The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  (She did not know that Violeta had had a similar experience, encountering Emilio as he stepped out of the bathroom one afternoon, covered only with a towel that did not do much to hide his attributes, and she had blushed and laughed and gone into the kitchen, thinking, My goodness, while she washed the dishes.)

  Gloria reasoned that if she could entertain such thoughts—she would slip into a daydream of joining her brother in bed so that they could “embrace” as they used to as children, and she would reach down and touch him: “Stop thinking this, Gloria!” she would tell herself—certainly her oldest sister, Margarita, who had always been seductive with Emilio, must have had similar ideas as well.

  These speculations made her jittery in Emilio’s absence and depressed her. If not Margarita—and certainly nothing was really going on—there would be someone else. Perhaps one of those sporty tennis-playing types in town—for when they walked along the main street of Cobbleton, she was always aware of the way the young women looked at her brother, and she had seen them making eyes at him when he in his usher’s outfit would lead some of the ladies to their seats, and when they went into the ice-cream parlor there was always a little group of girls to start giggling, as if he were (and this would be funny enough) some movie star like Clark Gable or Joel McCrea, whom people always said Emilio resembled.

  And it would bother her to learn that on certain weekend afternoons her father and Emilio would load the car with fishing rods and tackle and cans of worms, driving off to fish by the Susquehanna, or simply to get away, out of the house—away from her, she would think.

  On days when he would tell her, “Come along,” they would go happily to town together and he was nice to her—it wouldn’t matter if Carmen or Marta accompanied them—it would be as if she’d never had such thoughts of abandonment, their rituals moving along in the same way, off to the ice-cream parlor and to browse through the magazines in the pharmacy, or, when she had it completely her way, to look at the wedding gowns and pretty dresses in the Silver Bells Bridal Shop, or, quite simply, to see their father and to sit, keeping him company in his studio.

  Now and then, she would say to him, when no one was around, “We’ll always be together, won’t we, brother?” and he would tell her, “Yes,” but a flush would come over his face and he would quickly change the subject, the two of them walking on quietly and at times with such formality that it would seem he was walking home a date he had not known for very long. But each night around nine-thirty, when they’d all finished listening to President Roosevelt on the radio or to one of the funny variety shows out of New York and it was time for them to go to bed, Gloria would leave the parlor just after her brother, each time planting on his cheek a kiss and saying in a singsong voice, “Nighty-night.” She would linger in the hall until he’d close his door and in a revelry of self-satisfaction go to bed in the room that she shared with Violeta, sighing happily, because he had been so nice to her, as if she had fallen in love.

  — And Margarita Loved Emilio —

  Margarita also loved Emilio very much, and although she may have been too casual around the boy, sometimes greeting him at the door of her house in a slip, she never entertained any sensual thoughts about him, even when he was turning out to be quite a good-looking man. She was careless in the way of a racy aunt, and perhaps a little absentminded—her life with Lester had made her forget she was quite a beautiful woman—but, if anything, she felt almost maternal toward him. She was the sister who had once allowed him to suckle her, but if he knew that, he never let on. All he knew was that, despite the torment of her marriage, Margarita could be counted on for advice.

  On days when he would visit Margarita at her house—the poor woman passing the monotony of her days reading books—or when she would come to visit and they went picking flowers in the field, he would talk about his ideas for the future. The hard times did not give him much recourse, but it weighed heavily on his heart that he really did not have much interest in continuing on in his father’s business. The photography trade and movie-house work were good for the time being, but not at all what he really wanted to do.

  This was before the Second World War, and although he would graduate from high school in 1942 (they’d have a grand party in the house, a reunion of just about all the sisters, marked only by the absence of Isabel, who was married and living in Cuba), by the time he was fifteen or so, in 1940, he’d fallen under the influence of the flamboyant trio, Olga, Jacqueline, and Maria, who would sometimes come back to town to perform. He had no musical talents, but he very much liked the business of the stage and the idea of making people happy by getting up in front of them. Developing certain skills over the years, he learned sleight-of-hand tricks, with which he entertained his sisters and the intermission crowds at the Jewel Box, and for a time he dabbled with more formal magic apparatus, having acquired for himself a kit from the Apex Novelty Company of Brooklyn, New York—fine hobbies, as his father would say. And spending so many hours in the movie house, where he, like his sisters, worked in many different capacities, he became enamored of certain actors, much admiring comedians like Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy, but aligning himself, because of his good looks, with the matinee idols of the day, fellows like Cary Grant and Errol Flynn. He was always happy when his father rented out the theater to a traveling troupe of players, the boy delighting in all the business that went on backstage, and he’d relish those visits to New York when he would stay with his sister Helen, who had married well, and they would go see shows on Broadway. Though he would attend these performances with the younger sisters, and they enjoyed them, too, such exposure made much more of an impression on him.

  So he joined the high-school dramatic society and would spend his time studying the lines of plays. He was always carrying around a copy of Romeo and Juliet, and he used to visit a rich girl, a sweet little blonde, and they would lie on a blanket on the lawn of her house, reciting their lines, and when out of sight of the adults, they would sometimes kiss. He’d even appeared in a school production of You Can’t Take It with You and, in the words of his teacher, had shown “flair.”

  What he had mainly liked about the experience was that it was a way of getting out of his own skin. He’d inherited some of his father’s gloominess, the torpor that comes from spending too much time around a man who was sometimes “not all there,” and he could feel, while moving through the house, his own mother’s nervousness, which, unknown to the others, sometimes possessed him. Besides, he felt in tune with his mother’s and father’s creativity. Then there was his simple vanity: long accustomed to being the center of so much female attention, he had naturally assumed that his presence on a stage or in a movie (that’s what he, like so many other young men and women in those days, dreamed about) would have the same effect more generally.

  And yet he had his doubts—particularly when it came to the notion of conveying such hopes to his father, and because, in any case, he knew that in all likelihood nothing would come of it. His main advantage—though he did not think of himself this way—was his handsomeness. But that in itself guaranteed nothing.

  He also felt a little troubled about Gloria’s reliance on him for her happiness, and on many of those days he felt like saying, “You must learn to get along without me.”

  Back then, he had no intention of leaving her, but it had often made him feel a little queasy when she would look at him in a certain way; what would she do in the future, whatever his decisions about a profession, when he simply left the household?

  Margarita would listen attentively to her young brother, and although she was not really in a position to give advice and was not especially religious in those days, she would counsel, “God will provide for you,” and hold him close. That’s all she could do, besides making him a sandwich and a glass of iced tea whenever he was hungry and in such a mood.

  — The End of Margarita’s—Marriage, 1941

  For Margarita, things were resolved when her husband, Lester Thompson,
met “another woman” in Philadelphia—a show girl, a model, a factory worker, she did not know, only that during one of his visits home in 1941 he announced after sixteen years of marriage that he wanted a divorce. The oddest thing was that, once he’d gotten all of it out, he seemed to become once again the gentleman who had so impressed her, kindly, introspective, courteous, and optimistic about the future—his future. He pleaded that he once loved her, that the troubles of the world had brought out his mean-spiritedness, that he’d never intended to hurt or offend her, that, aside from wanting a child, which she could not give him (his woman, she would later find out, was pregnant at the time), there had been the financial pressures of the Depression, but now things might shape up again, for his family’s factories were being refitted to prepare for the looming war, and of course, a financial arrangement could be made. She sat listening to him as he paced about the parlor of their house, perceiving the sudden sadness in his brow, and recalling the bawdier, more affectionate, and sometimes upsetting sessions of love that had marked the first years of their marriage, she felt pangs for the old sweetness—or what she had confused with a nostalgia for her own youthful hope for love. And for a moment she remembered when it was their habit to make love many times a day and how, with time, that had dwindled to nothing, so that for the last three years his occasional presence in the house seemed quite strained, and they would pass entire afternoons together without saying very much to one another, he content to sit in the parlor over some ledger books with a glass of wine, she nervously trying to read and improve herself. For many an hour, she would pass the time reading certain pages over and over again, because whenever Lester was in the household she found it impossible to concentrate, the sense that something disastrous was going to happen blurring the letters. Then she would find herself pacing the rooms, waiting for Saturday and Sunday to pass and the clock to ring at 6 a.m. on Monday, when he would get up and prepare to drive back to Philadelphia. She would watch him move down the street, the years of her life spent with him already feeling like time wasted. Life-loving and good-natured, with her own daydreams of becoming like those worldly women she would read about—the ladies embarking each year on liners for Europe—Margarita had become another kind of lady, the unfortunate, ignored “wife,” the best years of her youthful beauty squandered on the hope that things would change.

  But she found strength in certain memories—what was it that Miss Covington used to tell her: “A woman doesn’t necessarily need a man to find happiness in this world.” She had believed that and had tried to maintain her calm through all those days, spending time with her family, watching their lives change and basking in the affection she felt for her young brother, who would sometimes come to visit and find her so lonely that she felt like crying in his arms, an impulse which she always resisted.

  It was hard for her to think about her sister Isabel, with whom, without knowing it, she had been very close. She felt much happiness about Isabel’s discovery of love in Cuba and was consoled when one by one her sisters seemed to be slowly finding their way in the world. The love she felt for them seemed certainly more dependable than the love of courtship and romance, no matter what novels said about such things. On those days alone, she would miss Isabel (on whose lap she had sometimes cried when her spirits were low) and remember their months together in Santiago de Cuba, where for a time she had partaken of the love of her mother’s family, even while her father was suffering. In those days she became aware of how different her life might have been had her mother, Mariela, never entered a certain photography shop on the corner of a market street in the year 1900, that she might have ended up like her Aunt Vivian, content with her children—but would she have had any of her own?—and the quiet security of that life, Maybe a different love would have been her destiny and perhaps she would have been passing her days on a small farm in the province of Oriente, lamenting her life there. She did not know. Or what if she had been born in Ireland? She’d read books about the place—histories going back to the days when the Danes plundered and settled the island and when Druids and fairy folk were everywhere—and she knew about the famine, and Parnell and the Insurrection of 1916, and would drift, wondering if the pain she felt on certain days, the pain of an idealizing love skewered on the thorn of reality, would have come to pass. On certain days she’d laugh, finding herself staring out the window, like her mother. She would watch the clouds moving from one end of the horizon to the other. An airplane would come sputtering along and she would think about the pilot whom she’d taken a girlish fancy to, some twenty years before, and wonder what would have happened if he had fallen in love with her. Would they have entered a life filled with light, or gone tumbling through endless space thick with charcoal-bottom clouds? She would wince at her own cynicism, her own unhappiness, and berate herself, for did not everyone in the world have troubles?

  Her husband: the last time she committed the act of fellatio on his person had been on a balmy summer afternoon in 1938, and when he was ejaculating, she could feel through the stem of his sexual organ a shimmering rush of foaming, excited sperm—his seed rushing up into the world, and for what?

  In appraising her marriage to the man, she would wonder if she’d really even wanted to have children—his children, in any case. The idea of having a child, she supposed, was to bring forth a little human being who would embody the virtues and mutual love of the mother and father, the baby to be nurtured and suckled and brought along in the world to perpetuate more love. Had she loved Lester in the first place? Or had she suffered from a kind of moral laziness, finding in him the means to get certain things? This would make her feel a kind of shame, but as she got older, she had less and less patience for the nonsense of self-deception. In marrying Lester, she had fancied that she would become an inheritor of the earth and that she would somehow loom as a success before her own sisters, that her mother would feel some vindication in seeing her sometimes mischievous daughter get somewhere in life—that the mysterious process of love that had started when an immigrant Irishman married a young Cuban woman, many years before, would continue through her and her offspring.

  And for what? So that she could pace the floors, regretting the turn her life had taken? So that, before visiting her family, she could collect her nerves and feign happiness, as she did not want the family to think anything was wrong?

  He told her, “There’s someone else. I didn’t want it to happen, but you know that things have been a little shaky between us, anyway. And it’s for the best. We’re both getting a little older and we gave it a good try; sixteen years is a long time.

  “A very long time. I feel a little sick about it, but there’s no other way. I just want you to know that I will miss you and your family. I’d thought of going there myself to inform them of my decision—tell your mother that I’ve regarded her with only the highest sentiment—but I decided it would be better to keep my distance.”

  Putting some papers, “documents,” on the parlor table, he told her that at some future time, at her convenience, he would come back to collect his things. She could, of course, choose to remain in the house, as she pleased, or to sell their possessions, though one cedar closet, which had been in his family, he would like for himself. She watched him drive off and then sat at the table reading the documents, duly noting that “mutual incompatibility” was his reason for the divorce. She sat reading and rereading the documents and decided that she never wanted to see him again, wanted nothing of his money—though she would end up with ten thousand dollars as a settlement—and that on whatever day he returned to collect his closet she would be away.

  She was not a drinker but poured herself a glass of Napoleon brandy from his decanter, and she drank it down and then had another. The day became suddenly calmer, the light through the window the way she imagined the light of the Mediterranean from postcards. She suddenly became aware that birds were chirping in the trees and that the trees were rustling in the breeze. Then she remembered the
Mennonite farmer who had once declared everything around them the “work of the Lord,” and her mother telling her that He had his ways.

  Around four-thirty that afternoon, her brother, Emilio, came knocking at the door. She greeted him as if nothing had happened; he was there to tell her that she was invited to dinner at the house. That night, with her brother and youngest sisters present, she related the incident of the day. Her mother gasped and her father declared, “The bastard!” Afterward she went walking in the fields, Emilio by her side. The sun was just setting, the world at dusk quite beautiful, with bands of orange and red streaking across the sky. They went walking, and coming to the spot where they would sometimes sit, they both stared for some time at the sad face of the rising moon. He didn’t know what to say to her, or why she had singled him out from the others, and he spoke, as he often did, about a movie he’d seen over at the Jewel Box, some love story (he figured he could’ve played the leading role). It was in the midst of this luminousness that she took his hand and said, “As Mama would say, ‘Se acabó’; that’s Spanish for ‘It’s over.’” And she squeezed his hand, holding it for a long time, before a chill in the air inspired their return to the house.

  — Nelson and Emilio, 1943 —

  Some days struck Nelson O’Brien for their splendid physical beauty—for a kind of buoyancy that would come over him when all seemed well with the world. He could sit back and reflect that, despite his personal flaws, things had gone well for him in life; a little arthritic pain, on occasion, and terrific headaches from his indulgences, but many days came blessedly. He had lived to the age of sixty-five, long enough to see his children grow, and could look forward to an honorable retirement, if he so liked. He’d closed down the photography shop in 1942, relegating his craft to the occasional foray into “artistic photography,” and though he’d hoped his son, Emilio, might take up his work, he listened to Margarita, who one day confided in him that his son did not have an interest in the photography trade or in the movie house. That hurt him, but he would think of himself as a young man of Emilio’s age when he’d had no desire to continue the operation of his father’s roadside inn with its little pub and dry-goods store.