A Woman of the Inner Sea Read Online Free Page A

fights her tempestuous mother, Mrs. Kate Gaffney, had had at friends’ places.
    Kate was pleased she hadn’t inherited the jawline of the O’Briens, but she would have liked to have inherited more of the O’Brien social fortitude, the principles of tribal loyalty and of sisterly decency which let, and
made
Kate Gaffney the elder stamp out of some prim Christmas party as soon as she heard any excessive or stupid word against the Reverend Frank; made her walk down through the garden amongst the clicking of Christmas beetles and the barking of cicadas, and drive away.
    Honest Jim Gaffney had married an elemental force. Kate Gaffney the junior surmised that he might have been amply rewarded—her mother, she understood these days, was likely to have been a furious and rugged lover.
    So Jim bore bravely too the weight of that other elemental force, his brother-in-law the not-so-Reverend Frank.
    Just before her wedding to Paul Kozinski, Jim sat with his daughter, drinking a bottle of wine on the balcony of her flat. He looked out at the stupefying dazzle of the Harbour and said withdiscreet daring, Of course, Frank should never have been a priest. He would have been a better trade unionist. And a marvelous politician. A football coach. His forwards would die for him! Or a trainer. God, his jockeys would pull any race for him. But maybe he shouldn’t have been a priest.
    He’d looked at her directly.
    —It was poverty and limited opportunity that put him in a Roman collar.
    This was a rare and heretical outburst, and it was something Kate believed he would not in his right mind say to his wife.
    In the end-state in which we first encountered her though, looking at Uncle Frank’s poster in the rain, Kate Gaffney believes that if Uncle Frank hadn’t been what Uncle Frank
was
, she might now be dead. It is not that at the end of everything she was delighted to be alive. But she recognizes her survival as a phenomenon, of equal value to other phenomena, as the continuance of sunlight, say, or the persistence of magnetism in some objects. She knows that if the Reverend Frank had been a Labor Party number-cruncher, or president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, or president of the Republic of Eire, or coach of Parramatta Rugby League, then she would not still be here. Some other poor bitch would have had to be levered into place as Uncle Frank’s Queen of Sorrows.

Four
    W E ALL KNOW from our own histories or else from observation how a marriage between two families of different ethnic derivation generates clan rancor:
    how Uncle Frank would say one Christmas at the Gaffney home in Double Bay, That old Polish harridan Kozinski doesn’t like me one bit. Straight out of the muck of some Polish cowyard, and she behaves like one of the fooking Hapsburgs;
    how the two clans danced around each other at public festivals with a brittle joviality;
    how Paul, enriched for now by love, entered into a plot with Kate to rise above, to take a mocking stance on all this, laughing equally at the peasant priest O’Brien as at his own peasant mother, Maria Kozinski;
    how Mrs. Kozinski continued—with no theological basis—to mistrust the validity of sacraments as administered by the not-so-Reverend Frank, and so the validity of her son’s casual and self-assured happiness;
    how Jim Gaffney crossed the vast Gaffney living room, traveling from one tribe to the other, pouring wine and offering soothing compliments;
    how Kate O’Brien-Gaffney’s watchful and tigerish love of her brother ensured that everyone knew Frank was the Gaffney officiator; and how this fact needed to be balanced out against Mrs. Kozinski’s concern to have an impeccable Polish priest involved at all Kozinski rites;
    how, as you know, the wedding vows between Paul and Kate Gaffney were administered by Uncle Frank, while a Polish monsignor stood by to co-administer, to put licit value into the pledging of troth.

    A year later, at the baptism of Kate