Even Marta and Carmen, who never seemed to mind living at home, even they began to look around for a place of greater and more exciting opportunities. Now and then they would visit their sisters in New York and seemed happy with the prospects of getting around, if not to New York, then to Philadelphia to visit with Sarah. But they’d gotten a taste of another world when in the summer of 1945 they went to visit their snooty sister Helen in Newport, Rhode Island, where she and her advertising executive husband kept a house. They’d come back after a few weeks of the good life—swimming, going out on a sailboat, followed by dinner on the veranda of the beach club—filled with gossip, tanned, and bursting with health and a hunger for adventure.
The evenings would find them looking at train schedules and fares to points west, and it became their regular habit to discuss places they would love to see. (These included Niagara Falls, Lake Michigan, Hoover Dam, and the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, among others.) They’d even begun to entertain the idea of taking a vacation “down Cuba way,” to visit with Isabel and see something of their mother’s country; and that, for a time, prompted something of a studious demeanor in them. Much to their mother’s surprise, these two sisters bought a Spanish textbook, which they would read to each other in the evenings, their mother sitting with them, trying to help with their pronunciation. (Sometimes Margarita, visiting the house, would sit with them.) But neither seemed to make much progress, for their accents were deplorable, so bad that in mid-lesson their own mother would let out a sigh, and turning so many years of lifted eyebrows and “What did you say? Can’t you speak English?” around, she would get impatient and dismissive, saying, “Maybe you will be better off with English, because I don’t think anyone in Cuba will understand the way you speak Spanish.”
That would leave them stunned, but Margarita, more encouraging, would prompt the continuation of the lessons, these two daughters with their most Cuban appearance and Cuban names studying on, and Margarita, confiding, would say (as if her mother, listening from the other room, could not hear), “You must forgive Mama. She’s getting old and I don’t really think she wants you to go anywhere.”
Then: “And, like Poppy, she’s getting moody.”
(“Moody”: what was that? Her mother, carrying on her lips the sound of that word, “moody,” which she had heard many times in her life but never bothered to learn in terms of its exact meaning, opened up a Spanish-English dictionary in the kitchen and found the phrase de mal genio, or “of a difficult turn of mind.”)
What could they expect, she found herself thinking, after so many years of looking after them, of selfless concern for them, of sitting, tongue-tied and nervous, with their teachers in school without knowing half the time what had been said in confidence or the true drift of an expression or a tone of voice, especially during those early years, when she did not always have her husband by her side and her oldest daughters were reeling from her linguistic influence and were having their own troubles (though she was proud of them), after so many years of worrying about what would happen to them once they’d left the household, of having lost sleep over their illnesses, of having, in her own way, to counsel them about the turns of life, and of attempting to offer them some inspiration through her creativity. (Had they forgotten the painted-glass years?) Or that she, in her quiet way, had always pursued the art of poetry, filling notebooks which they would never see until after she was gone? And what about the example of her dignity? Even on those days, when she thought she was sometimes considered a fool, she would walk through town with them and elegantly smile, head and posture straight, despite her impression that someone somewhere was speaking poorly about her. Or that nearly every morning, on waking, there would be a moment when she would feel that she was young again and back in Cuba and the world seemed so new and everything seemed possible, the spell falling away and a tinge of sadness coming to her. Yet, despite those feelings, she always met her motherly responsibilities with affection and care. What of all that?
Now the house was emptying; and she’d begun to realize that, after so many years in that town, few friends remained. Even the Puerto Rican butler García had finally retired. He had moved away from Cobbleton in the middle of the war, pension in hand and savings in the bank, and journeyed back to live in Puerto Rico, near the town of San Germán, writing her thoughtful letters about the happiness of his days, and always lamenting the distance between them. (Their mother’s little secret: The day García showed up at the house to say goodbye, his wife by his side, they took a last walk in the field, as they did over the years, and she found herself shaking at the thought of his absence. The day, so sunny, suddenly clouded with her own fears of loneliness, the prospect of all future days less promising, as she asked herself, “Who will listen to my little verses?” Not even her own husband, as hard as he would try, seemed to have much of a taste or patience for her poems. She never knew if they were any good, but García always listened intently, his brows furrowing in concentration, the man nodding as if they were very good indeed. “Excellent, excellent,” he would say. “A work of outstanding virtue and talent.” And that had always been enough to give her a measure of self-satisfaction. Then, after so many years of friendship, this gentleman, with whom she had spent so many hours of earthly happiness, was telling her goodbye, and she had come to the verge of tears. “Don’t be worried, child,” he consoled her. “I’ll be back every so often to visit my boy”—he was referring to his son the lawyer, who’d married Sarah, the eighth of the fourteen sisters. “And to visit you, of course.” Instead, he had chosen to remain cozy among the palms in a nice house on a hill, living like a rich man, and perhaps he planned to visit, but she would never see him return, the gentle being who had been García now absent from her life.)
And Miss Covington had been gone since the day she left to visit her sister in Boston and was run down by a trolley car, her presence in the household now no more than a few plumed hats that she once left as gifts.
And Father Mancuso, the young and handsome priest to whom she could confess her sins, was now a refined and regal monsignor in a Catholic parish in a Frenchified township in Maine.
She consoled herself by thinking that, even if Carmen and Marta and Violeta were to leave, she would at least have the companionship of her daughters Irene and Veronica. But Veronica had also fallen in love. Some six months after the war ended, the very same young and forlorn-looking young man whom Veronica had once been kind to on one of the hungriest and most lost afternoons of his life in 1939, came around looking for her. The man was more prosperous and cleaned up now, with a fresh haircut and a brown suit, driving an automobile and appearing at the door inquiring if the young woman who had once shown him so much compassion, Veronica O’Brien, still lived in that house and would she mind if he left a letter for her? The man had spent the war years working in a factory and then gotten himself into the construction business in Illinois, and he was damned if he could not at least treat the woman to a good meal. That was how their love started, though it could be argued that it had begun that afternoon six years before when she had been startled by the hard times and pain in his eyes. She had thought about him through most of the war—a stupid little memory—and though he eventually prospered and could fend well enough for himself, rarely a day passed that he, too, had not thought about the redhead who once led him into the living room of the Montez O’Brien house for a meal before sending him on his way (tucking five one-dollar bills into his hands; she could not bear the suffering of others).
When he returned another day, this man, Rudolph Williams, found Veronica in the house and they sat talking over old times. He recounted his freight-car hobo life during the Depression and they laughed, as all that suffering seemed so far in the past. That night—it was a Saturday—he took her to the best restaurant in town, at the hotel. The next day he would be driving back to Illinois, he told her; and that he was looking for a good woman and she was the kindest woman he had met in his life. Eve
r a gentleman, he brought her home that evening by ten o’clock, and for months afterward he would come back every three weeks or so to visit with her in Philadelphia for the weekend, just so he could thank her some more for her kindness and take her out. And things between them got to the point where he said it would be much easier if she could be nearer to him, that it would really be something if she would consider becoming his bride. Up to that time, she never thought much about marriage with anyone; she thought more about making dresses and about the countless hours she had worked beside her older sister, Margarita, in the parachute factory. But she had told her family about him.
The prospect of her marriage to a virtual stranger troubled her mother and father, so, though she wanted their approval, she simply decided to elope with him.
***
More or less accepting the lives of her children, Mariela, feeling exhausted, decided that she would not meddle—and, besides, she would tell herself that the young do not always value the wisdom of their elders. She became stoic in the sense of allowing herself to take things in with some detachment: she did not want to be hurt. She became like a piece of pan con ojos, an expression her mother from Cuba sometimes used—meaning “bread with eyes”—promising herself that she would observe and appreciate the blessings of her daughters, keeping her misgivings to herself. She would not, for example, mention the travail of Margarita’s divorce from Lester Thompson and that she sometimes faulted her daughter for not being strong enough—if he was so bad, she should have gotten rid of him long before, so that at least she could have pursued a life with another man. (She forgot how, for many of those years, she’d refer to Mr. Thompson as a saint.)
Even as the house emptied, she believed that she could always count on her daughters’ visits. Perhaps she could persuade her husband, who had become very set in his ways, that they could make some journeys of their own. She would take note of the aging, white-haired man sitting in front of the fireplace and recall that he had once been something of an adventurer.
—New York, 1946—
Through the train windows, the brilliance of the countryside flashing, the faces of their fellow passengers blanching white and then darkened again by shadows. A Hamilton watch advertisement, among others in a row above the luggage rack across from where Gloria and her brother, headed for New York, are sitting. Out of boredom she reads the ad, “To Peggy—for marrying me in the first place… Darling, here’s your Hamilton with all my love, Jim.” The woman, a pretty blonde, is kissing a love letter and in her hand is the precious Hamilton that her wonderful husband has given her in gratitude for the happiness she has brought into his life. Gloria reads all the copy and sees that the man is grateful for their children, for all the socks she has darned for him, and all the meals she has cooked—happiness exuded, a simple moment, speaking of things that Gloria believes she will never have.
And, later, out the window, a simple scene, quick in the meadows and quick by the crashing streams: a woman running alongside the rushing train, a healthy, robust woman charging through houses and fences and stone walls. The woman who can do anything: Gloria, dreaming about herself.
***
In a Pennsylvania Central railroad-car seat, her brother, Emilio, dozes, lanky and uncomfortable, a brown felt hat pulled low so that it covers much of his face, the striations of light kept out of his eyes. He has fallen asleep, the car rumble and sudden braking, the tooting of the locomotive sometimes stirring him. For a long time, everything is dark inside his head, then a clearing and he sees himself as a boy, fascinated by the careful presence of his father, Nelson O’Brien, looking out through his archaic bellows-type camera, ready to photograph the sisters posed before the house, the boy crawling about and feeling himself lifted up and set down on the porch steps, a draft of heat and an inexplicably pleasant aroma wafting through his nostrils—a draft of pure femininity, the ladies of all ages hot in the early-summer heat, and that draft, that combination of sweat and juice and impatience welling up and transported his way by the slightest breeze.
He looks over toward the far end of the porch and sees his sister Helen, tall and elegant, in a white sleeveless dress, the ever beautiful Miss Spring Rose of 1925, shifting her posture, and as she moves to favor one hip, there slips down along her right leg, from under the umbrella of her skirt, a single drop of sweat, descending like a tongue over the curvaceousness of her legs, settling on the instep of her foot. Margarita is wearing a sun hat and sunglasses, which strikes him as exotic. She, too, shifts her weight and fans herself, feeling uncomfortable in her dress, so much heat being generated by the humidity of the day and by the sunlight and the brassiere and slip she has to wear, her fingers pulling every so often on the inner “bracing” that itches and makes her perspire—her fingers stretching the elastic band and snapping it back again. And there is Irene in a girdle, to make her thinner, scratching at her arms and waiting, waiting for her father, mumbling under a black cloth, to take the picture.
The heat of the day and the extra heat produced by his sisters. There are in this dream, or recollection, some lines from a magazine story about the Indians of the Wild West that Margarita once read to Emilio: “A fine and noble people, the Indians had lived in tepees, and in the harsh winters they would gather in their tepees and warm themselves by a central fire…” That’s what it feels like to him, sitting on porch steps among so many women. He looks around and swears to himself that under the restlessness of their skirts a kind of fire is burning, its heat, flowing out from under the layers of their undergarments, exciting him.
In the train Emilio feels himself falling down through a cloud of skirts and lacy undergarments, his hands grabbing at the items around him as if they were petals that will hold him aloft as he drifts through the clouds of femininity, floating in his head, waiting, as he always does, for his feelings of anxiety (and excitement) to abate, squirming in an uneasy sleep, his heart palpitating, as it always does in times of uncertainty—yes, as in the moments before he first went to bed in the countryside whorehouse, and before bedding down Spring Mayweather, and during his other encounters with women during the war—until he feels his sister Gloria shaking him awake to tell him that they will soon be coming into New York.
—With Their Sisters—
They settled into their sisters’ apartment, whose walls were covered with the souvenirs of their lives: posters, flyers, and photographs. The twins, Olga and Jacqueline, shared a bedroom, while Maria had her own. They put Emilio in the maid’s room and brought a bed into Maria’s for Gloria.
Looking out into the sunniness of West End Avenue was their parlor, ornate with potted plants, a grand piano, a harp and music stands, and, on every table, the flowers which Maria would buy; there was a pleasantness about the room and Emilio liked to sit there in the mornings, having his coffee and taking in the perfumed air. Because they were performers and worked mainly at night, Maria, Jacqueline, and Olga tended to have their days free, though they would sometimes give music lessons to children, who would come by. They weren’t famous but were professional and well liked. By the time of Emilio and Gloria’s arrival, they had taken on the air of operatic divas. There was a delicacy and tenderness about the three sisters that seemed to endear them to their employers. Their faces were refined, their cheeks perhaps a little too rouged, their bodies exuberant and a bit overly plump. Olga carried a Spanish fan, her arms glistening and heavy with bracelets (“The gifts of admirers,” she would say). And when Olga liked something, she would say, “Ooo la la,” their trips to Paris having made an impression on her. Jacqueline, the most buxom yet demure of the twins, would sway about, her wide hips an asset. (Though she and her twin, Olga, had nearly the same bodies except in the hips, Jacqueline, during the war, was the one to show a “little leg” to the troops.)
Otherwise, they seemed, as far as Emilio could determine, to spend their days going to lunch appointments, to movies, and window-shopping. Every now and then, they were off to work on the Queen Elizabeth,
but mainly they seemed to be earning a good living performing here and there in New York.
Sometimes men, Emilio observed, would come to their apartment. Their manager, a slender, bald-headed fellow who liked blue-serge suits, showed up on Monday nights for dinner to discuss possible singing dates, radio slots, and special events, such as weddings or a performance at a society cocktail party. (“Jack Benny—a doll.”) Would-be suitors, men of middle age with money, so it seemed, would turn up in tuxedos and suits, with bouquets of flowers, to escort one of the sisters out. On their free nights, one or the other would be off to the opera or dinner in a fine restaurant, a car and driver down below—and Emilio (and perhaps Gloria) would look out the window, watching them below. For all these suitors, though, there never seemed any movement among them to get married. They were middle-aged—Jacqueline and Olga were thirty-eight in 1946 and Maria forty—but they seemed to regard these men as diversions from routine.
Mid-afternoon would find them in the parlor playing serenades on their instruments; they would perform what Maria called “the more elegant music”—pieces by Mozart and Bach and Schumann, among others, a serenity filling the apartment. Maria’s favorite composer was a Frenchman, Gabriel Fauré, whose piano études she found “heavenly,” and she liked the fact that he was quite a religious man. She was always playing his vocal works on their record player, sitting quietly on the couch, listening intently and raising her right hand in swirls as if conducting the choristers herself. Emilio would watch her—if only for a moment, as he passed along the hall—wondering what brought such peace of mind to her expression. Having none of her “class” or, for that matter, her knowledge of music—she very much liked popular composers like Cole Porter but also took sustenance from the operas of Verdi and Mozart—he had no idea what would make her drift off into another world, far from her origins, far from their time. Once, when he asked her why she liked the choral compositions of Fauré so much, she had given him an answer that went far over his head: “Because he composes with the religious fervor of a Fra Angelico.”
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 30