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.
Someone wanted to build a two-story restaurant on Palm Beach. Its roof would break the pure sweep of Pacific he could see from his sun deck. It would also go bust and stand vacant or become a disco. The roads out here weren’t built for that sort of traffic. They were not built for young men to drive on fueled with grog (he used the old-fashioned, convict-naval term) while showing off to some tanned girl passenger.
The strain of all this activism just about made him sound pompous. But little ironies in his manner kept saving him.
Murray Stannard: an old-fashioned honorable man of the Anglo-Australian tradition, the way Jim Gaffney was an old-fashioned man in the Celtic vein. Two very different kinds of creatures nonetheless. He was never as funny as Jim. He had values, and she quite rightly thought the day he first visited to get her signature that he was bemused, that there was an intensity to his desire for petitions which perhaps his stated cause itself didn’t justify. That he was trying to preserve more than he said he was trying to preserve.
There were rumors his marriage was going wrong. The conventional wisdom was that it had happened because he was a man who typified the values of the early 1950s. His young wife, a seventies child, more of a freebooter in sex and culture, in reading and opinion, originally attracted by his quaintness, now couldn’t stand it.
—Of course (he said) people think it’s only because of my view I’m tramping round like this. It’s more than that. People come here from all over the world just because the view isn’t broken by structures. The building itself, Mrs. Kozinski, is—I admit—inoffensive by comparison with other buildings elsewhere. But that’s not the point. This is nothing else but Sydney’s last chance. If this view goes, then the whole coastline’s brutalized for the whole community. We have a concrete coast from Wollongong to Palm Beach!
She signed, yet she was sure he would take the list of signatories home and bore his wife with it.
There were plenty of people to tell her what was happening between Perdita Krinkovich and Paul Kozinski. Some did so with malice and some with concern. Krinkovich was—by report—delighted. He had a girlfriend of his own. He wanted to get out cheaply too, and he was most likely to do that if his wife married another of the group known as “Big Developers.”
Her mother, Kate O’Brien-Gaffney, demanded that she do something tough about Paul. Her mother-in-law advised her to be kinder and to go to more parties with him.
In the summer before the cataclysm, people could sometimes sit on Palm Beach and see with one sweep of the eye the parties to the three drowning marriages—the Krinkoviches, the Kozinskis and the Stannards (Murray and his wife). Not that people talked excessively about or were amazed by such things in Sydney.
If Reg Krinkovich however was said to take love easy, Paul Kozinski only pretended to.
Someone at the coordination clinic had mentioned that dance classes might be good for little Bernard. Dance appealed to Bernard temperamentally, Kate could tell, and might even unleash in him the athleticism looked for in antipodean males.
The classes begun, Siobhan managed in no time robust pliés and arabesques. Bernard achieved a more intense form of balance.
Attending a Christmas concert at the dance school Mrs. Maria Kozinski, always alert for signs of a malign destiny for her grandson, said, But there is only one other little boy in the class.
The curse inherent in the improper baptism and the Jewish first name continued to display its omens to Paul’s mother.
—I want you to speak to her, Kate told Paul. When we see them on Christmas Day.
—Why don’t you? She listens to you.
—No. You tell her to leave him alone. None of this, Wouldn’t you like to play a game that other boys play?
—Come on. You haven’t actually heard her say that to him, have you?
—She’s come close to it.
—And you say she misjudges you?
—She’ll be influenced by you, Paul. For God’s sake, just warn her off. Bernard may never keep wickets for Australia, but he’s got a greater strength than that. He takes things as they come. He’s practically the only boy in the dance class, but he doesn’t see it in those terms. They’re all just other dancers to him. His sister’s just another dancer. He sees her do some lairy grand jeté, but he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do that because it’s a girl doing it. And he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do it because I can’t. He just rejoices, that’s all. And I don’t want her messing him up, Paul.
She could tell Paul thought all this was only a matter of making an adjustment in the balance of rivalries between his wife and his mother.
He was in any case already bored with Kate and the tussle for Bernard’s unimpaired soul.
There was a thin freckled girl called Denise who had been coming for the past two years into the Gaffney-Kozinski household to help with the children. She was gentle. She had trekked in the Himalayas again and again. The Himalayan journey had become one of the rites of passage of the Australian young in the 1980s. They helped pollute the slopes of the mountains, even of Everest itself, but they also learned from the Nepalese to be vegetarian and studiously gentle. Denise was a vegetarian and intended to go on periodically trekking until she was thirty-five. She lived with her parents, who were bemused by her, her penitence, her lack of concern over real estate and career and all the rest. She had a special feeling for Bernard, and her Zen sense of the priority of all acts, human and animal, drove Siobhan to paroxysms of somersaults and jetés. She never drank, and for an ascetic, she drove well. It became an established pattern that she drove the children to their Tuesday dance classes.
Arriving home early during the summer one Tuesday afternoon, Paul found Kate sitting sun-dazed in an armchair, sipping a substantial glass of vodka and reading the Bulletin.
Kate felt bound to explain herself.
—The days Denise takes them to dance classes, I indulge myself.
She couldn’t help sounding defensive.
—Drinking to the overthrow of old mother Kozinski, said Paul, and poured himself a drink, and sat and looked out to sea.
There were a few such Tuesdays, when he got home early to sit with her and join in her hour-and-a-half party. Usually, he would be traveling or would not get home until late, drugged with fatigue, complaining about the long drive from the city.
He woke one night as she was returning from the bathroom with a bottle of sedatives in her hands.
—You’re taking too many of those, he complained, his side of the story for their cold bed. And she was. She was taking plenty. Probably twenty milligrams too much per night, and she was drinking extra vodka too. Marriage was a state of such rigidity. All the other people’s marriages seemed flexible and escapable. It was well known that people went for the bottle or the dalliance before they went for the lawyer. Another banal rule whose force had fallen on the Gaffney-Kozinski household.
—I hope you’re clearheaded when you’re driving the kids, he said.
Paul on his own could be happy for her to go on being mother to his children when the marriage ended. But Mrs. Kozinski might inflame her son, calling on his pride with the idea of extricating her grandchildren from the frightful ambience of the not-so-Reverend, from the flawed sacraments. Evidence such as the use of liquor and drugs were a gift to his case.
Preparing for unconsciousness at last, Kate envisaged some court scene, and a brief astringent sweat broke on the surface of her skin.
—Mr. Kozinski, did you ever remonstrate with your wife over the use of sedatives?
—I remember one night, when I saw her returning from the bathroom with a pill bottle in her hands. I complained then. I was worried about her competence to drive the children …
Kate took the interior oath to live in Guatemala with them if she had to. Or on the beaches of Costa Rica. She had a nightmare in which they went driving blithely away in a black car at whose wheel sat smiling Burnside, Kozinski Constructions’ heavy and enforcer.
She thought of asking Paul if the sight of her taking sedatives made it easier for him to sleep with Perdita. And then she thought that she was too tired to sustain the loudness this would generate.
That counting of small costs was a sign. They were near an end.
And then the features of a pleasant man, a man who would never be vengeful over children, broke with that random sort of clarity. The man who had come for the petition. Murray. A man who didn’t simulate.
Uncle Frank used sometimes to come to see her and the children on Mondays. Most of his confreres played golf that day, but he was already not so much a pariah but a sign of contradiction amongst his fellow priests, even though his cardinal archbishop had not yet—to use his own whimsical phrase—pulled his plug.
He was always restless on Mondays. Jim Gaffney said, Monday’s Frank’s black sabbath. He’s got to wait for the midweek race meetings before he can have another bet!
But the not-so-Reverend Frank had by now become more abstemious with liquor than he once was. Cronies in the police force and the magistracy who would have protected him had he driven boozed in the past were now retired or else facing charges. At Kate’s place, he sipped white wine on the sun deck and discussed politics. Cuchulain between cattle raids.
—If your poor grandmother could see us here in the sun, drinking this golden wine, she’d understand what all the suffering was for. Just the same, Kate darling, things aren’t good with your man, that bloody Pole …
—Not good, Uncle Frank, she admitted, against all the urgings of her passion for privacy.
—Oh, Jesus, he said. Marriage is a bugger, you see. It can aggrandize ordinary people. It can make extraordinary ones miserable. Do you love him still, this Paul Kozinski?
She had no answer. He had been easy to love in the celebratory sweetness of the first six or so years. Could he be said to be loved in the cunning warfare of the present?
—Dear Kate, breathed Uncle Frank. I suppose your parents will want you to undergo the entire canonical circus of annulment. All that stuff’s easier these days. To have a contract, according to little canonical weasels like Monsignor Slattery, you need material appropriate to a contract, suitable persons, mutual consent, and full knowledge. Now anyone can prove that one of those was missing. And I suppose you’ll want to go through all that. After all, it’s tradition. And tradition’s worth something. If the faithful realized how easy it was—and if they could afford it—half of them would be divorced right now.
—We’ll just see. The marriage can be retrieved, Uncle Frank.
But he had obviously heard differently. Everyone was hearing differently. Paul Kozinski bore all the marks of a man far gone.
—Do you ever wonder about Mrs. Kearney and myself? Uncle Frank asked, to show the extent to which he was willing to raise his questions above the level of domestic gossip.
Mrs. Kearney, widow of Alderman Pat Kearney. Mrs. Fiona Kearney—the name you were better not to utter in the presence of the Reverend Frank’s volatile sister, Kate O’Brien.
—I put this woman’s name in safe deposit with you, Kate, so you’ll know I’m not kidding around. I could always talk to you. By the time you were two years we were coconspirators. And you used to tell me anything when you were a kid—fourteen years old and so on. Remember I took you to a bloody awful Kiss concert, and we saw those rock hoodlums with paint on their faces, and the sound was coming up through the cement stand into my spine, Kate. But you looked at me and you were seraphic, and I thought, To hell with it all, if it makes her happy. That’s why I bring up Mrs. Kearney, Kate, to show we’re soul mates. I would surely do anything for you. And that’s why I bring up that name. Whatever complexion your sainted mother puts on it, darling Kate.
He waited for her to bring her eyes back to him, and she rushed to do it. She smiled to signify that Uncle Frank had safely mentioned and exorcised the name of his woman.
—Now I don’t want to make a meal out of mea culpas. The Irish are so buggered up with Manichaeanism and self-hate that all that comes without effort. But I would have to say I’m a profoundly flawed man. At the archdiocesan chancellery, they’re queuing up to say that’s what I am. Profoundly flawed. I mean, you’re looking at a fellow who, though breathed upon by the Holy Spirit, can barely get through today without a flutter on a horse. In my case, I admit, it’s not exactly a flutter. It’s more like a fooking myocardial infarction.
—Now other men in my situation have given up and renounced the collar, and got a bit of paper from the Vatican that says they’re all square and fit for gambling and matrimony. But I’m too bloody proud and rebellious, Kate, and I won’t let a load of Dago gobshites in some congregation in Rome force me out of my chosen path.
He drank on that, and then continued.
—I am, Kate, a priest according to the order of Aaron and Melchizedech. When I was a little feller in Ireland of the sorrows, they used to tell this story about the eternity of the thing. How a priest chased women and became a drunk and had been stripped of his powers by his bishop. But still one night, when he came to a bakery window full of bread, he had the power to consecrate the lot, every ounce within reach of his voice. For this is my body … Pausing by a bakery window in some miserable little lace-curtained town in the Bogs, he transformed an entire windowful of bread into mysterium fidei.
—Now see, that’s how I see the value of what I’ve taken on. In those terms. What you’d call inescapability. And no little gang of Italian monsignors is going to cast me out on the street like that poor feller in the story. I’m just letting you know, Kate, because you must wonder where I stand and what keeps me going in this stubborn way. You must look at a feller like me and often wonder. Even when you were a kiddie you must have looked at me and found it all mystifying. So I wanted to set the story straight for you, Kate darling. I keep to what I’m doing out of bloodymindedness. I’m blasphemous enough to think that even I might know more about love than they do in the joyless chambers of the Vatican.
Though Kate found it hard for some reason to control her tears at the end of these confessions, Uncle Frank was beaming and exalted.
—And let me tell you something else … Well, maybe after I pour myself another glass of this golden wine from the Hunter Valley …
And, holding up his glass, he burst into a parenthesis of song:
—Oh I wish I was in sweet Dunlow
And seated on the grass.
And by my hand a bottle of wine.
And on my knee a glass …
He sipped a mouthful and gasped and said that life was grand beyond our deserts! And then he composed himself and was ready to go on.
—What I’m telling you, Kate, is that I know you’re unhappy. I grieve for your sake. There are two people on earth I’d go to hell for. One of them is not—I’m sad to say—my good sister, your mother. It embarrasses me that I’m on her go-to-hell list, and she’s not on mine. She’d do anything for me. Blind to my faults, etc., etc. But the two people I’d go to hell for are you and Fiona Kearney. There it is. The story of Frank O’Brien, priest of the order of Melchizedech and living bloody shame. So it comes down to this. What can I do for you, Kate?
But of course, he knew and she knew that as soothing as it was to be told that the not-so-Reverend Frank would die for you, there was nothing he could do. Avuncular love, even unto hell, availed nothing when set up against Paul Kozinski’s absorption in Perdita Krinkovich.
His speech was not futile, though. She found to her surprise that she too had a list she had not been aware of owning, and that without even thinking of it she had fantastically considered Uncle Frank a possible parent for her children if, for example, as loving partners on a holiday, she and Paul fell from the sky in a helicopter or were lost sailing the Vistula to Tahiti. Bernard would grow up to be a bookmaker. Siobhan would own pubs, as Uncle Frank and Mrs. Kearney did, and none of that seemed such a bad thing.
The rumor was that Frank and Fiona owned eight pubs between them. Even more, that he had a share of a funeral parlor owned by his friend O’Toole, where on the positive side he spent a lot of evenings consoling the bereaved in the comfortable front parlors.
Uncle Frank said, Just watch him. He’s an intense sort of lad.
—What do you mean?
—Those Slavs are sort of emotionally concentrated.
—But his father’s always saying they’re just like you.
—Well, they’re not. We’re intense, sure. But in a different way. We drink to bleed the pressure off. They drink so they’ll never forget. You ought to watch them, and call on me in any circumstances.