O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [0]
CHOICE
A Novel
LEON URIS
Dedicated to
my cousin
HERSCHEL BLUMBERG
“the finest ever seen”
It takes enormous support. God bless and everlasting gratitude to Marilynn Pysher, researcher, Jeanne Randall, assistant, and Cassandra Bliss and Kathy Mulcahy, caregivers.
Contents
Chapters
1 Paddy’s Wart-Hogs
2 Benjamin Malachi Boone
3 The Return to Fort Sumter
4 The USS Tuscarora
5 Amanda Blanton Kerr
6 Captain Tobias Storm
7 The Guns of Nandong
8 The Birds of Peru
9 In the Garden
10 Amp
11 Paddy O’Hara’s Fine Son
12 Daisy
13 The Pleasure Garden
14 The Halls of Inverness
15 Willow
16 Now Hear This
17 Emily
18 Elysian
19 Monopoly
20 Beautiful Dreamer
21 After the Ball
22 The Jersey Shore Line
23 The Battle of Marathon
24 George Washington Barjac
25 Yolanda
26 Onde La Mer
27 Dixie Jane
28 The Yankee
29 Follow Me!
30 The Casino
31 The Baroness
32 Come Ye Thankful
33 Uncle Ben
34 An Irish Hunter
35 Nor’easter
36 Line in the Water
37 J
38 Nebo
39 The Creche
40 The Horse Marines
41 Winterset
42 Truce
43 The Letter
44 The Fifth Commandment
45 Hell’s Kitchen
46 O’Hara’s Choice
About the Author
By Leon Uris
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
• 1 •
PADDY’S WART-HOGS
1888—Prichard’s Inn
The Royal Society of Paddy O’Hara’s Wart-Hogs were the ugliest and most vile men to ever wear the uniform of United States Marines. They were molded out of old, stiff, cracked leather.
The Wart-Hogs were an exclusive brotherhood with no pro-vision at inception for perpetuation. There were about eighteen charter members, no one knew the exact number, all men whose lives had been saved in battle through the gallantry of Paddy O’Hara in three, maybe four, separate Civil War actions.
For many years after the War, all who could gathered for an annual donnybrook. As time moved on, many of the reunions took place at graveside and the society grew more exclusive. But no Wart-Hog ever died in the poorhouse. They were bound by the most powerful of all ties, that of men and their comrades in a war.
The Wart-Hog doors were always open to other Wart-Hogs, but they were scattered and burdened with family life and other traumas, so that meetings became occasional and by chance. Only three remained in the Corps. However, it appeared that the rendezvous at Prichard’s was by design.
Prichard’s Inn & Tavern stood on the Post Road in Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, a most convenient watering hole.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Wally Kunkle was first to arrive by horseback from Quantico down the pike. The Corps had a piece of land there and had established a small, convenient station near the Capitol, where they formed up new units, or housed an overflow from Washington. Quantico had become a nice rest spot and transit center.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Kunkle had been on sea duty and a member of the contingent that ran the Germans out of Samoa. Kunkle had not been home in three years. Well, he actually didn’t have a home.
The Gunny wore his forty-odd years well and he cut quite the figure as he rode up to the inn at Prichard’s. When the stable boy had seen to the horse’s comfort, he came to the Gunny’s room and poured buckets of hot water over him in a big galvanized tub to wash away the road dust. Kunkle then repaired to the common room with the large fireplace in the pub and allowed himself to be overtaken by nostalgia.
1840s—Philadelphia
Wally was the middle child of nine kids, son of a German immigrant who worked as a blacksmith in the Philadelphia police stable. The family lived on a cobblestone alley in a squeezed row cottage in South Philly. During one particularly dirty winter, Wally’s mother and an infant sister died of the throat disease.
The children, save Wally, were scattered to relatives, mostly on farms in western Pennsylvania. Wally was a quiet,