanciful one, the one given to excess of nicety and even oratory, and Uncle Frank was the man’s man, who knew horses and which referee kept a good five meters; who knew how to be utterly comfortable in company, who was in fact eloquent, but seamlessly. The not-so-Reverend Frank did speak in high color, but according to the idioms they were accustomed to.

Yet at some times in her childhood it seemed to Kate that all Uncle Frank’s most serious statements had been directed at her. There was a night—it was the start of the Australian Jockey Club’s spring season, in which a horse her father Jim had a share in had run second in the Doncaster Handicap—when she had gotten up from her fourteen-year-old bed and seen her father help Uncle Frank into a limousine, one from the company her father had an account with. And as Uncle Frank got in—so rarefied with booze that even his sister was moved to ask the next morning, Why do they say drunk as a lord when we have Frank to go by?—Uncle Frank had looked up at her window and yelled:

—Do you think the Pope is a higher being than the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia? It’s the processes, see. The processes are designed for gobshites. And they both oblige the processes by being gobshites!

She believed Uncle Frank was sure she was listening. Acquiring a very ordinary political and ecclesiastical education: not shattering news, but received a little earlier than most of her sister students at Loreto Convent were receiving it.

But before this ordinary heresy could escape too pervasively into the Eastern Suburbs air, her father had lovingly pushed Uncle Frank into the back of the limousine.

There had always been that nearly embarrassing feeling of personal communication. This scandalous priest, rumored to have investments in hotels and racehorses, would—often at the height of a binge, even at the point where incoherence threatened—raise his large prophetic jaw and utter a message which seemed to his niece to be meant for her.

Slowly she had gathered a portmanteau of usable Uncle Frankisms. Things barely worth saying in themselves but having force as said. All plain truths, or truisms. But there was something about the force of truisms when they’re uttered by certain mouths, and Uncle Frank’s mouth had that force for her. Uncle Frank was her teller in the furnace. The way lovers dealt in banal yet always refreshing praise, Uncle Frank dealt in banal but always refreshing truth. As essential as a lover is a teller! And the greater was the art of the teller, since with the right resonant dictum, you could understand even a loveless universe.

When she was quite young, even before she had identified Uncle Frank as her shaman, she noticed that other people, the parents of her schoolfriends, would sometimes denounce the not-so-Reverend Frank with a special fury. Their faces would close down. They talked about his imported cars, his alpaca suits, and his gambling and drinking as if he were the only priest guilty of such things. The Archdiocese of Sydney, whether Anglican or Roman Catholic, had never been intensely penitential. As in the brash city itself, the visionary or the mystic had never been encouraged. Generally a lower-middle-class virtuousness was counted more highly than searing faith.

Grafted on to these ambitions of low church respectability, which in