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.