Leon Uris (12 page)

“You mean prisoner first class.”

“Sometimes I wonder, Amanda. Who is the prisoner? You or I?”

Amanda came to her feet, irately, meaning to say something rotten. “Doesn’t it become demeaning to you to always be patted on the head as Paddy O’Hara’s boy?”

Zach gave her a smile in return. “I like being Paddy O’Hara’s son just as you like being Horace Kerr’s daughter.”

Amanda softened her tone, probing to find a way to break his skin, a paper cut, not deep but one that hurt. “What do you owe Sergeant Major O’Hara?”

“You’re trying to irk me, Amanda. Why?”

“Because I think you feel you owe your father too much. Someone with your ability and promise shouldn’t be slopping around at the bottom of a sty.”

“You’re rough, Amanda. You don’t want to hear about anything good because the only good is what you think is good. Nobody else’s good means anything if it isn’t exactly like yours.”

“Then let me know what you think is good,” she huffed.

“Amanda,” he snapped, “you are the commanding officer of the entire world except for me.”

“Then tell me,” she said.

They sat among the black-eyed Susans as the sun lost its power. They cared. Amanda wanted to understand why an orphan boy
found such contentment with so low a station. Even if he became an officer, he’d still be somewhere near the bottom. Is it laziness that holds him back? she wondered. Or fear? How can anyone accept such low status in the midst of all the glitter?

Zachary felt her searching, to turn the two of them into more grand than it was.

“My da left me with a number of wondrous things,” Zach began. “I owe him enough to try to understand what these things are.”

“And you’ve found them, then?”

“I had my problems with my da’s greatness, with his name. I had to fend off a lot of envious people, but I also understand what he gave me.”

“I think you’ve created a fantasy about both your parents. You’ve set them on lofty thrones.”

“I know what you want to hear, Amanda. Paddy O’Hara could be a mean son of a bitch. He oftentimes ran his men by fear and he could intimidate officers as well. But he got them through alive. He became a tinhorn politician in a saloon bunted in red, white, and blue swirling in a sea of corruption. He made himself believe he loved my mother like a saint, but he was a lying bastard to other women and he drank hard and always had a game of poker running.”

Zachary grasped both her arms and held her fast.

“And he read me Shakespeare and he wrapped his big hand around mine and trudged me to the playhouses on Broadway and museums where only the mighty trod. But what I really remember was when he was the great sergeant major of the Corps. I’d ride on his shoulders when we were passed through the sentry gate and we’d march out to the parade ground and hear the song of bugles and the roll of drums as the color guard lowered our flag. I watched five hundred Marines with tears streaming down their cheeks as they passed in review on his last day. Proud officers had tears in their eyes, as did the vice-president of the United States. They mourned and keened for a month in Hell’s Kitchen when my
da died, and they mourn to this day. He could do foul deeds, but they loved him. They loved Paddy O’Hara because he was an Irish champion when the Irish had poor few champions.”

He turned Amanda loose and stepped back. “My da left me his sergeant major’s buckle, not much more, and he probably thought I’d never grow into it.”

“Maybe he left you a cruel, false dream of the Marines.”

“I know you think we’re a pack of wharf rats with a high desertion rate and swilling in a sea of booze, but I own no more ambition than for a life in the Corps.”

They packed the picnic basket wordlessly. He helped her back into the canoe, and before twilight, they paddled back to the world.

•
12
•

From her widow’s walk at Inverness, Daisy Blanton Kerr watched her daughter being paddled to the dock. She saw Amanda and the O’Hara boy walk hand in hand lazily toward the stables, bumping each other playfully with their shoulders and hips, then disappear into the barn.

It was a time before they emerged, brushing hay off each other. In a moment the stable boy came out with Zach’s buckboard for his long ride back to Washington. Both horse and carriage showed Marine Corps vintage. It will take him all night to reach his barracks, Daisy thought.

Zach slung his pack aboard, hopped onto the driver’s seat, and helped Amanda up. Daisy turned the corner of the widow’s walk to see them move at a slow gait to the circular drive.

She looked through her spyglass. The watchman in the gatehouse opened the massive guardians to Inverness. Daisy blanched
as her daughter and the Marine went into a long, lingering embrace.

Daisy saw her daughter become distraught and half swoon off the driveway and hold both hands to her face. Was Amanda crying? Amanda never cried.

The Kerrs had waited half an eternity for Amanda’s time to come. The Constitution Ball would be their finest social conquest, an affirmation of the place they had reached among the nation’s mighty families. It had been dreamed of with pulsating anticipation by both parents. As the calendar announced the year of another “Constitution,” a sense of near hysteria bubbled up inside Daisy.

The ball, held every fourth year, beginning a decade after the Civil War, was initially meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. Unmarried postdebutantes from the ages of eighteen to their early twenties came together from every city in the nation: the proper girls from Boston and the honey-drawling Southern belles and such and such, invited by secret committee, “commanded” to the Potomac Mansion House Hotel.

They’d swoop in on the red-and-gold carpet with their escorts on their right and their patrician parents behind.

The ballroom filled with military flag officers, cabinet secretaries, and rarely anything lower than a senator. All parties in position, the Mansion House was a place for the celebration of treaties and mergers.

Forty-three girls were invited to this year’s ball, more from Boston and New York, fewer from Philadelphia and Baltimore. More from Virginia, only two from Alabama. The daughters of families from growing city empires, Cleveland or Memphis, found their way in, but hardly ever anyone from Mississippi or west of it. Hurrah, this year oil and cattle won recognition with the invitation to a girl from Texas. And two from California, where blue blood was on the rise from mining and railroad fortunes.

Amanda Blanton Kerr was the only Marylander to be so called, and it was up to her to choose a worthy escort.

* * *

Amanda came to the main door. Daisy met her on the stairs. As Amanda passed her mother, she briskly brushed the hay off her shoulders.

“Zach and I were necking,” Amanda said.

Amanda knew by her mother’s nervousness that picket lines were being formed for battle. Daisy took her arm, led her to the conservatory, and rang for tea.

“I sense a problem that I think best to face now,” Daisy began.

“What do you mean?”

“Many is the time I wished I had your wings. Your toughness also frightens me, but all things considered, I have never taken you for stupid.”

Amanda was startled by Daisy’s sudden show of purpose.

“It has been two years since you and your father came to your understandings, but I can see the wheels in your mind once more in motion. You are about to test the waters again, aren’t you, my dear?”

Amanda reddened.

“When one is eighteen,” Daisy said, “there is nothing to compare to the awakening. A roll in the hay against a boy’s strong body, a canoe ride over the lake and down the river.”

“That’s enough, Mother!”

“There’s nothing like first love, I agree . . . I almost remember.”

“Zachary is shanty Irish, an enlisted, Marine-barrack-raised Catholic, the lowest class of
merde
in the realm,” Amanda snapped, coming to her feet and knocking over her teacup. “Don’t bother!”

“Sit down!” her mother commanded.

She did, with aggravated stiffness and tightly locked teeth.

“Bank your rage, young lady. Do not use the Constitution Ball as a challenge to Horace Kerr.”

Daisy could tell by the look on Amanda’s face that she had read the situation accurately. “You are spoiling for a fight you cannot win. Horace Kerr has too many weapons in his arsenal, too much artillery, too many regiments, too much firepower.”

Amanda slipped back into her chair and tried to pour herself tea, but was too shaky. Daisy did it for her, calmly, and her mother’s calm ruffled her.

“You were, what, seven when you made your first stand?”

“I hardly remember it,” Amanda said.

“Like hell,” Daisy retorted. “You remember every moment of it and you have found and mastered ways to hold Horace at bay ever since, but while that was happening, he lost the family game badly.”

“Are we going to—”

“Yes, we are going to,” Daisy interrupted. “You are clever and you are courageous and I believe quite ruthless, like your father. Over the course he’s had to pasture out an entire clan fit for nothing but racing boats and cashing checks. And, your brother and sister as well.”

Even though she was a female, Amanda felt, early on, that she held the future of the Kerr family. She’d never seen her mother quite like this and it was disturbing.

“As I said, Amanda, I do not take you for stupid. It’s all yours, unless you push him too far. You will lose the game, endure cruel punishment and the precious freedom you’ve carved.”

Amanda fought back. “All my life I’ve watched the daughters of all our proper friends bounce out on the stage like painted puppets being manipulated by their parents working the strings. All of them too frightened to rebel against a system that stamps them out like so many dolls from a doll factory.”

“How very sad for them,” Daisy mocked. “But even bound by the rules, maybe there are five girls on this planet as fortunate as you are.”

“What about you, Mother?” Amanda threw out defensively.

“Huh, I was served up by my family to consecrate the banking end of the business. I learned, very early on, your father was driven by more ambition and lust than any one woman could cope with.”

“And you let him have his doxies?”

“Hell, he probably left the bed of a mistress to marry me. There were times I was delighted to discover that he was too used up to try to get close to me.”

“If this is my welcome to the way things really are, aren’t there some things we need to share?”

“Amanda, you are cleverly tilting this conversation away from its subject.”

“Mother,” Amanda started slowly. “Six months ago, you and I were going into the city for fittings. I waited for you in your apartment, as always, and I idled through your bookshelves. I happened on a book of poetry with a rose pressed in it, nothing more, except it lay on a page of desperately declared love.”

Daisy lowered her eyes.

“Well?”

“Your father is a bit of a brawler in bed and I had never really known a gentle man before. He was English, actually. I met him on my first trip to England. He was, of all things, a theatrical producer with a wife, children, and later, grandchildren. He passed away a few years ago.”

“Oh, Mother,” Amanda said compassionately.

“Obviously we carried out our trysts with extreme discretion. He knew of islands off England or up north in Scotland where no one knew us or gave ‘tuppence ha’penny.’ I don’t believe your father would have really cared. Perhaps it would have been a small blow to his ego. But how could the man complain with his string of mistresses, and a wife who ran his home and social life flawlessly?”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes. The only thing that Horace Kerr fears is public ridicule. So long as the news never reached his clubs or banks or the press, he wouldn’t give a damn. Just his fine name matters to him.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Hard to say, Amanda. After a while you stare at the rose pressed in a book of poetry and hardly remember what he looked like. What I do know about Horace Kerr causes me to shiver on your behalf. He was beyond cruel to your brother Upton, his only son.”