Leon Uris (21 page)

“Then write me an ending that isn’t tragic. There can be no fool greater than one leading a cavalry charge without a horse.”

“Take me, Zach,” she demanded.

He wanted to say something about defending her honor, his honor, the Corps’ honor, Horace Kerr’s honor. But there was something grinding at him from her.

Who was that speaking from inside her? Was she truly that deeply in love or hopelessly infatuated or . . .was this the rage of a spoiled heiress holding her breath till she got what she wanted despite the ruination she would wreak?

“How much of this,” Zach said, fearing her answer, “has to do with loving me and how much of it has to do with using me as a pawn in this game, this disease, this plague, between you and your father?”

Amanda had never been spoken to this way. She was exposed and startled.

“How much do you want to beat Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, not meaning to speak.

“I didn’t hear you!”

“I don’t know!” she screamed. Then there was the long silence that occurs as one mulls over what one has just discovered about oneself. This young man was as powerful as her father. She had never realized the impossibility of her quest. How do we leave these woods now?

“I guess that in whatever ending we choose for our story, there’s nothing so sacred as your Corps,” she said, trying to give him one last jab with her emotional sword.

“There is something more sacred,” he said.

“What?” she challenged.

“What you let me see and touch on our first night in the garden.”

This put her back on earth. She arched her back. “What happened in the garden was my needing to discover something and needing an honorable Marine to do the deed. So I found out. Having one’s breasts titillated can be rather enjoyable, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“But it
is
the end of the world!” he said.

“Tits!” she cried. “Is that all you people think of?”

“Pretty much, when we’re off duty.”

She cupped her breasts angrily. “Tits, the minute you get out of the trenches. Tits and trenches.”

“A woman’s breasts are the most beautiful creation God ever made. When they are the breasts of Amanda, they’re damned near worth dying for.”

A hard breeze hit the glade and the limbs all knelt and shook weeping leaves.

So, how do we leave the woods, Amanda? she asked herself. Love him every minute we have left, knowing your heart will be shattered? Run off to San Francisco? Have him desert and follow you? Go to Shanghai? Hear his fifty-year sentence at the court-martial? This man was all and he was not going to bring her to harm.

They had wrung each other dry.

“Let’s go back,” Zach said.

“You ride old Banjo back. He knows the way home. I need to be alone,” she said.

She closed up with nary a word and took her beauty away from his touch. Both of them deeply, deeply wanted her blouse ripped off, but to hell, let damned fools keep their dignity.

She gave a short whistle for the horse, then handed Zach the reins. He mounted.

“I’ll be around for a while, unfortunately,” he said. “What do you think we ought to do about seeing each other again?”

“It’s done,” she said.

Zach jabbed old Banjo in the ribs and the horse headed downstream.

“Zach!” she called.

“Aye?”

“Yes, I want to see you again!”

•
19
•

Did Amanda’s call mean peace or war? Horace Kerr, an ultimate master of intimidation, was having the tables turned on him. He walked to the boardroom adjoining his office and stood at the high windows looking down on the driveway.

Amanda’s carriage passed through the gate. Amanda closed her parasol and accepted the driver’s hand to help her out, then disappeared into the building.

Horace returned to his office and quickly involved himself in the papers on his desk as his secretary, Mr. Allsop, knocked and entered, with Amanda trailing behind. Horace Kerr wore his best mask, his smiling one, and instructed Mr. Allsop to see that they were not to be disturbed.

Amanda pecked his cheek. He caught a whiff of subtle freshness. She drifted to the huge bay window behind his desk that afforded a throne’s-eye view of the empire.

The iron crane birds hovered over three massive and three smaller dry docks. A slab of molded steel was being slapped into place. Hot rivets were pitched and the blue flames of the welders’ torches hissed. A railcar bearing a house-size boiler squealed to a stop.

The noon whistle blasted and the ship’s clock in the president’s office tolled. Horace’s hand instinctively whipped the gold timepiece from his vest pocket. It was noon, three times over.

In a moment, three thousand antlike workers had come off the scaffolding to open corned-beef- and knockwurst-filled lunch boxes.

It grew quiet, outside.

Amanda turned to face her father’s office, an American success story complete with a James Whistler oil of his late father. Disposable Angus Kerr, founder of the yard, still held the place of reverence at the altar, as one would have it in a civilized family.

“What’s the grand occasion?” he asked.

“Father, I’ve had some thoughts about the Constitution Ball,” she began.

“Oh yes, that. Your mother has kept me abreast of things.” His innards roiled.

“I’ve come to realize how terribly important it is to you.”

“Yes, but more so to your mother.”

“It is the only Constitution I’ll ever attend. I wish it didn’t have to be this yearlong girlie-girlie game in a coven of witches.”

“That’s rather harsh; however, not without merit.” He winked. Who among us, he thought, could follow the trail of a conniving female? Horace willed himself calm so as to see all matters coming up with clarity. He’d not blink if his father’s portrait fell off the wall. “Your mother has bemoaned the fact that the list of eligible escorts is growing thin.”

Her eyes danced about the room. She adored this office and all beyond that lay at her father’s feet. “Who among the crown princes is left?” she asked. “Two, three, maybe four, in a stretch. All of them second-rate Forbeses and Astors.”

Down came the gauntlet! Here comes the Marine! How many
hundreds of times had he looked over this very desk to men gone dry with fear, unable to speak because their tongues were stuck to the roofs of their mouths?

Imposing such terror, judiciously of course, was what made a great man great. Ultimately, he held all of the candy in his pocket. He warned himself not to explode, even though she was pumping him up with some kind of queer rationalization.

“We are going to have to engage in some very open talk,” Amanda said.

“Go on.”

She looked beyond him into the yard again. “With the new Vermont class you’re laying the hull for in number one dry dock, it will bring Kerr to within a hairbreadth of being the principal builder of warships.”

“What are you prattling about, child?”

“I’m putting things on the table that never have been put there before,” she said. “Shall I go on?”

He wanted to balk and demand she stop maneuvering him. “Certainly, go on.”

“My father is trying to build ships faster than his yard is capable of doing, and in another year or fifteen months, Kerr will have to stop bidding.”

Horace straightened up as though he had been whacked, dumbstruck by her sudden ambush. It was a first sighting of a hidden Amanda. Who was she? She’d come in armed to the eyeballs, perhaps after years and years of her own conniving preparations, until the Constitution gave her bargaining power. Listen up, Horace.

“The story goes,” she said, “that it was your brilliant stroke to select Dutchman’s Hook, because by the beginning of the Civil War, you’d already smelled the future of steel ships and wanted to be in proximity of the Sparrow’s Point steel mills.”

“And Mother no doubt told you about the Blanton financing.”

“Some of it.”

“It is far more complex than mother-daughter gossip over tea . . . or witches’ brew.”

Amanda kept going, refusing to bite at her father’s sarcasm.

“What my father needs now is the final, elusive piece of the puzzle to create a Chesapeake monopoly of warships, cargo ships, and passenger ships so every boatyard on the bay will be under contract to him.”

“Stop the babble,” he said. “You’re extremely clever, Amanda, but this goes totally beyond the scope of your comprehension.”

“Dutchman’s Hook is full up,” Amanda continued. “There’s no room to expand. Nor will the state of Maryland allow any expansion. The Maryland Select Commission has filed a confidential but strong report that the waste from Kerr and Sparrow’s Point could be endangering the oyster and crab beds for commercial fishing.”

“Are you going to tell me how you’ve come upon all this?”

“Matthew Fancy had a shrewd mind and made a very good teacher,” she answered.

Horace slowly poured himself a tall glass of water and asked for leave to light a cigar, then sat back, both enchanted and apprehensive. Then he arose, clasped his hands behind him, and walked away, his back to her. She followed him.

“The Kerr balance sheet has a building surplus. Suppose Kerr were to buy out a solid old yard, one that could put Kerr into the cargo- and passenger-ship business in direct competition with Belfast and the River Clyde in Scotland?”

“You have amazed me today,” Horace said. “But I’ve worked my way through all of this for years. There is no such yard, unless I go to sleep tonight with a molar under my pillow and the tooth fairy gives me one.”

“There is one in Hampton Roads,” Amanda said.

Horace allowed himself a deep sigh, turned, and patted her cheek. This was a wonderful new Amanda, but thank God this ridiculous game was over. Now let her down easily, he told himself. Do not bruise her dignity.

They ventured to the leather armchair part of the office. “I’m taken in by all this and I see it as an important moment for us. It’s going to take a while for it to sink it. You’ve given me a four-year
education in less than an hour. But Hampton Roads is a naval facility, lock, stock, and barrel. There are some small yards still operating under a grandfather clause since the Revolution, but none of sufficient size for Kerr’s needs.”

“Wouldn’t the Constable Works fill the old dinner pail?”

“Hugh Constable has a tradition of building beautiful bay steamers, coastal boats, personal pleasure yachts. And Hugh Constable would never sell or merge.”

“They’re in trouble,” Amanda shot back.

A first drop of real blood fell, and Horace Kerr smelled it. “How’s that?”

“Twenty years ago Matthew Fancy worked out an option for Constable on the adjoining South Basin, and although they used some of it as an auxiliary, it’s never been really developed. Hugh Constable has gotten a recent itch to go into ocean passenger liners. He renewed the option for the South Basin for another fifty years, but it cost him millions. He started to build a pair of dry docks that would hold twenty-thousand-ton ships, then found himself financially squeezed.”

“There is no possible way Hugh Constable could have been seeking financing without me knowing about it.”

“That is because they have done the bulk of their banking through England and some European principalities. They bought the South Basin option for several million, took further loans to dredge their channels, and badly misjudged the engineering needed. Halfway through the construction of the first dry dock, they were squeezed so badly they had to put up their private preferred stock as collateral.”

“How do you know this?”

“My brother, who is never mentioned here by name, happens to hold a seat in Lloyd’s.”

“I don’t want to hear a goddamned thing about Upton!”

“Fine, then that’s it.”

“Your mother told you this! Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Mother knew nothing of this. When she made her first trip to
England eight years ago, she brought home a letter to me from Upton. We write regularly to each other.”

“Where the hell does he send letters to you?”

“To Willow.”

“Behind my back!”