Leon Uris (25 page)

“What general?”

“Brigadier Pete Wyatt.”

“Jesus Q. Christ, Wyatt is so ancient they’ll never get the fart stains out of his uniform.”

“Precisely,” Nathaniel answered. “We don’t make Pete famous at this point by attacking him. Horace, we have reached a sea of smooth sailing. I am taking the majority position of the admirals, but at the same time I have advised them to proceed with caution on the Marines and I have told the Republican leadership to back off. We have a great navy in the dry docks ready to go down the ways. Your own problem is not with the Corps, now is it?”

“What the hell am I asking? This is not the war of the world, Nathaniel. This is merely a case of sending one little Marine out of sight. I am not without recourse in this matter.”

“Horace, I’ve always enjoyed you at my side. You are a magnificent bully. I’ve watched you bully two presidents and tongue-tie a secretary of state. I know it must be very difficult for a bully of your stature to have to stand down over such a trifling matter. If Lieutenant Zachary O’Hara is suddenly transferred aboard ship, it could open a Pandora’s box.”

“Nonsense, Nathaniel. Outside of a tight circle of a few friends, no one has the slightest hint that O’Hara and Amanda are anything other than casual friends.”

“Amanda is not your run-of-the-mill schoolgirl with a crush,” Culpeper said. “She is this year’s toast of Washington, as prominent as any young unmarried woman in the East. Unfortunately, O’Hara is not your run-of-the-mill soldier boy. He comes with a pedigree.”

“Earned by his father’s blood.”

“Indeed, we all climb on our fathers’ backs. Their romance is just too juicy for there to be any smell of foul play on the navy’s
part, like a transfer of assignments because Daddy Kerr has pull. Do you actually believe you can keep a lid on it in Newport, the gossip capital of the universe?”

“The risk comes with them rattling around together for an entire summer.”

“I can see the headline in the
Baltimore Sun
:
“ ‘
Marine Sweetheart of Shipbuilding Heiress Shanghaied.’ “

“I’ll buy the goddamn
Sun
and shut down its goddamn presses.”

“Alas, democracy breeds pamphleteers. Every poor working family in America will hate your bloody guts, Horace. Romeo and Juliet, Baltimore style. You’d be setting the two of them up for martyrdom. If there is the slightest hint of conspiracy in this boy’s transfer, the navy will have too much to lose. Your request is declined.”

“You can’t know what I’ve been through. Your daughters are well married. As for Upton, I tried with him. If you had a son, you’d know.”

“Don’t ask me to shoot one across your bow.”

“Say it.”

“It seems to me one must stand by one’s son, no matter what.”

“It was Upton who fled to England.”

“Beware, Amanda may be more Horace Kerr than Horace Kerr is,” Culpeper pressed.

His words struck deep. Horace had played on his people like a master. At Dutchman’s Hook, he’d press his managers into a corner, make his point by raw power, then reward them afterward to retain their loyalty.

Better to back off with Nathaniel Culpeper. “What am I to do?” Horace groaned.

“This summer you will practice restraint and compassion. Restraint, compassion.”

“I wonder,” Horace wondered.

“I have known of this affair from the day O’Hara stood guard at my door and Amanda came crashing into the office. The moment was lightning, their infatuation has lasted over three years. She cares
for him, I daresay, because he is strong, as strong as she is. Neither of them will bend to threats. They got themselves into it, Horace. Stand aside and let them get out of it. Any pressure from you will only make them more adamant.”

“And do you think all this is going to end?”

Nathaniel Culpeper mulled it over.

“Amanda Kerr is a woman outside of her generation, marked for greatness. She does not act in a haughty manner, yet everyone who comes into contact with her senses her keen mind and sees her regal bearing. She simply
is
. Having battled you to a tie score for nearly twenty years, she is also aware of her potency, her possible reach. Faced with a decision Amanda will surely conclude that as the wife of a Marine, she will end up personally unfulfilled, no matter how much she loves him.”

“Suppose she wants O’Hara
and
Dutchman’s Hook?”

“That’s certain to be her battle plan, right now,” Culpeper conceded, “but there is a flip side to the coin.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“O’Hara’s side. The core of the Corps is this insatiable drive. They are born different, beyond the lure of the spoils of commerce, industry, and governments.”

“Come now, Nathaniel, military officers are ordinary human beings with personal ambition.”

“Their ambition is to serve at the highest level. Strange breed, what? But, without an officer corps, no nation could be a viable nation.”

“And you believe O’Hara is so smitten?”

“He and the colors are one and the same. As Amanda Kerr would not be fulfilled in life by their marriage, neither would Zachary O’Hara.”

“Do you honestly think that he’d choose the Marines over her?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?”

Later in the afternoon, Horace requested that his daughter visit him in the parlor before dinner. “You heard?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is this going to change things about?”

“No,” she answered immediately and firmly.

A feeling of comfort swept over him and eased out the tension.

“Glen has invited me to visit the Constable farm outside Richmond for a week or so. His daughter, Dixie Jane, will be there. I ought to get to know her,” Amanda said.

Horace drank that music in. There was nothing frivolous about it, no question of her resolve.

“Of course that pleases me right well,” he said.

“Mother will be returning to Inverness to pack us up for Newport. I’d have to go to Richmond without a chaperon.”

“Not to give it a second thought,” Horace answered. “I’m heading for Dutchman’s Hook tomorrow and I’ll be staying at my apartment there. Your uncles Donald and Malcolm are coming down to run some trials with me on
Lochinvar
,” he said in reference to the Kerr racing yacht.

Amanda smiled at her father’s persistence. Horace had a professional crew, but she was the one woman allowed aboard for the match races and often relieved her father at the helm. His passion for the regatta was still on the rise.

“How did the old
Lochinvar
fare this winter?”

“Well, I hope. We’ve outfitted her with that system I told you about.”

“The ‘Butterfly’?”

“Good, you remembered.”

“Will you be sailing her up to Newport?”

“No, that’s Malcolm and Donald’s job. I’ll come back to join you and Daisy at Inverness to train up.”

America’s Cup had become bitter vetch for the British, who had pursued it futilely with a dozen challenges. For four decades,
beginning in 1850, the Yankee upstarts had made something of a mockery of Britannia’s mastery of the sea. Not that anyone was surprised when the Yankees put a fine boat on the water, but they were commercial people, not sportsmen. It was difficult to comprehend that the Americans could build, crew, and captain a yacht better than the English. Actually, it was the lack of sportsmanship that grated on the Brits. The Cup was on display at the New York Yacht Club and the true sportsmen were forced to race on American water under American rules.

If horse racing was the sport of kings, then yacht racing was the sport of gods and America’s Cup became a search for the Holy Grail.

The United States entered the 1890s on a golden wave of unprecedented personal wealth. Suddenly the city of New York vied with London as the center of the universe.

For their playground, New Yorkers had the South Shore of Long Island, a hundred-mile stretch of magnificent beaches and sailing inlets. Tens of dozens of great and small summer mansions and magnificent resort hotels burgeoned and the villages linked by rail line. The overflow of wealth found pretentious outlets in places like Saratoga (for the horsey crowd) and Asbury Park.

Yet Long Island and the South Shore was the gold coast of gold coasts, and Islip, the world capital of yacht racing . . . out past Sandy Hook and into the winds!

America’s Cup seemed permanently ensconced in the New York Yacht Club. There were lesser sailing venues—north of Long Island to Maine and south from the Chesapeake to the Gulf, dozens of new yacht clubs came into existence—but none was so grand as the NYYC and its territory.

In the beginning, racing yachts had been modified versions of commercial schooners, and the rules of racing were lax and sealed with a handshake. Over time the yachtsmen acquired the costly hobby of building pure racing boats. Hulls, masts, and rigs evolved from sloops and cutters to a fairly standardized yawl rig of under a
hundred feet at waterline, carrying a sail capacity, give or take, of ten thousand square feet.

Then came the bottomless-rules committee, which demanded of the British that they give a full and accurate measurement of their boats, six months in advance of a challenge. And other rules, all stacked against them, in their eyes.

It was the competition between American syndicates to represent the United States that advanced into the development of the big racing yachts.

The Kerr family raced around the Chesapeake. Horace was a builder of warships. It took a long time for him to get the message that hale and hardy Yankee labor could handcraft a yacht, matching the jewels that came from Scotland and Scandinavia. The Kerrs’ yachts had all sailed over from Scotland.

The family raced for years on the Chesapeake in match races for purses that often exceeded a thousand dollars. Alas, Horace yearned to get into the big action and entered in the challenge round of 1885 and was skunked by minor NYYC boats. So much for
Lochinvar II.

With fewer people and better sailing waters, Newport became the new gathering place. Although New Yorkers and the NYYC dominated the Newport scene, there was room for tycoons of the Kerr ilk coming from all over the country.

Horace’s brothers, minor players in the shipyard, set up permanent residence in Newport. They were damned good yachtsmen, Donald and Malcolm; Donald as navigator and Malcolm in the sail trimming. Back in Islip, New York, a crew and a professional racing captain were hired and
Lochinvar III
made a decent entry into the big time.

Horace was at the helm, of course, and after he won a few match races, his ambition grew.

Horace felt that the only way to get into Cup contention would be to invent and exploit something totally unique . . . not exactly circumventing the rules, but something that could
slip in under the rules until it was discovered and the rules were changed.

For the season of 1891,
Lochinvar III
would be carrying a secret system, spoken of in whispers as the Butterfly.

The basic thesis was that there should be an underwater device that could respond to what was happening with the wind and sails.

The Butterfly was a pair of mobile vertical trim tabs attached to both sides of the bottom of the keel, operated from cables inside the keel.

The tabs were free-floating and as sensitive to currents as the feathered ends of birds’ wings are to air currents.

Belowdecks, a system was installed to take instructions from the movements of the Butterfly tabs. A highly polished cannonball weighing a half ton, slotted into a rail, rolled instantly on command from side to side across the centerline, acting as a counterbalance when the wind tilted the boat.

. . . for the ultimate purpose of maximum rudder stability. A special crewman on deck read the Butterfly meter and moved the ball by a handle connected to cables below. One could liken it to dancing with a partner on ice without skates.

If the ball rolled too nervously, the operator could lock it into neutral and shut it down.

Thus, the theory went, they would always have a dead-on accurate register of currents in relationship to wind shifts.

Sails and masts would be operating to their maximum limits.

. . . and if calculations proved right,
Lochinvar III
could pick up a half-knot on upwind legs and in squirrelly currents and rough areas . . . perhaps.

If it worked, the apparatus could be stored so the fucking NYYC rules committee might take a couple of years to discover it.

And if it didn’t work . . . what the hell . . .

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