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

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. Inthose 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.

Six
    A PRIL IS A SWEET MONTH on the beaches north of Sydney. It is considered autumn, but would pass for summer in another place. There is a public holiday then—Anzac Day—the celebration of the sacrifice of young Australians and New Zealanders on the shores of the Hellespont in 1915. The day was generally so benign in disposition that the Gaffney-Kozinskis could spend it on the sand as if high summer