“Exactly, exactly!” the old man said, and then went on. “And they were about the same age, so my son asked Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day to come to New Orleans, to see the city. He came, and I opened my house to him. And I was the one, may God forgive me, who introduced him to my daughter. She wasn’t even through college, had a year to go at Rice. And Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day just swept that child off her feet.
“When he came to me and asked for her hand, I told him she was too young, and that I could not in good conscience offer my blessing until she’d finished her education.”
“I understand your position,” Ettinger said. “Any father would feel that way.”
“My wife, may she rest in peace, had passed on when my daughter was fourteen. They called it ‘consumption’ then; now they call it ‘tuberculosis.’”
“So you were both father and mother to your children,” Ettinger said.
“You could say that, Mr. Ettinger, yes,” the old man went on. “And so did Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day understand my position. Or so he said. So he went back to Argentina, and I thought—I’ve never believed that absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I concluded that would be the end of it. Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day would find some suitable young woman down there, and my daughter would find some suitable suitor here.
“Well, I’m an oilman, Mr. Ettinger…Did Cletus mention that?”
“Colonel Graham did, Sir.”
“I thought perhaps he might have,” the old man said. “Anyway, I’m an oilman, and the first thing oilmen learn is that the more you know about people you’re going to deal with, the better off you are. So I had a friend of mine with the foreign department of the National City Bank of New York City—when we first went into Venezuela, he was very helpful, and together we did all right down there—make some discreet inquiries about this fellow Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day down in Argentina. He reported back to me that he came from a fine family, which was highly regarded down there, and that they were, economically speaking, quite comfortable. To put a point on that, they have an estancia, what we call a ranch, that’s just slightly larger than the State of Rhode Island.”
“Very impressive,” Ettinger said.
“The next thing I know, a couple of months later, I get a telephone call from a fellow staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. Says he’s a friend of the family of Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day, and could we have lunch. I forget his name, but he was a gentleman. Charming fellow. I was halfway through having lunch with him—I had him out to the Metairie Country Club—before I realized that what he was doing was checking me out, to see if my daughter was suitable for Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day, not some Yankee gold digger after Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day’s daddy’s money.
“Well, I didn’t take offense, because I understood. There was nothing wrong with doing that. But I called him on it, and told him we could probably save some time by me letting him know I was dead set against any marriage, but just to put my cards faceup on the table, I wasn’t exactly walking around with holes in my shoes either.
“Then he told me—he was my kind of man, that fellow; I wish to God I could remember his name—that they weren’t exactly thrilled down there either that Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day was determined to marry a foreigner, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it.
“So I told him sure there was, all that had to happen was to have Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day’s daddy tell him, and mean it, that if he married the foreign girl he could go find himself a job someplace, ‘because the money tree would be cut off at the roots.’ I remember using those exact words.
“And then he told me that Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day’s daddy was about to pass on. Had kidney trouble, as I recall, and once the daddy was gone, there would be no control over him. And then we sat there in the bar drinking Sazeracs…
“I’ll tell you a secret about New Orleans, Mr. Ettinger. If you’re ever doing business in this town and the fellow offers you a Sazerac, turn him down. They sneak up on people; you could sell them the Mississippi River after they’ve had four of them.”
“I’ll remember that,” Ettinger said. “Thank you.”
“Anyway, I believed what this fellow was saying, so we sat there trying to salvage something from a bad situation. Well, after a while, it didn’t look too bad. Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day couldn’t marry while his father was dying. And they have some sort of Roman Catholic rule that the period of mourning is one year. So we had whatever time it took for Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day’s daddy to die, plus a year, during which time he would work at his end, and I would work here, to simply kill the whole idea of the two of them marrying. When I drove him back to his hotel, I remember feeling a little better about the whole thing. With a little bit of luck, Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day’s daddy would last a lot longer than anyone thought.
“Two weeks later he died. When my daughter heard about it, she wanted to go down there; and I had a hell of a time convincing her that before she could do that, the daddy would be a long time in his grave, and that it was unseemly, anyhow. They weren’t formally engaged.
“A month after he put his daddy in the ground, Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day showed up here with an engagement ring in his pocket. And then I realized that I had lost, my precious daughter was going to marry Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day whether or not I liked it, and there was nothing I could do about it but put on a smile and act like I liked it.
“The first time this theocracy business came up was when my daughter came to me and said she wanted me to know she was going to take instruction in the Roman Catholic Church. Now, as I told you, I have nothing whatever against the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop here is a close personal friend. But I asked her why she wanted to do that—she was raised Episcopal, and theologically, there’s not a hell of a difference between the two. And she said that for her marriage to be recognized down there, she had to get married in a Roman Catholic Church, and she couldn’t do that unless she was confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church, and that her Episcopalian confirmation didn’t count.
“So I called my friend the Archbishop, and he told me that was so, she couldn’t get married unless she was confirmed as a Catholic, but that I shouldn’t get so upset, it wasn’t as if she was going to become a Holy Roller or a Jew…no offense, Mr. Ettinger…”
“None taken, Mr. Howell,” Ettinger said.
“…certainly none was intended. And the Archbishop said he would personally take care of my daughter, and that if I liked, he would perfo
rm the marriage himself, to let her new in-laws understand that our family was held in a certain regard by the Roman Catholic Church here.”
“That was very gracious of him,” Ettinger said.
“So that’s the way it happened. A month before the official one-year mourning period was up, Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day showed up in New Orleans. I put him up in an apartment we have here in the Quarter…Cletus used to take girls there when he was at Tulane; he thought I didn’t know, and I never said anything; did the same thing myself when I was in college…and we started making arrangements for the marriage.
“It was one hell of a wedding, I’ll tell you that. Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day must have a hundred and two kinfolk, and I think every one of them showed up, all the way from Argentina. They were married by the Archbishop in what they call a High Nuptial Mass in the Cathedral of St. Louis, which is also right here in the Quarter.
“I gave her away, and she was a most beautiful bride, Mr. Ettinger, so beautiful and so happy. I even went along with that dowry custom of theirs, not that Hor-gay Goool-yermo Frah-day needed it. I gave her twenty-four-point-five percent of Howell Petroleum (Venezuela)…. Am I going too fast for you, Mr. Ettinger?”
“I didn’t quite understand that last. I don’t mean to seem too inquisitive.”