They had brought with them to Miami, in lieu of material goods, the talent and ambition that had made them successful in Cuba. After an initial period during which they had worked as a waiter (Carlos), busboy (Juan), and dishwasher (Salvador) in one of Miami Beach’s most famous hotels, they had gone into business for themselves.
To cut what was a long story short, Uncle Salvador now occupied the owner’s penthouse in the Miami Beach hotel where he had once washed dishes. The hotel was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cuba Libre Enterprises, Inc., of which Uncle Juan was president and Uncle Carlos chairman of the board. They were involved in hotels, wholesale foods, housing developments, and even an airline.
When Juan Francisco had finally been smuggled out of Cuba with his mother, it had been decided that the first thing the boy had to do was learn to speak English. It had also been decided that the worst place for him to learn English was in Miami, where the residents almost without exception had noticeable accents—Southern, or Spanish, or Bronx.
Uncle Salvador, who had become a Boy Scout executive, solved the problem neatly while attending a scout executives’ conference in Washington, D.C. There, he was assured by a scout executive from Maine that the inhabitants of Maine spoke English of such purity and clarity that the Crown Prince of England came there, incognito, to brush up. Getting Juan Francisco into Camp Kitatinny had been simple to arrange.
When Dr. Pierce and Dr. McIntyre, not without effort, finally succeeded in pushing uncles Carlos, Juan, and Salvador into their chartered jet, the two doctors felt that the Juan Francisco incident was closed. It had been an even more pleasant vignette in the practice of medicine than they had first thought. Not only had the patient recovered fully, he had turned out to be, instead of a poor and lonely refugee, a refugee with a large, loving, and loaded family.
And again, they thought that would be the end of it.
They erred.
Ten days later, they received official notice that there were now in the Ms. Prudence MacDonald Memorial School of Nursing something known as the Doctors Pierce and McIntyre Memorial Scholarships. The scholarships had been established by the Cuba Libre Enterprises, Inc., Foundation in their names. A bequest had been made large enough to provide, from earnings, full-tuition scholarships for two deserving young women who wished to become registered nurses.
Now, in addition to Uncle Carlos, Uncle Juan, and Uncle Salvador, little Juan Francisco had an aunt, known to all but her brothers as Doña Antoinetta. There are three titles to describe the gentle sex in Spanish. “Señorita” is an unmarried woman. “Señora” is a married woman. “Doña” is a title applied to ladies who have earned great respect and who enjoy unusual prestige. The matriarch of a family, say, pushing eighty, who reigns over a flock of sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, and other assorted kin is sometimes accorded the title of Doña.
Doña Antoinetta met all these criteria save one. Without question, she reigned over the family Gomez y Sanchez. It was she who had made the decision that the family must flee Cuba to seek a new life in the United States. It was she who had arranged for the boat that had carried them to Florida. It was Doña Antoinetta who had arranged for a small package of tobacco seeds to be smuggled out of Cuba to be planted in the Honduras—the seeds that formed the basis of Cuba Libre Enterprises, Inc.
It was to Doña Antoinetta that everyone in the family Gomez y Sanchez turned for advice, for approval, and, most important, for permission to do anything at all. A tall lady, amply bosomed, given to severe black dresses and no makeup whatsoever, she lived quietly, devoting her life to her family and her church.
But Doña Antoinetta was not a grandmother. She wasn’t even a mother. She had never married, and she was just this side of fifty. There had once been a man in her life; it had been a tragic episode of which she never spoke, and about which no one, not even—or perhaps, especially—her brothers dared ask.
When the Cuba Libre Enterprises, Inc., Grumman Gulfstream on which uncles Carlos, Juan, and Salvador had flown to Spruce Harbor, Maine, returned to Miami International Airport and taxied to a stop, Doña Antoinetta was waiting for it, sitting in the back seat of a black Cadillac limousine, her long pale fingers touching the crucifix she wore on a fine gold chain around her neck.
The first brother to reach the door of the aircraft, Uncle Juan (properly Juan Alphonos Gregorio Gomez y Sanchez), winced when he saw the familiar limousine. But then he forced a smile on his face, walked toward the limousine, and got into same.
Doña Antoinetta leaned forward to give her brother her soft, pale white cheek to kiss.
“Juanito,” Doña Antoinetta barked, in ever so gentle a voice, “do I detect the odor of fermented malt liquor on your person?”
“The natives of Maine have strange customs, dear sister,” Uncle Juan said.
“Indeed?”
“The doctors who treated little Juanito refused money,” Juan said.
“And what has that to do with your returning smelling of fish and beer?”
“It is a long story, dear sister.”
“We will listen to your story, Juanito, after we stop by the church and pick up Father Pedro,” she said.
“Father Pedro?”
“Not only am I sure the good father will be interested in the quaint customs of the natives of Maine, but I don’t think you’d dare lie about them to him,” Doña Antoinetta said very softly. Then she looked out the window. She reached across her brother to the door and pushed a button; the window whooshed down.
“Carlos!” she called.
“Yes, dear sister?”
“Salvador?”
“Yes, sister dear?”
“If you two smell anything like this beer-soaked blot on the escutcheon of the family Gomez y Sanchez, be good enough to find a taxi.”
“Yes, of course, dear sister,” Uncle Salvador and Uncle Carlos said, in duet.
Doña Antoinetta caused the window to ascend. She spoke to the chauffeur: “Please telephone to Father Pedro,” she said, “and inform him that I would be profoundly grateful if he could spare the family Gomez y Sanchez an hour of his time. Ask him to be prepared to take confession from three sinners.”
“Si, Doña Antoinetta,” the chauffeur said, reaching for the radio telephone.
Chapter Three
Father Pedro Huaretto sat in what looked like an attitude of prayer at the Gomez y Sanchez family table in the penthouse atop the Winter Palace Hotel.* Father Pedro was a roly-poly cleric, quite bald, wearing glasses and a black tropical worsted suit. His fingertips were touching, and his head was bent over them.
(* The former owner of the Winter Palace (sixty stories of plate glass, plaster statuary, and phony marble on the Miami beach) had realized that the owners of the Fountainbleau, down the street a little, had had a good idea in naming their operation after the palace of the kings of France. A little research had turned up the information that the Russians had had their own elegant establishment, called the Winter Palace because the czar had wintered there. The new owners, Cuba Libre Enterprises, Inc., had kept the name on, assuming possession for several reasons, including the very good one that changing the name would mean buying a new sign. The existing sign was twenty stories tall and in seven colors of neon reminded vacationing Yankees how lucky they were to be in sunny Miami, enjoying a Russian Winter Palace minus the blizzards.)
He raised his eyes slightly. Directly across the wide oak table were the brothers, looking much as they had looked, long years before, in school in Cuba. That is to say, they were waiting for the boom to fall on them.
At the head of the table, one hand resting on a crystal water glass, the other touching the crucifix at her neck, sat Doña Antoinetta. Finally, Father Pedro spoke.
“Under the circumstances, Doña Antoinetta,” he said, “I don’t see what else Salvador, Carlos, and Juan could have done. Refusing an offer of hospitality, particularly from men to whom one acknowledges a debt, would have been very di
scourteous.”
“You are willing to believe, Father,” Doña Antoinetta said, “their story that two doctors, two men pledged to ease suffering, actually pressed beer upon them, beer in such vast quantities?”
“I do,” he said. “Their customs are strange to us— as they proved by refusing the offer to pay for services to little Juan Francisco.”
“Which brings us to that,” Doña Antoinetta said. “How may we discharge that debt of honor, Father?”
“That should pose no problem,” Father Pedro said. “The suggestion offered was that a contribution be made to this home for nurses. That would seem to be a fair discharge of obligation.”
“Far be it from me to question your wisdom, Father,” Doña Antoinetta began—and Father Pedro looked at her, wondering what she could possibly find wrong with giving money to a home for student nurses. “But what do we know about this Ms. Prudence MacDonald Memorial School of Nursing?”
“Nothing but what we have been told,” Father Pedro admitted.
“We now know they have strange customs in Maine,” Doña Antoinetta said. “Would it not be your advice, then, that we inquire into the nature and reputation of the school?”
“That wouldn’t hurt,” Father Pedro admitted.
“Oh, Father Pedro!” Doña Antoinetta said, pushing a telephone across the table to him. “I don’t know what the family Gomez y Sanchez would do without your sage and wise counsel.”
“I really wouldn’t know where to begin,” Father Pedro said.
“Try the archdiocese,” Doña Antoinetta said, smiling one of her warm and utterly terrifying smiles. “Perhaps the chancellor would be good enough to tell you what he knows.”
Three minutes later, the telephone on the desk of Monsignor John Joseph Clancy, Chancellor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, rang.
Monsignor Clancy took the call reluctantly. He had only recently returned from a trying business luncheon. Twice a month he met with Father Jacques dePresseps, pastor of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Bayou Perdu, La. (and, more importantly, chaplain to the Bayou Perdu Council, Knights of Columbus). The luncheon had been at Brennan’s Restaurant, a little gift from one of Father dePresseps’ more affluent parishioners, one Col. Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux. Col. de la Chevaux also served as Grand Exalted Royal Keeper of the Golden Fleece for the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., which was sort of a mixed blessing. . . .
For nearly two hundred years, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Bayou Perdu, had been something of a problem, money-wise, to the diocese. A small building of rough-hewn timber perched precariously on pilings above Bayou Perdu, it served the three-hundred-odd Cajuns who had lived in the area since the time of Evangeline, barely existing on what fish and crawfish they could extract from the swamp and what deer, possum, and other wildlife they could reap with a grand disregard for hunting regulations. What little cash there had been had come from the illegal distillation of corn liquor.
The diocese had been forced to financially underwrite the cost of maintaining the parish and the small parochial school, and had made quiet Donations to the Bayou Perdu Council, Knights of Columbus, in the belief that membership in the Knights served to uplift the morals of the male members of the community.
All that had been changed by progress, specifically the interstate highway program. The federal government had wished to build a super-highway from the Texas border to the Mississippi border. A search of real-estate documents dating back to the French land grants had revealed that some fifty thousand acres of land (actually swamp, described by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as “swamp, and quicksand, unfit for cultivation or any other purpose, save perhaps an alligator refuge”) had come down through the years, free of any encumbrance, to one Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux....
Aside from a two-year tour of duty in the army, where he had acquired the wounds necessary to qualify him for a pension, several medals, and a taste for a particularly powerful potion known as Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon, Jean-Pierre (“Horsey”) de la Chevaux had never left Bayou Perdu or held a job, and had shown no inclination to do either. He was prepared to go through life as his ancestors had— poaching deer, making White Lightning, and more or less settling down with some comely Cajun to propagate the race.
But the Feds were not to be denied. They demanded, before advancing their ninety-nine-percent share of the cost of the super-highway, that Louisiana hold clear title to the land on which the highway was to be built. That meant securing a right-of-way through the fifty thousand acres of swamp owned by ex-Sgt. de la Chevaux.
Securing this right-of-way proved rather difficult. For one thing, the first governmental functionaries sent, by airboat, to discuss the matter with Mr. de la Chevaux were mistaken for functionaries of the Alcohol Tax Unit, known as Revenuers. The airboats were attacked by weapons including six Browning automatic rifles and two .50-caliber machine guns that Sgt. de la Chevaux had had the foresight to ship home in small pieces from Korea.
It was at this point that Father dePresseps entered the picture. The priest then in charge of the Church of the Immaculate Conception was an Irishman. There was what psychologists called a “personality clash” between the good father and his charges. After he suggested that Horsey and others at least talk to the men from the government, and even consider abandoning the illegal distillation of spirits, he was set adrift in a hollowed-out log (a pirogue) with enough smoked venison and other provisions to last him until he eventually floated down to New Orleans.
He was, in fact, plucked from the mighty Mississippi at the foot of Canal Street, and immediately begged the archbishop for an assignment to a cloistered monastery.
Two days later, after some remarkably fast paperwork through the Vatican, Father dePresseps arrived from Normandy. The Cajuns had originally been Normans, and when Father dePresseps spoke to them in a familiar accent, they were willing to take his word for it that he wasn’t an undercover agent for the Revenuers.
At Father dePresseps’ suggestion, negotiations were undertaken with the state concerning a right-of-way through de la Chevaux land. A price of fifty thousand dollars was finally agreed upon. The New Orleans Picaroon-Statesman referred to the purchase as “an unconscionable rape of the state treasury,” but it was either pay Horsey or not build the highway, and the check was delivered.
The diocese was at first delighted. Under Father dePresseps’ guidance, Mr. de la Chevaux decided that with the exception of the price of a new chain saw, a new outboard motor for his pirogue, and the drilling of a new water well by Sears, Roebuck & Company, he would turn over the balance of the fifty thousand dollars to Father dePresseps, who would apportion the money between the church, which needed both new pilings and a new roof, and the parish school, which had similar pressing needs.
Then the crew from Sears appeared to drill the well. They encountered something they hadn’t expected, and it incidentally resulted in the total loss of their drilling equipment. What their simple little drilling bit encountered, eight feet beneath the surface of Bayou Perdu, was “the largest pool of natural gas ever discovered in the western hemisphere.”
The first check, an advance against future royalties, came to just over a million dollars. A check for ten percent of that amount, a tithe, was delivered to the Chancellory of the Archdiocese of New Orleans the next day. Horsey had been taught to tithe by his late beloved grandmère, and he had done so all his life. The tenth poached deer, the tenth gallon of White Lightning, the tenth pail of crawfish had always been set aside for the Church, and a tenth of income would be set aside now. The only difference now was that a certified check didn’t have to be hung and drawn and skinned, or run through a barrel of charcoal, or pursued on one’s knees in a ditch.
The archbishop, while of course grateful for a check for one hundred thousand dollars, nevertheless had second thoughts. As he confided to Monsignor John Joseph Clancy:
“You know, Jack, I really hate to take this. I don’t mean to sound cynica
l, but I’ll bet you my two tickets to the next Saints game that Horsey de la Chevaux will be parted from all that money before the year’s out.”
Monsignor Clancy was forced to agree. Certainly a simple Cajun whose only excursion away from his bayou had been into the army would not be able to hold his own in the cold, ruthless, and sometimes outright dishonest world of high finance.
His Eminence and the Right Reverend Father were wrong. Horsey de la Chevaux, while frankly a bit crude, was not at all stupid. He was, moreover, the scion of a family that had for more than two hundred years been at war with the established forces of law and order. And he now had the sage advice of Father dePresseps to draw upon. No summa cum laude graduate of the Harvard School of Business, no matter how dedicated to the principle that thievery is the name of the game, was anywhere close to a match for a Louisiana Cajun getting advice from a Norman peasant priest.
Within two years of the discovery of the pool of natural gas, Chevaux Petroleum Corporation, International, had joined the list of the five hundred companies in the world. Within five years, it had joined the exclusive One Hundred Club.
There were some benefits to the diocese in addition to the tithe. The Church of the Immaculate Conception was rebuilt. The unpainted pine structure supported on pilings was replaced with a marble edifice bearing a strong resemblance to St. Peter’s Church in Venice. The parish school was transformed from a primitive one-room place into a multi-million-dollar edifice, which, with the aid of a professor formerly associated with the Missouri School of Mines, taught petro-geology.
The Bayou Perdu Council K. of C. Council House, which had, if anything, been even more rickety than the Church of the Immaculate Conception, was now a stone and marble structure housing, among other things, six bowling alleys, an indoor skeet range, and the longest bar in the United States. (The bar had been purchased from a to-be-torn-down hotel in Milwaukee, disassembled, and flown to Louisiana over the violent protests of the Save Our Wisconsin Historical Heritage Association, which felt it belonged in a museum.)
MASH 10 MASH goes to Miami Page 3
