The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  For their society outings, she’d dress more elegantly, in a formal gown and in a pearl-beaded cloche cap with a plume on the brim, her hair cut fashionably short, to enter rooms thick with prideful, advantaged people—those dames and gentlemen she’d read about in the newspapers coming back to her again (Mr. & Mrs. Edward Simpson, Mr. & Mrs. Commingworth, Mr. & Mrs. Downing).

  These were formal evenings, with waiters and butlers and rushing housemaids with platters of hors d’oeuvres and, despite Prohibition, glasses of champagne and wine from the family’s cellar. She would carry a Spanish fan, a gift from her mother, and on the arm of her husband, train behind her, make her way through the celebrants, nodding, smiling, and, when the moment arose, lifting fan before face to peer coquettishly, humbly, deferentially out into the world. Sometimes, when a photographer would turn up, she would linger about, sitting on a couch, and quite contentedly puff on a cigarette in a long holder, watching him at work. She might walk over, offering assistance, but because she was a “high-society girl” and married to a man of importance, the photographer would do his best to keep her away. Once, she would remember, a photographer, fumbling through his equipment searching for a lens, had asked her to help; and with the joy that came when she thought about her father, she had done so.

  Her husband, Lester Thompson, would get through those evenings by drinking large quantities of wine, so that by the time they would sit for the meal he would have loosened his cravat and a general disdain would creep into his expression. Sometimes, at the table, there would be a member of European royalty who’d happened to have made the acquaintance of one of the Thompsons in Europe, or there might be some old man’s mistress, a little too tipsy from the champagne, or “bubbly,” as Lester would call it, throwing a fit, or becoming too intimate and planting kisses on the ear of a red-faced dignitary, or, as it happened in 1926, they would be graced by the presence of a truly remarkable personage, the movie actor Buster Keaton, a shy, gnarly-faced man with soulful eyes, measured and pensive, who was on a promotional tour of the Middle American cities and had been invited to the dinner by the big-time owner of a Philadelphia movie-house chain. She would remember that he was wearing a tuxedo with bow tie and that she sat exactly four people across from Mr. Keaton and that from time to time he would take a black olive from a bowl before him and, when he thought no one was looking, pop it discreetly into his mouth. When he chewed, his face was a stoic mask, but his ears wriggled. He was so famous that her skin tingled at the thought of him, and although she had tried to concentrate on the meal itself, she could not resist a fantasy about bringing Mr. Keaton to visit her own family (her father, Nelson O’Brien, who often showed Mr. Keaton’s films, stricken with joy at his presence, and everybody much impressed with her progress in the world).

  Slipping off to the veranda, she and Lester would talk.

  “You look at me, Meggie”—that’s what he called her—“and you’d think that everything is okay, but the truth is, they’re all sons of bitches.”

  “Oh, but you shouldn’t say that about your own mother and her friends.”

  “No, I’m telling you, they’re like octopuses gobbling everything up around them, and what they want is to be amused and told that they’re really living on top of the world. But see”—and he would hold out his glass and Margarita, assigned the bottle of wine, would pour—“they don’t know about the purity and happiness of us pure souls. See, they have all this money. What’s money, I ask you, but an intermediary? Yes, intermediary. What they want with this money is to buy themselves…” “But, Lester—”

  “…something like substance. You know that little bronze vase in the other room? Cost my mother five thousand dollars in Paris, enough for most people to live well on for a year or two, and, oh, my God, it’s this Frenchy Napoleonic thing. I mean, it belonged to Napoleon, which is very interesting, but what does it have to do with this big mortuary of a house? So my mother feels she’s as good as Napoleon? Probably the guy didn’t even notice the goddamned thing, let alone hold it in his hands. What does it have to do with her? Nothing, doesn’t that stand to reason? And it’s as if—more, please, s’il vous plaît—by having this thing she’s somehow better, when it means nothing at all.”

  Moody, he would carry on about the trappings of his life, unhappily so, as if he had been raised in the worst kind of slum and impoverished—not from want of things, but from want of simple affection. And though people at these gatherings seemed civil enough, on balance, general courtesies observed and the details of travel and business dealings conveyed, these evenings were marked by such a chilliness of emotion that when Margarita would sometimes dream about the expansive-ness of the Thompson mansion with its marble staircases and Tiffany windows and enormous chandeliers and tables lit by so many candelabra the heat would seem oppressive, she envisioned a lifeless and dark house, its halls, through which she would wander, melancholic and sad, speaking of the terrible desolation of Lester’s past. And his face would contort with bitterness—“I don’t like them very much,” he would say about his own parents—but she always found herself defending them, though she did not know them well, and when she did, he’d become angry. “You don’t know what it was like,” he’d tell her. “If you’d been raised ever so properly by tutors who’d rapped your knuckles for failing to properly conjugate a Latin verb, if you’d had a father who was a former collegiate boxing champion who would force you to put on a pair of gloves and go a few rounds so that you would be toughened up, if you’d spent many an afternoon locked up in a closet by a governess who did not like to hear you crying…”

  “But, Lester…”

  “Then you’d be a little bitter, too. I could go on. Maybe you think I’m crazy, my love. Maybe you look at me and figure that because I’ve had everything that I’m a happy man. Have I ever told you that I haven’t a single memory of my mother hugging me? Or that, when we were in Venice with my rich family when I was a little boy and we were floating along the canals, I would see some Italian mother holding her little baby at a window and I would want to jump off the goddamned gondola, I was so starved for love…”

  “But, Lester…”

  “And you don’t know a thing about my love in France. For once in my life I was a happy man. I’d hang around this little restaurant with a chum on the rue de Seine, a cozy little joint where you could sit among the Parisians and have the feast of your life, and some good wine, too, for pennies. Well, there were always street minstrels around, musicians who would barge in, gypsy-looking people, the women among them in their ruffled dresses and pushed-up busts, singing and dancing for us and playing music, and the next thing you’d know, you’d be up on your feet dancing, all of us, drunk and happy and having fun. That’s where I met Jeannette and, my God, she was one of the sweetest ladies I’d ever known in my life. I spent nearly every night with her for two months, and I fell so in love with her I can’t stand what happened, which was that one night I got a little too drunk and felt some bad spirit entering me, and to let her know just what I had felt most of my life I began to slap her around, this delicate and beautiful woman, dark like you and…”

  “Lester, please…”

  “I know that maybe you don’t want to hear this, but I’m telling you so there won’t be secrets between us. I don’t know what came over me—it was like being caught in a nightmare when you look in a mirror and find out that all your teeth are rotted—but after that, I never saw her again, as much as I walked the streets of Paris looking for her.”

  “Oh, Lester, you’re a good man, but very drunk.”

  And she embraced him, patting his back and saying, “Don’t be worried, my love. You now have me.”

  ***

  They’d drive back to Cobbleton late at night, her knees trembling, Lester drunk, the Packard swerving along the roads. She would thank God when they’d made it back to their house. Then she would go through the business of putting him to bed, the man sometimes falling asleep as soon as his head rested on
the pillows, or else, his manliness aroused, he’d pull her onto the bed. When he was a little too far gone, even though Margarita by that time had worked out a system, knowing his body well, which squeezes, tugs, licks would bring him around most quickly, the woman working hard to facilitate his release, their lovemaking would seem endless, the man sometimes going at her for hours. She would want to give up but never did, always showing him more affection than he perhaps deserved—for he would hardly ever remember it—and always believing that she in her kindness to him would somehow help to ease his sadness. In the spirit of her own mother, she attended to him without complaint, feeling that, as his wife, she could do no less.

  And yet in the middle of those acts of love a profound sadness would twist through her body—she would first feel overcome with pity for the man and take much solace in his moans of pleasure, and then a kind of nostalgia would come over her and she would feel truly-amazed that, just a few years before, she had felt mischievous but innocent and much interested in the possibilities of life, which had seemed endless. She would close her eyes and remember the afternoon when the handsome aviator had rested in their house, and that even though she had gotten sick from that journey through the air, for a few moments the anticipation of that flight had made her giddy with happiness. And she would think, more sadly, that she had taken much for granted in the days when she lived in that house. What a pleasure it would be to sit again with her mother on the porch of the house at night to see if by chance a falling meteor might streak through the sky, or to hear her father’s footsteps in the hall or even to put up again with all the laundry and the business of looking after her sisters, to be mad for a few moments of peace when she might sit by herself with one of those books, to be further driven insane by the happy chaos of the meals, when she would swear to herself that, even though she was one of many, she was her own person—confusing such familial love with some kind of perpetual confinement.

  — First Reunion: A Son Is Born —

  On a Sunday morning in the late summer of 1925, the fourteen sisters gathered in the parlor of their crowded house to get a look at the boy who had finally been born into the family, the Montez O’Briens: a bright, happy, pink-cheeked, wailing young Hercules whom their mother would name Emilio after her father—or Poppy—in Cuba. He had descended out of the heaven of his mother’s womb, through clouds of Cuban and Irish humors, slipping into this feminine universe at half past ten in an upstairs bedroom brilliant with sunlight, surrounded by the chatting, nervous, delighted, and overwhelming female presences that were his sisters. The room itself had smelled like eucalyptus, mothballs, and the wildflowers that his youngest sister, Gloria, two years old, and the one Emilio would love the most, had collected. Running through nearby yards she’d found merrybells and woolly blue violets, and, coming back into the house with bunches of flowers, she’d stuffed them into a fluted pink vase beside their mother’s bed (she, immersed under the sheets and lost in the pillows, breathing softly) and then run out again (screaming) and returned with gaywings, geraniums, forget-me-nots, star grass, and daisies (“She’ll end up opening a florist shop,” someone had said), and these flowers opened, crying out like the baby who would be carried in his sisters’ arms.

  ***

  It had been at half-past eight the night before that their mother, Mariela Montez, her belly large as the moon, began to feel the bending of her bones, the squeezing of her heart, and a blood-red queasiness inside her. That was when a sputtering force first began to move Emilio, who’d weighed as much as a bronze altar bell, from the peace of his mother’s womb into the feminine universe of that house. Having brought so many daughters into the world, she knew that it was her time and that the creature inside her belly was going to turn out to be a male (praise be to God, because that’s what her husband had always wanted, a big, burly, and, with hope, handsome son). She knew this, because once the baby had sprouted bone and muscle, he carried on within her in a way that her daughters had not; he had thumped and kicked, jumped up and down, and would spend hours restlessly turning inside her, whereas the sisters had been quieter and smaller-boned and given over, she would think, to the study of the life awaiting them, delicate baby girls who slept sweetly inside her, as if on a bed of flowers.

  She was forty-one years old then and had nearly exhausted her maternal proclivities, as, for the last twenty-three years, she had been trying to accommodate her husband Nelson’s wish for a son, enduring each dripping, popping, and sometimes furiously weeping pregnancy after the other, giving birth to each of her daughters willingly, happily, and fearlessly, pushing them out into the world until the marrow of her youth had been sucked out of her bones and she had begun to take on the air of a good barnyard animal (like one of the spotted cows they would see in the fields of the countryside), her life having long been reduced to the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, and the rearing of her vibrant daughters.

  A small but full-figured woman, she had borne each of her daughters with the stoicism of a man like her father, Don Emilio, in Cuba. Like him—for he never missed a day of work—she had met her wifely duties with diligence, tending to her husband and daughters as if that were her only calling in life. She worked at motherhood as if the fecund interior of her body, thick with organs and tissue and blood, was a cavernous workhouse, all to please her husband, whom she had met so many years ago in Cuba.

  Having given birth to so many children during so many furious days, she knew intuitively the stages of a baby’s growth, at first feeling a bud parting within her, petals separating, roots turning and implanting in her womb as if on the most fertile ground; and then she would begin to discern the beating of a small heart, a small echo of her own, and the slow growth of those limbs which would be the legs and arms, and then a tiny rump pressing against her interior, a warmth there, too, and the beginning of a great weight and the stretching of boneless fingers and toes within her, until a slight turn of the softest head coiled like an emerging bloom. And then from these vegetable ridges, humming like the soft earth, came the slow formation of bones, so that the form rippled with ossification and with those fibrous muscles forming at the joints, and at the same time she would feel that a soul and mind were occupying her, because just then the baby, floating in the purity of her womb, seemed to take on a rudimentary personality, yawning or crying while eyelids, hair, and nails began to grow and mouths sucked the placental fluids of life. Then came the further hardening of the bones, and the limbs grew fatter and the eyeballs fluttered in their sockets, while the brain convulsed with the forming connection of the senses and memory, and the hardening spine grew stronger, the head—and she would hear an inward cry—shifting with an awareness that the world, good or bad, was waiting outside. And by then she would know if she was carrying a male or a female. They had so often been females that when Emilio Montez O’Brien’s testicular body began to emerge it was as if Mariela were being injected by an unknown perfume, or occupied by the flower of another aroma, and his body was so strong even then that it turned and contorted and stretched, as if it were a troubled soul, making this birth, that of the last of her children, the most cumbersome and painful.

  When their mother screamed, the plump Irene pressed to her forehead a dampened cloth, and the younger sisters put aside their toys and, with the religiosity of the very young, began to pray, imagining that through the house guardian angels floated, doctorly, protective, loving in their regard for the woman who once again was bringing life into the world. That night, as on the many other nights preceding it, when the great sighs filled the halls, a sound began to overwhelm them—not the breath of an exhausted woman, not the phrases she uttered in Spanish as if speaking to her mother and sisters in Cuba, not the low hum of the stars or of the moon floating curiously outside the window as if to peer in, not the rustle of the trees or the cicadas clustered at one end of the field, not motions from the rafters of the barn, where the mute gray bats hung upside down—but a kind of continual whisper, far in th
e distance, discussions perhaps among the angels, as if the firmament above that house, as in tales of the Nativity, in which all the world awaited the birth of the Saviour son, was dense with a many-tiered angelic hierarchy: trumpeting angels, angels of fire, angels floating in the clouds, angels emanating from the stars, angels with swords, great legions of them spiraling down, entangled like the angels hanging suspended from strings over the Créche displays that the sisters had seen in Philadelphia department-store windows and in the fancier Catholic churches (not like the simpler displays in handsome Father Mancuso’s church, for the Catholics of that town were few and for the most part poor).

  For her part, Mariela Montez saw herself at the center of a swirling and sometimes beautiful life, as if she were the pistil of a flower and they the petals, formed around her in a circle and protecting her from the ill winds of the outside world with their love. Yet the pregnancies were often difficult, and as the days would go by, her face, ever pensive but flushed with health, would show the pain. And then there was the expansion of her belly and the distortion of her form—they’d see her sometimes in the bathroom naked as she prepared to take a bath; the distension of her breasts, the clawlike stretch marks exploded from her plump nipples, and the striated markings over the great moon of her belly, her thin legs livid with blue, wormy veins and looking frail and thin, as if they might snap under the weight of her body. Seeing her daughters, she’d try to cover up, one hand on her breasts and the other on the burst of hair below, until, making a decision, she would uncover herself and, extending a hand, ask them to help her into the tub. The weight of her engorging breasts and of the baby would bend her spine, and she would suffer in the simple act of crossing a room or getting up from a chair, and that would make her moody and she’d shout out orders, and sometimes, when she had just finished suckling a baby on her breasts and things around her were too noisy or one of the daughters had snapped at her and she was plagued by a general nausea or suffered from the weight of the child pressing on her lower abdomen, she would feel like crying and, despite her love for the family—for love sometimes turned to air—she would wish to God that she could have had the independent life of a woman like Miss Covington.