O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [33]
He turned Amanda loose and stepped back. “My da left me his sergeant major’s buckle, not much more, and he probably thought I’d never grow into it.”
“Maybe he left you a cruel, false dream of the Marines.”
“I know you think we’re a pack of wharf rats with a high desertion rate and swilling in a sea of booze, but I own no more ambition than for a life in the Corps.”
They packed the picnic basket wordlessly. He helped her back into the canoe, and before twilight, they paddled back to the world.
• 12 •
DAISY
From her widow’s walk at Inverness, Daisy Blanton Kerr watched her daughter being paddled to the dock. She saw Amanda and the O’Hara boy walk hand in hand lazily toward the stables, bumping each other playfully with their shoulders and hips, then disappear into the barn.
It was a time before they emerged, brushing hay off each other. In a moment the stable boy came out with Zach’s buckboard for his long ride back to Washington. Both horse and carriage showed Marine Corps vintage. It will take him all night to reach his barracks, Daisy thought.
Zach slung his pack aboard, hopped onto the driver’s seat, and helped Amanda up. Daisy turned the corner of the widow’s walk to see them move at a slow gait to the circular drive.
She looked through her spyglass. The watchman in the gatehouse opened the massive guardians to Inverness. Daisy blanched as her daughter and the Marine went into a long, lingering embrace.
Daisy saw her daughter become distraught and half swoon off the driveway and hold both hands to her face. Was Amanda crying? Amanda never cried.
The Kerrs had waited half an eternity for Amanda’s time to come. The Constitution Ball would be their finest social conquest, an affirmation of the place they had reached among the nation’s mighty families. It had been dreamed of with pulsating anticipation by both parents. As the calendar announced the year of another “Constitution,” a sense of near hysteria bubbled up inside Daisy.
The ball, held every fourth year, beginning a decade after the Civil War, was initially meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. Unmarried postdebutantes from the ages of eighteen to their early twenties came together from every city in the nation: the proper girls from Boston and the honey-drawling Southern belles and such and such, invited by secret committee, “commanded” to the Potomac Mansion House Hotel.
They’d swoop in on the red-and-gold carpet with their escorts on their right and their patrician parents behind.
The ballroom filled with military flag officers, cabinet secretaries, and rarely anything lower than a senator. All parties in position, the Mansion House was a place for the celebration of treaties and mergers.
Forty-three girls were invited to this year’s ball, more from Boston and New York, fewer from Philadelphia and Baltimore. More from Virginia, only two from Alabama. The daughters of families from growing city empires, Cleveland or Memphis, found their way in, but hardly ever anyone from Mississippi or west of it. Hurrah, this year oil and cattle won recognition with the invitation to a girl from Texas. And two from California, where blue blood was on the rise from mining and railroad fortunes.
Amanda Blanton Kerr was the only Marylander to be so called, and it was up to her to choose a worthy escort.
* * *
Amanda came to the main door. Daisy met her on the stairs. As Amanda passed her mother, she briskly brushed the hay off her shoulders.
“Zach and I were necking,” Amanda said.
Amanda knew by her mother’s nervousness that picket lines were being formed for battle. Daisy took her arm, led her to the conservatory, and rang for tea.
“I sense a problem that I think best to face now,” Daisy began.
“What do you mean?”
“Many is the time I wished I had your wings. Your toughness also frightens me, but all things considered, I have never taken