He nodded, he smiled, then went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator for something to drink.
Sometimes the three sisters played around with opera, Così Fan Tutte being one of their favorites. Or, when having a dinner party, they would slip into the living room and, someone asking, “Sing for us,” let loose with the lovely melody of “La Donna è mobile.” He was fascinated by their singing and sometimes felt overwhelmed by their talent. He would sit with Maria, his favorite of the three—for she was talkative, while the twins tended to be more cautious, ever friendly and affectionate but never really telling him anything about themselves. He was interested in Maria’s romantic life, as it was a well-known bit of family gossip that she had once rejected a quite famous and glamorous man, who had courted her in Paris before the war. Whether she loved him or not, she always dismissed his name—“And what about Antoine Rameau?”—with a bit of laughter, saying, “He was like all men in some ways.” Yet she kept a framed photograph of herself posed beside him in a Paris photography studio, the two with their faces pressed together, she with a curly-helmet hairdo and translucent, happy eyes; he, incredibly dashing, as they used to say in those days. This photograph was kept in a gold frame atop the piano, and always near flowers, as if they were there to honor the portrait. Emilio, in thinking about the few years he lived in that household, would always remember that each time he looked at this photograph he knew that his third-oldest sister had once been deeply in love.
—Maria’s Second Love:—Antoine Rameau
One night in 1947, Emilio had come home from a late evening out to find that there had been a dinner party. The long oak table in the dining room was covered with the remnants of a meal, many brandy and wine glasses, crumpled napkins and dessert plates everywhere; and though his sister, Maria, was moderate in her consumption of food and drink, he found her in a rather intoxicated state, sipping brandy in a long gown, her feet up in the air over the back of the couch, wriggling her toes.
It was two in the morning, and yet Gloria was sitting up, as she did many a night, waiting for the arrival of her brother, or perhaps she was simply there to keep Maria company. But when Emilio saw Maria in such a state and asked Gloria what had happened, she told him, “This fellow, Antoine Rameau, her old beau, came here tonight and, in front of everybody, proposed marriage to Maria.”
***
Maria fell asleep—suffering greatly the next day—but that night she had perhaps thought about her first meeting with the great Antoine Rameau in a cabaret in Paris in 1937. She had been thirty-one then, but didn’t look her age, and the history of her life in Cobbleton had been largely obliterated by the diversity of her travels. She could speak Spanish, Italian, and French and was accustomed, as were the twins, Olga and Jacqueline, to the overtures of rich and presumptuous men. Never taking the idea of romance lightly, she was prone to sad bouts of memory about her first love, the tenor Henry Maine, and believed that she could do very well without further heartbreak. Although she never intended to make herself attractive, as a performer it was her business to convey a certain elegance and an otherworldly, angelic presence to men.
The night she met her suitor, the second great love of her life, she was wearing a chiffon gown of Parisian design, its soft material glittery with fake nonpareils, a veil of fishnet material falling over her cleavage, and a Majorcan pearl necklace. The cabaret they attended was renowned for its impromptu performances. Singers from all over Europe, and some from America, frequented the place, and it was not unusual for the emcee to invite one of the stars to sing.
Edith Piaf had been the headline performer that night, and in her formidable aftermath, the sisters, then going under the name of the Three Nightingales, were called to the stage. There, before the crowd, they sang through a program of George Gershwin tunes, to much applause, for the French loved that music. This happened on a night when Maria’s earnestness and strength and sweetness as a woman coalesced with her beauty and the allurements of her form and manner, to which she never gave much thought outside of a professional context. There had been a buzz in the crowd when the singer and actor Antoine Rameau, gallant lead in many a French musical film, the Bing Crosby of France, archenemy of Maurice Chevalier and veteran of a dozen M-G-M films in America, walked in.
Dressed in a tuxedo, and in the company of a female acquaintance, he sat near the stage and watched the sisters performing, his posture never changing, his chin on his hand, his deep blue eyes blinking occasionally. She had noticed him, and as he had seemed unmoved, never applauding when the audience did, Maria thought him cold. When the sisters left the stage, the emcee called out to Nelson Eddy, who was vacationing in Paris, to sing—but Maria did not feel like watching the rest of the show, and so she and the twins retired shortly to their hotel.
On another night, however, while the sisters were performing in the cabaret room of the Ritz, much frequented by American tourists, Rameau appeared again, and although he sat through their performance with the same indifference, he afterward sent Maria a bouquet of roses with a note saying, “I must have the pleasure of meeting you.” Romance did not interest her; nevertheless, she joined the great star at his table. In a French-accented English, he assailed her with praise: “You are more of a divinity than a thousand Aphrodites. Venus would be your house servant. You are beauty pure.”
Perplexed, she listened, nodding, and when she spoke French with him, he seemed charmed. But she wanted nothing from him. Instead, she had wanted to return to the comfort of her hotel room and the company of her sisters. He had told her, sensing her indifference. “Most people know me as a popular singer and movie actor, but in fact I studied opera in Milan.” And right there he began to sing an aria, and the face that she found so handsome yet predatory seemed transformed, a saintly nobility coming over his features.
He asked her, “Will you dine with me?” and she said yes, and the two walked along boulevards and over bridges, the river lamplit and misty.
He seemed a perfect gentleman, but she knew his reputation. He had been married to an American movie star, to an heiress, and in his youth to a Milanese contessa. Lifting her hand and dropping it on his left shoulder, he asked, “May I kiss you?” and although she had her doubts, she allowed him to.
But that was not all. When he started to press against her—they were under a bridge by the Seine, the walls about them leaking rainwater, and couples here and there necking furiously—she said no, thinking in those moments about her first love, who drowned in Lake Constance many years before, his lips pursing and his arms gesticulating as if he were singing an aria, bubbles of air rising around him, life and all his music leaving him forever.
Soon she felt Rameau’s erection against her leg. He was adamant, even then asserting, “I know what people say about me, but it’s not so.”
“Well, then, s’il vous plaît, take me back to the hotel.”
They made a date: he would pick her up two nights afterward at six-thirty. He arrived at her hotel in a carriage, its hood covered with blossoms.
Off they went down the Champs-Elysées—automobiles honking, men in carriages tipping their hats, passersby on the sidewalk watching them as they went by. He owned a grand house on the Right Bank and there they dined. That night, feeling nervous, she had, for the first time in her life, gotten drunk. He was handsome. As the movie advertisements would say, his was the “face that felled Helen of Troy.”
No lines, no signs of anxiety, pleasant angles, manly surfaces, a great and pleasing symmetry to his mouth.
Though he was in his forties then and without his movie makeup, he still seemed a quite fit man of thirty. She would look at him and feel as if, yes, she wanted to lean over and kiss him, and, yes, give in to his allure.
He tried to kiss her again, and she tried to turn her cheek. (But he succeeded in slipping his tongue in between her lips and, touching her breasts, he led her, in this embrace, to the couch.) Courting her, praising her, he tried one last gambit: he leaned over,
saying, “I will die without you,” and they awkwardly kissed again, her face blushing, hands shaking.
“Take me out of this place, please,” she told him.
It went on. The sisters were in Paris for another week. She agreed, because he was so famous, to see him twice more. By their last meeting, he was bitter. She would not go to bed with him. By that time, she had fallen in love (or as close to love as she could imagine, for to reach her heart he would have to penetrate the thickest walls of comfort and habit, her passion for music, her pain, and the simple affection and loyalty she felt for Jacqueline and Olga). On their last date, sitting on a bench, he rested his head against her breast and she felt a tenderness toward him. His surliness, she decided, came from a lack of family warmth, his arrogance from insecurity. In those moments she started to think fondly about him, and because of her good heart, she thought about taking him to bed.
They went walking along the river, and as if it were a natural habit in that city of love, they found a shadowy place under a bridge and began to kiss, and then, for reasons she did not understand—the smell of his cologne, the taste of his tongue—she allowed him to lift up her dress. She gasped, for he had pulled down her undergarment and thrust himself into her, so that in a moment they were like so many of the amoureux they had seen wrapped and clinging to one another here and there in the night. They made love standing—an uncomfortable and nerve-racking experience—and while she felt much pleasure, having thought about what it would be like for years, she afterward felt gloomy and wished that she could walk into a church and kneel down on the floor to pray. They walked back to her hotel in silence, and by its entrance he asked her if she would stay in Paris with him.
She told him: “I’m sorry, my darling, but I can’t,” and turned away.
The odd thing was that he kept trying to find her, whatever his reasons, in Geneva, in Amsterdam, in London. Long-stem roses would arrive in ribbon-tied boxes bearing messages gushing with endearments, bracelets or pearl earrings tucked inside. Her heart ached for him—or for the idea of romance or from desire, she did not know—and she spent many a restless night remembering their lovemaking by the river, and sometimes she would daydream about a life as Mrs. Rameau. She would think about a photograph she had once seen of him in a magazine, playing polo, a white helmet on his head, his silk scarf aloft in the wind. He owned a villa near Nice, on the Riviera. He knew movie stars, counting Charlie Chaplin and David Niven, who had taught him how to water ski, among his friends. He knew the royalty of Europe and was a rich man, and yet she could not abandon her sisters, nor did she want to break up their happy life, as she could always be certain of their devotion. But it had not been easy and her decision would weigh on her.
She was on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth on the way back to the States in 1938 when she happened on an English gentleman, Noël Coward. She had been standing by the rail, watching the endless waters—depressed not so much from the experience of her love as from the fact that her little interlude with Rameau constantly tempted her to abandon Jacqueline and Olga.
Coward, in a blue blazer and linen trousers, had been on deck for a smoke—in fact, running over the lines of dialogue for a play. They already knew each other from different cruises and had spoken casually and sometimes sat down together for a dinner with the captain, a great honor for her, but he had never really talked with Maria Montez O’Brien. When he saw her by the railing, though, he walked over and, tapping a cigarette free from a gold case, looked around the horizon and said, “Splendid, yes?”
Maria nodded and Mr. Coward stood beside her and for a long time just stared out over the sea. The moon’s reflection on the waves left an interesting pattern of light—almost hieroglyphic in form—messages in broken squiggles that asked her, Do you love him, and does he love you? And what if you’re making a terrible mistake?
Wishing to break her gloom, Mr. Coward said, “My dear, there are days when life may seem dreary, but only for a bit, and romance is a fleeting thing in the end, just another sweet memory. I’ve been to the States on many crossings and each time I have a moment when I look over the railing and think that our lives are rather like the cresting waves, with highs and lows, that the moon illumines the night as emotion brings a glorious flame into our hearts. But what one must do, when the thrills are gone, is not to let our joys be destroyed by sentimentality. Curious, isn’t it?”
His presence made a difference, his amused, capricious face looming above her, a cigarette poised in his hand. He gently touched the back of her neck and that made her lift her head up. There, against the backdrop of the rolling sea (there was nothing else, metal walls behind them), she told him about her first sweetheart, who had drowned. She said that she had been happy with her life, but that she might be forming an attachment to a “fellow, much renowned,” who, against her better judgment, had won her heart. He listened intently, his deliberation, in the end, that sometimes a brief encounter with a passing flame was only an illusion, for it takes many years to find a true love.
“Scoundrels, rakes, common romancers drop down into life like fruit from a tree. Forget him and come along, ducky, and have a drink in the bar with me.”
Before that night in 1947, she had not seen him in eight years. He had come looking for her in New York in 1939 and telephoned the apartment, begging that she see him. By that time, she had decided that he was quite simply a man who could not accept rejection, and by then much of her feeling of love or desire was a faded thing. He asked to meet her, anywhere, and finally she agreed. She did not want to see him and yet she felt curious. It was around Christmas and the sisters were going to Mass, so she decided to meet him outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral at noon. For a year the letters and gifts had kept arriving, and these she would send back to his Paris address.
Snow fell that day, a steady, gentle, drifting snow—and soon enough, after hearing High Mass offered by Cardinal Spellman, which she’d attended with her sisters, she found herself standing alone on the steps of the cathedral in a fur-collared coat and a felt, fur-trimmed hat, its veil falling mysteriously over her face. As the cathedral bells announced the hour of noon and all the world that day seemed covered with white, Antoine Rameau appeared before her, dapper and elegant, his face contorted with pain.
Once again, as he had repeated a hundred times in letters, he told her he was in love, and again she said she had made up her mind. She was not cruel, and when he started to shake, she wiped a tear from his cheek, and, with that, he knelt down in the snow, asking her to love him. It was a curious thing. In those moments, she thought of a passage she once read in a guide book about the Emperor Charlemagne being forced to kneel in the snow, to beg the Pope’s forgiveness—and as that scene flashed through her mind, she took him by the hand in her own doeskin-gloved hand and said, making a clicking sound with her tongue, “Mon cher, you mustn’t do this to yourself.” And when he had composed himself, she added, “I’m sorry, but I must go.”
***
By the time, years later, when he visited the apartment, he was a different man. The war and his sympathies for the Vichy government in France had led to the ruin of his career; he was in New York en route to California, where he was to audition for a minor role in a film. This Antoine Rameau wanted to humbly pay his respects to Maria—perhaps out of loneliness and despair. He had married and divorced again in the intervening years. His hair had turned white and his nose took on the raspberry coloration of a drinker.
***
What happened? Shocked by his presence but never unkind, Maria felt pity for the man, asking him to join the sisters and their friends for dinner. He sat in a high-backed chair, putting on a good front, much of his urbane conversation devoted to reminiscences of his life in Europe before the war; and in the course of the meal, quite civil, he drank several bottles of good French wine which he had brought along, and he singlehandedly finished off a decanter of Courvoisier. His mood changed. He could hear or see no one else at the table and the edges of
the room were blurry. Perhaps he was merely drunk and had lost his common sense, but he got up and, swaying as drunkards do, raised a toast and declared that he was there to open his heart to the true love of his life. Maria had tried to calm him, but he went on about the cruelties of life and, declaring that “happiness must be seized,” made his way over to Maria and, kneeling on the floor, once again proposed marriage.
Saying, “The poor man’s drunk,” she excused herself and left for the refuge of her bedroom, Gloria following after her.
Their manager helped Rameau to his feet and suggested that they leave. Down below, he gave Antoine a ten-dollar bill and hailed him a cab, which drove down a few blocks and turned east at Eighty-sixth Street. And so he left her life forever.
The next day, Maria was quiet and terribly hung-over. And while this would be one of the few truly unpleasant episodes of her life, something better forgotten, there were moments, her sisters and brother noticed, when the happier elements of that brief love affair came back to her. Standing by the window, she would remember how low she had felt by the railing of a liner crossing the Atlantic one night, and the kindly words of a gallant Englishman who by his presence helped to make the anguish of her heart more tolerable.
“Cheers!” He toasted her that night. “Here’s to all the bloody messes of love!”
— Greenwich Village —
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 31