The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  — The Photography Studio —

  Often, they would accompany Nelson to his photography studio, where he would sit waiting for customers or he’d go see if someone had dropped off a note, requesting his services, through the mail slot of his door. He would sometimes find customers waiting inside—for this was an honest town, where few would steal—and he would go about his work methodically and with good cheer, removing his jacket and working in a vest, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbow. He’d light the room with a chemical flash (a flint spark igniting the magnesium and potassium chlorate), and with a press of a pneumatic bulb take the shot. Margarita, observing this from the bench he kept before the window, would notice on the faces of his subjects, male or female, expressions of timidity, arrogance, vanity, jealousy, love, anger, envy. And remembering now, it makes her smile, proud of how the years give validity to youthful insights, to feel that her opinions of certain of her father’s subjects seemed to be true.

  Mr. Henderson, a banker, natty in a tuxedo, after the fashion of the President, whose mouth seemed weak and quivering when he posed beside his gargantuan wife, or Dame Henderson, as she referred to herself, with her belly, wide as the doorway, sucked in and countless necklaces, shimmery and opaque, tinkling on her breast each time she took a breath to sit still—“And, Mr. O’Brien, or should I say Señor O’Brien, pleeeease do capture me in a flattering light”—this Mr. Henderson, whose eyes seemed so frightened, would, years later, try to drown his wife in their bathtub and suffer in the process, hitting his head against the rim, a concussion of such force that he would spend his last days on the porch of their house in a wheelchair, a bald man in pajamas, tended by a nurse, his lips quivering and his eyes welling up with tears, as he watched the life around him. There, too, against the backdrop of velvet, pleat-centered curtains, she had seen impossibly dim-minded husbands ordering their wives around, and always with a scowl, shaped like the coil of a light bulb, across their brows, growing more intense and cruel over the years, the young brides’ ankles, arms, and jowls thickening, and their once-innocent faces growing heavy with accumulated grief. One such couple, a certain Mr. and Mrs. Dietrich, farmers, seemed so chatty when they’d first come to her father’s studio in 1912 or 1913. He, with his proper suit, hair parted in the middle, and huge farmer’s hands, would say to her, “Now you sit here, my dear,” while she, a vision of happiness and feminine allure in a puff-shouldered dress, racy for those days, that she had sewn for herself, seemed delighted, squealing and making jokes about the prospect of having children—“Soon enough we’ll be filling the room, Mr. O’Brien, with kids.” Yet this same lady, over the years, gradually retreated into silence, her cheeriness and vervosity disappearing. (On the other hand, Margarita thinks, there were very happy couples who, year after year, returned to pose at the studio, their loving expressions unchanged, becoming ancient and quietly dramatic, like those very couples whom, in later life, she would see browsing through the library, the man never letting go of the woman’s hand.)

  Her father kept a lot of props around: a large Grecian-shaped vase in which he would stick ostrich plumes, a head of Venus, another of Julius Caesar, both on pedestals, which he had purchased in Philadelphia, and he had a number of backdrops, the most popular being a scene from “classical Arcadia” with centaurs and forest sylphs dancing about rolling hills, depicted after the fashion of romantic British landscapists of the nineteenth century, this canvas ordered from a scenario parlor on the Lower East Side of New York. Sometimes he used the daughters as models, posing them for fanciful shots in the spring, their hair garlanded with flowers, and in little tunics, tossing petals out of a basket as they danced about a Maypole—this for a calendar which he would print. On another occasion, he had posed them with umbrellas against an Oriental landscape, trees in the distance laden with snow, again for a calendar, and for aesthetic interests, the daughters supposed. He also took them to some pretty spots high in the countryside, looking west over the Susquehanna, and to isolated waterfalls that sent up rainbowed mists, his daughters in their proper lace dresses spread out on rocks, parasols open behind them, the white water flowing around them, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. Or they would go to a lake, where the girls could pull up their skirts and go wading in their bloomers in the water. So many other shots, his daughters growing, as it were, before his eyes: for example, the first time she could recall seeing snow, when the sisters huddled in a sleigh, whiteness everywhere, and he had taken their photograph in what seemed like the North Pole; and there had been the time, speaking of winter, when he had bought them ice skates and taken them over to Farmer Tucker’s pond, where she and Isabel and Maria tried to navigate the blue sheen of ice, the snow falling around them like blossoms, all of them slipping, their bottoms aching, shouting out in fun. And what about the Christmas season during her childhood, when life seemed so sweet—the way life was conveyed in certain books and in love poems and gooey valentines—the shops on Main Street brilliant with decorations and a big tree put up in the square, strung with candles and antique-looking ornaments. Photographs, too, of the kids mounted on horses or on dromedaries at the traveling circus, or eating blueberry pie at a county-fair pie-eating contest, lips blue, teeth clotted with blueberry seeds, breath sweet with sugar, stomachs processing pie into good American waste; or posed in the field, the sisters pigtailed and alert, watching the autumnal migration of birds heading south (to Cuba?), or watching the sunset, the moon later glowing over a blue-tinged field.

  (He’d even traveled to the site of a great coal-mine disaster—was it the Darr Mine disaster, Margarita wonders. There in 1909 he gave away medicine and blankets and set up his camera, returning to Cobbleton desolate but vaguely elated, with dozens of photographs of sadsouled, twisted-spine, begrieved men with lantern caps—shadows swirling like moths around them—laid out in the mud and on planks and stretchers, expressions gnarled, faces blackened, limbs slack, hands hanging down into the dark; and he’d spent a day developing the plates, appraised them for their humanity, and then put them into boxes that he’d store in a shed.)

  In fact, Nelson O’Brien not only made photographs of his daughters, but from time to time, when the fancy struck him, he would rent a moving-picture camera and for the hell of it, and because he was a lover of gadgets (in the closets in his house, in his photography studio, and in the theater, there were piles of camera, machine, and movie-equipment catalogues) and, as always, had artistic pretensions, fancying himself a director, make home movies of his daughters at play, which he would show, projecting the developed film against the side of the house on late summer evenings—the sisters moving through the world in an almost mannequin-like fashion as if their limbs were joined by screws and hinges. And horsing around, director O’Brien had filmed a few short, five-minute dramas, scenes of which he had taken out of a book of plays about early Pilgrim life in America (all these films gone now forever).

  On sunny days, her father, Nelson O’Brien, would sometimes pose his subjects across the street in the town square, where there was an equestrian statue of a Revolutionary hero: he with colonial flag raised and the horse’s bronze hoofs high in the air. Or he would look for a garden-like spot, sometimes taking his subjects to a farmer’s field where the light fell kindly through the trees and where flowers seemed to be everywhere.

  ***

  Now: the saloon, a pianola’s ragtime melody floating out through its doors into the world, and she would sense that establishment’s tug on her father, who would sometimes slip inside for a quick mug of beer. On one of those days, after a tormented night of sleep when he had his sad dreams about Ireland and he had dallied in the saloon too long, Mariela, impatient about waiting outside in the summer heat, marched in with the children, passed the “No Ladies Please” sign with its curly script on the wall, and demanded in quickly flashing Spanish that he reassume his paternal responsibilities. He reacted by wiping some froth from his mouth, and, his face turned all red, told her, in a
Spanish that he now rarely used (except, Margarita supposed, during moments of intimacy, for sometimes she would hear his deep-timbred and slightly brogued Spanish cutting through the silence of a country night, as he would tell his wife, gasping, breathing heavily, “Ay, siempre eres linda,” and “Ay, mujer, mi mujer”), to please mind her business and not embarrass him in front of the men.

  During such incidents, when he would feel humiliated—there would be others—he’d walk quickly ahead, leaving them all behind, and, mounting the carriage, or later his automobile, he’d ride away, disappearing along one of the country roads, only to turn up an hour or so later, having regained his composure, to collect his family and bring them back to the house.

  ***

  She’d also remember the presence of spittoons and chamber pots in the corners of the rooms, the annual spring visits by a crew of men who would arrive with shovels and kerchiefs over their faces to dig out the murky content of the outhouse and cart it away for use in the fields. She would remember the grand day in 1916 when the plumbers came and installed a modern water closet and faucet-run bathtub in the room off the kitchen. Then another day when the electrical lines were run out from town and single plug sockets were set in the walls, and the appearance of spiral-corded lamps—light filling the rooms and an atmosphere of modernity entering their lives. What else?

  That and many things, and then the late afternoon, when she would hear about the aviator again.

  — The Jewel Box Movie House—and Nelson’s Commercial Trade

  Although she’d often been her father’s companion on his treks about the county, she felt a special connection to the Jewel Box Movie House, as she considered herself part of its history and had been ten years old when the idea of opening that theater—back in 1912—had first occurred to him. Up to that time, their Poppy had been supporting the family through his on-and-off photography trade, with which he could make a living—his wages supplemented by some savings from the old Irish inheritance which had brought him to America in the first place (that and a wish for adventure), and from the occasional odd jobs he would take here and there. In those days, when he was not going about in the Model T with his new celluloid camera with drop-leaf shutter, taking portraits (or, as he preferred, with his reliable camera of old), he depended on the commissions he earned as a traveling peddler of goods for the great Hemmings Co. of Chicago, a position he had acquired after reading a recruitment ad in a Philadelphia newspaper, dated November 12, 1908: “Wanted: Men of Vision! Men with Unstoppable Goals! Men with Unbreachable Ambitions! Men with a Love of Commerce and Unstinting Determination! To SELL the GREATEST and UNCONTESTABLY durable goods AVAILABLE to the common CONSUMER in AMERICA!”

  He had written a letter (“Dear Sirs, I am the sole supporter of a growing household, of Irish inclination, who, having a sound profession in the photography trade, wishes to supplement his income. I have no experience selling goods, man to man, but. I come from a family of merchants in Ireland, and I am certain that, whatever your needs might be, I can fulfill them”). And when they had not responded, he had left his wife and five daughters (Margarita, Isabel, Maria, and the twins, Olga and Jacqueline) and taken a train out to Chicago to the offices of the company, where he obtained a brief interview with an officer, securing, with his earnestness and gentlemanly courtesy, an appointment to be the regional sales representative in the districts surrounding Cobbleton, where he earned ten and a half cents on every dollar’s worth of sales. He was destined, it seemed, to a connection with black trunks, for in a trunk similar to the one in which he carted about his photography equipment he carried samples of his company’s goods in the back of a wagon or in his Model T, traveling from town to town and farm to farm, trying to persuade hard-pressed customers—farmers and torpid factory and mill workers—to buy everything from animal-footed stoves to Spanish fans, all of which could be ordered from a fabulous ten-thousand-items catalogue whose proud cover was emblazoned with an American eagle and American flags, stars spiraling everywhere. Back then, he also sold all kinds of potions and pills: kidney and liver pills, pills to ease constipation and pills for troubled hearts, nerve pills intended to strengthen men afflicted by “femininely inclined emotions”; remedies for diarrhea, colic, malaria, bronchitis, asthma, croup, mumps and pleurisy; a liniment called Angel Oil that was composed of “vegetable oils and electricity,” and another item named Death to Microbes. Most popular was a medicinal called Larson’s Vegetable Cure for Female Weakness, which was purported to do away with ailments specific to women: inflammation, ulceration and falling of the womb, languor, nausea and deeply felt feminine fear; it also did away with hysterics, sparks before the eyes, dread of impending evil, shortened sleep, dizziness, palpitation of the heart, depressed spirits, and countless other ailments associated in those days with the monthly cycle, which tended to make women weep.

  She had to give her Poppy credit, for he was always hatching schemes to make money. (One of his more practical and profitable ideas came to him in 1908, when there were forty-six states in the Union. That year he had bought some stock in the American Flag Company, so that when two states were added in 1910, he quadrupled his original investment.)

  But it had been in 1912 that her father decided one day to open a movie house, the idea coming to him during a visit with an old friend from his days in Cuba. There had been a rare trip to New York City that year, a high-class outing during which Nelson tried to provide his wife with opportunities to take in culture. Nelson had initiated the journey because of Mariela’s low spirits—she would sometimes pass days in silence—and Margarita and Isabel had accompanied them. On that visit they had gone to the Metropolitan Opera House and heard Enrico Caruso singing the role of the Duke in Rigoletto, and in the ballroom of the Waldorf they had watched the Russian dancer Pavlova perform. On other days they passed their time in the penny arcades of Times Square, where, with a derby tipped over his brow, Nelson O’Brien peered through the eyepiece of nickelodeon machines. They walked, the females lifting the hems of their dresses when crossing the dung-splattered streets, Nelson with his trouser cuffs rolled up and his tripod and folding-bellows-type camera in his arms (Margarita and Isabel playing with an Eastman Brownie camera, whose existence Nelson accepted—now everyone could take a photograph, even children—but secretly feared). They saw automobiles on Fifth Avenue, mainly Model Ts, and an endless succession of horse-drawn coal, ice, milk, fruit, and pots-and-pans wagons. Calliopes on the street corners, organ-grinders and their monkeys (“Be careful,” their Poppy would say. “Them little beasts’ll pick your pockets clean”). Uptown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they saw such things as they had never seen before: mummies and ancient sarcophagi. They saw Roman statuary and Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front. They saw paintings by the artists of the Flemish school, by the American naturalists, by Spaniards like Madrazo and Alvarez. They saw Delaroche’s Napoleon. Down at Coney Island, Nelson blushed at the sight of a belly dancer named Abdullah’s Loveliest Daughter, and they rode on carousels and Ferris wheels. They also witnessed an aviation display—three bi-wing planes flying in formation, making loops over the clouds—the first such display any of them had ever seen. (Ah, the aviator!) For the sake of promotion, three pianists, lined up in a row, were playing popular tunes. Back in Manhattan, they were among the crowds as a suffragette parade, proud ranks of women in flower-brimmed bonnets, marched up Fifth Avenue with arms joined, one of these ladies handing little Margarita a feminist rose. Then they went to a movie house where they saw some cowboy films, Mariela leaning over and asking Nelson to verify her own translation of titles like “The Posse advanced upon the desperadoes.”

  They stayed with a man in the movie business named Harrington, a tall cowboy-like fellow whom Nelson had befriended years before during the Spanish-American War in Cuba. His residence was on Gramercy Park, a many-roomed flat with a view of the private green, his long hallway filled with the souvenirs and mementos of his travels. Harrington, resplendent
in pajamas and a fur-collar robe, was the head of a film outfit in New Jersey and lived in the company of a young, pretty girl, who, appearing in a navy-blue dress, cut high at the knees, seemed very anxious to please him—Margarita remembered that.

  The two men hadn’t seen each other for years, and reunited, they had embraced and were soon drinking champagne, the children served glasses of chocolate and soda by a gloomy manservant. Mariela sipped, taking in their conversation and trying to understand it, while Harrington, forwarding his ideas, regarded Mariela with a gallant and patronizing attitude, the men speaking in English.

  “My friend,” Harrington had said to Margarita’s father, “it’s a pleasure to see you again, both of you!” (Toast.) “And I hope,” he added, nodding to Nelson, “that you will take my advice this evening: I’m telling you, my boy, there’s money to be made in the movie-exhibition business.”

  That evening, they dined in a German restaurant on Fourteenth Street where Mariela found the food too saucy and the waiters brazen. But she enjoyed the playing of the Viennese waltzes and the pom-pom rhythms of the orchestra. Out on the dance floor and under the light of an ornate chandelier they danced and for the first time she learned, in the arms of the immense and towering Harrington, some American steps—first the turkey trot, and another called the grizzly bear.

  It was after that journey that Nelson decided he would one day buy or rent the old Jewel Box Theater, which opened its doors only when traveling theatrical companies came to town. (It was at the Jewel Box that Nelson and Mariela saw a production of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, put on by the Dublin Dramatists Society, then on a tour of the country. Margarita could remember her father’s pleasure in hearing the Irish actors performing, their rolling r’s, the clipped cut of their sentences, their melodies unfolding.)