O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [101]
Daisy would have to find accommodations for those they could not fit at Tobermory. There would be a hundred people in all.
The logistics of number of servants and tons of food were staggering, but when Daisy had a gala to oversee, she was renewed.
Horace had a telephone line and switchboard direct to Dutchman’s Hook so he could keep an hourly control of the yard, and he sure as hell enjoyed being able to holler from Rhode Island all the way down to Maryland.
Narragansett Bay was emptying of those pissy little day sailboats. Wind and weather gave bite to his sails on Lochinvar and a real chance to test out the Butterfly. So far, the results were tepid.
As it headed into a stiff wind and through riptides, races, and fluky currents, the weight shifts had enabled Lochinvar to pick up a quarter-knot speed. If one were running a fifty-mile course, that would be enough to whip anyone. However, the Butterfly kicked in and out and often mysteriously, with no rationale.
Horace decided that at the right moment, he’d sail Lochinvar on the cruel course to Immigrant Reef, a three- to four-day test of seamanship.
When he was at the helm, his mind drifted to making the ultimate gesture of inviting Upton over from London for Thanksgiving.
Horace had a growing begrudging pride in his strange boy who now headed one of the top syndicates at Lloyd’s and was a member of the governing board.
These times saw an astonishing development of direct communications between America and London by telegraph and telephone cable. Horace gleaned enough information to know that Upton had his finger in the pie and made and covered his bets beautifully.
Of equal interest was that Upton was accepted in “normal” social circles in London. In fact, he had an impressive standing with some royalty. Horace assumed Upton did his queer thing away from observation.
It was difficult for Horace to feel he should be the one to break the ice. One touchy problem about Thanksgiving was that Upton might feel free to bring one of his pansy friends over with him.
Would an invitation to Upton show that I have the magnanimity of a great patriarch or would it cause me unbearable embarrassment?
He wouldn’t go near Daisy on that matter. Better not push it. Things were going too well. With the Constable merger just on the horizon, the Kerr name would have the strike of a rattler in that rarefied air that Vanderbilt and Harriman breathed.
Emily had done nicely during the summer. Thanks to the tenderness of her mother, sister, and Dixie Jane, she had moments of smiling and lucidity.
Upton? Don’t have to make a decision this instant. By God, with direct communication to London he could do it in a day.
Folks came to Newport to play. Two centuries after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, lawn tennis landed in Newport, which became its American capital. The medieval game of court tennis had been modernized and formalized by the All England Lawn and Cricket Club in Wimbledon.
For centuries it had been played in the interior courtyards of palatial mansions and châteaus of England and France.
If the paintings were correct, one could make out Henry VIII prancing about a court, racket in hand, though that might be stretching it, given His Majesty’s obesity and gout.
When the game was moved outdoors, it remained an elitist sport played on lawns clipped to near velvet. Wealthy vacationers took to the new sport and formed clubs near their own winter mansions in Brookline and Forest Hills.
As with golf and yachting, tennis socialized into private venues which protected its exclusivity. The American palace of lawn tennis, indeed, was the Newport Casino.
The massive clubhouse was proclaimed a Victorian marvel, shingled, gabled and clock-towered, bulky, asymmetrical, and rambling, enclosing a center court as though inside a horseshoe. Covered stands of boxes