A Woman of the Inner Sea (31 page)

So that one night, drinking late, she had been able to raise with him the friendly, hackneyed question. Had he learned anything of God in space?

She asked him because by now she expected from him a novel answer. He had already disproved the accusation that spacemen were humanoid. He had told her, for instance, that he hated the jungle training and suffered a childhood phobia of insects. When dumped with the others north of the Panama Canal in rotting rain forest where they were expected to live off the land, he had become ill when served iguana, and had huddled on a muddy slope watching the mulch of leaves beyond the door of his pup tent for fear that they might disclose a spider or a scorpion.

His frankness about his refusal as a certified superman to countenance lizard meat had gone together with his brotherly acceptance of Kate’s rebuff, to generate a kind of friendship. So, both their brains tinted with whiskey, she could raise with him the question of space and the ultimate principle.

The astronaut grew somber and said he—like the fundamentalist who had already gone soberly to bed—believed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

She looked for a twitching of his joker’s lips but there was none. So he believed in the Incarnation. How strange he’d say it just like that! Raging at his own reflection in a mirror behind the bar. Real Hound of Heaven stuff; wrestling with divinities. And playing out his startling argument.

—God was made flesh in Judaea, said the astronaut. God made Jewish in fact. Imagine. I believe it. I wish I didn’t. It has what you could call important implications for my lifestyle and my future … I realized in my spaceship—really had it come home to me—that
we, the earth, the race … we’re a suburb. A little corner. A cul-de-sac.

—It is therefore in my opinion obscene to be stuck with the idea that the only intelligent life in the universe is here, here in this dead-end street. What I believe is … Christ has been throughout the universe, to many, many constellations. Otherwise there’s no sense. Okay, that’s number one.

—Number two. Number two: our idea of aesthetics and of what is noble in the body of a man or a woman is based on gravity. Gravity makes us. Gravity made Marilyn Monroe. Gravity made Jesus Christ. If we lived on a planet where the gravity was 1.5, Christ would be four and a half feet tall and have an enormous flat brow to stand the extra pressure. Marilyn Monroe would be four foot two and her ankles would be seven inches through, and we would still think that was damn marvelous. Because gravity would’ve given us our idea of beauty as well.

—But imagine (continued the astronaut to the now enthralled Kate Gaffney). Imagine a planet where the gravity was three, Christ and Venus would be hunched over, they would drag their forepaws along the earth. And again we, made by that same gravity, would think they were beautiful, worth dying for, worth our souls. And then a planet with gravity eight! Christ and Venus would be serpents or multipedes, and
he
still would have died to wash us in his blood and we would still have wanted
her
.

She remembered the nature of the awe she and the astronaut had shared then. Reverence for the serpentine Messiah. The vision of the serpentine Venus. It took much headshaking to rid the imagination of these images.

The Kate who made love to Gus knew she was Kate from a planet of gravity two. Her skull had been pressed flat by the weight of events. She had turned herself by will into a Venus from an alternate planet. She had let the gravity of Murchison’s Railway Hotel thicken her. Yet Gus clearly came from a similar planet, because entering her and caressing her from behind, his mouth near her ear, he writhed and jerked with cries of praise.

As Chifley had had one or two great and foredoomed glandular adventures, Kate imagined—but she may have been wrong—that this was a rare excursion for Gus’s body. In tune with this belief Kate herself felt certain waters breaking and flowing inside her.
She approved of it all distantly, a Maharani approving of the coming of the monsoons.

Flung with abandon across the frost outside, Chifley waited, owing her something for the pain of being shackled to language, even for the milliliters of painful breath, the ounces of broken words Gus uttered against her ear.

But though Chifley had the lungs and sinews, he couldn’t provide everything. Toward the edge of sleep, she said, Would you let me go to Mass?

—What do you mean,
let?

—I want to take the truck if you’ll let me. I want to go to Mass in Bourke or Wilcannia.

—Bloody long way to go to Mass, Kate, he said.

He was very wary with his affection now the frenzy had ended. Again, being proud, loath to offend or presume.

—But it’s okay by me, he added then.

—And if I meet Burnside, I might sign. Just for peace. But I wouldn’t let him follow me back here. This place wouldn’t be found or anything …

—Your business, Kate.

A
MONGST THE DWINDLED NUMBERS of devout in Bourke, she attended the Mass. The church in Wilcannia where Mick Cassidy had cast aspersions on the then and forever late Tim Brady was, as Gus had persuaded her, too far to go, so Bourke must serve.

The cast of the rite:

The Catholic doctor and his placid wife and handsome and mannerly country children.

The Catholic lawyer who looked Lebanese, and his young freckled-Irish spouse.

The elderly women, and the runty little men called Kelly or Mahony who had worked on cattle or sheep stations and retired in town, wearing everywhere, perhaps even to the bathroom, the sweat-glutted Akubras they had worn in their days of labor.

And although the congregation was smaller than the Irish monsignors who had built this church would have ever foreseen, it was in some ways as if nothing had changed since Uncle Frank had been a cleric of this diocese. The young priest could have been a bygone not-so-Reverend Frank. Though Frank and the others had come to Australia because there were too many devout for even the native Australians to supply the sacerdodal need, this lad was here because no one cared anymore, because Madonna had acted and Jack Nicholson had slickly taken the souls of the young. The crass but complex world would in the end distract even the country doctor’s wholesome children.

The priest was wearing green vestments, for that was the season of the year.

She sat through the Mass and numbly through the sermon. The young priest had been to some elocution teacher who had taught
him to hone the final consonants of words. She listened to the shape of his words and imagined where he came from. The standard green lane in mid-Eire? A pub in Meath? Or judging by the burr, a pub in Derry.

Numbly she took communion from one of the town’s remaining nuns. Not a galleon of a nun, full habited in the manner of the year when Tim Brady had perished in this diocese. A nun in a calf-length dress. A modern woman.

At the end the priest with the sharp-honed words blessed them in English. Divesting himself of his green chasuble at the altar, he made for the front of the church to intercept his departing parishioners and peck some of the women on the cheek. Such Protestant folksiness wouldn’t have characterized the wrath-of-God, I-might-shake-your-hand-but-God-will-still-damn-you Irishmen of Uncle Frank’s youth.

Only a few aged faithful, dissenting from the folksy handshaking and kissing in progress outside, stayed behind to make their private devotions. Kate stayed with them. She could hear the young priest being genial around the doors of family vehicles, sticking a head in to rib one of the children on intelligence from the parents. He seemed so remote that the world—at least the world as it existed in Bourke—was tearing him further and further out into the secular streets. His green vestment lay barely remembered on a chair.

Kate left by a side door. She passed the graves of monsignors called Cullen and Fitzgerald and entered the sacristy from the outer door. The smell of Uncle Frank and all the others was there. The highly scrubbed and beeswax scent of the catechism. The smell of Uncle Frank’s soft hands on race day. Long before he thought of applying them to Mrs. Kearney’s whippet body.

There were long, brown varnished drawers with brass brackets to hold a label.
Albs. Tunicles. Surplices and Stoles. Chasubles
. Two drawers of chasubles.

She pulled out the lower of the two. Red and black assailed her eyes. Blood and desolation and burnt offerings; martyrdom and loss. She kicked this drawer shut with her shoe. She was affronted by even the chance idea that the black of the Mass of the adult dead applied to her case.

A new drawer. With the green and yellow, there were two sets
of white—a modern silken chasuble, made for the weather, and a heavy brocaded and braided one built without reference to Bourke’s mean summer temperatures. She pulled this one out. She inspected it, felt its texture, and then folded it to herself, against her breasts. The young priest appeared in the sacristy doorway coming from the church, carrying his green chasuble of today’s Mass, but not as intimately as she carried the white.

He was surprised, but he said pleasantly, Is there anything I can do for you, madam?

Kate walked toward him. Yes, she said. These white vestments …

—The heavy set, he said, still pleasant and willing to humor. Probably eighty years old, that one.

She hit him in the stomach with all her force twice and then ran away, clasping the thing to her. The churchyard rang with the Jansenist disapproval of dead monsignors. The street was empty though except for peppermint trees. All the faithful had vanished.

She did not wish to have to explain to Gus what the vestment for the
Missa de Angelis
was doing in his truck. It sat beside her on the front seat and she felt it one-handed and was satisfied. Ultimately, she was pleased to encounter an irrigation canal, well before the turnoff to Gus’s place. She laid the white chasuble down into the water, and it floated away like an august living thing.

—That’s it, she said reassuringly, standing on the edge of the canal, on the limitless bottom of a once inland sea. It was well known from the classroom: two hundred million years too late the English gentleman Charles Sturt came with certainty to find a sea that had so long stopped lapping, and had found instead the harshest light off white objects and been blinded instead of bathed.

She inspected her hands with which she had taken the wind out of the Lord’s anointed. She did not know why she’d done it to that poor, jovial man.

Back in the truck, she drove home on spidery trails amongst the stringybarks to the Soldier Settler ruin, and went inside to sit by the stove and listen to Gus’s quiet inquiries.

Gus turned on the radio news in the still afternoon as they sat content, she with her morning’s work done, he with his veneration of her and the old rifle to work on.

The radio said:

—Well-known racing identity, the Reverend Francis O’Brien, was arrested in the early hours of this morning at a hotel in Ermington, Sydney.

Letting an unwise yelp loose, Kate saw that Gus had noticed nothing. She composed herself. She knew the name of the hotel after all. The Partridge and Grapes. A massive barn of an Aussie hotel to carry such a cozy name. Mrs. Kearney’s hotel.

—Also arrested was an associate of Father O’Brien’s, Mrs. Fiona Kearney. Father O’Brien and Mrs. Kearney are charged with taxation fraud, illegal gaming, and with violations of the Federal Telecommunications Act. Mrs. Kearney and Father O’Brien between them have interests in at least ten Sydney hotels, of which Mrs. Kearney is nominee. Mrs. Kearney is the widow of well-known East Sydney alderman, Mick Kearney, who at the time of his death was a witness before the inquiry into illegal gaming. The Reverend Francis O’Brien was suspended from duty by His Eminence, Cardinal Fogarty, Archbishop of Sydney, in November 1988, at a time when the Reverend O’Brien’s connections with starting-price bookmaking were revealed before the Independent Commission into Corruption.

Morosely gratified Fogarty, who had managed to move in on Uncle Frank before the police did. Though there was no sense to it, she felt something like a fury at the righteousness of His Eminence Fogarty.

Gus heard all this newsreading static too but knew nothing of what it meant. Chifley, beneath the stringybark, heard it and gazed at the verandah.

—There, she believed he placidly said. The gift of sodding language. Keep the bastard.

—Thanks a lot, said Kate.

At least the radio was too prim to say what Kate knew in her blood: that Uncle Frank was dragged half-naked from the same bed as half-naked Mrs. Kearney. Neither of them beauties, Frank in his tousled plumpness, she angular and her face blurred. As she had heard someone, probably a friend of the Kozinskis, say, If he was going to break his vows, you’d think he’d get better value than Fiona Kearney.

What is required of me now? she wondered. Whatever it was, there wasn’t any chance she would provide it. The not-so-Reverend Frank was not dependent on her favors.

The bottle the shocked young fireman had pressed into her hands.

—Reached inside the door, but this was all I could get before everything went. Sorry. Sorry.

Even in prison, Uncle Frank would be Uncle Frank, a god who would know where the bottle was. In a cupboard at Mrs. Kearney’s at Ermington at the worst. In a cupboard at
his
house in Abbotsford. It wouldn’t be right to ask him now, burdened as he was.

Just the same, she wondered should she write to him? He would have the best of counsel. His ten hotels would pay for it. His tax-evaded earnings. If not that, his loyal brother-in-law James Gaffney, or his tame mortician O’Toole.

Siesta: an unlikely event in Gus’s life. It is midafternoon on the day after Kate stole the vestments of the
Missa de Angelis
, and still she cannot think of anything Uncle Frank needs from her. Somewhere Jim Gaffney is discussing bail and lawyers with him, while Gus has yielded to drowsiness and is languorously entwined with Kate.

—Man’s getting bloody lazy, leading this life.

Half-asleep, they could hear the engine of a truck and both got up on their elbows to get a view through the window. Soon two distinct motors could be heard.