In his days as an actor in New York, Emilio Montez O’Brien much enjoyed the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village. On one of his first mornings in the city, he went browsing along Fourth Avenue, where there were many old book and print stores, and saw the actor Vincent Price foraging through a bin of old etchings—looking for Dürers. Three days a week he would take a West Side subway down to his acting workshop, which was in a second-floor studio on Tenth Street, off Sixth Avenue, and there his overworked instructor tutored him and his fellow students in the correct and lordly enunciation of Shakespearean dialogue. These workshops lasted the whole afternoon, and on days when they weren’t held, he took elocution lessons on West Seventy-ninth, concentrating on the movement of the tongue against the palate and the enunciation of vowels. (“Ooooo” for “O,” “Ahhhhhh” for “A.” “When you read a phrase in a script and it ends with a period, that means that you should stop… And remember, as it is written, there is a pause between one word and the other. If a word ends with a consonant, there should be a sharpness, a finality. You must remember that the mumbling speech that we take for granted confuses the listener in a theatrical setting. Now repeat after me, ‘A, E, I, O, U.’ Now again… No, no, open your mouth for ‘O.’ Have you bread in your mouth?”) Riding the subway or strolling about the downtown neighborhoods with a few pages of script or a much rumpled and water-stained copy of a drama manual, he’d go to a little café, where, with beret on his head, and feeling like a Continental, he would sip a coffee or drink beer, watching life passing on the streets. There were many Ukrainians and Italians and Jews in those neighborhoods; college students, too, and a surplus of what he would call the “artistic” community—painters and actors and musicians, as well as a great number of introspective types—intellectuals who, he imagined, were college professors or philosophers or poets, their brows heavy with thought, as if trying to solve a crucial issue of life.
And there were women also. Young ladies making their way along the sidewalks sometimes gave him a sideways glance, appreciative of his blue eyes, which could be picked out, distinctive, from across the street. He would watch them walking by in their plaid skirts and ruffled blouses, and in the simply designed dresses, shaped like bells, that were a holdover from the war, and he would see in each something beautiful.
On some afternoons, he would fall again under the spell of the feminine influence and swear that the world and everything in it emanated from a female source. The paper flowers, rounded and curvaceous, that the café owner put out on his tables, the undulating and fancy script of a menu, saying “Cappuccino, 20 cents,” the circular motion of a rather devastated, street-worn pigeon, following another over the curb. He would step into the rest room and notice the ovularity of the toilet’s shape, of the mirror, the sanitary tissue, the octagonal tiles, notice every hint of rounded motion, even in an unsavory facility, all suggesting the female presence in the world.
What was ugly in life, he thought male. Even the most winsome-looking men—like himself—he considered crude in appearance (though he was always happy when a woman stared at him). He’d once watched a man with his girlfriend come into a café and take a corner table, in the darkness the man fondling her under her sweater. He heard their laughter, and looking over from time to time, noticed later, as they walked out, that the woman, with her Lana Turner breasts, was beautiful, and he thought that the man, with his fledgling erection evident inside his trousers, seemed grotesque by comparison.
Well, God bless them, he thought.
He’d get lost in the labyrinthine streets, on his way to a dramatic reading put on by some actor friends, and waiting for a traffic light to change, he’d find himself appraising the architecture of a street lamp, its petal-like ridges, its blossoming rims, female. And he would look up and swear that the finial of the lamp, bursting with electric light, resembled a woman of the Victorian era wearing a slightly pointed hat. The moon over the rooftops; a cat in heat perched on some garbage cans, raising her rump in the air—all female.
(Of course, he was aware of the hard-edged contributions of men: a particularly ugly postwar high-rise seemed male. The Empire State Building, to whose observation deck he had once ascended on a sightseeing tour with his sisters—he had looked out to the south, naïvely imagining, for a moment, that he might be able to see as far as Cobbleton—had struck him, with its phallic eminence, its similarity to a hypodermic needle, as powerful but vaguely depressing. Then a view of all the square-topped apartment houses, going on into the distance, and a look at the Chrysler Building, with its jagged ornamentation, an edifice touched equally by the male and female influence, mostly pleasing him with its female characteristics. It would remind him of the Statue of Liberty, sitting out in the water with its crown, its flaw, in his opinion, the manly arms and hands of the Lady.)
Some days found him in the company of friends to take in “culture.” He went to art galleries and saw modern paintings, some odd configurations of geometric forms, others squiggly and stormy. He would look them over and sigh. And yet the most vaguely curvaceous paintings interested him. (He would remember something that his commanding officer had once said to him: “There is nothing more beautiful than a circle.”) He was not by nature a thinker, and on his walks along the streets or on his way home to the apartment, these notions would bring back the same feelings that he’d always had as a child, an ambassadorial sensation that he, Emilio Montez O’Brien, could never articulate to himself, but which made him feel like a well-loved but minor functionary in a sometimes good world whose creation and whose better aspects had nothing to do with himself or others like him: men.
He’d study lines of dialogue, practice enunciation. And often, lost in thought, he would look up to find a pretty young woman sitting at a nearby table. His reaction, as it had been for many years when his sisters got his attention, would be to smile, for he did love women.
One late afternoon, as he sat in a café, a plump, red-cheeked brunette, wholesome as the German farm girls he used to see in Cobbleton, asked, “Pardon me, but haven’t I seen you up around Dobbs Ferry?” He’d said no, but moved over to sit beside her, asking, “Do you mind?”
They talked, and she mentioned that she had noticed him reading a script, and that he must be an actor. He listened, his eyes on her eyes and her lips—a plump and cheery-looking mouth, suggesting, he imagined, that, despite the Depression and the war, she had never gone wanting. He further surmised, during their conversation, that she was in New York to become an actress but that her decision did not weigh well with her family, and that she was lonely living in a boardinghouse. She was very young, maybe nineteen or twenty, but there was a nervousness about her, her lovely hands shaking slightly when she sipped her glass of iced tea. Focusing intently on her and looking away only when an airliner was heard above, he told the young woman that, like her, he came from a small town, and impressed her with the details of his life in Italy during the war.
When he asked for her name, she told him “Katherine,” and the demure tone of her voice moved him. Reaching over, he tapped her shoulder and said, “Well, Katherine, don’t be worried. I think your life will turn out fine.”
She was tender. She was interested in him. She talked a lot about her family, who had been disapproving of her chosen profession. (“They’ve given me two years to make a name for myself. My dad’s a judge and he sends me a hundred and fifty dollars a month as support—money that I’ll pay back. But they keep waiting for me to come home.”)
He took her out to see a couple of Broadway shows; he seemed wealthy. Receiving two hundred dollars a month from the government, he thought nothing of buying her little gifts, or treating her to dinner. He was always polite and a little reserved; bringing her back to the boardinghouse, he would shyly say “Good night” and she would double the effort to win him over, giving him a sweet kiss.
One night, at two in the morning, after attending an Italian street fair—spending twelve dollars at a stand, he won her a t
eddy bear—they slipped into a restaurant, Sorrento. They were drinking wine, and his memories of Italy flowed into him. They ended up sitting in a corner, necking, and that led them to an Eighth Avenue hotel room. As he rested back on the bed, she told him, “I don’t know what to do.” All the same, she had stripped off her clothes, and while he lay there, fully dressed, she let the weight of her brunette plumpness settle on him. As she undid his shirt and trousers and all the rest, it struck him that she had fallen for him. Her fingers stroked the curls on his head, and though he considered her a delicate and refined person, he suckled her breasts. He noticed that her bottom ridges were quite sweaty as the fingers of his right hand slipped from the low knob of her spinal column down her body. She said, “You are the kindest and most handsome man I have ever met in my life, more handsome than Errol Flynn.” With that affirmation, he grasped her by the hips and shifted her position, and with the strength of one knee, the left, he opened her wide, telling himself, “No matter what, my boy, you can’t fall in love.”
He was going out with three other actresses at the time, insecure, flamboyant, and hopeful young women with whom he worked and who, in various incarnations, reminded him of his first great love, Spring Mayweather, women whom sooner or later he took to bed. (Making love on a lounge couch, in a room filled with bits of scenery, and doing it quickly, because they could hear the stage manager’s footsteps sounding louder on the rotting wooden floors; making love after twelve rehearsals, backstage when the others had left, almost standing up, with his right knee getting bruised against the rim of a prop crate, or in the large walk-in closet of a producer’s town house on Eleventh Street, against a bundle of clothes, or, in the spring, strolling in Central Park, on some downy meadow, ever nervous that a cop, twirling his nightstick, would come across them in the act while walking his beat; and making love, hurriedly, in a dressing room, some of those women so wanting distraction that now and then an actress would invite the youngest Montez O’Brien into the room to help zip up her costume, the touch of his warm hands producing more warmth on her back, so that she’d turn around and, saying, “Oh, fuck it,” pull up her dress and rest back on a chair, a matty rug, or a couch, her anxiety and fears for the future alleviated in the muscular quivering of her legs, her hands pressing against the small of his back, and asking for more—Emilio on some nights left confused by his power but always willing to go along, for it seemed the manly thing to do.)
His evenings were so broken up with dates that he would come home to his sisters’ apartment at five in the morning, opening the door quietly and finding, more often than not, his sweet sister Gloria on the couch waiting for him.
— His Debut, 1947 —
Elevated to an advanced level after a year of conscientious studies, and assigned by his drama coach to a role in a reverential production of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, which was to open in a run-down Bleecker Street theater, Emilio, the son of a Cuban mother and an Irish father, was to play Britannicus, Caesar’s secretary. As written, Britannicus was a tall, solemn fellow of about forty, hair grayed, and sporting a white beard. He would appear dressed in a blue toga. Miscast and somewhat deficient in conveying the wisdom of the man, Emilio had one saving grace. He did not forget his lines and made quite an impression on that contingent of the audience composed of his family—his mother and father and all the sisters who’d shown up to give support and applaud loudly, their clapping rising above the polite response of an otherwise indifferent audience, during the curtain call.
The occasion marked not only his first appearance on the New York stage—he threw up before and after the performance—but one of the few times that his mother and father would venture outside of Cobbleton to New York, the family finding accommodations in Helen’s Park Avenue apartment and with Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline. That his mother had shown up seemed miraculous, for, despite many previous invitations from her daughters to visit them in New York, she’d always been afraid of leaving her husband alone.
At sixty-nine and still working as an “exhibitor of movies,” Nelson O’Brien showed the symptoms of senility—forgetfulness and indecision becoming more common in his behavior, so that Mariela, his wife, began to fear that if she left him alone for even a single evening he might, while lighting his old Dutch pipe, set the house on fire. (He had started to talk with more frequency about going on to his heavenly reward, and made it a subject of their bedtime conversation, so that, while he would eventually fall asleep, she would spend the nights awake, wondering how she would feel in his absence. On the other hand, these symptoms seemed to come and go—weeks would pass during which they would sit on the porch together and talk as they used to, when they were both young, about what they might do in their retirement. Their children’s desire to see something of the world influencing them, they would sometimes make vague plans for excursions around the country. “Maybe out to the great West,” where he wanted to go as a younger man, Nelson would say. And she would listen and nod, taking hold of his ruddy and big-knuckled hands and squeezing them tight.)
Emilio’s first performance did not receive good notices, but the cast party after the opening, held in their teacher’s Barrow Street town house and thick with fledgling actors and their friends and fellow students, was joyful. There were punch bowls of a potent mix (his father grew happy-eyed from its effects), and young pianists and singers took turns at the kind of casual performance that Emilio would always identify with his happy days. Stubby Kaye showed up, singing by the piano, and later, in came Zero Mostel, passing half the night in the corner telling naughty jokes. The sisters themselves swooped down into the midst of this affair with shopping bags filled with baked pies, compliments of Irene, and some Cuban-style dishes which Maria, having access to the ingredients in New York, had prepared in great quantity. (In Helen’s magisterial Park Avenue kitchen, as big as a living room, Maria, with her mother by her side, cooked up a large kettle’s worth of paella and another of black beans. And in the kitchen during the party their mother, taken by the activity around her, spent an hour frying plantain fritters, which went out in great platters and disappeared soon enough into the mouths of the grateful, celebratory, and hungry aspirants to the stage. She had been struck by the little trip she and Margarita and Maria made up to 116th Street and Lenox Avenue—the neighborhood where García’s New York family once lived—and she marveled at all the food shops, some Italian, such as she had seen during a rare earlier trip to New York, and at others whose awnings announced themselves as bodegas, where she had felt a little stunned to hear the shopkeepers speaking in Spanish, and to see that their racks were filled with fruits and vegetables that she had not seen since she’d visited Cuba in 1932. Above all, she had felt a little surprised at how many Spanish-speaking people there were in New York, for in 1902, when she and Nelson had first passed through the city en route to Cobbleton, she thought it mainly an Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish place—in fact, there were no more than two thousand Puerto Ricans and a handful of Cubans living in the city at that time—and she marveled at how, during the years she spent in Cobbleton, the outside world had changed. At one shop she found herself inquiring if the owner happened to know a certain Herman García, the butler, and she was pleased to find that he did, and right then, as Margarita paid for their groceries, she had felt pangs of longing for “her people.” This mood followed her throughout the day and into the theater where Emilio, looking quite strange, first stepped on the stage and recited his opening line in a deep and solemn voice: “My master would say that there is a lawful debt due to Rome by Egypt.” And as she watched her son attempting to make his way in the world, she saw him as an absolute American, like certain of her daughters. As he crossed the stage following Caesar about, declaiming his lines, she regretted that neither of them seemed to know the other. What had she been to her son, and to some of his sisters, but their mother, from another world?
She had always tried to remind them that they were half Cuban, regardless of the w
ay their bloodlines made them look, but she supposed that to her Irish-looking son those words did not make much difference. As she watched his faulty and unconvincing portrayal of the Briton, the cadences of her husband’s pronunciation of English coming through, she found herself losing track of the play. Taking in his performance with a remote appreciation and hope for what her son was trying to do, she sighed and asked God to bless him and to carry him off on the wings of success so that he at least—she would wish this for all her children—could thrive in the country which to her seemed so complicated.)
The party lasted until three-thirty in the morning, Emilio passing the night chatting amicably with his theater friends and enjoying the camaraderie of his fellow aspirants, dreamy unknowns drinking and singing and doing bits from the shows and plays they knew. (He loved musical-comedy actors and actresses, and wished he was not so clumsy when it came to dancing, and that his voice was decent, which it was not.)
He adopted an actor’s air, having bought for himself a fedora and a cape, in the style of a European count, an affectation he acquired from his teacher. But on his walks through the streets of Greenwich Village he had also seen the actor John Carradine, tall and lanky and crag-faced, making his way along, reciting Shakespeare to his friends in his fine bass voice, physically impressive in a cape and a crimped hat and cane. Emilio forgot the cane but adopted for his wardrobe not only the aforementioned items but an ascot, a silk shirt, and a tweed jacket.
That night, Katherine turned up, too; and Emilio, who had broken her heart, was surprised to see her. (He ended things with her for reasons she would never understand, just at a time when she had become really accustomed to him, going about by his side to auditions for plays and musical shows, and getting quite used to going to bed with him, and the violet coloration in her nipples when he would kiss them. She could not understand what he meant, one afternoon in the park, when they had been dating for three months—April to July 1947—by saying their love affair was “too distracting.” And even though she started to cry and he held her close, saying, “Now, be calm about this,” he did not, just the same, change his mind, though she was a sweet girl, walking away from her with a heel’s expression on his face and, she hoped, some regrets.) She happened to have walked over, on the arm of a young actor, at a moment when Emilio was standing with a group which included two other women whom he had also taken to bed dozens of times, and as if a kind of radio communication had risen among them, Laura Hathaway, “willowy and as tall as a drink of water,” to quote The New York Times, and Ellen Conners, “a gypsy who deserves the central spotlight,” seemed, in a spontaneous revelation, to know that Katherine Dempsy, “a worthy supporting player,” also made love to him.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 32