The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Especially you, my dear,” he kept saying to Helen.

  Helen had found French cuisine much to her liking, and that meal (impressed, they’d asked the waiter to wrap up the remnants so that they could have a second late-night feast in their room) would be the first of many—so many that years later Helen would find herself bored by the “usual French fare” of New York restaurants: yet, at the time, she regarded everything about New York with delight.

  True to his word, the agent soon parlayed her physical winsomeness into money. But a decision had to be made as to what name she would go under. European names were greatly in vogue then, and because the name Helen O’Brien was so typical, they settled on the more exotic Helen Montez, a funny choice as far as the sisters were concerned, because Helen, ever confident and full of herself (though never unkind to her sisters), had always been the one to set herself apart. Walking in town with her mother, she made it her habit to maintain her distance, either moving ahead briskly or lagging behind, and when her mother would rush ahead or wait for her, taking her hand, she would feel embarrassment, often pulling away and saying in English, “Mother, please. I’m not a child anymore.” (Her mother knew what went on—she had seen it, too, in her older daughters, even those who spoke Spanish with her—that they were sometimes ashamed to be identified with her; anxious, fumbling in English, she took it in good stride. And although she always loved the little ones, like Gloria and the boy, Emilio, she would often feel angry with Helen for ignoring her, and one day, exasperated, she had simply told her in English and Spanish, “Pero, chica, nunca olvides que yo soy tu mamá. Never forget I am your mother.”) But for all her feelings about her mother, she capitulated to her agent’s suggestion, her name becoming Helen Montez. She modeled sleeveless dresses with skirts cut at the knee, in Saks and Bloomingdale’s, posed (scandalously, but for good money) in a Kestos brand brassiere advertisement, her head anonymous and turned away from the camera; and with penciled-in eyebrows, mascaraed eyes, and ruby-lipped mouth, she appeared mysterious and agelessly beautiful in cosmetics advertisements that would adorn the windows of many a beauty parlor in New York.

  Isabel, bored and a little wary, did not like this world and was often shocked by the way women were treated. At a showroom on Fortieth Street and Seventh Avenue, she would sit off to the side while the models got dressed, Helen, ever private, going behind a screen to put on a dress, while the others, more seasoned and perhaps a little jaded, would pull off their dresses and slips and sometimes stand bare-chested in the middle of the room with gruff floor managers and front-office accountants all around them, pencils wedged over an ear. And department-store buyers would happen by, some having the nerve to stop and chat as if in fact the young lady to whom they were speaking was not naked under a slip. This Isabel found intolerable and she would ask her sister, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” They got to know other models and heard stories about how, to get the best jobs, one had to sleep around, and heaven help you once you began to lose your looks. And yet Helen maintained a certain dignity about her. There was nothing cheap about her person—innocence, yes, but also a certain elegance and an almost aristocratic air that, were she to confess it, she owed to the example of her mother in her better, calmer moments.

  Slowly—it would take her two years—she began to get better work. It wasn’t easy for Nelson and Mariela to live with the idea that their daughter would be more or less alone in New York. Margarita and the musical sisters would make it a point to visit her from time to time—but Nelson decided that New York and her career were something that Helen would get out of her system, given that she must certainly feel lonely at times and that the stock-market crash put a lot of people out of business, making such work more difficult. But Helen had luck.

  She would never grace the covers of magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue, nor become a model for such artists as Erté—Romain de Tirtoff—but she became quite popular with the advertising boys. There was something about her wholesome and secure looks that was perfect for the climate of the times (the racier, sexier ads of the late 1920s were out), and she began to go under the name of Helen O’Brien again, posing as a young, concerned mother diapering a baby, a practical but lovely wife mopping the floor, a toothpaste girl with a “pearly smile,” the lovely sweetheart perched atop a hill with her boyfriend, smoking a Camel, a “Weaver of Speech” telephone operator wearing a headset for the Bell System (her creed, “The Message Must Go Through”), and, more lucrative, “The Pause That Refreshes” girl for Coca-Cola.

  She changed, becoming the sister whom Gloria and the others would remember as an occasional presence, an angel, triumphant in an ocelot coat with blue fox sleeves, dropping in to report on the sophistication of the outer world. She’d come back to Cobbleton at least once a month, arriving by train, and usually her father would pick her up at the station. But one day she drove up to the house in a shiny Packard. She was in the company of a man, about thirty, who seemed, in his gleaming black English shoes, very far removed from the troubles of the times. He was a straightforward and polite fellow (the way her mother liked them), with a seaside scent about him, a partner at the Field & Lowe Agency, for whom she had sometimes worked. They had met during a photography session and he, “smitten by Helen,” as he told the family that day, had invited her to dinners which she had at first refused. She did accept an invitation to attend a Christmas party at the agency in 1931, a densely packed, joyous affair (though she would say that one “felt rotten as all hell,” making one’s way through the pencil sellers on the streets below) where they drank a “tangy Christmas punch” and danced all night, her face pressed close to his, the bulbs and holiday lamps of the twenty-foot tree in that hall aglow, couples necking everywhere, and with her friends, other models who had been invited along, telling her: “He’s quite a catch.”

  Whether this fact impressed her, the family would never know, for she was very private about her affairs. But the day they had come to visit, they were “engaged” and Helen, possessing the ability to feel ever assured and certain of her happiness, continued to move forward through the world.

  ***

  Her sister Veronica was, it would seem to Gloria, the most compassionate, the story of Veronica’s veil, which their mother had recounted, making a great impression on her. She was a redhead (red like Christ’s blood, red like Aunt Kate’s hair), and though she was almost as quiet a presence in the household as Gloria, she was so aware of the meaning of her name that she had torn out the page of a religious magazine, putting above her bed (in the room that she shared with Patricia) a lovely rendering of St. Veronica placing the renowned veil over the face of Jesus. In 1940, she put an ad in the Cobbleton Chronicle offering her talents as a seamstress. She felt that the business of sewing and cutting materials to the precise design of a pattern, and proper repair, was an art. (It was Veronica who took it upon herself to mend the hems of skirts, to take in or out her father’s trousers, who would run around at the last moment to sew up a thread in the seam of a wedding dress.) During the Depression, loving to mend things, she would sit in the basement of St. Anthony’s Church in town, darning the stockings, blouses, shirts, trousers, skirts, and underwear that had arrived as donations for the poor, and could not help but work each stitch so carefully that the garments seemed like new. She was thin and almost ascetic in appearance, though when she turned twenty in 1936 she filled out, in a late bloom, her bosom larger and her hips and bottom more enticing. When bums and hoboes came to the house begging for bread and food, she would stand on the porch, shy and proud, distributing leftover food to them. In the winter, when families roamed the countryside, she would sometimes set out in her father’s old Model T with provisions—food and clothing—looking for them. The hoboes got to know her as the nice young lady, an angel of mercy, whom they would find here and there in her auto or out by the fence of the Montez O’Brien house giving out goods (“This is for you, these trousers for you, this skirt for you”). She was so
attentive to these unfortunates that her mother, Mariela, sometimes thought her too “good,” and worried that some slick young hustler would lure her away and take advantage of her. And so, seeing Veronica, she would call out to her from the porch of the house, “Venga! Venga! Come inside.”

  — The Handsome Young Man in Rags —

  Once in 1939, when a handsome young man in rags had fallen exhausted on his knees before the front steps of the house, she had brought him inside, pulling him up over the porch steps, past the screen door, and onto the lounge in the parlor where the aviator had once rested, and attended to him, scrubbing his forehead, hands, and feet clean.

  He would come back looking for her six years later.

  ***

  And there was Marta and Carmen, homebodies for the most part, who seemed destined to live quietly forever in their town, a common fate for young girls who were not outgoing and too comfortable in each other’s company. The two living tranquilly at home, passing their time in the shadow of their more flamboyant and lucky sisters and only gradually coming to fear the prospect of spinsterhood. As they got older, they would stoically go about tending to their looks and acquiring for themselves a proper young woman’s toilet, with pomades and vanishing creams, the two venturing out together into the world, nicely made up and beautiful, but ever modest, nothing like the musical sisters, or the much more forward Violeta, their excursions to dances and church socials no longer marked by timidity, their choices few. They were cautious, even when life in the house seemed the same from day to day, a terrible feeling gripping them sometimes at dinner, when their father, presiding, would notice their mood and announce, “No matter what happens in this world, don’t you worry, for I will provide for you.”

  During the Depression they relished the security of their house—they were not lacking, as their father’s theater always provided an income. But during the war, when it was easy to go off to a USO dance in Philadelphia and fall in love with some young man about to see action, they held off, wanting neither the quick romances—though they were often approached—nor the heartbreak of the war widows they would see in town. And so they remained in the house.

  — Emilio in Cuba, 1932 —

  That he was half Cuban (behind that thought, his mother’s words, “Being half Cuban is better than not being Cuban at all”) meant little to him. Even during the family journey to Cuba in 1932, when his mother presented him to the frail, white-haired man who was his Cuban grandfather and namesake, those days were merely a sequence of moments in which the boy played on the back patio among the jade plants, digging into the earth with a stone, chasing after iguanas and the chameleons skulking along the wall, the history of that house—his mother’s first home—unknown to him, its voices and those that he would hear on the streets sounding to his ears as if from another world. He’d remember going for walks with one of his aunts, who did not speak English, and with Margarita and Isabel—sightseeing tours of the city of Santiago, strolls down to the Marine Park, where bands sometimes played, up a cobblestone road to look at the antique stone house in which, Isabel explained, Hernán Cortés, conqueror of the Indies, had once lived. And often in the late evenings they would make their way up to the Cathedral Plaza and sit at a café (the Venus), watching the passersby, his mother sighing in concern over the poor state of her father and preparing for the vigil which she and her sisters and mother would undertake when, returning to the house, they would light holy candles and sit in high-backed chairs saying the rosary for the soon-to-be-departed soul. His sister Margarita sighed as well, while catching the eyes of the gallant gentlemen in their straw boaters and linen suits, lamenting her marriage to Lester, which everybody in the house, even the littlest children, knew wasn’t working out. Sorrow plagued both Mariela and Margarita, whereas Isabel, the family wallflower, found herself happy in the company of a gentleman whom Emilio would remember for his hands, which smelled of soap, and the absolute cleanliness and order of his being, not a stitch out of place. While the Cathedral bells rang on the hour, and birds flew around the Cathedral towers and musicians played guitars and sang, moving from table to table, the boy would grow restless, feeling out of place and far from home. He’d remember taking a walk with his mother down the hill from where the family lived, going through a market and coming to a street where she pointed out a shop window and in her best English told him, “This is where your father once had a studio. This is where I met him, many years ago, before you were born.”

  Of course, they took along a Kodak camera and posed at many of the aforementioned places, Emilio and his Irish-looking sister, Isabel, the tall blonde who was falling in love with the Cuban (that was something his mother and Margarita seemed to joke about when Isabel’s suitor, the pharmacist, came to the house in the evenings to keep Isabel company), blissfully smiling in a way that she had never smiled before, their blond hair and fair faces, as they stood together before the window of the shop that had once been their father’s studio, nearly washed out by the brilliant light. As it was at home in Cobbleton, so it had been in Cuba, very little being denied to the boy, but just the same he felt restless, even if it was interesting to accompany his Aunt Vivian’s husband and their sons to the jai-alai matches, or to walk by the harbor and watch the fishermen coming into port. They’d even gone to see an Edward G. Robinson movie in a local theater, and the boy was shocked when Robinson could speak in Spanish. He’d never seen anything like it, and for days wondered how all the American actors and actresses in a gangster film had come to learn Spanish, when he himself could not speak more than the few phrases that his mother had coached him in. (“Abuela, abuelo, estoy muy contento de haber venido aquí, Grandmother, Grandfather, I am very happy to have come.” And: “Yo te quiero mucho, I love you very much”—phrases which he would often say in those days and which would remain with him for years, though he could not say much else and did not know what the people in Cuba were saying to him, only that they were very nice, as the world was nice to him in his youth, the pure affection that he felt in Cobbleton duplicated in Cuba.) It was Margarita who would explain the principles of dubbing to Emilio—that Spanish actors went into booths and spoke the words for their American counterparts, and that had fascinated him then and would years later when, having become an actor, he would be sitting in his California bungalow looking in the TV listings and find one of his movies, Desperation, listed as Desesperación on the Spanish-language channel, the man watching himself in that more-or-less mediocre potboiler speaking his lines in a Spanish whose origin he could not determine, the high-pitched fluency of that other Emilio Montez O’Brien impressing him and then leading to a depression, for in later life, long after his descent into obscurity, he would wonder how much he had missed in life because he, like his younger sisters, did not speak Spanish.

  Yet, in those days, he was getting along well in life without that language, even if he was never certain that his mother truly understood him, or was never sure what she was saying to him, even in later years, when their conversations were of a practical and simple nature, the feeling that he did not know her making him sad also.

  On one of those nights, he had spied on Isabel and the pharmacist, Antonio—who’d always give him candies—as they sat on the back patio in courtship, the man whispering to her in a low voice and from time to time pulling her close and giving her a long kiss, his murmuring speaking of a desire which was clear to Emilio even then. And despite the grief that came over the household when a cry was heard in the middle of the night, his grandfather finally shutting his eyes for good, he had loved the journey itself, the busy terminals, the rail trip to and from Havana and then the boat out of that port city back to Key West, Florida, where Margarita, ever kindly (and a little seductive) with Emilio, bought him a rubber alligator at the rail station and they made their way home, north to New York and west to Cobbleton.

  — Nelson O’Brien’s Chagrin —

  Despite the birth of a son and the love of his daughters, his fat
her, Nelson O’Brien, had failed to find within himself a feeling of real contentment. Maybe he had seen too much suffering during his early life. He’d seen his share of it back in the days of the Spanish-American War, and with the onset of the Depression had pitied his fellow men, the ranks of the unemployed, hoboes, who would get rousted from the freight cars and come drifting through town looking for work and, when they could not find that, for a handout. He would sometimes get a man to come in and clean his shop window, hand the fellow a buck for mopping up the floors, or, even when it wasn’t necessary, hire a small crew and have them scrub down the walls of the movie house, mop the floors, maybe put a fresh coat of paint in the rest rooms. He’d have one of his daughters cook up a pot of stew, get a case of “near-beer,” and feed these men, so that the unfortunates would have at least a few days of decent food and some work, but there always came the moment when he would have to let them go, slapping their backs and wishing them the best of luck. Sometimes he’d had trouble. He’d hired someone to work in the studio, and a few of the nicely framed photographs that he’d put up for display would be missing, or some boxes of candy would disappear from the movie house—but nothing more.