Taller than his own father and broad-shouldered, he seemed like a giant when he entered the femininely adorned parlor. Gloria, who was no more than five feet two in height, had loved to stand by him when he was a boy, but in time she found his looming presence a little frightening.
When the lengthening of his bones and the onslaught of his sexuality had begun and great surges of natural strength came to him, Gloria had lamented the loss of physical parity with her brother. For his part, he had begun, perhaps from the age often or so, to feel as if his maleness amounted to some form of exile. When his body began to “shoot up,” his physical size changing so much with each year, he would have odd dreams. In them he became so large that, as in a fairy tale, he, with bent back and thick limbs sprawled all about him, took up the interior of the parlor and, expanding, crushed all the furniture, smashed the windows with their lacy curtains and vases and lamps, and, with his immense head pressing upward, burst through the roof of the house.
He became more cautious around his sisters, for on certain days when he caught sight of some piece of dainty laundry hanging on the line in the yard, he found the titillation a little startling, and he began to understand his father’s queasiness about ladies’ things left around in the house, and his demands that his youngest daughters, who had remained at home, follow the rules of propriety, as the older sisters had: that they not get careless about dressing, that even in the hot summer months, when they would sometimes leave their beds in the middle of the night to cool off on the porch, they wear a robe over their slips and be very careful about closing the door when bathing—for what good would it do for their father or brother to be given the sight of their unclad fannies, what good would it do to know which daughters possessed brown rather than pink nipples or that Veronica with her red hair and freckled back had a pubic mound covered with hair the color of cardinal feathers, or which sisters had moles on their bottoms, or who, naked, had the featureless beauty of a young angel, or whose bodies would quiver with voluptuousity, whose Venus mounds burst with the thickest Andalusian or dark Irish or blond hair? He began to understand why his father had been strict with the troublesome Violeta, whose idea of a fun afternoon was to sunbathe in the front yard in a pair of white short shorts and a blouse that she would roll up, exposing her belly to the sun, her body protuberant and beguiling to drivers passing on the road.
Walking with his sister Gloria, he would often wish he was so little that she could carry him in her arms, as she used to. It would have made her happier, he would think, and less edgy. Sometimes, while puttering in the yard, putting a new chain on a bicycle, or just raking the leaves away from the lawn, he would see Gloria watching him, diminutive and nearly closed off from the world, and wish that he could pick her up and put her into his pocket, walk away, and, protecting her, go about the business of being a man.
— Little Gloria, Years Later, — and Her Sisters
Gloria would not be like her naughty sister Violeta, a young voluptuary two years older than herself, who, by the beginning of the Second World War, would fashion her image after the fast girls the movie posters in their father’s theater described: “She was a fun-loving bobby-soxer and he was a handsome naval officer!” Violeta, who tortured her father with her free spirit, seemed to live, to his exasperation, in the town drugstore, dancing in front of the jukebox—she in her tight sweaters and Lindy Hop skirts, soft white stockings and low-heeled shoes—and (in his opinion) trying to arouse the attention of the GIs on their way in or out of the war who would pass through Cobbleton and spend the night in the hotel. Violeta came home one evening in 1942, after a dance, reeking of so much whiskey that, reluctantly, her mother, Mariela, had to drag her by the hair into the kitchen, where she washed her daughter’s mouth out with soap before presenting her to Nelson O’Brien. He, most reluctantly, too, beat her into sobriety with a belt. (Even then, Gloria would remember, Violeta had not changed her habits; ushered from the parlor to the stairway, Violeta passed by, her fleshy burgundy tongue sticking out in jest.)
And she was nothing like her older sisters, who were already making their way out into the world. Her second-oldest sister, Isabel, had moved from the house, having found herself a husband—in Cuba. (How twisted was the family history, that love coming about under the saddest circumstances, when in 1932, after so many years’ absence from Santiago, their mother received by cable the news that her poor Poppy, Emilio Montez, after whom she had named her son, was ill, suffering from a “bad heart.” And all of a sudden, after having gone from year to year discussing such a trip with her husband, Nelson, and deciding against it for one reason or another—it would be too expensive, there were too many children to look after, or she was pregnant and in no condition to travel—she found herself making hurried preparations to go to Cuba with Margarita and Isabel and Emilio. Their visit lasted several months, and while there they stayed in the family house on Victoriana de Avila Street, keeping the old man company in his last days. Isabel, on the verge of matronhood, twenty-eight and still a virgin, made the acquaintance of a kindly-hearted Cuban fellow, Antonio Valdez, some ten years her senior, a pharmacist and family friend, who looked at her as no man had ever looked at her before, their romance flourishing during a most funereal time. And when the day came for her mother and sister and brother to head back to Cobbleton, she decided to stay behind, taking work as a seamstress and falling more deeply in love—with Antonio and with Cuba. And one day she’d married him, with several of her sisters in attendance, and became the sister in Cuba.)
Nor did Gloria possess the tremendous urbanity of Maria and the twins, Olga and Jacqueline, whose life as self-styled singers and instrumentalists blossomed during the 1930s, when, despite the misery of the Depression, they became regular performers at local weddings and society (what was left of it) affairs. The sisters would switch instruments—Olga playing the harp, Jacqueline the violin, and Maria the piano, and were also known to appear in the exotic cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, where they had taken an apartment together. Not only did they wear beautiful gowns and glittering jewelry and perform in places like the Waldorf-Astoria and sometimes at the Paramount Theater, but they had the distinction of being the first of the sisters to make regular crossings to Europe as singers aboard the Queen Elizabeth. And there, like young Anita Loos, they met their share of European counts and barons and rich gentlemen and great stars like Nelson Eddy and Noël Coward, tales of whom they would relate to the sisters when they’d come home for a holiday, laden with gifts and always with the mischievous air of beautiful and talented women who had laughed over flirtations in Parisian cafés, sisters who were so devoted to one another that, though they were wooed by many men—and sometimes dangerously so, as with Maria’s great second love in Paris in 1937—they would remain stubbornly, gloriously together.
And Gloria was not like Irene, corpulent and happy with her husband, their butcher shop and little babies, and she was not like Sarita, whose life had taken an unexpected turn when she became the subject of the affection of Rafael Garcia, that earnest young man who had first fallen in love with Margarita years before. A lawyer in Philadelphia now, quiet and businesslike, he had remained a friend to the family, and returning again and again with his father to visit the household, he had transformed his earlier love for Margarita into a love for Sarita, composing poems that she would read with wonder, for it was known in the family that he had done the same with Margarita, and she felt flattered (and a little wary) receiving them. But he courted her with sincerity, and though she suffered from an occasional ringing of the ears that went back to a day in 1922 when she had fallen through the ice of Tucker’s Pond (and gotten very sick as a result), she heard his words of devotion clearly. She had many doubts and fears, but she married him nearly ten years to the day after she had been a twelve-year-old bridesmaid at her older sister’s wedding.
Nor was Gloria, despite the mystery of her expression and the prettiness of her face, gifted in the ways that Hele
n and Patricia “the living” were. From the time that she was a little girl, Patricia had been aware of her predecessor, the other Patricia, who’d left this world before ever having the chance to enter it. She would say years later, in an interview with a spiritist quarterly, The Angelic Voice magazine, that while sleeping at night she could feel the spirit of the dead Patricia flowing through her body, and that the other Patricia, in the capricious ways of the spirit world, lived vicariously through her, so that whenever she experienced a simple moment of earthly happiness—the bite of a sweet autumn apple, a delicious late-afternoon slumber during a rainstorm, a first kiss, among so many other things—she knew that the little spirit was also enjoying it. And it was the other Patricia who helped her to “see” and “hear” things. Knowledge that she had this ability came to her slowly. She had never been visited by premonitions, had never been enchanted by a fortune-teller as a little girl, never had an eccentric old aunt who could foretell thoughts (their aunts in Cuba were only a few lines of information in the letters her mother received over the years), had attended no mentalist or Theosophic society meetings—nothing at all to put such ideas in her mind. But it started to happen when she was seven years old, and the first of these events led to many others.
One afternoon, while taking a short-cut through the cemetery with Irene, Patricia noticed for a brief moment a beautiful red-headed woman in a white lace dress moving sadly among the half-toppled tombstones, her sadness so powerful that Patricia began to hear weeping, and as quick as a wink, when she turned to point out the woman to her sister, the woman was gone. She would think about it for days, sleeping fitfully though she shared a room with Sarah and Veronica, and eventually she had forgotten (her childhood days were endless and dense with events), when, in the middle of another night, as she got up to use the toilet, she saw the same woman standing at the door of her mother and father’s bedroom in an aureole of light, her hands extended and shaking, for she must have been very cold, and her kindly face racked with confusion. Then she went away, stepping back into the shadows. This event Patricia reported to her mother, Mariela, who had reacted by saying, “Ay, no me diga, hija!” Knowing the identity of the apparition—Mariela had seen her back in 1902, when she and Nelson had first settled in this house—she sighed and patted her daughter on the head, saying, “It’s nothing, child. Just a dream. Now, why don’t you go out and play?” Obedient to her mother, she ran out into the yard to play with a diablo, a donut-shaped piece of wood on a string which she would spin around her head and try to catch on a peg. And then it happened. Her mother always lamented silently to herself the fact that she felt a sadness while sleeping in her canopied bed with Nelson, as it was in that room, years before, in 1897, that her husband’s sister, Kate O’Brien, died from pneumonia. That thought spontaneously settled in her daughter’s mind. She had even “heard” a name, Kate, though she would not know the details of the woman’s death until years later when she was of an age to discuss it with her father. Now she knew that the lady in the hallway was the very same woman about whom her father, Nelson, never spoke, whose portrait he kept in an oval-shaped, gold-leaf frame in the parlor, Aunt Kate, dead and long gone from this earth, but, for a few like herself, still present.
(And on this subject, of all the sisters it was Patricia who would have the suspicion that Aunt Kate was not in truth an “aunt,” and that her father had been not a brother suffering the loss of a sister but a widower; but if it was so, the secret would follow him, as they say, to the oblivion of the grave.)
Though it would be many years before Patricia would attempt to parlay her otherworldly gifts into a livelihood (or what some would call a “scam”) and though she had never made much of her ability, wishing to be like the others, she had become the sister known for her uncanny luck at carnival games, especially wheels of fortune—she was much disliked by the games men, who would tire of giving her dolls and teddy bears, as she’d “guess” the right numbers nearly one out of every three tries—and for the casualness with which she would predict at two o’clock the arrival of a Bible salesman at three-seventeen, or that the postman would be delivering a letter from Cuba at four. And while these were the kinds of minor intuitions that would give Patricia her legend within the family, she would also suffer from such foreknowledge, knowing, with some sadness, that the kindly Miss Covington would be run down by a trolley car while visiting her brother in Boston in 1933 (“My dear, why are you so sad?”), and that her mother would one day receive a cable from Cuba containing the news that Don Emilio was dying. All this became a burden and she got into the habit of keeping things to herself. But her powers developed regardless and even affected her appearance. A brunette with clear dark eyes, she had a high forehead and high cheekbones. She was pretty, and exerted like the others an inevitable female influence, but her skin began to take on a translucent quality, so that, when looking at her, one became vaguely aware of the flow of thoughts and blood, the gleam of her powerful soul, underneath her skin.
Mainly, she got used to knowing about things. She’d remember riding the train into New York, as she and Helen and Margarita (with her lousy marriage) did in 1926 so they could join the crowds thronging the streets outside the Campbell Funeral Parlor, where Rudolph Valentino’s body lay in state, and predict to herself that the young and handsome college student sitting across from them would pull from his satchel two books, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, that the latter’s cover would have a stain shaped like the bottom of a coffee mug, and that tucked inside that book was a kiss-off letter from a sweetheart. She knew, too, that his name was Johnny. Or, years later, riding the same train, that the ticket taker possessed not only a cheerful disposition but a sex as long and textured as a loaf of bread, that the secretary and executive who had entered the rail car were having an affair, complicated by the fact that he felt estranged from his wife but was very close to his children.
As she was working in the movie house, behind the popcorn stand, a profitable concession, a man would hand her a nickel and she would hear his heart wheezing; or another fellow, a truck driver headed for Youngstown, Ohio, would walk away and she would know that he was suffering from a bout of syphilis.
And years later, during her maturity, there were the young men of the town, worried about money and thinking an awful lot about sex—for in the back rows of the movie house the couples would sit in the darkness, necking. One look and she could tell whether they were “good” or “bad,” and while she had never thought an unusual amount about love (on some days in the house the rooms were thick with love, the sisters daydreaming about future husbands, and about sex, too, and love for each other), there came an evening when a lanky, awkward blond-haired hayseed fellow, with serene eyes and an air of innocence about him, came to buy some popcorn and instantly she knew that he, a feedhouse worker, an honest and hardworking person, was going to be her husband, a flush rising in her face.
It came true. When she was eighteen—in 1932—he would come back to the movie house seven weeks in a row before working up the nerve to ask her out for a date (to go by buckboard to a picnic in a beautiful field near Farmers’ Crossing). In time he unburdened himself, explaining to her that he worked so hard he’d hardly ever given much thought to girls; that he would feel honored by the pleasure of her company. And so it went: an old-fashioned romance ensued—it was three months before he kissed her—and in 1935 they were married.
— Helen and Veronica —
Like her other sisters, Gloria had felt wonderment at Helen’s presence, not so much for her beauty, but because she had always been so self-confident and robust—it was as if life’s ordinary troubles had passed her by. Tall and statuesque, and altogether satisfied with her physical appearance, she had passed her teenage years in a revelry of male adulation. Even their father, Nelson O’Brien, who seemed largely indifferent as to which of his daughters was most beautiful, took so many photographs of her in his studio that years later they would fill three
cartons. Nor did he seem to mind it when she would enter and win beauty contests. She had been Miss Spring Rose in 1925, 1926, Miss Autumn Harvest in 1927, and, in 1928, the Pennsylvania entry for the Miss America Pageant, which had taken place on the Garden Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, many of the sisters in attendance. She did not win. But with her participation came offers to work as a model; a gentleman from New York, an agent, approached Nelson and proposed that if Helen could spend a month in New York, he would certainly be able to find her lucrative assignments as a magazine cover girl and in advertisements. (“Imagine her picture, plastered up in Times Square,” he’d told them.) She was eighteen then, and excited about living another life, but Nelson and Mariela were reluctant to give her permission: New York could be a little rough for a young, inexperienced girl. But Helen then settled into such a lethargic, life-was-over gloom that after several months Nelson and Mariela changed their minds and prevailed on Isabel to accompany her for the month, the two sisters taking rooms at the YWCA.
She was so good-looking—as Isabel related the story—that when they walked along the streets of New York nearly every man would tip his hat or smile, the more aggressive types following them for blocks, men always holding doors for them and offering to give them a hand up on the Ninth Avenue trolley. At the Metropolitan Museum, which they’d wanted to visit, as it was something their mother often talked about, Helen saw herself in a sixteenth-century portrait of a Florentine princess. A middle-aged man from London, a lawyer on holiday, a baldish fellow with a thick Ottoman mustache, was so taken by Helen that he had started to follow them around through the exhibition rooms. Unable to contain himself, he approached them in the cavernous lobby as they were about to leave, insisting that he be allowed the privilege of taking them out. He seemed suave and nice enough—and they didn’t have very much money, wanting to save what they’d brought along for the variety shows on Broadway—so they accepted, joining him for dinner in a French restaurant in the Fifties where they tasted for the first time in their lives creamy escargots and beef bourguignon, the gentleman explaining that he was a widower on holiday and very happy to be in the company of such pretty young women.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 22