The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  (And she never knew that the mailman, Mr. Smith, once saw her standing naked before her bedroom window and every day for months afterwards would dally by their mailbox, looking up at that window on the chance of seeing her again, that for many nights, when the mailman would go home and sit down to dinner, he could hardly bear to look at the affectionate and matronly corpulence of his wife, and that on some evenings the mailman would tell her that he was going out for a walk and, putting on his boots and coat and hunter’s cap, make his way into the rawness of the season by lantern light, trudging along the back lots and streets of Cobbleton and down the mile or so of road to the house where the sisters lived. He would stand in the darkness, observing their silhouettes through the yellow-lit windows, unable to understand what he, a man of forty or so and married for eighteen years, with three children of his own, was doing there. One night, snowflakes like porch moths fluttered down around him and still he remained another hour, until every one of the lights in the house dimmed and the winds had risen and a chill had entered his bones, and he sadly made his way homeward, back to the comfort of his own household.)

  In those days she became so self-involved, spending long hours in the bathroom and bedroom, that Isabel, who’d always had the disposition of a matronly aunt, would bang on the door to rouse her from her reveries, or, if she happened to be passing by and saw her older sister in a natural state, would throw her a robe, a sheet, a blanket, and ask, “What’s wrong with you, anyway, that you suddenly detest clothing?” And reluctantly Margarita, who tended to defer to her younger, more authoritative sister on the practical matters of life, would get dressed, that matter of exhibitionistic glee or vanity resolving itself over the coming months and gradually giving way to other, more humble pursuits, such as crocheting, embroidery, dressmaking, and the playing of parlor games with her younger sisters, and to other diversions which in that epoch were deemed proper to the upbringing of a young lady (and boringly so, because Margarita in the midst of a card game, in the process of choosing between a queen of hearts and a seven of clubs to discard, sometimes yawned or let out a sigh, the sigh of a young woman from whose life the excitement of adventure and love was absent).

  Although she kept much of what had taken place in her body a secret—or tried to—it was the bloodied evidence of her sheets and the complaints of the twins about her moodiness that made her mother, Mariela Montez, realize what was happening to her daughter. Feminine and suddenly voluptuous, Margarita not only began to attract the solicitous smiles and glances of shopkeepers and male passersby in town, but during a certain time of the month she began to experience pains so severe (as if her kidneys had been punched, her rump were stuffed with broken glass, her belly filled with stones, and her intestines with prickly worms, as if a thorny rope had been wrapped around her internal organs and had been pulled taut by a powerful and unrelenting wheel to the point of breaking—that’s what it was like) that she would take to her bed for days at a time, feeling both disgraced and powerless. And while the severity of those pains would pass with the years, the humiliation would not: she always hated wearing a strip of cotton from a torn sheet pinned like a diaper over her vagina to absorb the flow of her monthly cycle’s blood, and found that the cloth made her feel self-conscious as she walked, especially when she accompanied her mother or father to town or was hurrying along the streets with her younger sister to shop, convinced that people somehow knew about her condition, that she was marked or smelled bad or was leaving a trail of blood behind her. And because Mariela, who’d never bothered to explain the biology of the occurrence, always reminded her to put on the trapo, or “rag,” as it was indelicately called, Margarita despised the term and its implication, finding it an offense to the haughtier part of her female disposition.

  And yet she got accustomed to all that and used her experience to make things easier for her younger sisters, Isabel being the first beneficiary of her sister’s knowledge and research (for Margarita had studied the symptoms and biophysiology in a book that she’d borrowed from Dr. Schultz, the family physician, who had delivered each of the sisters with the exception of herself, Isabel navigating the sometimes turbulent waters of that condition with cantankerous piety. And she had advised Maria as to what to expect—Maria would stoically sit out on the porch, rocking in a wicker chair, discomfort teeming through her body, bones, belly, and head painful with the “female malady”—and had recently introduced her to the concept of “hygienic dressing” and the safety pins to her two playful and elegant sisters, the musical twins, who, sharing the experience so closely—Olga’s menses would begin a few hours before Jacqueline’s—always endured its discomforts together. (Margarita could tell, for during those times Jacqueline’s violin playing, celestial and melodious, would begin to screech and shriek as if to call out to all the other mournful violins in the world, and Olga’s piano playing became more halting and she tended to lose her patience with lovely chords like the E-flat major of a Mozart sonata and would, for no apparent reason, begin to hate every note on the piano, abruptly slamming her palms down at random on the keys and crashing the fall board so hard that on two occasions the cherrywood cover loosened from its hinges—and then, frustrated, she would head up the stairs, forlorn and lost to music, throwing herself on the bed to cry.)

  ***

  In the early afternoon Margarita bathed and put on a sweet pink dress and sun hat, a pair of low-heeled lace-tied shoes, and decided that she would go for a walk along the country roads to the field near Farmer Tucker’s pond where she would often sit under a tree with a book and read for a while before heading off to town to work in the movie house, for in those days she was already known as the sister who liked books and it was a normal thing for her to seek solitude. She’d always liked to read—books taking her out of herself and the “little shames” Margarita would feel in her young life, beginning with the image of her ever-pregnant mother, Mariela Montez, whom she loved very much but whose dogged “foreignness” and absolute determination to remain Cuban in an ail-American town, the other Spanish-speaking inhabitants of which could be counted on the fingers of one hand, prevented her from caring in the slightest about the way she spoke English, which she did only in snippets with her youngest daughters, from Helen on, and with her husband, even then saying little—“I’m coming,” and “Yes,” in response to a question or an order, at dinner instructing her daughters, amid the slurping of soup and the chomping of buttered slices of bread, to pass their father another bowl of stew, and saving her gossip or her most rarefied opinions for her older, Spanish-speaking daughters. She had not bothered to teach the babies Spanish; like a grandmother, she’d delegate that work to the oldest daughters, if they so liked. She regarded the youngest girls, following her in packs about the house, their heads filled with English, with both pity (“The poor things are too distracted to learn proper Spanish”) and contempt (“They don’t really want to learn!”), forming her strongest alliance with the oldest sisters, like Margarita and Isabel, who of course had their own opinions on the subject. For Margarita, the oldest, the soft and beautiful vowels of the language were one with the tint of her skin—she’d once gone to the rail station to see her father off on a trip to New York and some wise-guy kid, a soldier, had leaned over the caboose railing and called out to her: “So long, gypsy!”—words that had somehow struck in her gut and sent her home in a sad mood, up to her room, where she sat before the mirror plucking the barely perceptible bridge of black hairs over her nose and scouring her chin for facial hairs—what gypsies had… This in itself did not make Margarita ashamed, for she much enjoyed the music of her mother’s voice, her mother reading to her as a young girl from a Spanish Bible or from La vida en el planeta marte, or singing in some heaven of old Cuban danzons, lines of which Margarita would be able to remember into old age. All that was good, and warming to her heart, but there was also her mother’s absolute terror of the world outside their house, which had always made Margarita unhappy.

 
; — When Margarita Was Alone —

  She did not mind the solitude of her walks, when she’d experience the odd sensation that she could go on forever in one direction and never escape the household. She’d carry a straw basket filled with books—some of which she had read a dozen times—and a copy of one of the Philadelphia newspapers, the Philadelphia Times, and the local, the Cobbleton Chronicle, which were usually two or three days old. Sometimes as she left the yard and watched her younger sisters at play—Marta, Veronica, and Patricia, running in circles, each properly attired in lady-like fashion, in dresses that reached down past their knees, and high stockings and beribboned hats—she had the impression that she could have been observing herself; and she’d think about what she had been like as a little girl, in those days before she’d started to appreciate and deplore her maturity and awareness (fledgling) of the way the world worked.

  ***

  She loved the open air, the sight of a sparrow alighting on the ground, a breeze through her curly black hair, and the scent of the wildflowers all around her, what an old Mennonite farmer used to call the work of the Lord. (He was gone now, as she made her way along the country roads, but she’d remember how, when she was a little girl, this captainly-looking fellow with his great white beard and in a black top coat and bent-up hat would come by in his wagon and at the sight of her suddenly command his heavy-hoofed Clydesdale horses “Whoa,” these animals coming to a halt, their reins jingling. And the farmer, tipping his hat, saying to her, “Isn’t it a nice day, yes? And do you know why, because it’s the work of the Lord”—that’s what he would say, his hand spread out toward the fields and the vivid life around them, God brilliant everywhere. Then he would reach into his pocket and, with his immense frame towering over her, his hands thickly calloused, would give her a little cube of sugar or a hard candy, telling her: “Now you be a good little girl and always pay heed to your parents.”) Sometimes, in a “naughty” mood, she would open the top buttons of her dress so the sun could warm her breasts under the slip and camisoles she’d wear. (She also daydreamed about swimming naked where the willows bent low over their own maudlin shadows in the waters of Tucker’s Pond—how she had been tempted to do so, especially on unbearably hot summer days.) A bluebird flew overhead and disappeared in the treetops, then darted out of the branches, followed by another bluebird, the two singing merrily.

  She sighed and remembered the handsome pilot and her dream of love. She read the Cobbleton Chronicle, full of local farmers’ news, and news about the more provocative events taking place in the outside world—an announcement, for example, that a new contest called the Miss America Pageant would be held that coming September at Keith’s Theatre on the Garden Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, or, sadly, that Mr. Enrico Caruso, the great Italian tenor (whom she had once heard sing), had been called forth from this life. Also an item about the lynching by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen of “two negro males, suspected of thievery” in Alabama. What else did she read? On the society pages: “Mr. and Mrs. Pendergast of Chestnut Hill will be arriving in New York from their extended tour of the Orient aboard the steamship Crescent out of Southampton, England, on June 17”—the words “Orient” and “Southampton” enchanting her. (“The name is Dame Margaret,” she fancied herself haughtily instructing a ship porter. “Please do be careful about moving my trunk into the stateroom.”) She twitched: there was a photograph of Suzanne Lengleng, Wimbledon tennis champion, in a scandalously short tennis outfit, leaning over a net and shaking the hand of a vanquished opponent. For a while she stared straight up into the blue of the sky, experiencing nothing but its blueness for many minutes—no leaf, bird, cloud, or aviator in sight…

  Then her eyes fell on an advertisement whose illustration showed a young woman crying hysterically in a dark room, stretched across a divan that seemed to be floating in the air, imagining that rugged pilot’s fingers touching her, his lips on her neck, and she noted the headline over the ad: “Often the Bridesmaid but Never the Bride.” And that was true in her own case. Over the past few years, she had watched three of her high-school friends get married, but that did not really bother her, though the girl in the purgatorial shadows of solitude, pictured in the advertisement that read: “The Diary of a Lonesome Girl,” wandering aimlessly in a many-roomed, lightless house, seemed reminiscent of herself on those days when she felt that love would never come into her life.

  ***

  Of course, she knew all about love—feeling so much for the family and affection for movie stars like Valentino and Ramon Novarro and for literary creations like David Copperfield or Captain Blood, and for those avuncular types who slipped in and out of her life such as the milkman and the postmaster and the stable owner and the ice-house man. But little else, as life in their town, she thought, was a bore, and left her with much time to read, to cultivate herself as a lady and pursue her impure thoughts, as the handsome Catholic priest might have put it. On many a day she sorrowfully regretted that her family lived in Cobbleton, as quiet and orderly a town as one might ever find but with little promise of romance, unless one counted the society balls, to which the sisters were never invited. In her habits, she seemed restless, and because she was naturally pensive, there had been talk of sending her to secretarial school or to a women’s college, where she might apply herself to education courses or household management; but, most of all, her mother and father simply wanted her to get married—the proper destiny of a young lady of that epoch.

  But there were no men in that town who appealed to her, not the men who would sometimes come with their haughty dates to films at the movie house, or farm boys, or the sons of railroad workers; nor was she interested in Rafael Garcia, the butler’s oldest son. Ever attentive and courteous, and a few years older than herself, he’d follow Margarita about the house, treating her with so much respect and reverence as to turn her stomach. This young Rafael, as darkly serious but not as handsome as his butler father, was a studious and quiet fellow. During the few moments when he would say anything at all, he tended to speak about his life as a college student in Philadelphia—“the only Puerto Rican in that school,” he would say in his low voice—where he studied law. For Margarita, whose head sometimes floated in the clouds, he was so practical, sincere, and “good” that she found him a bore, her own preferences tending toward the more adventurous type of man such as she perceived her father, Nelson O’Brien, to be, or the likes of that pilot.

  While away at school, he’d write Margarita long, evasive, and finally (that is, obliquely) confessional letters, which she would never finish and would tuck away in a lacquer box, and while she would write him back appreciative notes, she did not give him much thought. Then something new began to appear in the bundles of mail that would come to the house: little envelopes, smelling of violet perfume and love poetry, addressed to Margaret from an “anonymous admirer”—Rafael himself, of course—poems which he may have styled after the ditties that appeared in little “love booklets” such as could be found in the local pharmacist’s, which cost ten cents and came nicely bound in pocket-size editions and had, with their flowery designs, something of an air of Japanese art, much in vogue then. His own poems were carefully written out, in as fine a script as he could manage (the g’s and h’s shaky, the w’s bending to one side, the j’s often not dotted), and surrounded by a border of hand-drawn cherubs and blossoms—why, the man must have spent hours on those notes. The poems, as Margarita would recall them years later, could have been composed by an adolescent boy. One ditty called “Dreams of You” went as follows:

  In Spring my dreams of you

  come joyously welling

  up like the waters of brooks

  bubbling clear in the sun.

  What a joy in the telling,

  for to my heart you will

  remain forever dear.

  Come the roses of May

  or the snows of December,

  my love for you I will

  always remember.
r />   Gray be the skies or like azure

  the blue, far be the day

  I slumber without

  my dreams of you.

  These and others arrived from time to time, and she knew the poor fellow’s reserve would dissolve just by looking at her—he had always looked at her in a certain way, even when she was a little girl—his expression conveying to her, as male expressions would, the simple wish that he might connect with so pleasing a being, as if she were an angel with the power to remake a man’s life, his sense of the past and of himself, as if a woman was something in which a man and his history, his pains, his failings, could reside.

  Sometimes she would accompany him out to a dance or a movie, though not without misgivings: Rafael had inherited the Negro blood of a grandmother, and although she did not care about it herself and liked the “boy,” as she’d call him, thinking him far from a man, it made Margarita uncomfortable, as she did not like the feeling that people might find new ways to look down on her. She did like him and sometimes thought that, were he a few shades lighter and more handsome, she might entertain the idea of a romance with him. But it would not happen, and whenever he tried to hold her hand as they walked down the street, she would pull it away.

  ***

  That was during the time when Margarita believed that all men could fall in love with her, and she had acquired an alarming tendency to flirt—when she would come to town, knowing (or wishing it so) that the men were looking at her. If she went into Mr. Roig’s bakery, as she did that day before making her way to the movie house, and there was a handsome man waiting about beside his wife, or one of the hicky farm boys with his mother, she would have fun dallying with loaves of bread, pouty as she appraised them, nose whiffing the grain, eye darting to see if she was being watched, and, while doing so, sometimes imagining the most lurid conversations with men, for she was aware, coming from so fecund a household, of the laws and bawdiness of nature. (How many times had she looked on a tree branch in the spring at a configuration of blossoms and realized that it was one butterfly mounted on another?) As she and her vivacious younger sisters walked in a group, the unspoken rule among them was to relate by posture and general giddiness a contempt for men—to parade in a startling procession, on their way to church or to the movie house, aware of how men tipped their hats and young boys whistled, while they comported themselves with the mischievous authority of European countesses.