In time he would seem, in the manner of his parents, to behave around her with more and more detachment, but he always wanted to impress her family, with his natty clothes and the very fancy red Nash sedan that he’d take the children for rides in and with his air of prosperity and earthly success. He won the younger children over with bagfuls of candy, crinkly, frill-trimmed, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and occasional gifts of dolls and board games. Because he’d turn up at the house with a fancy purse from Philadelphia or New York for their mother and had on various occasions presented her with a wide assemblage of hats, shoes, once in fact whisking her away from the house to a big Philadelphia department store, where he’d bought her a nice new dress; because of all this, and the way he was so courteous, and because he sometimes attempted to speak some Spanish, phrases he had learned from Margarita, her mother found his “respect” and generosity overwhelming and had come to like him very much.
Margarita could never complain, appearing at the household every so often with him by her side, holding hands, even laughing as they carried on in some mutual charade—though some of the sisters such as Isabel and Helen (my, but he always liked to look at her) sensed her unhappiness, but they never said a word. Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline, mermaids swimming through a sea of music, were oblivious to him. Fat Irene was too far away in some other universe to appreciate her oldest sister’s situation. And the younger sisters and the boy, Emilio, seemed enthralled by this man who cut such a grand figure. So when he walked in the door with Margarita, the younger ones would overwhelm him with affection, so much so that his wax-tipped mustache would quiver with delight and the hardness of his eyes would seem to melt away.
(The man would display a critical narrowing of the eyes when, standing naked before a mirror, she would begin to sing or to take a little dance step to amuse him, or when, in the interest of rekindling their romance and to reinvoke past discussions about their plans for European journeys, she’d show him the travel brochures she had mailed away for. He would become maudlin and his gloom would heighten and he’d accuse her of having taken him for a ride because he was rich.)
— Another Moment of—Happiness, 1928
The unhappiness of their marriage only strengthened her love for the family. She’d look forward to her visits with them, and began to live for those moments when she could return to the house, turning up with some books and sitting out in the yard with the younger sisters gathered about her, contentedly teaching them to read. Those visits were often the only events in her life that made sense to her. She made it her habit to drop into the photography shop in the late morning, and she was frequently seen at the movie house on weekends—for that was when they did their best business—to keep her sisters company. They’d show films a few nights a week and all day on the weekends, and she loved it when her sisters worked the shows and she would leave her house and fool around in the back with them, as if she had never lost her virginity, and when, as her next-oldest sister, Isabel, put it, she refused to act her age. She’d even join in the flirtatiousness that had made certain of the sisters—even the darker ones—famous in the town. They’d sit in the back of the theater watching the movies, or else by the caramel-popcorn counter, amid a display of give-away novelty items—tin soldiers, lace-haired dolls, and George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt plates—fooling around with a Ouija board and sometimes laughing so loud over the answers of the spirit world that some of the patrons would come out and shush them, or else they’d play rummy or hearts, passing the night until it was time to open the exit doors and preside over an orderly closing down of the theater.
And she would take French lessons from Miss Covington and for a time put together a literary society which would gather in her parlor on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. She had decorated the parlor of the Thompson house with lace curtains and a chintz sofa and love seats with cushions whose flowery needlepoint coverings said things like “Home Sweet Home” and “Mother,” and with elegantly mounted prints of birds and scenes from nature, a bridal photograph of herself and Lester on the center wall. Gathered by the window, where the light was greatest, they would drink tea, eat biscuits, and read aloud to one another, the gentility of the situation often making Isabel, who was not bookish but who loved her sister and worried about her, yawn, while the others, her sister Maria and the twins and sometimes younger and most beautiful Helen, would sit about, enjoying the relative calm. Other friends had joined, a certain well-off girl, Sally Smithers, recently wed and ever interested in the trappings and rituals of society, and sometimes Miss Covington. In this way, Margarita had read Edna Ferber’s So Big, Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and, among many other books, Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead, the name Samoa sounding in a whisper off her lips as she walked down the streets of Cobbleton, all this in 1928.
(But, more beautifully, she would remember an afternoon in late April 1926 when she, heartsick, had gone to the house. Out on the porch with Maria and her mother, she watched the children play, Emilio in Patricia’s arms, and, just like that, she’d wanted to take Emilio for a walk in the field. He was a heavy baby, and as she carried him along, his head falling back with a great weight—she was afraid that his head would snap off—the baby gurgling and spitting bubbles, she thought to sit on a favorite spot on her father’s land where there was a stone wall, an old, crumbling property divider. From there you could see other farms, cows grazing in the pastures beyond. Holding Emilio, she whiffed the sweetness of his skin and hair, rocking him in her arms until he began to coo and reach for her face, pulling with his soft fingers on her mouth and nose, so sweetly and innocently. He touched her breasts and had seemed to want them very much, his baby mouth reaching. She pulled away and he started crying and turning cantankerously about. “Sisters do not breast-feed their brother,” she told herself, but feeling sorry for the little creature, who was so hungry and innocent, she decided to undo the buttons of her blouse, exposing her breast.
Years later she would remember the Y-shaped vein that seemed to lie below the surface of the skin of her breast, its plumpness and the womanly fibers leading to his mouth. Her breasts were bulbous then, but she had no milk. Emilio did not know that. He suckled her until her nipples became prescient with a fecundity that she would never have. She had sighed, and although the sucking had left Emilio content, his tiny nose squinting and a nearly undiscernible snore rising up through it, a few moments later she deemed it inappropriate, but better, so much better, than the suckling of her husband.)
EMILIO MONTEZ O’BRIEN AND HIS SISTERS
— Gloria —
The sisters would always remember how for many years Emilio had seemed inseparable from Gloria, the youngest of them, and how he, growing to be tall and broad-shouldered, cocky and handsome, had come to tower over her. She was thin and, like her mother, pensive, frail, and diminutive, with a teaspoon face and large, honey-colored eyes. In photographs, she would stand demurely in the background, her hair in braids, and had so delicate a presence and such a look of haunted distraction as to give the impression that, like her mother, she could read minds. Small-boned (Emilio, if he wanted to, could wrap his hands around her waist), she’d had the misfortune of entering her feminine maturity in poor health, having developed, from an early age, a great number of allergies. Dust, the pollen of the flowers she so loved, the ordinary mildew of life, afflicted her with a swollen face and teary eyes, and the sting of a yellow jacket, such as those which sometimes inhabited a barrel of kindling wood in the barn, would send her to bed for a week. Even so, she had always done her share of work in the household and, despite her discomforts, had pursued the activities of daily life, going to school and accompanying her mother to church on Sunday, where the smell of the beeswax candles made it difficult for her to breathe. Taking pride in her determination and wanting to show the family that she could do as well as anyone, she’d work at the Jewel Box Movie House, the theater air thick with perfu
mes (rose, lavender, violet, lemon scents, which made her feel dizzy) and cigarette and cigar smoke floating like a blue-cresting haze before the projection booth. And she went to dances and sometimes stepped out to the back alley of the town hall and allowed the boys to kiss her, later paying for such fun with nights spent wearily in bed with a throbbing headache thanks to the inhalation of their cologne and hair tonic.
She used to sleep in a room on the upper floor, two doors down from her mother and father’s bedroom, sharing that corner space with its low-hanging beams with her sister Violeta and her brother, who had a bed across from them. His portion of the wall was covered with pictures of baseball players and old framed etchings of scenes out of the Wild West which his father had put up when Emilio was three—cowboys busting broncos and herding buffalo, great clouds of dust rising up from their hoofs. They shared that room for many years, a box of tin soldiers underneath his bed, until Nelson thought it better for the boy to sleep alone. Then he inherited the room in which Isabel had once slept with Margarita and Maria. His father had always been squeamish about the boy’s masculinity. It had startled him that Emilio, his flesh and blood, felt so at ease around the females of the house, that the boy seemed so to enjoy their company.
He did not need to have any such fears for Emilio, who would love women too much, and not always in the most fraternal way. The world seemed quite simply a female invention intended to bring him affection and pleasure. From the time he was little, his sisters’ love for him riddled the curtains of the house, whipped and breathed through every piece of linen and cloth; it had radiated in the glassware, in vases, in the tulip-shaped electric lamps, in the scent of their dresses, slips, and underdrawers, which, hanging off laundry lines in the yard, were like the flags of a beautiful and luxurious nation. He would twist happily in their lumps of clothes, jump up and down on their beds, dangle off the hems of their skirts, lose himself in the scent of their feathered and ribboned hats and parasols in the cedarwood closets. Their love was in everything, from the morning buttermilk which he consumed by the quart (the kitchen aromatic from pancakes, sweet with blueberries and maple syrup, prepared by Irene) to the bread, thick with female tenderness and affection, whose dough they kneaded on flour-covered boards, to the chicken baked in their stove, to the very stockings that his older sisters would pull onto his feet, their hands forever tender and reassuring, whether combing his hair, making it slick with tonic, or gingerly teaching him the business of buttoning up his trousers. It wouldn’t much matter that the faces of his sisters seemed interchangeable; what mattered was the female tenderness of those hands which would roam, soapy and diligent, over his body when they’d take him out for a bath in a tin tub in the yard or wash him inside the house, the boy squirming in the liquidity of that pleasure, then bundled in a towel and left to dry off in the sunlight or to rest, years earlier, in his exhausted mother’s arms, suckling her.
He was unable to walk by a mirror without taking a glance at himself and had been so touched by the benevolence of his world it seemed that even the rooms around him and all they contained were approving of his arrogance, that the pink and yellow lace-hemmed curtains, the hand-woven rugs, the knobby, curvaceous divans and chairs hummed with happiness in his presence. His sisters had bathed him, they had combed his hair, they had taught him to wipe his bottom; they had taken him for walks in the fields, the older sisters lifting him into their arms, all loving him.
The sight of bluebirds alighting on a branch would remind him of the happy birdsong on those mornings of his youth when in the good weather the sisters would sit out on the lawn, lazing about on chairs or on blankets, reading their magazines under ribbon-brimmed sunbon-nets and gossiping—the vista of fields and hills in the distance and the many wildflowers that grew everywhere an extension of the women gathered there. In his sisters’ company, he’d experience a sensation of pure happiness and it would seem that everything around them emanated from those females, the world itself a fertile living thing, the earth beneath them humming with its unseen life: roots and stems and burrowing insects and worms aerating the soil, and flowers striving to reach the light, and the soft grass surrounding them reaching up toward the sun, in the way that his hands would reach toward his sisters’ faces. Moss and lichen covering the very stones on which he would sometimes sit; dragonflies flitting through the air and in the trees around them—the birds swooping between the branches, and the animals of those trees, chipmunks and squirrels, scampering about, attending to the commerce of life; even the tepid water in the muddy-bottom pond in which he, in short pants, and his sisters Gloria, Violeta, and Carmen in their sun-suits used to bathe in the hot summers, its ripples cresting out from around them, bristled with femaleness.
— Everything Arranged to Please Him —
Two of the sisters especially doted on him; they all did, even Isabel, big-boned and plain, who kept a watchful eye on him as he charged through the yard chasing the hound with a stick, and who would proudly hold his hand when the family headed out to church on Sunday, dressing him in short pants and a navy-blue jacket, bow tie and shirt, the boy with a bit of sunny rouge in his cheeks and brilliant blue eyes like his father’s: the oldest, Margarita, and Gloria, who, closest in age and living to impress and win his heart, would feel melancholy whenever they were separated.
Their childhood was happy. Off to the county fair, to dances, to swim in Tucker’s Pond, to go into town and sit in the ice-cream parlor, taking a booth and watching passersby on the street. Or having races, which he would lose on purpose, even while she would go wheezing along, the two playing cards or, under the guidance of their sister Patricia, seeking to contact the spirit world with a Ouija board. Little Gloria would linger by the door, waiting for him to come back from the Young Citizens’ Club meeting, a kind of Boy Scout outfit that Emilio had joined at Nelson’s insistence; or she’d wait outside the bathroom for him to finish his business so that they might go out and play. She loved being around him and regarded his robustness and his good-natured and quiet demeanor with joy. She loved it when, as an infant, he would slowly wake up, eyes still heavy with sleep, thick head of dark hair falling over his brow, and she would lead this docile and splendid being by the hand and make sure that he brushed his teeth before taking him into the kitchen, where they joined the others for breakfast. She liked it very much when they would nap in the same bed, and she would listen to his strong heartbeat. And on those days when she could hardly get up, lips and nose chafed from kerchiefs and the scent of medicine, when she found herself crying for no reason, and the outside world was beautiful with sunlight, Emilio would come play with her.
But there came a time when he left their room, when his physical maturity became evident and he had to shave at least once a day, and in the mornings he’d gotten into the habit of turning his back to the sisters, Violeta, ever so curious and of a mischievous nature, asking him, “What are you hiding?” in a singsong voice, while Gloria, ever respectful, would avert her eyes—foolishly, for both sisters had already intuited that in the mornings the curvaceousness in his pajama trousers was not a hip, or a buttock, or any other feminine entity. If truth be told, he was not even aware of it, having been so accustomed to the tribulations of growth that many nights, sleeping face down on his bed, he did not know what was going on. He would feel confused by the asser-tiveness of pleasure, his body shifting against the mattress and pressing into heaven-knew-what (Gloria, awake at three in the morning, observing this through the twilight of the room), the healthy young lad, as his father might have called him, discovering in the fabric of the bed a feathery, heated response, so delightful that, without wanting to, he could feel a liquid turning inside him, like cream poured onto a cast-iron skillet, a kind of froth shooting up from the base of his spine and into his head and back around again through his body, as if a thread of sensation were looping through every stem, every rib, every muscle. He’d shake, feeling as if he were being carried away in some odd dream, his heart beating as if h
e were running up a hill with a sled in a foot of snow, as if suddenly he was falling—and he’d cry out. And Gloria—what did she know about men except the occasional remark from her more worldly sisters (“They’re all babies,” she’d once heard Olga say)—would swear that her brother was suffering, as he would moan and his head would rise in some contortion of pain and his boyish expression would become gnarled and fierce, and she would want to wrap her arms around him and bring him peace.
By the time he had his own room, his maturity had been more or less widely noticed in the household by his sisters, with many laments. “He was such a darling boy,” Carmen would say. “He was more precious as a baby,” Irene would say. “He’s lost his angelic features,” Maria would say, but for all that, the sisters had to contend with the barbed masculinity which was their brother. He was tall and lanky, and though he would one day consider himself a graceful man in movement and character, he became an awkward though welcome presence, knocking things over and, miscalculating his gentleness, lifting his sisters up in his arms as if they were dolls. He was six foot two by the time he was sixteen, and most Irish-looking, with a symmetrical, high-cheekboned face, a cleft chin, and his father’s blue eyes. At the same time there was something of his mother in him, in his eyes, that suggested her ancestry, and a cast about his face when he was deep in thought that, in his mother’s words, seemed “muy, muy español.”
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 21