O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [32]
“Why do you want to stay in the Marines?”
Zachary knew her question had been long in coming. The afternoon became serious.
“It’s my home,” he answered.
“Somebody always telling you what to do?”
“There are rules, and if you follow them, it’s a good thing. It’s a good structure and I have a thousand brothers.”
“You couldn’t have joined to please your mother, Zachary. You did it to please your father.”
“Probably,” he answered. “It all came in a natural order of things for me.”
“Then you would be someone else if it hadn’t been for your father,” she said.
“Who would you be,” he shot back, “if it weren’t for your father?”
“But I like who I am,” she said, “and where I am, and I know where I am going.”
“So do I.”
“Then you must like being a private sleeping on a straw mattress in a barrack.”
“I haven’t had time to sew my stripe on. I’ve been promoted to private first class.”
“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