When Clete saw her, his heart jumped.
Goddamn it, she’s beautiful!
She came to him and kissed him on the cheek. He could smell her shampoo.
Clete tugged the bell cord again, and the housekeeper appeared.
“We need a little more Champagne in here, please,” Clete ordered. “And we can have lunch as soon as Antonio and Señora Carzino-Cormano finish their tour of the museum.”
Luncheon was served in the upstairs dining, whose bay windows overlooked the formal gardens in the rear of the mansion, and whose table could comfortably accommodate fourteen people. As master and mistress of the household, Clete and Dorotéa were seated at the head and foot of the table. El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón sat next to Clete, with Señora de Mallín across from him, and Father Welner was next to Dorotéa, with Señora Carzino-Cormano across from him.
At least four feet of highly polished wood separated the lace place mats of the diners. Antonio circled the table, filling wine and Champagne glasses as the housekeeper and one of the maids offered a choice of beef or Roquefort-and-ham empanadas as the appetizer.
I wonder, the master of the house thought, what the boys are having for an appetizer on the wooden-plank tables of the Fighter One officers’ mess on the ’Canal?
Maybe, if the mess sergeant is in a good mood, Spam chunks on toothpicks. Most likely, the Spam will be the entrée.
And I wonder what Claudia thinks, seeing Dorotéa sitting there, Mistress of the Mansion, on the day she’s removing the last of her personal possessions from a house that by all rights should be hers?
Father Welner rose to his feet and invoked, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the blessings of the Deity upon those about to partake of His bounty. After he sat down, both he and Clete reached for their glasses of Merlot. El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón rose to his feet.
Now what
? Clete wondered as he took his hand away from the glass.
“If I may,” Perón began. “As I looked around this table, I could not help but think that our beloved Jorge may well be looking down on us from Heaven at this moment. And if he is, I like to think he’s smiling.” He paused to let that sink in, then went on. “The time came to Jorge to leave this world for a better one…”
With a load of buckshot in his head, Clete thought.
“…as it will come to all of us,” Perón went on.
Clete saw that Claudia was looking at Perón incredulously.
“And all of us, myself included, thought his going on to a better place was the end,” Perón said.
Clete glanced down the long table at Dorotéa. She was looking at him with a look he recognized as a wifely imperative signal: NO!!!!!
She thought I was going to say something I shouldn’t.
I wasn’t.
Or was I? My mouth sometimes shifts into high gear all on its own.
He flashed Dorotéa a small, reassuring smile.
“But it was not the end, I submit, my dear friends, my dear family,” Perón continued solemnly.
Family? What the hell do you mean, family? That “Tío Juan” crap again? What the hell is that all really about, anyway? Are you playing with a full deck, “Tío Juan”?
“It was instead a change of the guard,” Perón intoned. “A beginning. God sent our beloved Jorge’s beloved son Cletus back to the land of his birth…”
If that’s so, then God is an OSS Tex-Mex full-bull Marine colonel named Alejandro Federico Graham.
“…so that Cletus could step, so to speak, into his father’s boots and assume the responsibility for the land and the people of the land, as Jorge had assumed it from his father.
“And, at the risk of indelicacy, my dear Dorotéa, God in his wisdom and generosity has seen fit to put a new life in your womb…”
That wasn’t God, Tío Juan, it was a Good Ol’ Midland, Texas Boy named Clete who done that.