O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [61]
Amanda pecked his cheek. He caught a whiff of subtle freshness. She drifted to the huge bay window behind his desk that afforded a throne’s-eye view of the empire.
The iron crane birds hovered over three massive and three smaller dry docks. A slab of molded steel was being slapped into place. Hot rivets were pitched and the blue flames of the welders’ torches hissed. A railcar bearing a house-size boiler squealed to a stop.
The noon whistle blasted and the ship’s clock in the president’s office tolled. Horace’s hand instinctively whipped the gold timepiece from his vest pocket. It was noon, three times over.
In a moment, three thousand antlike workers had come off the scaffolding to open corned-beef- and knockwurst-filled lunch boxes.
It grew quiet, outside.
Amanda turned to face her father’s office, an American success story complete with a James Whistler oil of his late father. Disposable Angus Kerr, founder of the yard, still held the place of reverence at the altar, as one would have it in a civilized family.
“What’s the grand occasion?” he asked.
“Father, I’ve had some thoughts about the Constitution Ball,” she began.
“Oh yes, that. Your mother has kept me abreast of things.” His innards roiled.
“I’ve come to realize how terribly important it is to you.”
“Yes, but more so to your mother.”
“It is the only Constitution I’ll ever attend. I wish it didn’t have to be this yearlong girlie-girlie game in a coven of witches.”
“That’s rather harsh; however, not without merit.” He winked. Who among us, he thought, could follow the trail of a conniving female? Horace willed himself calm so as to see all matters coming up with clarity. He’d not blink if his father’s portrait fell off the wall. “Your mother has bemoaned the fact that the list of eligible escorts is growing thin.”
Her eyes danced about the room. She adored this office and all beyond that lay at her father’s feet. “Who among the crown princes is left?” she asked. “Two, three, maybe four, in a stretch. All of them second-rate Forbeses and Astors.”
Down came the gauntlet! Here comes the Marine! How many hundreds of times had he looked over this very desk to men gone dry with fear, unable to speak because their tongues were stuck to the roofs of their mouths?
Imposing such terror, judiciously of course, was what made a great man great. Ultimately, he held all of the candy in his pocket. He warned himself not to explode, even though she was pumping him up with some kind of queer rationalization.
“We are going to have to engage in some very open talk,” Amanda said.
“Go on.”
She looked beyond him into the yard again. “With the new Vermont class you’re laying the hull for in number one dry dock, it will bring Kerr to within a hairbreadth of being the principal builder of warships.”
“What are you prattling about, child?”
“I’m putting things on the table that never have been put there before,” she said. “Shall I go on?”
He wanted to balk and demand she stop maneuvering him. “Certainly, go on.”
“My father is trying to build ships faster than his yard is capable of doing, and in another year or fifteen months, Kerr will have to stop bidding.”
Horace straightened up as though he had been whacked, dumbstruck by her sudden ambush. It was a first sighting of a hidden Amanda. Who was she? She’d come in armed to the eyeballs, perhaps after years and years of her own conniving preparations, until the Constitution gave her bargaining power. Listen up, Horace.
“The story goes,” she said, “that it was your brilliant stroke to select Dutchman’s Hook, because by the beginning of the Civil War, you’d already smelled the future of steel ships and wanted to be in proximity of the Sparrow’s Point steel mills.”
“And Mother no doubt told you about the Blanton financing.”
“Some of it.”
“It is far more complex than mother-daughter gossip over tea . . . or witches’ brew.”
Amanda kept going, refusing to