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Flashbulbs went off again as Perón toasted his bride with a champagne stem, and a half-dozen times as the witnesses were photographed with the bride and groom, separately and together.
The mayor appeared with two copies of the witness page.
Clete, Martín, and Father Welner signed both copies.
Perón examined both and then handed them to General Martín.
“When the boys show up for breakfast tomorrow at the Circulo Militar and the senior officers’ mess at Campo Mayo, General, I want them to find one of these posted at the door. You will arrange that for me, won’t you?”
“Certainly,” Martín said.
“Okay. Well, while I hate leaving this charming company, duty calls. Thank you all for coming.”
Thirty seconds later, the newlyweds were gone.
“What the hell was that all about?” Marjorie Howell inquired.
“True love,” Clete began sarcastically. “One day you may—”
“Shut up, Cletus,” Dorotea said.
He clapped both of his hands over his mouth.
Marjorie smiled. Father Welner shook his head in resignation.
“What that was, Marjorie,” Dorotea went on, “was the brilliant manipulation by Juan Domingo Perón of three people—four, if you want to count me—who are not usually able to be manipulated by anyone.”
“You want to explain that?” Marjorie asked.
“Yeah, honey,” Clete said, smiling at Dorotea as he reached for a bottle of champagne. “Why don’t you? I’m just a little confused by all this myself.”
“So far as the army—the officer corps, army and navy—is concerned,” Dorotea said, “they don’t know what to expect of Perón after the assassination plot failed and his speech from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. So, he just told them, using these three as actors in a carefully staged little play.
“I would say that he extended the olive branch of peace, but the gesture was more like this.”
She held her left hand out, fingers closed except for the center finger, which pointed upward.
“I can’t believe my wife,” Clete said in mock horror, “the mother of my children, a member of the altar guild of the Anglican Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, has any idea what that gesture she’s making means.”
Marjorie chuckled.
“You told me on our wedding night, darling,” Dorotea said. “The message of the copies of the wedding register he’s having Bernardo pin to the doors of the senior officers’ mess at Campo Mayo and the Circulo Militar dining room is: ‘I just married that woman you don’t like, so go screw yourselves.’ And there’s a second message: ‘General Martín pinned these up because he works for me and does what I tell him to do.’
“And when the photographs of the wedding appear in La Nacíon and El País, there will be Father Welner blessing the wedding. The message there is: ‘Don’t think you can still complain to the Church about me marrying’—in my husband’s words—‘a semi-hooker half my age because if Father Welner approves, you know that the Church does.’”
“I think you’re grossly overestimating my reputation, Dorotea,” the priest said. “As well as my influence.”
“Hah!” Clete snorted.
“And the presence of my husband here today,” Dorotea went on, “and last night on the balcony, tells them, ‘Whatever you may have heard about Don Cletus throwing me out of el Coronel Frade’s house on Libertador because he disapproved of me sleeping with teenaged girls . . .’”
“He was doing what?” Marjorie asked incredulously.
“‘. . . is untrue. Or at least has been forgiven,’” Dorotea finished.
“He was doing what?” Marjorie asked again.
“What Mom thought Jimmy Cronley was doing with you,” Clete said.
