In the barracks, after their evening meal, Emilio and his fellow soldiers usually passed the time playing cards and listening to radio broadcasts over the short wave. Through the static, the slow and inevitable progress of the war was reported, and some nice entertainment shows, too. Feeling pangs of loneliness—he’d not been with a woman since Naples—he surprised himself with the vagueness of his own recollections of Spring Mayweather, whose stupendous influence during the brief time he had bedded her down had now waned. Instead, he was thinking about the woman in the window, Antonella.
The fellows were laughing and talking mirthfully (and with some embarrassment) about a club in Naples, Il Capro, famous in its time for its floor shows of beautiful young women and for the way these women serviced the men. They’d all gone there. You paid a few dollars to get in, had all the wine you could drink, and, sitting at your table, which was on a raised platform, you would wait for one of the young ladies to come along: standing on a narrow walkway that passed under all the tables, the woman would slip under the tablecloth and in a kind of gleeful game “blow” one of the men. A fellow would be sitting there laughing with his chums and in the next moment feel a hand opening his trousers, a pompino ensuing, as his penis was taken into the woman’s mouth and sucked, the idea being to keep a poker face and watch the show while this was going on, until a head flung back, face grimacing, the others laughing, betrayed the act. It amounted to an interesting kind of roulette, because, on entering the club, one never knew if one would be chosen, or, for that matter, if, one by one, each of the men sitting in a row would be serviced.
But a kind of philosophical problem arose when it became common knowledge that the army closed the club down because the beautiful and curvaceous young women with their worldly mouths and soft feminine lips were, in fact, beautiful and curvaceous young men.
“You’re kidding me,” said one of the boys. “I don’t believe it,” said another, the pleasure taken, the lascivious “maleness” of the situation, diminished.
Although Emilio listened, his thoughts were on Antonella. How could he meet her? She had a child, but did she have a husband? Many Italian men had been killed in the war. But even if he were to meet her, what did he want from her?
A funny thing: He remembered that when he was driving Major Strong through the countryside outside Naples, the major, who’d trained in engineering and architecture, liked to stop from time to time to examine the interior of churches. Emilio must have seen fifty—so many that he would find himself a little bored as Strong walked about, examining the ceiling vaultings, trying to date the brickwork. (“That wall, with the crenellated, criss-crossing pattern, was made of Roman brick, while that chapel wall is medieval.”) During those trips, Emilio had become fond of a certain kind of fresco that adorned many a church—depicting the Holy Mother and the Infant Jesus. Some did not compel him at all, the workmanship ordinary, and some were too polished. But in a little church (whose name he could never recall) near Sorrento, while the major had conversed with the priest, for he spoke a serviceable Italian, Emilio found himself languorously disposed toward a fading, paint-flecked fresco in whose surface he had seen an expression of pure affection. The Virgin, in a blue gown, with a halo, and with cherubs fluttering about her head, was gazing with absolute love and compassion at the Infant, plump, healthy, and with angelic locks of hair, his pudgy hand reaching toward her lips. The woman poured all her love into the child, and her eyes revealed that she, in that moment, certainly knew that the Child in her arms would become the man on the cross.
He felt an odd empathy for the scene, thinking that women (his sisters and his mother) were delegated to the comforting of men before the storm that would be their lives. He sat there, adrift in his despair and wishing that, for all his other longings, he could pass into the corridors of perpetual love.
— Antonella’s House —
He got into the habit of stopping before Antonella’s house—always looking up at that window. And when he trekked up the hill, making his way toward the tower, he’d hope to see her, but it seemed as if she never stepped outside her door. One late afternoon he was in the square, where he would often sit, pull off his boots, and wash his feet in the fountain where water poured out of a bronze lion’s mouth. He was rubbing his immense toes when he saw her walking down the street. She did not look at him, did not smile, but when he called out, “Hey!” she turned, waiting. She was plumper than he imagined. Standing before her, he fumbled awkwardly for candy and cigarettes, saying, “For you.”
She took a deep breath, appraising the American soldier; she looked him over with her almond eyes and smiled. “Grazie.”
He watched her walk off and watched her coming back. And when she walked by him again, he clutched at his heart. “My name is Emilio,” he called after her. “Emilio.”
GIs were always falling in love in those days. One of his fellow soldiers, a Private Haines, had something going with a young widow in town; but mainly the soldiers, looking for companionship, would make forays into a nearby town where there was a bordello. Emilio, however, could not get this woman out of his mind. He kept his vigils, waiting outside her house, sometimes encountering her on the road, though few words were exchanged between them. He gave her candy and cigarettes and Superman comic books and imagined that she thought him “simple.” And then, just like that, she had stopped by the fountain, saying, “Venga,” and although he did not know Italian, he followed her. They came to the doorway of her house, three hundred years old, and he was soon entering another world. The rooms were cool, with a crucifix on the wall in every room, reminding him of his grandmother’s house in Cuba. He did not know what she was saying when she introduced him to her family—grandmother, grandfather, her mother, her father, and many little children running about—but he surmised that she had described him as a “kindly soldier.”
They’d dined on pasta and cheese and the grandfather had produced a bottle of wine. And he had passed the night shifting positions in the chair of honor, and oblivious to what they were saying, nodding, nodding as he always did with his mother when she spoke Spanish. By the evening’s end he, with his courteous humility, felt certain that a door had been opened, that he could court this woman.
Later, when she took him downstairs, he blushed, lowering his head, and said: “Antonella, I want to get to know you.” And she smiled. “And I hope that we can do this again. I can bring you things, canned meat, chocolate, whatever you want, and”—she had straightened his cap—“I want so many things with us, so many—”
She cut him off, saying, “Lei è molto simpatic. Grazie.”
But when he tried to kiss her, when he took her by the hand, she told him, “Non posso.”
And then abruptly, at ten-fifteen on that evening in 1944, the door closed.
(Sometimes he would remember that event differently, Antonella detaining him by the doorway, her baby in her arms, and speaking ever so sweetly. On her face the expression of a woman who wished that she could get to know the young man. That’s when she started to cry, for her husband, though absent from the household, was still somewhere in the world. And though she knew that she could easily fall in love with him, it was an impossibility. So what she did, in the way that he preferred to remember her, was to pull him close, giving him a long and tender kiss, and in a state of torment and agony, had told him, “I will never forget you.” And then she left him standing outside her house.)
He walked back to the barracks and happened on the fellows as they were leaving by jeep for a late-night excursion to a brothel in another town, and seeing that the affable Emilio was in an unhappy, daydreamy state, they invited him along, their jeep making its way along the dark, unsteady dirt roads, the soldiers drinking merrily. In the brothel, he went to bed with a woman of ingratiating proportions and stoic manner, in whose skin and scent he lost himself, thinking often that night about Antonella and wondering how he could have fallen in love with her, when really all she was was a pretty woman
framed in the window of a medieval house, holding a child. He had gotten along with her in a small way but he could never understand her, and he convinced himself, with his penchant for self-deception, that the woman of forty or so with the pendulous breasts and the wild head of black hair was almost like Antonella. Years later, when remembering that night, his mind fogged by drink, he would not only have shared a tender kiss with Antonella but believe that she, too, had fallen in love with him. In that invention of memory, when he left the house she went walking with him toward the church, and there, in its back garden, among the pear and fig trees, she rested on the ground and he covered her with kisses.
It must have been five in the morning when they’d returned, and because Emilio was to leave for his post on the tower at six, he saw no point in trying to sleep. Not one to drink in those days, he had fortified himself that night with too much cheap Chianti and was a little unsteady as he made his way toward the tower. A cool breeze had resuscitated him, the first birdsong greeting him, and Venus, the morning star (which his mother had always pointed out), up in the sky. He had looked forward to his ritual of spreading bread crumbs along the ledges for the birds and to watching the butterflies rising over the field (it would make him feel a little like St. Francis, on some days). But, climbing the narrow stone stairway leading to the tower, he faltered on the top step and slipped back, tumbling down. He landed badly, and broke his right arm at the elbow, the bone and sinew tearing through the skin.
He came to within the hour and reported to the medics, who gave him some morphine, and he seemed to have slipped into a dream as they went about setting the bone, or trying to, for over the next several months it healed oddly, his elbow slightly distended and a deep scar where the skin had been penetrated. Soldiers who noticed this would ask him if he had “caught one” in battle, and he would most often tell the truth, that he had fallen down a stairway, but he so wanted to get out of himself that he would sometimes say he had been hit by a sniper down in Paestum during a clean-up operation.
— Newsreels, 1944 —
Newsreels of the war, a Betty Grable film, a short with Leon Errol, a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and next to Margarita the smartly dressed officer whom she had met at a dance which she’d attended with some of the other girls from the factory. The night before, the night her brother dined with Antonella’s family, she got into a nice dress and went to a beer hall and, in the spirit of patriotism, danced with a lot of the servicemen, who didn’t seem to care if she was past forty. She felt so taken by this break from her routine that she flirted, laughed, and drank with them—and then she had met the officer, a Marine from Pittsburgh, a fellow who had seen action in the Pacific, “stuff that would make your skin crawl, but let’s not talk about that, let’s talk about your pretty face,” he’d told her, and though she had been to bed with only one man in her life—Lester Thompson, who had made her think “To hell with them all”—she accompanied the officer to his hotel room and spent the night. He had a hard and muscular body, his skin smooth save for a star-burst scar over his right shoulder, and he was virile, suckling her breasts like a hungry baby; the rocking, the penetration, and the fact that she had not lost her ability for pleasure exhilarating her in those moments.
— Gloria’s Little Romance —
That night his sister Gloria experienced the tedium of yet another evening of worry about Emilio. Even though he was safe in a beautiful part of Italy near the monastery of Monte Cassino, she lived in the fear that he would be reassigned and sent to the front or that some freak accident would take his life or hurt him badly. By then she had drifted into such a state of gloom that even her mother, Mariela, became concerned. Encouraging Gloria to have faith in God, she urged her to get on with the practical business of life. And Gloria tried, heaven help her, as she would always try. Though she was sometimes a wreck of nervous symptoms, real and imagined, she would get dressed up and go out on dates, with one boy in particular, a schoolteacher a few years older than herself, a fellow who had been too myopic for the service. She had been sitting with Carmen in the ice-cream parlor, feeling Emilio’s absence deeply, and as she was sucking up a vanilla ice-cream soda through a straw, this schoolteacher came to sit beside her, apologizing for his rudeness but saying that he could not help himself. He was a genteel-looking man, thin-faced, with soft eyes and wire-rim glasses, and had sand-colored curly hair reminiscent of the movie actor Leslie Howard (who, having become an RAF pilot during the war, had been reported lost over the North Atlantic). He was about twenty-five and new to the town. Seemingly much taken by the delicate presence that was Gloria, he confessed an interest in taking her out, to an afternoon concert in Philadelphia, and though she felt that her life had become one long wait for the return of her brother, she liked his manner and (truthfully) wanted some companionship.
They dated for six months and the man adored her. Of limited means, he was always buying her gifts—“ladies’ things”: mirrors, compacts, mother-of-pearl-inlaid boxes (“So that you can keep the letters I send you”). Love letters, of a more cerebral, nearly Victorian bent, confessing to the ardor of his heart and the sublime and pure affection he felt toward her, that each and every day he woke up thinking about her and thanked heaven that he’d been so bold with her. She liked the attention but did not once invite him to the house, as if that would violate the sanctity of her past life there with Emilio—as if the house had somehow become Emilio’s realm alone. During country rides, they would stop on a hill and look out at the valleys—beautiful days when most anyone would have felt elated, and yet, when he kissed her, her body would go limp, her mouth passive. Still, they would kiss for so long that she would begin to show some signs of interest, kissing him back. Once he had even worked his teacherly hand under the buttons of her dress and felt the softness of her breast. And although she had much enjoyed that sensation, a wall came down between her and her teacher friend—his name was Harold Downs—so that, while she wanted him to touch her some more, she felt it too inappropriate and told him, that sweet and gentle soul now perspiring and with a flush in his cheeks, “Please, I just can’t.”
“But one day you will, won’t you?”
She smiled and buttoned her dress and suggested that they drive back, her schoolteacher suitor collecting himself and making the best of things, whistling the melody of a Mozart adagio as he steered his automobile over the hills. That’s when he told her, “I just don’t understand you—don’t you think this life is beautiful?”
“Of course I do.”
For all her reticence, he fell in love with her and proposed marriage some fifteen times: she told him no. And hurt that she would not invite him into the house even though the family knew something was going on, he showed up several nights, knocking on the door and sitting with her out on the porch, frustrated and unable to understand why she would not let him into her heart.
Finally, he’d given up. They would pass each other on the street or find themselves in the same shop and he would merely tip his hat, say “Hello,” and walk away.
Sometimes she would sigh, thinking about him: perhaps she had been a little cruel, too protective of the circumstances that Emilio had left.
One night, as Gloria sat quietly reading a Life magazine, with articles mainly about the war and the domestic lives of family and wives at home, her mother, in her best English, said to her: “You’re going to be crazy if all you can do is sit around and think about your brother. Just remember, that’s who he is, your brother. Don’t forget that.”
— His Return —
They all had prayed for his safe return, and at the war’s end their prayers were answered. His sisters were at the station—much palpitation of the heart and cries of happiness when Emilio, sunburned and handsome, military pins and ribbons on his breast and corporal’s stripes stitched to his sleeve, stepped off the train with his duffel bag. He flew into their arms—Margarita, Gloria, Helen, Olga, Maria, Jacqueline, and the others who had come to greet him, covering his face
with kisses. His mother, neither elderly nor young, wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him so tight that she’d surprised him with her strength. And his father, Nelson O’Brien, had been so elated by his arrival that he was unable to resist a few celebratory sips of drink, his face slightly flushed, but grinning with pure happiness. And Emilio? He was welcomed as a hero, his picture in the Cobbleton Chronicle, and he slept very late—having sat up with the family until five in the morning becoming reacquainted with them.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 28