Every night seemed to go the same way: with her husband, Lester, elegant in his British silk smoking jacket, suave and so debonair while pouring out from a decanter a measure of good Napoleon brandy which he had gotten through connections in New York, or from his family’s own labyrinthine wine cellars. (Oh, yes, the exquisiteness of wealth—of dining with his family in their many-roomed house in Philadelphia, servants waiting on them, butlers to open the door, the plates before them thick with creamy French truffle-flavored dishes, ever so delicately chewed and properly swallowed and later, not an hour later sometimes, elegantly expelled through the rear seam of Mother Thompson’s silk gown, in the form of a slow, creeping wind, ever redolent of the swine-haunted grounds of Provence.) Eyebrows high, hair slicked back and parted in the middle, with a smartly raised crescent in the manner of Esquire fellows, he would sip from his little snifter, an expression across his face of sublime satisfaction, such as he had when Margarita straddled him on the bed. He was always wanting more and was rarely satisfied with her efforts to please him. He wanted to hear her scream and to rock on him as if he were a wild horse, and to sing out the praises of his slightly bent, hook-headed armature, and to swirl, hips wriggling, as if she had been caught by a whirlpool, and to wince and shake her head and—he liked this especially—to scream out “Dios mío! Dios mío!” in Spanish, even if she was not having the vivid orgasms he imagined: “Yes, yes, my darling!” He got just about as much satisfaction from those little sniftersful of 1898 Napoleon brandy as from her, and on many a night when he was away and she did not sit waiting for him as instructed, he would, to his later regret, punch her in the higher reaches of her thighs, leaving marks that no one could see. Then, instead of just sitting there in her silk robe, her body rubbed with oil and a French perfume, awaiting his pleasure, she would sometimes feel tempted to empty his bottle of brandy into the sink. Or else she might sit reading books, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina being two of her favorites, and keep her head filled with thoughts of her husband’s magnificent, penetrating, sperm-rich, gargantuan, life-giving, woman-splitting, spine-pounding member. (She had always been able to reach a climax by herself, through the manipulation of one of her sinful parts—in the toilet, her clitoris agitated from the heat of the day or a horse ride through the country, her body writhing from the touch of a single finger, or unwillingly, during the sweetest dreams, when she seemed to flow to that one point of her body and she would grind into the mattress until Isabel awakened and, shaking her in the darkness, would ask, “Girl, what are you doing, what’s wrong, are you in pain?” Or else Isabel, hearing her and knowing what was going on, would ignore her, and she would squirm until her body splintered into a hundred and twenty-two pieces, digits, bones, loins, tendons, muscles, organs, veins, and body parts exploding out of her in a warm gush of light and imploding back in—what dreams those were, because, while having them, she became the lover of her own body; men were shadows.)
And though she could reach a climax with her husband, she did so despite him, and not because of him: she would suspend judgment and think of only one thing, to get it over with, to concentrate and concentrate on the fleshly tube which at a certain angle seemed hooked and brushed ever so pleasantly against her. But she wouldn’t open her eyes, or, seeing his face, she would have to start all over again.
— Miss Covington —
The subject of Miss Covington would make all the sisters—particularly Margarita—laugh. By the standards of the day, Miss Zelinda, as her mother sometimes called her, was an unusual woman, a pesky-nosed troublemaker as far as men were concerned, for she had long been a devotee of the women’s rights movement. Their mother’s old friend, she was one of the first and only American ladies Mariela had befriended in that town back in the days when she first arrived in Cobbleton. An occasional and welcome visitor in the house, she had met Mariela in the General Store in 1904 while waiting out a particularly fierce rainstorm. Curious about the pregnant and beautiful young woman with the slight look of apprehension about her, Miss Covington had asked her in Spanish: “Aren’t you the photographer’s wife? The one from Cuba?”—and since that day, their friendship had flowered, Miss Covington becoming Mariela’s most distinguished American friend and a sometime confidante: “Do you think that it’s worthwhile for my daughter Margarita to go off to a finishing school?” “I want to buy my husband a special case in which he might keep his photographs. Have you any idea where I might find one?” “Zelinda,” for that was her given name, “yesterday little Marta woke up with the croup, but she doesn’t improve with the lemon and honey. What else can I give her?” In memory, her face was shaped like an onion bulb, her head was widow-peaked, with a large hooked nose, intense eyes, jutting chin. An unimaginably homely but elegant lady of middle age in a veiled hat and fur-collar coat, she was very much a nineteenth-century apparition, breaking into pieces and jutting movements, as if she were a character in a silent movie. She lived in a big white clapboard house and would visit the family at least once a week to practice her Spanish, a language she had studied formally at Vassar (along with French, Italian, and the banjo, as she was a member of Adella Prentiss’s banjo club) and had honed during occasional journeys to Madrid and Salamanca over the years. In the spring and in good weather, she would sit with Mariela on the porch, sipping lemonade, and, with a newspaper in hand, read and translate articles for her, and the ladies would converse in Spanish, the older woman teaching Mariela snippets of French and touching on many things, from dietary habits—she was an advocate of what today would be called a holistic approach to medicine and diet—to learned talk about astronomy, enchanting to Mariela’s poetic heart and a natural subject to the worldly Miss Covington, whose father, a wealthy firearms manufacturer, had been a member of the New York Astronomical Society. 1910 had been one of the best years for such musings, for Halley’s comet had lingered for months in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, inspiring in Mariela much secret poetry and affecting with its electrodynamic impulses the inner workings not only of the heart and imagination but of clocks and most mechanical devices. And Zelinda would often talk about how women were denied too much in this life and how she could not understand why a woman of Mariela’s intelligence put up with the drudgery of child-rearing and housework, and why didn’t Mariela make use of her many talents—say, becoming a painter, a portraitist, or a landscape artist, instead of painting jars—or why was she not passing her days before a desk, writing poetry in earnest. (From time to time Mariela, bursting with pride over the mellifluousness of a line, would be tempted to share it with Miss Covington.) It would have been an odd relationship to predict, as Miss Covington, at first sight, seemed a stuffy, pretentious, cold, and off-putting woman, typical of the high-rumped ladies who had their own exclusive club in town—except that she did not have much use for their snobbery and was at heart, like most of those ladies, a kindly person.
Despite the chilliness of her outward demeanor, Miss Covington, in fact, had become something of a great-aunt to the family, and a fine example of womanly behavior to the sisters. She had never married or been in the throes of a romance (at least, that’s what their mother said), yet she was, all the same, happy. A cultivated woman, she highly advocated female independence; Margarita would remember those cheery afternoons when Miss Covington would startle the members of the Ladies’ Society by bringing Mariela and the older sisters to tea and crumpets and strudel, the ladies a little put off by the family’s sometimes exuberant behavior. A woman of extremes, Mariela could carry herself with a quiet dignity, while at other times, feeling nervous, she would speak rapidly in a loud voice, the stolid, carpeted quiet of the room—the tick and snap of popping firewood aside—shattered by her and her daughters’ laughter. Certain women in the club would look up from their sewing, magazine reading, darning, silhouette-making, and glare at them, or clear their throats or shake their heads, as if Mariela had been a hillbilly or a savage dancing to a jig or war song atop a table.
To help
prepare the family for the vicissitudes of female experience, Miss Covington would drift into recollections of her encounters with great women and stories about the challenges they had had to overcome during their lives. Women like the eminent physician Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, whom she knew from the New York Consumers’ League, a suffragette society of which Miss Covington had been a member. “Though she was an ordinary-looking woman,” Miss Covington would one day be quoted in a newspaper obituary, “Dr. Putnam Jacobi was a powerful human being who changed by dint of will the preconception most prevalent in her time, that a female doctor could never be more than a glorified midwife.”
And: “Have I told you about the opera singer Louise Homer? The first time I saw her, she was singing the role of Maddalena in Rigoletto with the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso’s debut. And I have seen her in many roles since.” And she would recount to them, the musical sisters particularly enraptured: “Dalila in Samson et Dalila, Amneris in Aïda, Venus in Tannhäuser, Fricka in Das Rheingold, and Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice,” and on and on. Her stories told of social reformers—“Have you ever heard of Emma Goldman?” their heads shaking no. “Well, you will now.” Breaking into Spanish from time to time, she’d explain Emma Goldman’s opinions on the notion of parity in romantic love between a man and a woman, or “free love,” as it was called in the press. And she’d state her opinions that women were not simple “sex commodities” destined to a life in the kitchen and in the bedroom, and she spoke about birth control, among many other ideas, for the subject of women’s rights was far-reaching. And she’d try to explain concepts of individuality, rights, and empowerment, and how there were many women—journalists, writers, painters and musicians, inventors, scientists—ready to take their rightful places in society. They would listen politely, trying to understand, their mother judging her talk as the rantings of a kindly but lonely old maid, passing her time on a sunny afternoon having tea with friends in a ladies’ club and speaking about a world in which Mariela believed she would never live. All that, many years ago.
— Visits —
During the early days of Margarita’s marriage, Miss Covington would make it a point of visiting the young bride in her grand new house once or twice a week, to have tea and talk, so that Margarita would not forget her. They’d sit, and fidgeting, Margarita would feel a little nervous in Miss Covington’s presence, as her husband, Lester, in those days gave her everything and she was wary of seeming spoiled. She no longer had to work and, if she so liked, could spend her free time reading books, as long as Lester was not around; she could pass her days becoming “educated” and informed, and yet, when Miss Covington came to see her, she felt vaguely embarrassed—as if, finding happiness with a man, she had violated one of Miss Covington’s rules about being a woman.
Setting teacup upon saucer, Miss Covington would look around and tell Margarita: “Well, it all seems very nice. You’ve done quite well for yourself. Your husband—I’ve met him a few times—seems a very good man. But don’t be deceived, for courtesy in a man is not everything.”
On one of those afternoons, she, dry and unromantic, confided a story to Margarita about a past love.
“I once had a man in my life—a decent fellow who used to come to our college dances. A formal chap, quite educated, a law student, and handsome. What he saw in me, I don’t know. I was homely as a young girl, but very alive, and at this dance he had been looking around for someone pretty: I had so many sorority sisters who were beautiful, I can’t tell you, but for some reason he came up to me, and soon enough we were out on the dance floor, and I can tell you that when he pressed his handsome face against mine I was elated. But I did not believe that he liked me for myself. My family was wealthy, and so I thought that he was interested in me because of our standing. We danced all night and I made nothing of it, but at the end of that night he asked me out; the next week we went rowboating, listened to music from some distant pavilion, and I had the impression that he wanted to kiss me. I was not pretty, but I used to have a good figure, and I can remember that he caressed my hand. But, when he leaned forward to kiss me, his eyes would be closed. Not just when he was kissing me, but as he was coming toward me, as if he didn’t really want to look at my face. What does that matter. Well, I’d never had a man touch me before, and frankly I liked it. We were boating on a little lake, and there was a small island where he took me, and one night, lulled by the stars and the teary-eyed moon and every dream I’d ever had about love, I gave myself to him.”
“Gave yourself?”
“Yes, gave myself, and in 1888. I would be lying to you if I told you he wasn’t splendid. I lost myself in him. I became a quivering young girl, and in time I became pregnant. Do you know what happened?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m leading to the dirt. He was engaged to someone else, and when I told him that I was carrying his child, he denied it. Heartbroken, I resolved myself to bring the child to term. My family was not happy. My father, straitlaced and proper, had suggested the intervention of a doctor, but I refused. My parents would not allow me to leave the house by day and forced me to wear a wedding ring, though I wasn’t engaged. Rumors circulated, I lost a lot of friends, and yet, when I was carrying that baby, I felt good. I was happy for a long time. And then I miscarried.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’ve told you this—and even your mother doesn’t know—because I know what it’s like to be in love.” Then: “You are in love, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then I think you shouldn’t look so unhappy.”
— On the Veranda —
He’d taken care of her, she’d remember. Each month Lester gave Margarita a fifty-dollar allowance for clothing (for hours she would sit looking through the fashion magazines). He’d praise her (“You look quite nice in that little thing, my darling”), and from time to time, returning from a business trip to New York, he would present her with a string of pearls or a fancy silk scarf that he’d bought at one of the nicer shops in that city. And although on some days she felt like a heroine of a silent film, moving through the shadows and demurely and sometimes cynically contemplating before the mirror her “new life” as Mrs. Thompson, she took a squeamish pride in pleasing him. Whenever they’d drive to another town for a night out in some smoky speakeasy where he could be anonymous, she’d put on the dog for him—trampy and loose, in tight, tassel-hemmed skirts and sleeveless, nearly transparent blouses sans brassiere or camisole or corset, so that when she danced the Charleston she resembled one of those flappers that ministers carried on about in church. They would find a little corner table and sit drinking together till all hours of the night, listening to Dixieland jazz improvisations. (My God, but in those days the lushness of the music and the ease with which the musicians played, their prolonged, screaming notes cutting through her, made her envious of their creativity. Some lean black fellow would stand in front of the little orchestra, moving his fingers swiftly along the valve board of his instrument, playing notes that seemed to go all over the place, working pleasingly upon the ear, fitting in around the chords that the other musicians were playing, compositions with names like “The Cakewalk Blues” and “The Late June Shuffle.”) Admiring this music, feeling a kind of pleasure in her brow—she slipping her fingers under the brim of her cloche cap to rub her scalp—Margarita would swear that she herself was playing, much in the same way she imagined herself singing with a celestial voice whenever one of her musical sisters would get up before a crowd, or felt she had a poetic bent of mind whenever her mother, in the middle of the day, would stop to scribble down a verse, or when she would imagine being as beautiful as her most beautiful sister, Helen. Or as saintly as Father Mancuso, or as strong as Miss Covington, or as delighted by life as that old farmer who used to call to her from his horse and carriage on the road and declare nature the good work of the Lord. She would listen, wondering about her own abilities, for, during her life with her husband, her o
wn bookishness had slowly begun to fade, the pleasures of her introspection giving way to the notion of being a good and courtly wife.
She’d wear lots of jewelry, some real, some costume—even a jingly ankle bracelet, which was a craze among the college girls of the day, though she wasn’t one, a bracelet that he’d given her while they were sitting at one of those tables: “This is so that I can hear you when you walk toward me.” She’d sit beside him, his hand under her skirt, playing around with the snap of her garters, enjoying the music and the fact that she was now out in the world, a grown woman with her own husband. And yet she’d wish that her sisters could see her, take in some of the exotic atmosphere, sometimes shuddering from their absence, and as nice as things seemed to be—with Lester, feeling bawdy, putting her hand on his trousers pocket and asking her, “What do you think I’ve got in there?”—looking over at the door and wishing she did not feel, despite his presence, so alone.
Sometimes, groggy from bootleg gin, she would allow her head to fall back, so that in the midst of a slow dance Lester, with his hands braced behind her, would ask “Are you okay?” And she would dream about falling back, not on the coarseness of a dance floor, but back into the confounding, promising, yet more blissful state of the innocence of her youth.
(Having these thoughts many, many years later, she could not help but laugh, thinking about the days when the notion of a man placing his hands on her body seemed scandalously sinful, when she would pray at night to God, as her mother had taught her, her knees aching on the floor, for forgiveness for having such thoughts, and yet always fantasizing about love and how glorious the idea of love had seemed, with its promise of eternal happiness.)
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 18