The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Carrying Emilio in pregnancy had been especially difficult. From the beginning, he was heavy inside her, as the others had been, but at her age, when she had first felt his tumblings in her belly, she imagined that he liked to jump up and down inside her, imagined that he could somehow reach up through the placental womb to yank on her ribs and bend her back low, so strong was his force. She was always tired and often slept through the mornings; her dietary habits changed and she developed a taste for snacking on jars of mustard and honey. At night, she’d rest in bed, her husband’s hand on her belly, and when he would ask, “Are you sure it will be a boy?” she would tell him, “Yes, I’m sure.” But then a nervousness would seize her—Of course, a boy, she would think—and she would twist around in bed with the agony of knowing that she was too old to endure yet another birth, and the anxiety of thinking that her baby would be another girl plagued her.

  But she sometimes felt a deep pleasure. A sense of elation would flow through her. She was not an intellectual or a saint, but she would look around and feel such a sweetness, such a connection with what she saw as the continuity of the world: all this would be passed on to the boy, everything that occurred within his endlessly diverting body, all that occurred out in the world. And it was that feeling that sustained her in the days when she was carrying the baby who would be their son.

  Earlier on the previous afternoon, Nelson O’Brien, thinking that the birth would take place a week or so later, had gone off to Philadelphia, as he often did, to buy photography supplies and to pick up the week’s films from a distributor. He had wanted to get back to the Jewel Box for that evening’s show, but he had experienced a mechanical difficulty with the engine of his automobile, an oft-used excuse, or he’d decided to park his car near the Thirtieth Street Station and hit one of the speakeasies there, a place called Irish Bill’s, where the password was “King MacCool,” and having perhaps one too many, trusted that the sisters would know what to do with the movie house that night, the big feature being Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

  That night, as the pangs grew more intense, the very moment when Mr. Chaplin sat down in a shed in a snowstorm to dine with great daintiness and aplomb on the tethered laces of an old boot; just as her husband, Nelson O’Brien, lifted to his mouth a frothy-headed stein of bootleg beer, wiping his lips and speaking with authority on the vicissitudes of war—the details and dangers of his journey to Cuba would grow more spectacular with each sip of the brew and each passing year; and just as Margarita, now married, was planting on her husband’s navel a tongue-tipped kiss, which stirred his valiant masculinity; and as sister Maria, feeling the need to use the Jewel Box Movie House ladies’ room, got up from the piano, which she had been playing as accompaniment to the aforementioned film, switching places with Jacqueline—just as these little things happened, their mother had started to go into labor with Emilio. That was when she thought that her guts would split apart, when she soiled the sheets beneath her and wept with shame (it had been Isabel and Irene’s work to lift her off the bed, clean her, and replace the sheets), when even the presence of those sisters in the house was not enough to calm her. As the night wore on, all the sisters, save for Margarita, at home with her husband, would be there, either asleep in their cribs or waiting out on the stairwell landing. They had put up a Chinese screen with lotus-blossom fabric so that the younger ones would not peek in and see their mother crying out, as if in a prayer, “Ay, ay, ay,” that ululation becoming all distorted (so that some of the sisters such as Isabel, ever protective of her mother, heard “Why, why, why!” and imagined Mariela asking, “Why am I here in such great pain?” and “Why did I ever leave Cuba!”). Their mother had been especiaily worried, as had the others, for that was a time when many mothers died in childbirth or the babies died, strangled on their umbilical cords or born “blue.” And the sisters had been happy when Miss Covington arrived with her night bag to sit in vigil down below not an hour after their mother’s contractions had started and the doctor had been alerted. Miss Covington, with her New Englander’s sense of propriety and order—a bit of a restraint when the girls wanted to make merry in their parents’ absence—was a godsend, even if she was a Protestant, for her staidness, her levelheadedness were a salve on their fears; Miss Covington, an elegant lady of great feminine inner strength, could maintain order and calm even when the screams of childbirth filled the house, sending the black birds out of the trees.

  By then Mariela started to shake and cry and feel a terrible chill, when the boy Emilio, wide-shouldered as a bull, began to move inside her. She asked her daughters for something to relieve the pain, to relax and free her from the symptoms that suddenly beset her, for that night she was suffering from languor, nausea, and a deep-set feminine fear, almost hysteria. She had begun to see sparks, like popping fireflies, floating through the room before her eyes; she felt a dizziness, a dread of some impending evil, and palpitations of the heart. To alleviate these symptoms, they had rubbed into her muscles a liniment called Angel Oil, composed of vegetable oils and electricity; and until the doctor arrived and gave her something stronger, she was administered the medicinal called Larson’s Vegetable Cure for Female Weakness.

  Then she received many kisses, the sisters prayed, Emilio pushed, and in the swelling crest of life on which she wanted to remain afloat, Mariela Montez, racked by the pain of childbirth, drifted toward the light of maternal fulfillment.

  ***

  Held aloft, young Emilio was passed from Margarita to Isabel to Maria, and then to Jacqueline and Olga, to Helen, and then to Irene, and from Irene to Sarah and Patricia, and then to Veronica, Marta, and Carmen, but not to Violeta and Gloria, who were too little and too excited to hold him. They had kissed his puckered face, unfurled his toes, and played with his fingers, laughing wildly and with great shyness when he shot an arch of piss into the world through his strange and diminutive instrument. And then they had watched as the good doctor, who had examined them during so many different times of illness, with his silvery beard, his bifocals, and his raven-black waistcoat, bent low to their mother’s ear to convey instructions in his gentle German-accented English, saying, “You know, Mrs. O’Brien, that now you can rest. And you must, understand, for you’ve lost a lot of blood this time.” Their mother, despite her claims that she did not always understand English, knew exactly what he meant and nodded, the expression on her face, buoyed by the sound of the healthy baby’s cry, that of a woman who’d returned from a distant place. Earnestly relieved, she touched the doctor’s strong hand in thanks.

  The fourteen sisters would think of this gathering as a reunion because, some months before, their oldest sister, Margarita Montez O’Brien, had married Lester Thompson,-and her visits to the family had since become infrequent. Having slipped under a trellis of lilting roses into the life of a newlywed, she had lost her virginity and learned about love in a flowery room overlooking the cascading mists of Niagara Falls, where they had honeymooned, and now she lived in a good section of town, where she spent many of her days wistfully in the parlor, wearing a robe, naked underneath save for her gartered legs—how he loved that—awaiting the arrival of her husband and the fulfillment of his pleasure.

  During those hours of the night that her mother, Mariela Montez, was in labor, Margarita, absorbed in her own life, had been in bed, daydreaming about what her mother had said about love: “Your heart burns when you love somebody, your soul becomes restless, light enters your every thought, and when you close your eyes, all you can see is your man.” But that night, as had often happened before, she had closed her eyes and, resting beside her naked husband, he with his lean, matty-haired, smooth body, his sonorous and ever-alert masculinity adrift and awaiting her nocturnal touch, she did not think about him but rather about her family.

  ***

  That morning in 1925 she was in her parlor sipping tea. She had just taken a sponge bath—on the dressing table before her, a Spanish Bible, a wedding gift from her mother, inscribed in h
er mother’s meticulous and elegant script: “Para la joya de mis sueños,” “For the jewel of my dreams.” And beside that a small jewelry box and a silver hand mirror of baroque design. Her plump breasts, whose purpose just a few months before had been more of a mystery to her, were sore to the touch, tender from biting, and faintly aureoled with a purplish hue. Her vagina hurt, and her rump hole smarted from when, carried away, he’d jam his fingers inside. Men were funny, and her husband, Lester Thompson, whom everyone knew as a gentleman, a high-society “catch,” a grand and promising businessman, well connected and the inheritor of this earth’s bounty, lived to pursue a secret life with her in the bedroom—obsessed with her bodily parts and secretions and scents.

  Thank God they’d arrived. Bells for the first services had already rung, people were on the street on their way to church, when her sisters Isabel and Helen came into town to tell her the good news that a brother had finally been born to the family and to take her back to the house. When her sisters tapped on her door, her husband was calling to her from an upstairs bedroom: “Come on in, honey, your man is waiting for you.” That night he really wanted to “bugger” her—where he’d gotten that notion, she did not know, but he seemed fascinated with her rump; he’d even told her, “You know, the women of Spain and Italy let their husbands do it that way all the time.” But that had not convinced her. He would get angry, then they’d make up and settle for the more conventional forms of love.

  ***

  Their first words that morning—“Margarita, Mama’s given birth to a boy!”—sent her back up to the bedroom, where in the half light her naked husband rested atop the mangled sheets, his masculinity alert, and when he saw that she was putting on a dress, he asked her where she was going. Telling him, she saw that he was growing moody and discontent, twisting on the bed and reaching over to a side table where he kept a decanter of whiskey, from which he poured himself a little Sunday-morning drink. The strong brew burned his gullet, as it would on many a night—for he liked to drink to calm himself—and, coming into a newer, cheerier mood, he complimented her on how pretty she looked in her flowery dress and sunbonnet. Helen and Isabel waited below, and as a kind of reward she knelt beside him on the bed and took him into her mouth, and within a few minutes he’d gotten what he’d wanted. (She was aware that the door was slightly ajar and was worried that the world would somehow know, because it was a Sunday and the clarions were ringing and the shadowy nature of her life with this man had begun to depress her, even then, during the sunny days of this, her first marriage.) Satisfied, he rested back in bed and she stood again before the mirror to reapply some oxblood lipstick to her pretty mouth, and even though she felt he was admiring her and perhaps really loved her, she was anxious to slip out—planning to spend the day with her family and her newborn brother.

  It was on the way to join her sisters below that she heard a most shocking thing. “Enjoy yourself, honey,” he’d said. “Maybe I’ll drive up later to see the kid myself.” And then, in his offhand way of presenting ideas to her: “I kind of like little tykes. Maybe we should have one of our own, my darling.”

  ***

  So that day his many sisters kissed, pulled, tugged on Emilio, and in a celebratory mood played music boxes and musical instruments, their chattering voices cutting through the powerful wailing of the baby boy.

  And they were present when their father, Nelson O’Brien, arrived, a little the worse for wear, his automobile chugging to a halt. Nelson, who had seen his share of suffering and who moved through life sometimes with a forlorn expression (advancing, as if against the storm of a winter’s day, against the female brilliance around him), was led by two of his daughters up the stairs and, hat in hand, approached the bedroom where little Emilio rested with his mother, suckling her breast. They were present when Mariela’s exhaustion seemed to leave her at the sight of her husband, and happiness entered her eyes as she knew that after so many female children this boy would please him. She told him, in Spanish, “Mira, tu hijo.” Dumbstruck, he loomed over mother and son, smiling, and said, “Well, I suppose I should kiss the lad,” and with his large hands lifting the boy up, he planted a kiss on his cheek. As he did so, the light seemed to shift in the room, for the sun had momentarily moved behind the great maple tree and, emerging, sprinkled the room with the promise of hope, of future happiness.

  Then he put the baby down and, though he felt a great elation, the pain of new love and fatherhood came to him. Slipping through his bones was the knowledge that with his paterfamilias, as per the methods prescribed in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love, he had helped to bring another new and helpless being into a world thick with joys and sorrows—and he said a prayer to himself that, though he was not a bad father to his daughters, he would be an especially good father to this boy, God willing.

  And Margarita, like the others, would remember the afternoon of the first day of their brother’s life. After they’d dined on a summery meal of cold cuts and watermelon and nearly overripe peaches, little Gloria, sitting out on the porch blowing soap bubbles with Violeta, had propped open the screen door as a support to her back as she played. She watched bubbles with coronas of pink and forest-green light float by, and as she did, two swallows came flying into the parlor of the house where the other sisters were gathered, and circled around, chasing each other as if madly in love, flitting without hitting the walls, as birds caught inside houses sometimes do, circled tranquilly until, having made their presence known, they returned to the trees in whose high branches they belonged.

  — Margarita’s Discovery —

  During the years of her young brother’s childhood, Margarita had the displeasure of finding herself in an increasingly unhappy marriage, and she thanked God that she could return to the house in which she had lived with her sisters, to find solace in their company.

  In those days, she learned that one of Lester’s motivations for marrying her in the first place was to rankle his ever-proper family. That had been a source of satisfaction to him, had nourished his glee (his mother and father ashen-faced and embarrassed when they first met her), and he’d even told her so, one night in 1926, when, a little tipsy, he said: “You may be my little dark rose, but to my mother and father you’re a thorn.” He told her this while suckling her breasts and fondling her bottom. “You don’t know my folks; they die a little bit inside each time they think about us, which is just fine with me.” And he laughed, and even though they’d proceeded with an energetic coitus and he’d covered her body with kisses (she did not doubt that her nakedness made him feel a genuine lust), she’d felt herself demoted from wife to parent-rankling device.

  Still, he relished her “delicious body,” as he’d call it, and though that very night she’d started to regret their marriage, she would tell herself a thousand times a day, “I am his wife,” a vocation she identified with compliance. She mainly felt that during the act of love. Coming home from the store or from his business trips, he’d let down his suspenders, pull off his trousers, and rest back on the bed so that she could rub his feet and wipe his naked body down with a dampened cloth; then their lovemaking would take place—and on a few occasions when she’d hoped to God to make him happy, she’d let him “bugger” her.

  She did so in the belief that in her kindness to him she would somehow help change his demeanor, as she wanted the marriage to work, and wanted it so badly that she put up with just about anything he demanded. Yet, no matter what she did for him, each of their evenings became more and more of an ordeal. He’d make her wear tight bodices and red ribbons around her thighs, demanded that she be always prepared for him in bed. And there were real humiliations, such as when Lester, returning from a trip to New York in the spring of 1927, produced an electrically operated “giant power belt” with an ornate rim and leather backing, with electrical wiring and a loop that dangled down from its buckle, “a spiral suspensory” through which, once switched on and wrapped around the base of his member, an eighty-gauge current woul
d flow.

  That night, straddling her husband, she began to feel a pure astonishment at how quickly the promise of her marriage to Lester, comfortable in so many ways, was unraveling before her. It turned her stomach to think how she had confused the desire to escape and make her way in the world with love—how she had allowed herself to be lulled by the gentlemanly and accomplished surface that her husband had presented to her. Further, she could not understand what he had seen in her. Yes, there was her pensive and slightly mischievous air, to which he would allude from time to time, his attentions lavish until he’d gotten what he wanted, when he would groan and shake and then turn away to sleep, leaving her to contemplate, at three in the morning, the promising/unpromising progression of her days.

  There was another reason for their troubles: Margarita, her fecund mother’s daughter, could not have children. And because of that, a certain logic came to her, a logic that forgave Lester’s growing contempt for her (she could not fault her virile husband).

  Dr. Schultz, who had delivered every one of her sisters, and who was therefore familiar with her mother’s fecundity, at first refused to believe that Margarita could not have a child. He prodded and probed her interior, and as he had had a late-nineteenth-century medical education, he reluctantly pronounced in the end that her womb, while normal in every other respect, had a certain misalliance of the ovaries. Perhaps, he had told her, an operation might cure that, but it might almost kill her, too. So he advised her to drink a concoction of milk and eggs and sugar and prescribed certain bromides said to promote fertility, but she never was to become pregnant, and this had not made her husband happy. When a bad mood came over him, or he was dissatisfied with her in bed, this great gentleman would tell her, “Not only can’t you have children, but you can’t even satisfy me anymore,” carrying on in this way until he reduced Margarita to such a state that she’d ensconce herself in the parlor with her beloved books from the library (how she would envy the solace of that place).