Leon Uris (49 page)

“Having brought the Princess Amanda to her knees, begging and crawling, the two, so, so much in love, have a plan to cut the balls off Horace Kerr. Our man has found his big ticket. Now, to get out of the Corps before his beautiful scheme collapses. Gentlemen, I give you the new tycoon, the master of Dutchman’s Hook and his blood-drinking wife a-weeping and a-wailing o’er the old man’s grave.”

“Do I have permission to leave?” Zach asked quietly.

“Bastard!” Ben cried, throwing his fist. Zach turned his head so the blow glanced. Tobias backed up against the door and threw the bolt.

“You have broken the Fifth Commandment to love your father!” Tobias cried.

“That’s enough, both of you,” the Gunny said. “The Fifth Commandment doesn’t say anything about loving your father. It says you will honor your father.”

“Don’t get cute, Gunny,” Ben warned.

“Zachary O’Hara has given his life to defend Paddy’s honor and the honor of the Marine Corps.”

Tobias was about to come on shouting when Ben held his hand up, trying, trying to get into what the Gunny was saying.

“What are you talking about?” Ben rasped.

“I was at Paddy’s bedside as he lay dying. A day before he got away, he asked me to take his confession and he told me everything.”

“No! You be quiet!” Zach demanded.

“Sorry, sir,” the Gunny answered.

“I did not know you were aware of it, and I command you to remain silent,” Zach said.

“Sorry, sir. We have to deal with it now.”

The Gunny had puzzled the accusers into silence.

Zachary continued to protest weakly as the Gunny pressed him down into a chair.

“I’ve watched Zachary O’Hara bear it year after year in silence. He wrote the book on courage.”

•
45
•

Had Paddy O’Hara remained in Ireland under livable circumstances, he would have become a self-ordained clan chief as powerful as the priest.

He was of great strength, a boy like a man, working the fields with his da and brothers from a tender age. No man dared challenge him, even as a teenager, lest he get starched.

There was a learning side to him. When a traveling bard or illegal hedgerow teacher came to the village, he’d slip off to the hidden classroom to fill a longing. As the sole member of the family and village, including the priest, who could read and write English, he got to read the viscount’s dirty edicts aloud as well as quote a line from Shakespeare.

Paddy was fifteen when the Terrible Hunger struck and over those years he buried his mother, father, two sisters, and four brothers, victims of starvation and disease. Two other sisters died at sea fleeing Ireland on a famine death ship.

When it was done, only himself and his older sister Brigid had survived.

The two of them landed in New York in 1852 into a chaotic scene. The Irish shanties of New York, tin and clapboard shacks with yards that held a chicken or two, were cluttered up along the Hudson River at midisland, then segued into tenement up to Seventh Avenue near Times Square.

New land, old story of survival. Immigrants were dumped at a fort, the Castle, at the bottom of Manhattan. No one forgot their first night in America, sharing the place with hundreds of cats and the devastating smell of cat urine.

The Germans had come from higher social orders—tradesmen, craftsmen, stone masons—and even the Italians had seen great art and had a true cuisine, giving off vast aromas.

Every waterfront dumped coolies. The Chinese banded together in mysterious alleys of high suspicion.

Already they were stepping off boundaries of ethnic enclaves; Germantown and Chinatown and Little Italy, and the blacks fleeing north jammed the Upper West Side in Harlem.

For the Irish it was picking shit with the ducks, shoveling holes and ditches. Their place was a bawdy land near the bottom of the pole.

The first Irish immigration, a generation earlier, had come to build the Erie Canal. They had improved their lot very little.

The coming of the young Irish women fleeing the famine gave a first true grace to their community. In the eyes of affluent New Yorkers, the Irish women spoke a variety of English, were severely Catholic, and thus honest, and were of special value to those who could afford a nanny or domestic. The Irish maid, snippy, clever with words, and an independent breed, formed up strong sisterhoods at the local parishes, able to pick off the best of the lads, get them out of ditches, and settle them into the misery of the married life, so long avoided in their ways.

Brigid O’Hara was such a domestic. Although she never married, she placed herself well as a head maid of the second floor in a
Fifth Avenue mansion owned by German Jews. The Germans were inclined to be demanding and stingy but capable of loyalty to those loyal to them. Further, they were nowhere near as class-conscious as the newly rich Americans.

For Paddy O’Hara, choices were simple. He replaced the neighborhood gang leader. In a year or so Paddy was on the well-worn path that ended up in the state penitentiary at Ossining.

Fortunately, Paddy caught the eye of Corporal Gilligan, the local Marine recruiter who trolled Hell’s Kitchen for prospects. That day Paddy took the oath was a grand day for himself, and for the Marine Corps as well.

In a manner of speaking, Paddy O’Hara was born to be a Marine. Of obvious value, he did well at a time when promotions in the Corps were rare. In a matter of a few years, he was a sergeant in the detachment at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

The soft side of Paddy was never far behind. The death of his family brought on an abstruse search to replace them, and in the Corps, he found some of it.

A little brother came to him in the person of Wally Kunkle, a boy who lived as a sewer rat and fought for pennies at the yard. The day Paddy carried the battered boy out of the ring, took him to the barrack, and mended his wounds was the beginning.

Wally was taught to read and write and ultimately got sworn in to the Corps as a drummer boy at the age of thirteen.

During the Civil War, Paddy saved Wally’s life at Bull Run and again at Fort Sumter during the creation of his legend.

The war done, Marines went to faraway posts, but the friendships stood firm, particularly those in the special order of the Wart-Hogs.

Peace brought Paddy into contact with his softer side again. He had risen to top major and was one of the most honored Irishmen in New York, useful for ceremonies and recruiting. The recruiter was himself recruited.

Brigid pulled him by the ear to church for Sunday mass, where
he was introduced to Maureen Herndon, recently out of County Meath, and a member of her staff at the mansion.

The great warrior melted, and after a proper courtship, they married and left church under a canopy of drawn sabers.

Unknown to either, Maureen had contacted the consumption, a scourge of post-famine Ireland. She was soon with child and the illness raced into her lungs as she gave her entire strength to her pregnancy.

Maureen died three days after Zachary was born.

Never was a man so crushed as Paddy. The sweetness fled. Giving his son to Brigid to raise, he sought duty in places far away, where he could drink, fight, and fornicate. For over four years he evaded the child. Then Brigid tired abruptly, wore thin, and her own demise could clearly be seen.

By command of the commandant, Paddy was awarded the highest enlisted rank, sergeant major of the Corps. The commandant suggested he take care of his son, who had spent his first five years in Hell’s Kitchen.

Zachary proved hardly a trouble. Marine wives on base mothered the lad even though he preferred to fend for himself. Father and son lived together in a civilized manner, enjoyed the ceremony and color. As long as Zachary was a little Marine and so long as he stayed clear of Paddy’s moods, it went smoothly.

But not inside them. They seemed on good terms at times, then Paddy would go into a long and brooding silence that shut out the world, including his son.

Zach never knew if he was truly wanted.

The place they seemed to come together was in Paddy’s moments of pride over his son becoming a self-taught scholar and a voracious reader.

They were friendly indeed, later sharing the end of a bar, but untouchingly so. Zachary did not fear his father or back away from a point he needed to argue. He was proud of Paddy O’Hara, but he was not his father’s satellite.

Going their opposite ways except when they needed contact, they established separate lives and a kind of mutually agreed-on friendship.

By the time of Paddy’s retirement, with the vice-president in attendance, Zachary was in total comfort in the Marine atmosphere.

Paddy O’Hara’s return to Hell’s Kitchen with his son had obvious rewards. With few Irish heroes to celebrate, Paddy O’Hara’s Saloon became an instant shrine.

Paddy proved not much of a businessman but of enormous value to Tammany Hall and the rising Irish politicians. This was the ward central, where deals were cut and palms were greased.

Within the hallowed halls, Paddy’s Medal of Honor and ten other citations for bravery were encased in glass, along with his sword and pistol and a battle flag from Fort Fisher.

The man had pissed more beer in the ocean than most breweries could make in a week. He was a deserving icon and could spend out his days being the object of worship.

Paddy had a decent flat over the bar and grew friendlier to his son. He had free access to every vaudeville, play, and musical in the city.

Fact was, Paddy was growing dependent on Zachary. And that was fine. Zach carved himself a space in the storeroom adjoining the bar, a mat on the floor, reading lamp and a square of wood to write on. From this vantage he could keep an eye on his da, lend a hand at peak hours, help shut down, sweep the sawdust, and now and again get into the singing with those fine Irish voices.

Zach kept an eye on the register and moved into taking better care of the books. And better care of Paddy, who became more and more permanently engaged in greeting and missed the good solid meals, and often ended up in his bed snoring with one shoe off and one shoe on.

Zachary dearly missed the Corps, where footsteps clicked smartly and did not stumble, and all was bright and shined up and crisp, with no slobbery bragging of men who used the bar stool as their stage.

They’d never smell ale on a parade ground or know the exultation of exhaustion at the end of a three-day forced march.

It was a foul place, Hell’s Kitchen, and though he was becoming his father’s keeper . . .

Well, then, girls took his mind off the work and study load. Zach was fancy company, with vaudeville tickets and sweet talking learned from his books. But Zach was counting days after his sixteenth birthday. In just two years, he was going to be able to enlist in the Corps.

Oh, for the clean barrack floors and starched shirts and orderly manner of life, where men got along with one another and need not scratch eyes out or spit teeth from a split lip.

You see, he did not find it in the gangs. The young thugs were fiercely jealous of him and of his da’s fame. The older crowd in the saloon reminded Zach on a daily basis that he’d never measure up to his da as they patted him on the head.

He was a loner walking the streets of the strange neighborhoods but sure enough of himself to go where he wished, and soon knew how to draw smiles from the Greeks and the Poles.

He wandered into the upper reaches of the West Side, where those odd folk, the Jews, had set down. He could sense their old-country privations.

Story after story of massacres of Jews in the Pale gave a growing sense that there would be floods of Jewish immigrants in the next years.

The other face of Harlem, the black continent, was crowding up with former slaves or the children of former slaves fleeing the South.

The songs of the neighborhoods, the Irish and Italian tenors, and the longings sung from the rickety Negro churches to the strange wail of the Jews, had a harmonious meeting place in street after street. After all, they sang of the same thing.

This burgeoning place was a strange place of villages, toiling, sweating, aspiring side by side there to serve the comforts of an exploding middle class and upper middle class and upper class and upper upper class.