The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  She believed that all her sisters were lovely, save Isabel, with her matronly wide, hard-boned face, freckly, she thought, like an apple, her moody disposition and propensity for plain dresses—but she had always enjoyed the attention they attracted when she and her sisters went to town together and marched as a chatty, clamorous group down Main Street to a dance or a silent picture at their father’s movie house, or while hearing Sunday Mass at Father Mancuso’s church, a casual and capricious flirtation prevailing whenever they saw men and (consciously or unconsciously) exerted their female influence. In those days she wanted to be like the women in those engravings of famous goddesses that she saw in the old history books—Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus—or like a Gibson Girl from old magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which their mother, to practice reading English, kept in the house. All these had in common the same serenely lilting foreheads, genteel and somehow transcendent—what medieval physiognomists would define as “noble.” She wanted to be as beautiful as the lady depicted in a Grecian tunic, reclining on a couch, who was on the label of the Helen of Troy Beauty Pomade jar, which, at thirty-five cents a jar, often found its way into the house—and wished, while posing one afternoon, her hair pinned up in a great mangled coif above her head, that she could resemble the beautiful Florentine lady, Beatrice, pictured on the wall of the Cobbleton Library, crossing the Ponte Vecchio to meet, as the caption confided, the poet Dante. She saw images of herself, or suggestions of her own hopeful feminine beauty, so often repeated—on coins, stamps, magazine ads, movie posters.

  — Spring Photograph —

  The spring, ice beds breaking up and the trees budding, she remembered, was her favorite season in adolescence, the world fertile, the sunlight contagious, her head filled with nothing but the future. Their father, Nelson O’Brien, sleeves rolled to his elbows, would stand behind the tripod of his folding-bellows-type camera, posing the sisters out under an elm tree in their yard, blanket spread out underneath them as if they were having a picnic, butterflies fluttering about, and the Pennsylvania countryside radiant as far as one could see; or he would have them climb on a wagon, the littlest ones squirming and carrying on, while their mother, Mariela Montez, ever serious and moody in an introspective way, seemed unable to smile. She would stare intently ahead, her expression passive, the very same expression she would maintain for cameras for the rest of her days. A great silence would ensue as Nelson, with artistic and fatherly pride, head disappearing under a black velvet cloth and hand on a pneumatic bulb, recorded for posterity the feminine progress of his daughters. Photograph taken, life would come swirling back into motion—Margarita and Isabel tending to the household chores and the care of the little ones, diapers everywhere, while their mother would make her way through the house, her stride often weighed down with the emergence of life, for it seemed she was always pregnant.

  There was something else in regard to the photographs. Even though Margarita had always seemed outwardly humble, bowing her head and averting her eyes when a man or a woman would pay her a compliment—“My, but aren’t you the prettiest thing”—she, having her moments of vanity, secretly believed that it was so. (“If you look too long,” she can hear her mother saying in Spanish, “your reflection will swallow you.”) Years later, when regarding those photographs, cracked and tinted by age, she would take a good hard look at herself and find that she had had, more or less, pleasant but ordinary looks as a young woman—she would blossom with age—and that while she certainly had something of a foreign air about her, which would always seem to intrigue men, she was not beautiful, though her father, Nelson, would tell her differently.

  “You have classical features like a Venus,” he would say while posing this daughter, alone in his studio (crack of light, chemical flash, the child brilliantly smiling). “You know that, yes?”

  The funny thing was that he’d tell each of his daughters, be they plain or beautiful, that they were equally “generous to the eyes.”

  ***

  Margarita would remember that in the earliest days of her life, before her father would buy himself the Model T, they would go to town in a cabriolet, the simple carriage pulled along by their serene horse Hercules, who liked to eat apples and who inhabited the barn along with the swallows. They would ride the few miles of tranquil country road to Cobbleton, her mother holding her younger sister, Isabel, born in 1904, the plainest-looking baby in the world, with a broad, sunken-featured face, but with pretty eyes, wailing away, Mariela ever pregnant, with Maria or the musical twins, Olga and Jacqueline, perhaps, cuddling her daughter and looking off into the woods around them and saying, “Hmmm,” when asked by Margarita’s father, “Are you comfortable?”—the Irishman tugging on the reins and giving out a click of his tongue to encourage their horse, with its cocking ears, forward, the man hunkered over and brooding, a derby atop his head, his blue eyes straight on the road, his clothing smelling of a cherry blend of pipe tobacco and burned firewood.

  They’d make their way down past Farmer Tucker’s pond, where in the winters the girls and the other children of the town would learn to skate (and where poor Sarita, born in 1912, would fall into the frozen water through a crack in the sun-softened ice and develop the infection that almost took her from the family), and the roads known as Farmers’ Crossing, where, if you made a turn in either direction, you could ride past miles and miles of dairy and wheat and corn farms, before coming to the gentle glen, glorious in the spring (and she can’t help imposing this), where years later her first husband, then a new gentleman acquaintance, would nearly succeed in seducing her. Everywhere she looked along that road, there were farmhouses and silos, farmers working their fields, and dogs to bark protectively, and little stands and tables on which there were unattended baskets of apples and pears and fresh corn, each costing ten cents, which one would put in a tin cup: cows and horses grazing, the fields running in bands toward the horizon, and flocks of wild geese and wrens and crows spiraling in loops toward the sun.

  They’d come to Cobbleton, whose streets were lined with thick oaks, hickories, maples, butternuts, and locust willows, trees that in the summers provided much shade. Her Cuban mother never knew the names of those trees. To her, Margarita imagined, they were simply trees, great decorative and flower-boughed ornaments that sprouted out of the ground, shedding leaves in the autumn, covered with snow and knobby tubes of ice in the winter, and returning in the spring—elms (olmos), oaks (robles), and white-barked birch trees (abeduls), among others that she simply thought of as árboles, as in “Look at that pretty tree,” her mother, if she knew them, keeping the Spanish equivalents of their names to herself. And she was the same way about the names of flowers, happy when there was an equivalent, rosa for “rose,” but moving through their yard that would grow thick with claveles, violetas, azucenas, flamenquillas, hibiscos, and botones de oro, without knowing that in English they were called carnations, violets, lilies, marigolds, hibiscus, and butter-cups. Literate in Spanish, she simply could not relate the English names of things to her daughters; intelligent and secretly erudite, she, in her linguistic solitude, moved through this world tentatively: “Oh, look at that! “¿Cómo se llama eso en ingles?” to Margarita. “¿Cómo se llama un granero aquií?” And Margarita would tell her, curtly at times: “It’s called a barn here, Mama.” She would be happy to inform her mother of such things, but at the same time she would feel annoyed at having to relay such “common” information again and again, tired of being the teacher of her own mother.

  When they’d arrive in town, people, lining benches, were fanning themselves, gents moving in and out of the shadows, and the world, as in a film of that time, filled with a kind of oscillating light. Her father, or Poppy as she liked to call him, would head off to the Farmers’ Market to buy some chickens, which they would later carry home squawking in a wire cage and defeather over a bloody tub in the yard, and great bags of rice and potatoes and carrots or whatever they might need. In the post office, they would ask
if any letters from Cuba had arrived, by way of Havana and Tampa, and every few months one would, Mariela tearing open the envelope, always scented with the tropics and the perfume of blossoms, to receive the family news. Thus Mariela had learned about her father’s ailing health—he’d broken his hip a few years before while hoisting a Chinese lantern onto the eave of the porch—the birth of nieces and nephews, and the political situation, Cuba now being a republic, all summed up in her mother’s arthritic script; her own responses, meticulously written, conveying an ever-cheerful tone, for Mariela could never allow her parents to sense her own self-doubts about her new life.

  It was rare that anything came posted from Ireland, sometimes a note from Nelson’s old parish priest, with its little prayer pamphlets and news of life in the town, where nothing much seemed to happen (and he would shrug), and at Christmas the occasional greeting from an old friend who’d been informed of his whereabouts. Very little else from that distant place.

  They would stroll along Main Street, among the good citizens of the town, who by that time had gotten more or less used to the ever-pregnant Spanish lady whose aristocratic demeanor and tendency to silence in their presence set her apart. There was something else: though she was a beautiful woman who liked to dress well—she favored great plumed hats, which with vibrant creativity she would further adorn with beads, artificial birds, and flowers, and wear white gloves and carry a parasol to avoid direct contact with the sun (“It will turn your skin to parchment, children”)—her coloring, “Mediterranean,” “swarthy,” or “Mex,” as it was sometimes referred to in the yellow press of the day, made some people distrust her. And she displayed her religious inclination on her breast, wearing a large silver crucifix with a sullen Christ on a chain around her neck, an heirloom, which may have seemed ostentatious, for in that town religion was concealed within the heart and displayed only during evening prayers and in the pews of the Protestant churches.

  There was also a Catholic church in that town, with a handsome and youthful priest named Father Mancuso. Like a circuit judge of the Old West, on Sundays and Wednesdays he would travel from town to town, saying Mass and hearing confession. In the days when they had first arrived in Cobbleton, Nelson had taken her to this simple church, St. Anthony’s, tucked away some few blocks behind the Jewel Box Movie House on Main Street, where she heard an eleven o’clock Sunday Mass. And although she did not know enough English to pursue a confession, she returned on a Wednesday at four, joining a line of penitents and awaiting nervously to see if God would hear her confession in Spanish.

  “Padre, quiero confesame, pero no hablo inglés muy bien.” Then she added: “I want confess, but my English is no so good.”

  “Well then,” he asked, “parla italiano?”

  “¿Italiano?” and she thought about it and said: “Quizás un poquito.”

  “Allora, possiamo fare la confessione in italiano e espagnolo, si?”

  “Bien, padre.” And she began her confession and then asked, “¿Pero listed me entiende?”

  “Cosí cosí, un poco.” And when he laughed, it was the first time she’d heard laughter from such dark seclusion.

  “Ma, debemos provare tutto nel name del Signore.”

  Absolution for her sins, the cleanliness of her soul, and much happiness that she had someone new to talk with, even if she did not understand everything he had been saying.

  Those walks to town, to market, were mainly conducted in silence. Margarita could barely recall any conversations between her mother and father—just intimations: “Shall we go in here?” Or: “I have to go to the bank,” her father would say. Or her mother, attention caught by the sight of an item of interest, would happily point it out to the children: “What a beautiful hat that woman has on!” Or: “Look there at that little bird on the fence.” Or: “That horse over there is smiling at us!” But they would always greet passersby, men tipping their bowler hats and derbies, the ladies with their parasols and ripple-layered, out-of-fashion Empress Eugénie hairdos, nodding and occasionally smiling.

  Still, her mother was a fragile, changeable being. Whenever she and the children attended to a chore, and Nelson was elsewhere, and they entered one of the shops, like Collins’ General Store, their mother would become timid. The shopkeeper’s wife, addled by problems of health—people whispered that she suffered from a terrible rheumatism—was sometimes so severe that Margarita would think the thin-lipped porcelain cups, with their little Cupids adorning the sides, were shaking and the air would have (in memory) a singed smell, as if an electrical wire had been smoldering inside a wall. Quiet and sullen, Mariela might say, “Good afternoon,” but that was all. And she would begin to get nervous, standing in a corner of the shop and wanting to touch, but refusing, the things around her. Suddenly she would become tentative and the very thought of examining one of those delicate cups was enough to bring down the entire rack of tureens, bowls, and pitchers above them.

  Needing an intermediary, she would then begin to ask questions:

  “Margarita, ask the lady how much for that sack of flour.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “And, Margarita, would you please explain to her that last time we were here she did not give us the correct change.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Once she was out on the street again and free from nerve-racking scrutiny, either her gaiety would return or she would take on the air of an offended aristocrat—“Who does that woman think she is, looking at us in such a way!” Those looks—those expressions of opinion with a glance of the eyes—seemed terribly important to her. “That woman, the poor thing,” her mother would say, “is pure envy. ¿Sabes que es una envidiosa?”

  The daughters would nod.

  “She’s jealous of us because we are so pretty to look at? Yes? And because we are a happy family, while that woman suffers from a terrible solitude, and a state of solitude makes a person envy everyone else in the world.”

  “But, Mama,” Margarita would feel like asking her, “why are you so afraid?”

  “Whatever these people do, children, don’t forget the family is all that matters, that even though you have the name of O’Brien, my family name, Montez, is just as good as any other. Do you understand me?”

  (And she did, Margarita and her sisters regarding themselves not just as O’Briens but as Montez O’Briens, their mother’s family name slipping away from the more traditional Spanish order and going before their father’s: the utterance Montez O’Brien falling quite simply on their ears as more “American.”)

  Strolling, they’d pass the three-story red-brick building near the town square, Miss Peterson’s elementary school, which all the sisters and their brother would attend, with its proud forty-eight-star American flag on the front lawn, and then come to the ordinary white clapboard house, with its Georgian porch, where one could find the offices of both the Morality League and the Good Citizens’ Club. Sometimes they would make their way to the hotel and its dining room, where Nelson would treat the family to heaping bowls of ice cream, Mariela always ordering vanilla and Nelson, not prone to appetite, contenting himself in the days before Prohibition with a glass of whiskey or a schnapps. And she would remember that when she was older and at liberty to roam along the main street with her younger sisters, she liked to sit on the high front steps of the town hall, where President McKinley had once given a speech, and they’d be sucking on hard candies or eating ice-cream cones, ever careful not to stain their pretty dresses and content to watch the wagons and trucks and automobiles moving along the street. Those steps were especially good for watching parades on the Fourth of July, circus processions and the great displays that the drum-banging Democrats and Republicans would put on at election time. (And she would remember that on the Fourth of July her father would walk around with an American flag pin on the lapel of his jacket, samples of which he sold with other patriotic buttons outside his photography shop for a dime, the buttons stuck to a board on which he had placed velvet mounti
ng. He’d hoist an American flag over the doorway of his shop and, climbing a high ladder, tack a flag to the porch rim of the house, so that people could see this flag from the road, this great symbol of patriotism covering the east view windows of their parlor and kitchen and leaving that part of the house in a kind of perpetual shade. Proudly—for passersby always noticed it—he watched as a troop of soldiers in full uniform marched past the house, turned their heads, and gave the flag a salute. He saluted them back, his eyes squinting, as if caught by the light—the soldiers’ brilliance, their heroism, their manly virtues rising in a cloud of dust around them.) Sitting for hours sometimes, Margarita would never suspect or even begin to imagine that some years later she would be walking up those very same steps to a reception, blushing and laughing as she passed through a storm of tossed blossoms, a wedding bouquet in one hand and the skirt of a long, flower-embroidered bridal gown hoisted high in the other, her heart in love.