During the months that followed Emilio’s return, his youngest sister, Gloria, tried her best to reassert her place in her brother’s heart. And indeed at first, because he was so kindly and had missed her and the family and had not forgotten the surprising solitude he had felt in their absence (though he did have his moments when the prospect of adventure and the allurements of the future had excited him, little moments when aboard ship he’d make his way along the crowded decks to stare thoughtfully into the water, or when standing on a mountaintop in Italy he’d looked out over the endlessness of the world, and he’d felt a connection with all the other men who’d come to stand on the same spot, and he found that heartening), Emilio Montez O’Brien had made it easy for Gloria. The two had once again become inseparable, Gloria happily accompanying her brother through the routine of his days, on his trips to town, where he basked in the feelings of appreciation that the townspeople showed their returning soldiers—his money was “no good” in the ice-cream parlor or in the hotel bar, and he was the guest of honor, along with other veterans, at celebrations mounted by the Catholic, Lutheran, and Mennonite churches and was invited to parties thrown by the Farmers’ Association and the Ladies’ Society. She was his companion, sometimes to his annoyance, when the Good Citizens’ Club held match-making parties for the returning soldiers, Emilio turning up in uniform with Gloria by his side and dancing with her until one of the young debutantes of town would tap him on the shoulder and ask him to sign a dance card. Sometimes Gloria would be left alone in the corner while Emilio danced a waltz or jitterbugged with one of the local young ladies. But he’d always come back to her, sensing her low spirits, pinching her chin and, taking her by the hand as the music started again, saying, “Come on, now.” (She remembered that sometimes, while being twirled around by her younger but much larger brother, she would feel herself in the swirl of romance, an odd feeling of both desire and hopelessness coming over her. And he would remember dancing to a slow song with one of the more beautiful local girls, an elegant brunette who under other circumstances would never have given him the time of day, and he’d swear, as he pressed close to her, that through the thick cloth of his uniform, through his shirt and his sleeveless T-shirt and in spite of his dog tags—he still wore them around his neck—he could feel the tips of her breasts against his chest. And at the dance’s end, when he released her to her next partner, a fellow named Mackenzie whom that beautiful dame would end up marrying, he’d had the chance of romancing her, if only Gloria had not been so punctual about appearing at his side, for his partner looked her over and said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you.”)
The Mayor of Cobbleton had even invited Emilio to a banquet at his house, which he attended with Gloria, other veterans being toasted and fěted, and Gloria, ever nervous and wondering if he really wanted her around, sipping too much champagne and getting so sick Emilio had to help the poor girl out. There was something about feeling his arms around her, as he escorted her to the car, that made her feign an even greater illness, moaning with such terrible pain that for a few moments Emilio thought of taking her to the doctor, though an Alka-Seltzer from the local pharmacy and a brisk ride through the countryside soon fixed her up.
Even though he sometimes found Gloria’s presence restricting, he decided, being a good brother, not to let on. He’d never forgotten their childhood together, and though he had both delighted in and been disappointed by two tormenting loves—with Spring and Antonella—he felt tempered by those experiences, brief as they were. He was, in that period, dedicated to the exercise of caution toward members of the opposite sex. In a way, he’d started to regard Gloria’s infatuation with him—he was very much aware of it—as a kind of buffer between himself and the female world.
(For this reason, he liked to be around Margarita, who would come down on the weekends and in the late hours, after everyone else had gone to bed, sit talking with him. In her eyes there was a feminine wisdom—she was smoking too much in his absence—and as she had a practical, bedded-down air about her because of her years of marriage to Lester, and had suffered much and survived, Emilio came to think of her as strong. He felt that he could open up to her, speaking softly on the porch of his self-doubts and of his desires to do well for the family. He liked the fact that she, in her forties, divorced and childless, would speak about her own plans and seemed able to dismiss the sadness in her past life with the detachment of someone flicking a too long ash off the tip of a cigarette, which she often did. He wanted to become an actor, he’d told her on those nights, and also that he was sometimes afraid.
“Well then, you must do it. Never get yourself into a situation of entrapment, such as I had for many years. Do as you like, for time passes in any case, and you will succeed, one way or the other. You don’t want to end up like me.” Then he would reach over to hug her, and she would feel her hands tighten around his back, pulling him close, tobacco and perfume rising off her, and say, “Don’t be worried, you’ll always have me.”)
***
So when Gloria tagged along and seemed too doting, he remained tolerant, and set about, at the lordly age of twenty, to decide what he would do with himself. The army would afford him a chance for an education through the GI Bill, and though during those first months back he entertained the idea of attending college (he had been seventy-seventh in his high-school class of one hundred, much to the consternation of the family, as Margarita had been number one, Isabel number twelve, Maria number eight, Olga number twenty-two, Jacqueline number seventeen, Irene number thirty, Helen number twenty-seven, Sarah number twenty, Patricia number seventeen, Veronica number eight, Marta number forty-two, Carmen number twenty, Violeta number twelve, and Gloria number thirty-three), he started to daydream again about becoming an actor and wrote to various schools in New York asking for an application. There were drama workshops of every level there, theatrical schools sponsored by the WPA, schools connected to New York theaters, schools that were part of the YMCA curriculum. He had written to them all and one day received an acceptance from the Greenwich Village Dramatic Society.
— His Plans for New York —
When he made plans to stay with Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline in their big apartment on West End Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street, he tried to dissuade his sister Gloria from joining him. The day he announced his intentions, she feigned a gripping illness, suffering chills, growing puff-faced (as if through an act of will), and took to her bed, and then (as this did not work, for he would sit on her bed, joking and cheering her up until her symptoms ebbed from her body) she announced her intentions to make her own way, independent of her brother, to that city.
“What will you do?” her father asked her at the dinner table one evening, and scrambling about for a plan, she reminded them that she had done very well in bookkeeping in high school and told them that, unbeknownst to the family, she had received a certificate of bookkeeping from a mail-correspondence course. She would use this skill to find a job, as she was tired of Cobbleton. Her father said, “But, child, you can come and work for me,” but she remained adamant, impressing them with her resolve.
“Well then, where will you stay?” he asked her, and as if she did not know that Emilio would be going, she said, “With Maria and the twins.” At the table that night, Emilio, face turning red, excused himself and went for a walk to the farthest reaches of the property and then passed half the night pacing in the yard. Later, when he came back to the house, Gloria was waiting for him on the porch. Speaking in a low voice, he said, “Gloria, don’t you think that it would be better for me to go to New York alone? It’s not that I don’t want you around me, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I mean, I have no idea what it’s going to be like, sister, and, in any case, I don’t even know if I’ll have the time to go around with you. Besides, don’t you think it might be better for you—and me—to find our own ways? It’s not as if you won’t see me again—heck, I’d come back to visit pretty regularly, I don�
��t see what would be so bad about that.”
He could not look her in the eyes, and when she said, “You don’t want me around, do you?” her sadness and the helplessness which seemed to come over her in his company began to tear him up. My God, but how he wished he could walk away without having a moment of worry about her well-being, to go and do as he’d like, without the sense that he, her brother, would be committing a terrible wrong. Maybe it was Catholic guilt, he did not know, but he found himself softening toward her, and he began to revise his feelings. He couldn’t bear the idea of leaving his poor sister behind. At the same time, he had a feeling of doom, for, though he felt love for his family, the notion of hurting Gloria raised the possibility that there would be less love in the world for him. And yet he knew that not every brother in the world assumed the care of his sisters.
What would happen, he asked himself, when he inevitably moved on?
“Well, I suppose we could get along well enough. But understand, I can’t guarantee to spend a lot of time with you.” And sighing, he said, “I suppose it will be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
And with that she wrapped her arms around him in the same way she used to when they were children.
— A Distant Sadness —
Their mother, Mariela Montez, had watched them that night. She had sighed, a little worried about her youngest daughter. At one time or another, she had worried about all of them, but she liked to think that God would help them find their way. That’s what she’d started to feel as she got older. She was then sixty-one—and had begun to think herself much like her paternal grandmother, whom she remembered vaguely from childhood, as a woman of traditional values who had learned, during troubled times, to move stoically through the world. Or perhaps Mariela was now like her own mother, Doña María, who had died during the Second World War. (In the grief of those days, she dreamed of her mother’s ghost—an odd relief from her concerns for her son’s safety—for on the night when her mother died, a gaunt, thin, white-haired woman had appeared in the bedroom, not five feet from where she slept beside her snoring, tipsy, but beloved husband, the woman unrecognizable in a simple cotton dress, holding her arms out to her and speaking in an inaudible whisper, eyes wide and sad, as if to ask, “Don’t you recognize me?” She had sat up, experiencing palpitations of the heart, and had gone downstairs to sit in the parlor by a lamp, reading, with the help of a dictionary, with her bifocals low on her nose—the way her father used to read in Cuba—whatever magazines were in the house, Life and Time and Screen Life, among others, until her eyes grew heavy and she felt that she could sleep again. But no sooner had she fallen asleep once more than she became aware that the woman was entering the parlor and this time, when she looked up, she was only a few feet away, and still she did not recognize her, and in a kind of terror she made her way back up the stairs, passing the rest of the night sitting up with a light on and watching the door. The pattern repeated itself for two more evenings—the white-haired, gaunt skeleton of a woman making herself known by leaning so close to Mariela’s ear that she could hear the whisper: “Soy tu madre.”
That it had been her mother was verified when, through the tangled wartime communications, Mariela received a cable from Isabel in Cuba conveying the news that her mother, María Montez, had passed away three days before, of cancer.
And that certain knowledge, she supposed, made it unnecessary for her mother’s ghost to appear again before going off into the peaceful kingdoms of heaven and memory. What had shocked Mariela was her mother’s condition, never alluded to in letters from her sisters or her daughter Isabel, for her mother had always wanted to spare her the grief. Then a week later, a letter from Isabel had followed the cable, explaining that toward the end her mother was unrecognizable. Her hair had turned white, she had become skin and bones, and the color seemed to have drained from her eyes. But she had been taken into God’s arms, and God would restore her whole.
Mariela had become stoic. Even when Patricia came to the house one morning to tell them that she had been feeling a communication from Cuba, though she could not say what—as marital happiness and the presence of two children, Henry, born in 1938, and Clara, in 1940, with a third to come in 1947, and the chores of her daily life would cloud her visions for a long time—Mariela had already guessed the identity of the woman in her dream, and when that intuition was borne out, Mariela felt some kind of relief—another proof of spirits and the world awaiting them all.
She had been unable to undertake a second journey to Cuba. To console herself and her family, and to satisfy her daughterly guilt, she’d said many novenas and rosaries and offered many Masses for her mother’s soul. She had felt heartbroken after her journey in 1932, and not just because her beloved father had died. During that visit, she had started to grow reaccustomed to Cuba, feeling a comfort and familiarity that, even after so many years in Cobbleton, had never come to her there. She had wanted to stay behind, wishing that she could transplant the life of her family; and on their return to Cobbleton, old pangs of longing plagued her for many months. (The family thought she was pensive over the loss of Grandfather Emilio.) Now a certain resignation seized her; at least her life in Cobbleton was bearable. She was no longer the colorful lady on the streets, timid and sometimes unreasonably angry in the shops, but a citizen like the others, with her own family, a husband of responsibility and stature, and daughters—and a war-hero son—who were known to all.
— Their Mother’s Concerns —
Knowing that some things were beyond one’s control, she had watched Violeta lose her air of mischievous and curious virginity and, once she was of age, become arrogant about going out and doing exactly as she pleased, her dresses too tight, and her sweaters (in Mariela’s opinion) giving her an alluring but cheap appearance. There was nothing to do, for she was over twenty-one and a woman. What could she do, beat her (as she had a few times before), or send her off to a prison for foolish young women? Or, with much pain, send her out of the house? The house which with each passing year was becoming emptier and emptier.
Mariela did find some consolation in the fact that Margarita often tried to intercede (“Whatever you do, Violeta, do not get yourself pregnant,” her oldest sister said. “And don’t be so trusting of men. Believe me, I know”), and one day Patricia, sensing her mother’s concern, told Mariela, “Don’t be worried about Violeta, as I know she’ll end up just fine.” But, all the same, she braced herself for the worst: the news that her daughter, who would stay out all night in the dance halls of neighboring towns, had gotten a swollen belly from some dashing officer or cheating husband, or, even worse, that she would end up like one of those unfortunates slashed up by some crazy man and left in a roadside ditch, as the newspapers reported from time to time, she carefully deciphering their contents.
(She’d first gotten into the habit of sitting down with a dictionary and a newspaper back around 1910, when Halley’s comet would appear at night, brilliant in the sky, and the Cobbleton Chronicle featured weekly installments of scientifically speculative articles about the celestial event and its effect on human and animal behavior. Hounds barked everywhere, horses stirred in their stables, insects seemed to teem under the ground in greater numbers than before, and the nature of time was reported to have changed, some clocks inexplicably ticking more slowly. The incidence of suicide went up, too, for the electrodynamism was exerting its influence on the brain. She would look up and think about the monk Theocratus on the planet Mars and the splendid beings who were supposed to live there, look up blinking, and think about Cuba—those thickly written texts too difficult for her to decipher, so that after hours of effort she would simply give up and ask her husband, who doted on her in those days, to read the articles and explain their contents in his best Irish-brogued Spanish.)
She prayed for Violeta, finding it nearly unbearable when she would enter the parlor with a certain look of carnality in her eyes. (One day that carnalit
y was most pronounced, for on the previous night she’d met a fellow at a dance and afterward they’d gone to a bar, and because she’d had a few too many highballs, she sat with him in his parked automobile and they kissed and “fooled around,” though, contrary to her mother’s worst fears, she would not go “all the way,” as they used to say in that epoch. But they were so drunk that, between the kisses and his attempts to undo her dress, she began to lock her legs together, and things were on the verge of getting bad, with the man attempting to force himself on her, when she resorted to a compromise, undoing the fellow’s trousers. She did not much mind the act and found it much more convenient and in a way more satisfying, as she delighted in the fact that while Rudy Vallee or Bing Crosby was crooning away out of the dashboard radio, she could make a man’s penis fill up and thicken and rise bit by bit, with her mouth, until she would feel siren-like and powerful, especially if the man was larger than most of the other fellows, if he had a particularly striking and virile inguinal vein or a beautifully shaped glans—some were even pretty. Just the sight of it, engorged and livid red, would make her feel as if she were the most alluring woman in the world, and not just one of the sisters. Then she would bring the gentleman around—that part of the business a bit of a chore—until the man was satisfied and, feeling more kindly-disposed, as happened that night, drove her back through town and to the edge of the Montez O’Brien property on Abelmyer Road.)
Mariela was troubled not only by her daughter’s changed air and by the worries she felt for her future (she did not know, and this would make them laugh one day, that she would marry a Protestant minister) but by the fact that her daughter’s youthful and sinful zest reminded her, from time to time, that she was becoming old. She’d feel this more and more as each of her daughters reached the age when they would naturally begin to leave the house.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 29