A Woman of the Inner Sea Read Online Free Page B

Gaffney-Kozinski’s first-born, a daughter named Siobhan, the ceremony was again performed by Uncle Frank, but a Polish priest, Monsignor Pietecki, assisted Frank in wresting Siobhan’s soul from Satan.
    A similar arrangement was made for her son Bernard, named in honor of the great Carthusian mystic (at least, that is what Jim Gaffney would softly tell Mrs. Kozinski) and of Bernie Astor, the publicist.
    It was only later that these politic ceremonial balancings would take on a height of meaning in Mrs. Maria Kozinski’s mind. It was only later that the Kozinskis would begin to believe that Uncle Frank had poisoned the marriage and even the breath of the infants right at the source, on the altar steps and at the font of baptism. It also came to be believed that the tainted priest had insinuated into Kate Gaffney-Kozinski’s heart the frenzy of motherhood which left her husband lonely and drove him out amongst the whores.
    To Mrs. Kozinski then, Uncle Frank was first the disreputable clown, and then the malign wizard who brought curses on her son, the prince of mall development in six Australian states, two Federal Territories and large swaths of California. Everything Mrs. Kozinski had heard and been through in the Polish mud told her that where there is a prince, there is also a smiling maledictor. So Mrs. Kozinski attended to the broader question of how some visiting Polish monsignor might inject legitimacy into the barbarous baptisms the not-so-Reverend Frank had performed on her grandchildren.
    In the amplitude of love between Kate and Paul, all primitive mothers were seen to be mere primitive mothers. She who believed that her bloodline had been hijacked and transmuted into Siobhans and Bernards was amusing for the moment. Paul grinned handsomely, suppressing the laugh with an upthrust lower lip so that it came out through his nose like a series of snorts. It was one of those surprisingly entrancing mannerisms of his.
    —Babushka wants you to call the poor little bugger Casimir after her uncle in the Resistance. Can you imagine what would happen in any schoolyard to a kid with a name like Casimir?
    It was later, in the savagery after loss, that Paul would climb back into his mother’s world scheme.
    —And
Bernard
? I don’t go along with Hitler. I never went along with Hitler. I bled under Hitler. It doesn’t mean you need to dance with Jews, or name your children after them.
    Another of Mrs. Kozinski’s continual griefs—that people might think her family was related to that novelist, the one who was a friend of the child-molester Polanski. Polanski had tainted the name Roman for centuries to come. The novelist had not done such a thorough job on tainting Jerzy. To Mrs. Kozinski, said Paul,
Jerzy
had a relatively short taint life of perhaps one hundred years.

Five
    W HEN KATE LOOKS BACK to her children’s brief rearing, she always sees the beach. The beach is her garden and her age of innocence. To sunbathe then with merely a high-factor sunscreen was still considered safe and rational. In the year Siobhan was born, the sun was in its last four or five summers of being considered nutritious and kindly.
    Kate sees Sydney sand, that ideal childhood sand—not powdery and bleached, not black and volcanic, not shingly and hostile to bare feet. Soft enough for a child to launch himself onto, shoulder or stomach first, without pain; compact enough for the constructions of fantasy. It is made of fragments of ocher-yellow sandstone, and may have been stone and alluvium, stone and sand again and again, many times over. A granular sand therefore with a residual memory of its other forms.
    In the surf-fed pool at the south end of the beach, in the dense and buoyant sea water, Siobhan could swim twenty-five meters by the age of two and a half. Bernard would prove slower than his sister. His tottering walk, his tendency to subside while in thought, indicated that he might not become a sportsman. His interest in specific