O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [78]
Horace had never said these words aloud and it made him feel unburdened in many ways, with his daughter listening, mesmerized.
“I am not the enemy, Amanda, so don’t point your finger at me. When I was an immigrant boy, I had a number of your liberal ideas. I looked over the lay of the land, knew I wasn’t going to change things, so I got into step.”
Horace went on. “Our most thrilling declarations for freedom and our most noble documents notwithstanding, America belongs to white Protestants. The Civil War did not change things, it merely altered them with scar tissue. The true battle cry of freedom has not come to pass.”
He stood at the window and studied the fields outside. “Sugar beets on the Jersey Shore Line. The farmers in Europe are growing sugar beets as an answer to sugarcane just as they planted flax to try to replace cotton.”
He turned to his daughter and felt comfortable, probably for the fist time, in putting his hand on her shoulders.
“Do you believe that if we had known about sugar beets a hundred years ago it would have prevented slavery? The Constitution Ball affirmed that, did it not? A room filled with white Protestants.”
“Father, how can I make it?”
“Fulfill the plan we are hatching. You must have a husband of repute fronting you, carrying out your interests. Glen Constable is delicious, a pure white Virginian of the proper faith and a sharp businessman. Bear in mind, Amanda, you will always hold the purse strings.”
The freight train blew past them noisy and rumbling, setting off a blast of air that shook their car. In a moment it passed and the engine of the private train belched into motion.
• 23 •
THE BATTLE OF MARATHON
Early Summer 1891—Newport, Rhode Island
Ben Boone made a perfunctory knock, then entered the adjoining office. It was clogged with half-full sea chests, their contents being separated on a worktable twenty feet in length, set up on sawhorses.
Books, maps, retrospective reports, documents, artists’ renderings, memoirs, studies, scholarly dissertations, monographs, and whatnot. This was Ben Boone’s collection, gathered for over a generation. It was being sorted out chronologically and dated back to a time before Christ.
Second Lieutenant Zachary O’Hara was asleep atop the table, his jacket rolled up as a pillow.
“Hit the deck! The United States Navy has provided you with a bunk.”
Zach popped one eye open, then the other, rolled off the table, and tried to arrange himself.
“It took me years to collect this crap. You’re not going to get it sorted out in a week.”
The major knew his man was working around the clock out of sheer exuberance . . . partly. And partly to keep his mind off Amanda Kerr, who was due to arrive in Newport soon. The annual “march of the moguls” to their summer “cottages” had begun its entry into the town like overloaded elephants hitched trunk to tail.
“Get your eyes drained or you’ll bleed to death. What are you working on here?”
“The stuff Captain Storm sent you from China.”
Ben picked up the thick notebook which had been opened and left lying alongside Zach.
“It’s a jewel, this. It covers the years from the Sea of Japan to Borneo to the Indian Ocean.” He flipped the pages. “ ‘The Thirteenth-Century Mongol Invasion of Japan,’” he read, and set it back on the table. “Storm’s monograph is the finest treatise on the subject. Unfortunately, most of the reading here is dull going. It will suck you dry. It shot me down so, I couldn’t face opening another trunk.”
Zach didn’t seem to hear him. “How did you get all the foreign documents translated?”
“Maybe that’s what wore me out. I had every professor of language in every university from Hopkins to Harvard translating, pro bono.”
“Sir, it’s not dull to me.”
“It will be. Give it time.”
“Whenever I get into a new paper, I feel like—what?—a spelunker entering a dark cave and inching my way