A Woman of the Inner Sea by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online

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