The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  ***

  The next morning, when her father drove the pilot into town (they had waved at him as he made his way, limping, out to the automobile), Margarita, feeling most interested in the man, insisted on coming along and she luxuriated, sitting behind him in the back seat, inhaling deeply of his adventurer’s leather and the sweet Brilliantine hair tonic that he had scrubbed into the dense head of curly hair as he dallied before the washstand earlier.

  When they reached Main Street and the pilot climbed down, Margarita, extending her hand delicately covered in a white doeskin glove, bid him farewell again and told him, in a whisper: “Please come back and see us.” Then: “Or at least come back and see me.”

  “I surely will,” he told her.

  — Another Saturday —

  Two months had passed, it was a Saturday, and the Montez O’Brien sisters had more or less forgotten about the pilot; that is, all but Margarita, who felt a little slighted that the gallant aviator never returned. That morning the sisters were out in the yard under the shade of the spreading chestnut tree, parasols in hand or sun hats on their heads, the littlest ones playing tag out by the barn and running in circles or jumping from the rear of their old cabriolet, that elegant, high-wheeled wagon which their father, Nelson O’Brien, used as transport in the days before his purchase of an automobile. To the south, a grand view of hills and other houses, prosperity in the air and felicity communicated by the sunlight, feminine in its giving nature. Nine years old, Sarah was up on a stepladder filling the bird feeders, like lanterns off the lower limbs of the trees, with seed, for, during those months, tawny sparrows, blue- and yellow-rumped warblers, goldfinches and meadowlarks and blue jays, among so many others, would in memory come flying across every spring morning of her youth—crowding the branches and swooping around the delighted, spinning child, as if she had the powers of a female St. Francis, whose image hung on the kitchen wall, titmice and petite chickadees scampering and hopping on the lawn below, pecking after the fallen bits of nut and grain.

  These were beautiful bird feeders, some dating back to when the house had been built many years before; others, resembling pagodas and little churches, gifts to the family from their mother’s good friend, Herman García, a most un-British Puerto Rican butler who, working for one of the richer estates of their town, represented exactly one half of the rest of the Spanish-speaking population of Cobbleton, the other half (excluding the Romance-language teacher, Miss Covington) being a certain baker, Mr. Roig, a tall, pock-faced Spaniard who resembled Abraham Lincoln, and his wife, famous in the town for their many-tiered wedding cakes, their puff pastries, strudels, and pretzels. (“One has to adapt,” Mr. Roig, with his deep Basque voice, used to say. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”) And while these Basques were friendly with the family—whenever Mariela and her daughters went into his shop, he would always chat with her—it was García who had over the years become a regular visitor to the household, dining with them every so often on Sundays, when he would show up with his two sons and his young wife, his arms filled with gifts for the house. Over time, he would bring them cribs, rocking horses, children’s chairs, a hat rack, wooden puppets, even a domino set that he made for Nelson O’Brien on his birthday (he rarely played with them, preferring the game of checkers), all of the aforementioned items constructed in a little workshop behind the cottage of the estate where he was a butler and sometime chauffeur, and where his wife also worked as a maid. Many years before—it must have been around 1909 or 1910—their mother and Mr. García had met in the town post office, he waiting for a letter from San Juan, she for one from Cuba. He was “new” in those parts then, as he had arrived to work from New York, on the recommendation of a former employer (“You don’t have to pay him much, you know”), on the estate of a prominent banker. With his dark-whorled eyes, his great crooked nose and gaunt frame, he had an ascetic, nearly monkish bearing. But that was not his way: a man in his late thirties at the time, he had been married to a woman fifteen years younger than himself. And despite his appearance, he was ebullient and friendly. He, too, had felt the loneliness of being one of the other foreigners in town, but had the advantage of having relatives who lived in a place called Harlem, New York, and so now and then, on his free Sundays, when he was not visiting the house, he would take the train into that city, return late at night, and the next day, usually in the mid-afternoon, appear at the door of the house where the sisters lived, holding a bag filled with plantains, yuca, mangoes, malangas, and other foods that would not appear on the shelves of any store in Cobbleton for another sixty years or so. (Years later, a large Shop-Rite would take up half of Farmer Dietrich’s field. And its manager would notice those items listed on an inventory order sheet and check them off, for he had heard that there were inhabitants whose peculiar tastes had brought these foods into demand.)

  Their mother was seated before a picnic table in the yard, with little Violeta, healthy and brimming with life, on her lap, enjoying the breeze and looking forward to that moment later in the day when García would invariably show up to discuss the next afternoon’s menu: would they cook a suckling pig? or a big pot of chicken to go with their other dishes? They still had some green plantains left over from the week before, and half a sack of black beans—a happy prospect, in terms of the stomach and heart, for whenever García visited the family, Mariela Montez would feel elated, as she considered him both a friend and an artistic confidant, to whom she allowed access to her most inward thoughts.

  Trusting him in a way she had trusted few others, Mariela was reminded by García of a poet named José Luna, who for the years of her childhood had been a close friend of her father in Cuba and a frequent visitor to their house on Victoriana de Avila Street in the city of Santiago. This Luna had been a chaste and impoverished, elderly Don Quixote-like fellow, whose poetry (who could say if it was good or bad?) had been an inspiration to her own young life. So much an inspiration that now, these years later, whenever she sat down to write her own poems, or “versitos,” as she would call them, she always felt that in some way they were written for this man—and the life she had once lived. And because she saw something of José Luna in García, he was about the only person to whom she ever showed them. Even though she sometimes read these verses, often religious and contemplative musings, to the older sisters, like Margarita, who understood much of what she had written, she never took their opinions seriously, as, in her view, their comprehension and use of Spanish, in the main conversational and gossipy, could not begin to grasp her poetic intentions. At some point during his visits, Mariela would take García aside—out to the yard or for a walk in the field around the house—and recite these poems to him, the man walking quietly and perhaps stoically beside her, hands in pockets and head nodding, as she would go on with her orations of poems that she would not read to her own husband. Sometimes they would walk for an hour through the fields. There was a path that cut downhill from their property to another farm where there was a great meadow of wildflowers, a favorite place for the sisters to collect bouquets of convolvulus, heartsease, and snapdragons, and there they would find a place to sit while Mariela recited. Found in a cigar box in 1972, a fragment of a poem, circa June 1920, scribbled on the back of a calendar page, entitled “Lamentation of the Crow”:

  Poor Crows, dark and heavy-winged,

  with their ugly beaks and horrid caw-caw.

  They, too, would like to fly to heaven

  and live among the pure doves

  and the flamboyance of the peacocks…

  [Breaks off]

  They would sit there for so long, sometimes until it began to get dark, when the farthest ridges of the hill disappeared gradually in the shadows and the last pink radiances of the sun were swallowed by the sky. And although no one would say it, there would remain for Margarita and the sisters the impression that something might have been going on between their mother and García—the unthinkable, perhaps, the two of them walking in one of those fields aft
er she had bared her soul with those verses that she kept a virtual secret from the others, stopping behind a tree for a quick kiss, was that a possibility? the two embracing at that time of the day when the meadows were liquid and mist-ridden and the wind tousled the grass and chilled the fingers, so that they would hold hands, up along the serpentine path, ever so quietly breaking their hold at the first sight of the house or the barn in the distance.

  ***

  These walks brought her much satisfaction. But they confused the sisters, because, despite her initial elation—she would come back to the house laughing and ever so happy—later, washing dishes, breast-feeding her little one in a corner, their mother would seem suddenly so overcome with sadness that she could not open her eyes and her hands would begin to shake. And then their father, who sometimes noticed this and ascribed it not to melancholy or soulful longing for a different life or homesickness but to what in that epoch was known as “feminine weakness,” would take from the kitchen a bottle of Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener and pour three tablespoons of this curative potion into a tin cup for his wife. Then he would tell her, “Drink it down. Now, that’ll do the trick.”

  — Margarita’s Bath —

  That Saturday morning, while her father was out in the yard among his daughters, the horses, the birds, and his wife, performing his exercises, Margarita was locked up in the bathroom, just off the back porch, taking one of her twice-weekly baths. Much work was involved in this simple act in those days, the water heated on the kitchen stove or on a burner in the bathroom and poured from buckets into the metal, gondola-shaped tub to keep it warm, always aiming the hot water in a certain direction—that is, between her legs—its lick of heat slipping down over the matted, sea-orchid-like opening of her pubis, the young woman luxuriating in the flow, the sensation of bodily pleasure, a way of getting outside herself. The room was one of the few private places in that house where she could remain alone, to read, to hum, to do whatever she liked, without anyone seeing her, tranquilly floating in the bathwater.

  (Someone’s eyes were always on you, a small hand tugging at your skirt, a voice calling from another room: Margarita! No privacy unless you locked yourself in the bathroom or in the recently installed toilet, which was off a hall from the kitchen. On cold winter nights, she would lift her nightgown hem to her knees, pulling down her underdrawers, her buttocks touching the weathered wood of the commode seat, a shocking feeling—and it was fly-ridden and sometimes unbearable in the summers—but there she would sit, just to be alone and pass the time, until someone—and there was always someone—would bang on the door and demand, “Margarita! Please let me in.”)

  Being the oldest and always surrounded by younger sisters whom she had to look after, Margarita spent much of her youth, in that crowded household, busy, sometimes reluctantly, with chores and the upbringing of the others. She had also been the first to experience many things: the first to attend Miss Peterson’s grammar school in Cobbleton; the first to contend with the taunts of her fellow students, who had confused her initial shyness with stupidity; the first to experience shame whenever her mother, who did not speak very much English, met with her teachers; the first to be ridiculed because she possessed that Cuban’s dark spirit and skin in a town filled with Swedes and Finns and Norwegians and Germans; and the first to daydream about running away. But she had also been the first to experience the simple pleasures of this life: the first to inhale deeply from the garden’s aromatic blooms; the first to run, turning in circles, under a heaven of falling snow; to watch with sweet interest the swallows exercising in the clouds; and the first to rest in a bed beside her mother, listening as her mother read to her from the books she had brought with her from Cuba, one about the planet Mars and the other about the creation of the earth, the travels of chosen people and the salvation of men’s souls. And she had been the first to look at the maps of Cuba and Ireland which their mother had cut out from some old book and put in frames in the hall so the children would at least know the cartographic appearance of those distant lands in which their parents were born. And the first to hear her mother singing a zarzuela in Spanish and to hear her father, corny as he could be, moving through the rooms of that house on one of his good days, whistling an Irish air; and the first to navigate through the two flowing rivers of language in that house, to sense the music and the voluptuousness of each and yet to feel them sometimes warring inside her, when she was not sure if she was a bit more of a Montez or of an O’Brien. And she was the first—or would be the first—to wake up one morning and, looking back, sigh wistfully and with affection for that time when her life had been filled with many moments of earthly happiness.

  ***

  Year by year, she had watched the rooms of their house fill with cribs and basins and mounds of diapers and with new sisters, who ran, charged the sunlight on the walls, danced and squealed, cried, shouted, plucked flowers, sucked sugar cubes, smeared jelly into their hair, pounded the floors with their little feet, turned in circles, sang in and out of key, rested in her arms, yanked on her apron, napped in corners, piled on top of one another, and, filling the house with exuberant femininity, made like Spanish- and English-speaking sprites.

  Attentive to her duties in the household, she had, as a little girl, always felt “saintly” and humble in the manner of a good, demure, and obedient daughter. She had been the kind of young girl who, in the days when she knew mainly work, was rarely seen in the house without a laundry basket, an iron, a broom in hand. She was obedient then and lived in a good tremulous fear of failing her mother, wiped chins, wiped bottoms, learned to cook, to sew, to spend an hour turning the crank-driven mechanism of a pot-shaped laundry machine, later diligently appearing in the yard with bundles of sheets and dresses, stockings, underdrawers, and linens and sheets, which she would pin to lines, doing all such work cheerfully and without a thought for herself.

  But as she got older she happily discovered the benefits of her seniority and was not at all reticent to play the mistress of the house when Isabel and the other older sisters (Maria, Olga and Jacqueline, Helen and Irene) reached the age when she could give them work. They, in turn, did the same with their younger sisters, to whom the oldest were like aunts. And while she had never truly been freed from housework and always enjoyed the simple pleasure of bouncing a newly arrived Montez O’Brien sister on her knee (yes, and sniffing the sweet scent of unspoiled, talcum-powdered skin and curly locks, and feeling the touch of soft, grasping fingers, the tip of their digits damp from sucking, nails marked by a swirling white moon, on her nose and chin and cheeks), she had by now, and with great delight, experienced something of the outside world. She could look back to those times when she went to work for her father, sometimes accompanying him on his photography excursions and business trips, and helped to run the movie house, where she had been doing odd jobs for the past seven years—back to 1914, when the theater first opened. (She did everything in the Jewel Box Movie House. Sometimes she was the projectionist, the ticket taker, the usher, the lobby manager, the distributor of promotional items by the entrance; that is, she would oversee the distribution of such items—certain of the younger sisters, “cute as all-get-out,” as they used to say, standing inside the doors in their ruffle-skirt pink and yellow dresses, their knee stockings, and with ribbons in their hair, giving away decorative and entertaining items whose purpose was publicity for the theater and for silent movies in general. They’d distribute “Hoot Gibson” and “Buck Jones” glasses, Abraham Lincoln spoons, lead doughboy and lasso-twirling bowlegged cowpoke figurines, Spanish fans that opened to the words “The Jewel Box Movie House,” and “For the Best and Latest in Biograph and Kinescopic Entertainments!”; and Kewpie and Raggedy Ann dolls, and, later, during the King Tut craze of 1923, Pharaoh whistle rings and jigsaw puzzles of the Great Pyramids. Cap pistols, too, and on the last Sunday of the month, “Hollywood Star of the Month” plates, featuring such prominent screen idols as Rudolph Valentino, Theda Bara, Mae
Marsh, Douglas Fairbanks, and Julia Opp.)

  Still, she valued her privacy and loved the bathroom, as it was in some sense a historic place. It was in that room, during that very same act of bathing, one autumn day in 1915—she had already passed into her fourteenth year—that Margarita Montez O’Brien moved from the physical oblivion of childhood into the sudden awareness that she had acquired the body of a woman. That day she had removed her dress, stripped down to her underbodice and camisole, slipped those off, and then climbed out of her cotton underdrawers and, looking into the large speckled mirror on the wall, with its oak cherub frame, first realized that the thick womanly shock of black pubic hair between her legs and the plump breasts that she was observing had just burst forth, as if overnight, overtaking the child that she had once been. There she stood, curvaceous, sweaty, with mangly body hair which erupted not only below, its highest reaches a thin delicate line of hair rising to her navel, but under her arms and all over her legs—which young women in that epoch never shaved (unless they were “professional ladies”). Once she had gotten over this change, fascinated (and sometimes repulsed) by the sight of her own body, she got into the unbookish habit of parading about naked in the upstairs bedroom and posing before the dresser mirror, where she would examine herself carefully, her hands touching her breasts, as if to measure their daily change in size and weight. She would do this even when the room was chilled and goosebumps covered her skin and her nipples puckered, her body stretching in all angles, as if to accentuate the natural grace of her form, or to transform some unpleasant feature. This physical onslaught seemed to have come over her suddenly and without anyone, not her mother or her father (certainly not him!), to explain what was going on.