A Woman of the Inner Sea Read online

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 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

  WHEN 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 rock pools along the sandstone platforms below the house was greater than his interest in the immense sea. He was an eternity-in-a-grain-of-sand man.

  In the spirit of Kate’s memory of it all, Siobhan accepted the surf, even at its roughest, as if it were some Gaffney-Kozinski backyard beast. But the smallest waves at the sheltered southern end knocked Bernard on his backside. People—even the not-so-Reverend Frank—commented on the contrast. Most of them came to see that these observations were not popular with Kate Gaffney-Kozinski. Since Bernard was in no way affronted or humbled at being knocked on his arse by moving water, it merely indicated to her that he was growing in a different but equally meritorious manner. Had he been offended or oppressed by water—that would have been a different question.

  Jim Gaffney, inventor of the hypercinema, was one of the few who could talk about young Bernard’s poor balance and lack of an eye for moving objects without having Kate fall away into a threatening, primal silence.

  —It’s just this, said honest Jim. School’s hard on a boy who hasn’t got a sort of bodily aptitude. It’s not as bad as it was in the days when the teachers saw sport as a holy Australian duty. But schoolboys are pretty primitive about these things, Kate.

  Jim now sat back to gauge the effect of his words. To see if he was still in business with his daughter.

  —There are clinics. Thank God there are. There weren’t any clinics in my day. The Christian brothers just beat the shit out of you instead.

  So Kate would strap young Bernard into her wedding-present BMW and drive him an hour into the University of Sydney, where in a brightly painted clinic attended by poorly coordinated and beloved children, he learned to catch those future balls which would never be thrown to him. To his enormous credit with his wife, Paul Kozinski sometimes took his son there. Another time, rushing from one building site to another, he called in to see his son swimming in the clinic pool. He was gratified the way a parent should be: by his son’s minute advances.

  —You’ve really taught him well, Kate. Good to see him away from his sister. Beside her, he swims like a sinking container ship, doesn’t he?

  He took equal joy in Bernard’s lumpy progress through the water as in Siobhan’s Olympian smoothness. He implied that all styles that worked were of equal value. That was an unexpected latitude of mind to find in a tycoon. In a man who—as she suspected—could in other contexts speak in harsh and primitive idioms: the language, for example, of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, a rough language, the roughest language there was.

  Her vanity was to believe this democratic frame of mind of Paul’s would last a lifetime. She did not know it would be chaff in the furnace.

  By the end of his brief time at the clinic, Bernard was catching small hard balls. He did it with a little bark of laughter which showed he didn’t quite understand what the point was but was pretty well enjoying himself. There had been a minor lesion in one of his synapses at birth, a little tear in the normal human aptitudes, caused perhaps by a two-second delay in taking his first breath. But now he was the coordination clinic’s summa cum laude. He was certified to pass on into a world of catching, tumbling and side-stepping.

  He was still reflective on the
beach, however. He could spend an hour peering into the mute mouth of some shell.

  It was appropriate for a mother to look in two directions: the mercurial child first, then the hypnotically reflective one. Then back to the mercurial, who in one of Bernard’s mesmerized instants would have leapt or swum further than you might believe likely.

  All on a beach so often shaded from the prevailing south wind by its tiers of south-end sandstone, that it served for winter celebrations almost as well as it had for summer.

  In a decade of boom, Paul and his father were heroes of the Polish community in Sydney. They were generous to and were honored by the Polish Association, the Polish Club, the Polish Centre, the Polish War Memorial Chapel. They endowed the Polish Performing Arts Theatre and the Polish Sports, Recreation and Social Centre. Their faces were fixtures in the Polish News. Their name ran like wine on Polish Ethnic Radio.

  For a time Kate sat in the front row of the Polish Theatre, or watched teams called Polska and Krakowa play tight games of basketball. She attended the dinners at which the Kozinskis were acclaimed and at which they gave of their plenty. She listened to the immigrants of the 1950s greet each other in that spiky, assertive tongue, evoking memories of vanished women from Lodz or Wroclaw or Bydgoszcz, of black marketeers in Olsztyn or Bialystok or Lublin, of close shaves with Germans or Soviet policemen in Ostrowiec or Leszno, Opole or Katowice. It was peculiar to come from a blithe society and to find yourself envying them their Polishness, their historic misery.

  Here is Mr. Kozinski senior’s favorite after-dinner joke about the Polish lust for vengeance and wry acceptance of suffering:

  A Pole in one of those primeval Slavic woods finds a tarnished lamp hidden amongst the roots of a tree. He extracts it, brushes it off. The genie of the lamp appears and announces that the Pole should make three wishes—the usual arrangement, one per year for the next three years. The first wish the Pole makes is that the Chinese army should come to Poland, should bayonet, plunder, ravage its people, put it to the torch, and then go home. The genie—as always in these jokes—considers this a strange request. But he obliges, and within two months the Red Army is at the gates of Warsaw. After a season of pillage, they retreat.

  A year passes. The Pole approaches the lamp again, and the genie appears, and the man makes the same request with the same results. When, once again the following year, the man makes this identical wish for the third time, the genie consents to it but is possessed by curiosity and asks why. Because, says the Pole, every time they march into Poland and then go home, they have to cross Russia twice.

  Mr. Kozinski senior considered this story a key to the Polish soul. Kate looked at all the Slavs around the dinner tables on which sat raw Polish wine and good vodka, and she wondered if life could ever be as bitter as that, where all that could be achieved was a scale of relative torments.

  Mr. Kozinski often repeated the joke to Jim and Kate Gaffney before saying, There you are, darlings. We’re just like the Irish. No wonder we fit right into Sydney.

  Mrs. Kate Gaffney, our Kate’s mother, who did know something of grief and oppression, would not say anything; she had no intention of admitting Mrs. Kozinski to her sisterhood of suffering. She would remark too that in the construction business, Mr. Kozinski senior was himself the equivalent of a plundering army.

  Kate was aware her husband had a partisan toughness of the kind typified by the joke. His was not an industry for the timid or for those with obscure incentives to failure. The dealings with the unions alone absorbed more daring and caused more nervous trauma in a week than orthodontists or lawyers expended in a year, and on top of that there were shire councils and environmentalists and politicians as well to be talked to, soothed and—sometimes this was implied in mutters—frightened off.

  Early in her marriage though, Kate did not find this Kozinski style forbidding. She liked to listen to old Andrew Kozinski make his observations on the Slavic soul and come up with his little tales to validate them. She was perplexed though by the old question: how a man who could handle whatever governments and unions threw at him could tolerate having his family agendas set by Mrs. Kozinski. It must be true, she thought, what the social scientists said, that to men power in the more visible arenas was the desired power. If they had that, they were quite content to be dominated at home.

  She looked at roguish, pleasant Andrew Kozinski, at calm, mediating, whimsical Jim Gaffney. She considered the wives. Everyone believed the wives turbulent, caricatures—in their different ways—of the tribal mother. Kate wondered how she might stop herself going that way. Were Mrs. Kozinski and Mrs. O’Brien-Gaffney suffering from an unacknowledged pain, from having spouses considered powerful in what you could call the larger sphere? The raising of Siobhan and Bernard seemed to her the most spacious of human endeavors. Had Mrs. Kozinski once felt the same way about young Paul? Had Kate O’Brien about young Kate Gaffney? And yet both still ended up spiky, discontent pulling at the corners of their handsome mouths.

  The Gaffney-Kozinskis did much of their entertaining in Pittwater, on the Kozinski corporate yacht, the Vistula. I have already mentioned sublime Pittwater. So exquisite that one English business associate murmured to Paul, And to think we sent you here for punishment!

  Kate came to dislike the Vistula, however, because Paul was never himself aboard it anymore. Under pressure of the growth of Kozinski Constructions’ development arm, his arm, he invited aboard not friends but people he wanted to use, and pretended with an overeager smile to want to please them at all costs. One of those people was Kozinski Constructions’ chief of security, a tall, cropped-haired, meaty man, a former footballer of some renown, named Burnside.

  When Burnside swung Bernard in the air, as if Bernard too was going to grow to be a great, beefy enforcer, Kate felt a contraction of her womb.

  An infection of Siobhan’s upper respiratory tract gave Kate her first excuse for failing to attend a building industry dinner, the sort of event at which the Kozinski boys, father and son, were able to flex their social charm and show their princely power.

  She found that she liked staying home. She liked taking all the medical precautions—flattering Siobhan into swallowing a child’s dose of aspirin, a child’s dose of elixir. Then the long tale-reading session which sedated the children. She loved to emerge then into a living room in which she could feel the voiceless motors of her children’s sleep. She sat down, taking a glass of wine and the Sydney Morning Herald, or she poured herself vodka and watched some current affairs program.

  She felt no guilt at liking such evenings better than anything else. She presumed she was for the moment in a primal mode, and like a nomadic mother, like someone in touch with the passages of the sun and the tides of the moon, she savored everything being the same every day and every night. Sameness was blessed. A social calendar was a low form of sport and a torment of the spirit. She was willing to fulfill obligations only for Paul’s sake.

  So she found herself—to her own astonishment—content with that commonwealth of three. Kate, Siobhan, Bernard.

  Afterwards it would always amaze Kate how the eternal banalities had been proven by her case. The banality that a man who is allowed to socialize without his wife will speak to and be spoken to by other women in a way he wouldn’t be if the wife were there.

  In staying home from the dinners, she forfeited, she was penalized, and ultimately she paid gigantic tolls. Because she didn’t know she was a player in the trite game. She thought she transcended all that.

  Paul’s first affair, so far as she knew the record of his affairs, was not with his own secretary but with old Andrew’s. This was a minor adventure. The real thing began—by irony—at a dinner at which film distributors honored Jim Gaffney. Paul met the great obsessive love, the one who demented him, for whom he felt not simply desire but a delirium, for whom he would willingly and in the end devour fire, be damned, walk through hell.

  Kate happened to be there; an off-the-shoulder dress in the days
before her shoulders were scar tissue. If Paul’s affair had not become the heroic obsession it did, Kate might have thought that the Gaffney-esque quality of the evening might have been what led Paul to take a little conscious or intuitive vengeance against the Gaffney family by seducing a stranger.

  The woman’s name was Perdita. She was angular like Paul and had fine skin and blond hair. Kate knew and could recite all her features; Perdita and her Croatian-born husband were regulars on Palm Beach during the summer, so that Kate even knew how Perdita looked in a bikini. So did Paul. But it seemed he did not really notice her in that superheated and single-minded way until he was seated beside her at the Gaffney dinner. Anyone would have said that neither her conversation nor her beauty came to explain the hectic and disordered devotion which possessed Paul Kozinski from that point on.

  Paul’s affair with Perdita Krinkovich began soon after the Gaffney dinner. It caused Kate the usual anguish. But what she most hated about it was that it altered the terms under which planet Palm Beach maintained itself. It brought to an end the ecstatic age—the one in which by choice she dispensed the laughter and the sunlight while the divine children, with easy and infallible grace, availed themselves of it all.

  For their sake and by choice she had been in social exile. Now she was a social exile by Paul’s choice. He found reasons to stay in the flat at Double Bay during the week. When he came to the beach on weekends, he slept a great deal on Saturdays. He and Kate would go out to dinner together on Saturday nights, but the conversation would be tentative and sporadic and would turn gratefully to questions and anecdotes about the children.

  He would take a boatload of targeted people out on the Vistula on Sundays. Though she sometimes took the children so that they could swim with their father, she often found a pretext not to go. She hated the sight of Burnside and the others.

  The plain, square-faced man Murray first came to Kate’s door with a petition he wanted her to sign. She’d had him pointed out to her once on the beach. He was a lawyer who worked for a merchant bank. Now he was engaged in an uncharacteristic act of overt politics—gathering signatures.