WE 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 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.