O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [88]
Even the highest lords of industry looked for the chance to rub elbows in that certain Fifi French aura.
“Benjamin Malachi Boone!” George roared as Ben’s shay passed through the carriage gate. George was grayed and thinning atop with a potbelly amidships, but as neatly pruned as a Faustian character, and he greeted Ben with a bear hug.
The lady alongside George made a full statement of her command, with no words needed. Josephine was a stunning matter, in full bloom and of easy manner.
“And you are the son of Sergeant Major O’Hara!”
“Yes, sir.”
George took a step back, examined Zachary, and nearly broke into tears as he pinched Zach’s cheeks and unloaded a juicy kiss that landed somewhere on the bridge of Zach’s nose.
“I, of course, was long out of the Corps when your sainted father served, but I had the honor to meet him on a number of occasions and I even saw you a few times as a boy, but you wouldn’t remember.”
“He spoke of you with great reverence,” Zach said.
“My wife, Madame Josephine Barjac.”
She kissed Zach on both cheeks, her eyes twinkling. The host and hostess each took an arm and led him up a long path toward a knoll.
Halfway up the path, Lilly Villiard came to meet them with a big embrace and kisses on the cheeks of Ben Boone.
Zach became instantly aware of her. She was a petite lady with eye-catching roundness and of elegant carriage. Her milliner’s creation was a broad-brimmed hat that curved to form a classic silhouette of her face. Her white skin was framed by black curls that lay across bared shoulders.
Lilly’s nose was definitely Barjac, but she wore hers as an attraction.
“My daughter, Baroness Lilly Villiard, and this, dear Lilly, is the son of Paddy O’Hara, one of the great men of the Corps.”
Zach shook her hand and nodded, taken by the way she bore her four decades with little flaw, like a nicely turned out Limoges statuette.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.
“Call me Lilly,” she said.
“And I am George and this is Fifi and this is your home. Lilly will introduce you around and we will catch up with you.”
Lilly took Zach’s arm pleasantly and they ambled up ahead, exchanging getting-acquainted banter.
At the top of the lane, they passed through an arabesque archway that led to an immense lawn and garden. It was as though a book had been opened in its center and a lace valentine had popped up; a tree bearing a swing bearing a little girl, a row of pansies with their faces all bent in the same direction, a dog leaping for a ball, two boys rolling down a slope, a girl running a hoop, ladies in little boxy straw bonnets, and two gentlemen in conference with their heads close and hands clasped. Behind the tree, lovers sneaking a kiss.
If one jiggled the tabs, the valentine went into motion, the tree swung, the pansies swayed in unison, the doggy went up and down on his hind legs.
Zach had never seen a scene like it, except in an illustration in a book. The whole place seemed to be floating.
. . . until a scream as a child fell into the frog pond, was fetched by his nanny, and the mud scraped off.
It was easy to tell the Barjac sisters from their sisters-in-law, not only by their fine noses, but a universal twinkle of mischief and matching scents.
“Oh, hi hi,” followed every introduction.
Zachary acquainted himself at each level. He fungoed fly balls treetop-high to the boys and was a one-man demon on the soccer field, but it was his skipping rope double Dutch that won him all the maidens. Zach knew his double Dutch. Gunny Kunkle at AMP used it as a torture device.
He moved among them well; no stuffy yachting type or golden-armed admiral, but a Marine like Uncle Ben and George Washington Barjac himself. Winks, smiles, nice little touching.
Onde la Mer was a mood piece, a low rippling spread along the cliff, a departure from the massive Protestant manor houses, a cloud misting in and out of the levels with a central Moorish fountain and graceful archways. But France was also represented in a tiled roof overhang on the big patio and a square