There were a dozen individuals standing watching Emilio Montez O’Brien perform some sleight-of-hand and card tricks—he could “guess” the card picked from a deck, effortlessly—and these three women, shifting their positions, drifted together. And he saw them standing off in a corner, Laura recounting to the others how she liked to be kissed in a certain way, and Ellen, with her gaunt white body, recounting how, when she mentioned that she did not much like her bottom, the lick of his tongue had moved along her buttocks and he had told her, “You’re delicious.” And he saw that Katherine was not happy at all, that she must have told them the whole story, for they began to stare at him with murderous intent, their disdain for him so powerful that he felt a buckling of his knees and a waning of his spirit.
As some young and frantic musician banged out a Hoagy Carmichael tune on the piano, they decided that the earnest actor, whose seeming lack of guile so moved their hearts, was just like so many of the other men they’d met: perhaps they’d wished him some future lonely hell.
***
That night of Emilio’s debut in New York, most of his fourteen sisters showed up (Margarita, Maria, Olga, Jacqueline, Helen, Irene, Sarah, Patricia, Veronica, Marta, Carmen, Violeta, and Gloria—only Isabel, in Cuba, missing). And how they had fawned on him. Only Gloria, who seemed enchanted by his performance, kept her distance, bent on allowing him the freedom he so wanted. Sitting off to the side, engaged in a conversation about the aspirations of actors in general with a sweet, vaguely effeminate young man, Gloria would look around for her brother. She admired him and felt grateful that he allowed her into this world. She wished him well, she hoped that he would thrive, that he would fall in love and be happy, but at the same time, with so many women about, she wanted nothing to change.
Margarita, beautiful in a red dress and happy to jitterbug with some professional dancers, would sometimes plop down on the couch, fanning herself, exhausted and happy. Then she would say to Gloria, “Maybe you should dance, too,” but the youngest sister would shake her head, as if she found great comfort in playing the demure wallflower. That night found her making frequent trips out to the back garden of the town-house apartment—it was on the ground floor—to take the air, for the fumes of cigarettes and cigars and the women’s perfumes were making her a little ill. For all that, she did not want to leave, and revived by the night air, she would come back inside, always looking for her brother.
His father, Nelson O’Brien, stood near the punch bowl in a gentlemanly way, nodding and offering to ladle more of the brew into cups and trying to think what he would say to his boy. In the dead center of the evening, when Emilio came by with a young woman on his arm, he said: “Well, you did good, son.” And Emilio gave his father a hug, the older man feeling most tactful and happy that he had been coy enough to lie, for he slept during the performance. He was the ever-cheerful Irish gentleman, raising his cup of punch in a toast to those who happened by, saying, “God bless you,” and “Ahh, back for some more. Well, good, then.”
Everyone in the family had a good time, but eventually there came a moment when the happy partygoers all began to leave and Emilio found himself walking with his mother on his arm, his father by his side, and the sisters following along, with the moon over the rooftops and a few stars in the sky. Emilio looked at his mother and asked, “What did you think?”
And she said, “Good! Good! My son,” speaking to him in her clipped English, thinking that he would not understand anything more complicated. He’d consumed too much punch and was almost as tipsy as his father. Bewildered by his debut, Emilio secretly wondered if he succeeded only in humiliating himself, but at this moment he had looked off, swearing that it was a great pleasure to be so young and to have aspirations and to be in love with the future. That night, as he climbed into a Checker cab with Gloria and the Chanteuses, he tried to define the quality of the blue sky that seemed so enchanting to him, the distance that seemed like his future. A blueness zooming in through the taxi window; the blue of those storybook illustrations that Margarita, ever the lover of books, would show him as a child. Not the black-and-white skies of cowboy fantasies, not the blue of vacation brochures, but the blueness that he recalled from an illustration in the Arabian Nights: a tower, phallic and powerful, at the summit of a hilly Arab town, cutting into the horizon, and the sky a deep and mysterious blue, dotted with feminine, adoring stars.
—The Happiness of Their Days—
The sisters would remember those years for the happiness of their days. (The oldest, Margarita, attending night school in Philadelphia, was working toward a degree. Isabel, in Cuba, had her third child, a girl. Helen, affluent and ever elegant in her Christian Dior New Look dresses with their nipped-in waists and short Chinese button jackets and planet-Saturn hats, enjoyed playing the New York society lady. Patricia had her own baby, as did Sarah. Veronica seemed content enough in Illinois with Rudolph Williams.)
And Gloria, close to her brother, was also happy, waiting on him, doting and ever loving. Proud (and anxious) to prove that she could take care of herself, she had gone to work as a bookkeeper for a doll manufacturer, a tedious job, as her boss was a terribly disorganized businessman who for years kept his receipts, invoices, and orders in barrels, and every morning she would come into the factory to try to put these chaotic records into some kind of order. She did not mind the endless nature of the work; it was a way of marking time. And on good days she would leave the factory (on Thirty-eighth Street, off Sixth Avenue) in the afternoon and walk up to sit on the steps of the Public Library on Forty-second Street, eating her wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches and a soda and watching the passersby, seeing in a half hour more human beings thronging the sidewalk to and from their offices and shops than lived in Cobbleton, whose population had risen to just over eighteen thousand. All kinds of people, too, venders and cops, and Bible salesmen, office executives and buxom, brainy-looking secretaries, students and GIs heading up the library steps toward knowledge, messengers and bank clerks, advertising-agency workers and many bookkeepers like herself, stunned and happy to be out in the light. And she would sometimes meet with one of her New York sisters, one of them turning up to take “the poor thing” out for lunch. They liked to go have a bite at the Horn & Hardart, where one could eat nicely with only a handful of nickels for the soup, sandwich, and dessert vending machines. Or, if Helen came along, Gloria would ask her boss for some extra time, for they would dine in some fancy joint over on Madison or Lexington Avenue, where the food was good, the service languorous, the waiters polite and self-effacing. Helen, the sixth-oldest of the fourteen sisters, who had never really known how to relate to Gloria, would urge her to take better care of herself, to dress with more style. And to that end she would sometimes promise to meet with Gloria in the late afternoon so they could visit dress shops, a process that Gloria, with her love of simple clothes, found a little self-indulgent, though Helen was generous, always paying for the purchases. She’d begun to feel the pressures of “growing up,” a natural step, and of becoming desirable to men. But she had no interest in men, even on days when she was feeling well and put on lipstick and eye makeup and seemed quite pretty. (Some lonely bookkeeper like herself would slip a section of newspaper down on the library steps close to her and sit down, attempting to strike up a conversation: “Have you the time? A nice day, isn’t it?” But she tended to respond with mere politeness, for even if the young man was the nicest fellow in the world, well-intentioned and simply wanting some pleasant company, she would turn away.) And though many a handsome man passed in the crowds—and quite possibly “the right man,” as magazine stories used to say—she did not, like so many other girls, get dressed to the hilt on the chance that on a particular lunch hour “Mr. Right” would walk into her life. Gloria did not pay that kind of hope much mind, even when she did catch a man’s eye and he tipped his hat and smiled.
Her happiest lunchtimes were spent with Emilio. He’d take odd jobs, selling ties out of the Times Square shop
s, or working as an usher at one of the big movie houses, day work that he’d get through a temporary agency, a job that would leave him free to attend auditions or to study whatever he liked. And sometimes when he was in the neighborhood he would come by to see Gloria. Even though she might have seen her brother the evening before at dinner, those lunches, when he would sit beside her on the steps, seemed very special, as if then, among so many strangers, they shared a kind of anonymity and she could have him to herself. He, like the family, knew that it was not good for Gloria to shut out the world. And he knew that there was something vaguely unsisterly in the way her eyes became so happy at the sight of him, or when he said to her, “You look very pretty today, Gloria,” a blush coming over her face, or, when walking by his side, she would hold his hand and swing it along with hers, as if they were teenage boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d tried to interest her in the company of one of his cronies at the workshop, a good-looking actor Gloria’s size, a nice fellow who came along to join them for lunch—a mistake. Gloria thought the fellow pleasant enough, but for days she felt betrayed and angry that Emilio had allowed someone else to intrude on their special time together.
It was a strain for him, as she wanted to know everything about his life: which plays he was auditioning for, whether he would have classes on a given night, or if he had met someone. Dutifully, he would report on the first two items, keeping the third a secret, as he thought it would make her jealous and unhappy and because, on those occasions when he opened his heart to her, mentioning the few infatuations or loves of his life, he had the sensation that such admissions cut through her like broken glass. (He knew, for example, that on nights when he came home quite late from a dinner or a party, she would have spent the night unable to sleep, listening for sounds in the hall. And his love affairs with the young sweet women of his profession—his way of marking time—would intrude on the delicate balance of her heart and mind. He’d talked about it—with Maria and Margarita—and each had cautioned him to be careful. A few times he had moved out of the apartment, to share a place with some fellow actors in the Village, and each time Gloria would slip into such a state of silence and discouragement that Maria or one of the twins would call him up, asking Emilio to come talk with Gloria; and each time, having a good heart, he would decide to return to their apartment. They knew that something wasn’t right about all this—even Gloria knew it—but what could they do? Maria had spoken to Margarita about the sisters pitching in to send Gloria to a doctor of the nerves, and one day Maria had mentioned this to Gloria, who was unable to accept the reason for doing so: “Why, just because I care and worry about my brother?”
Sitting on the Fifth Avenue library steps, Emilio would remind Gloria that, if things went well for him, he would be heading out to California to try his hand as a movie actor. There was their father’s connection in California, and he had a feisty agent who in those days sent out his growing resumé and 8 × 10 black-and-white glossies to the different studios. Emilio gave himself three years of apprenticeship—for he liked New York and was not in a rush to go West. But that was his eventual plan. In Gloria’s company, he tried to prepare her, but at the mention of California, she would become so happy. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go,” she would say, and Emilio would feel even more confounded.)
Back in the factory, she would spend her afternoons taking care of paperwork in a little office with a window that overlooked the factory floor. Down below were some twenty tables where women, mostly Italians and Puerto Ricans, assembled the dolls and sewed their dresses, tagged and packed the finished dolls into boxes, their overflow on any given day arranged in a row along racks. Cry-baby dolls and Little Sis dolls, with their pretty blue blink-open-and-shut eyes, were the first sight that would greet her when she came to work in the morning, and the last, watching her mutely as she, waiting for her boss and the floor manager by the door, would click the lights off, one by one.
—Gallant Heart—
In 1949 it happened that M-G-M was casting for a new film, a romance (Gallant Heart) about the love affairs of American GIs and British women in London toward the end of the war. The actor cast to play the small role of an Indiana farm boy, with some eighteen lines of dialogue and one “kiss-off” monologue (in which he convinces the sweet farm girl he loves that he is secretly a heel, so she will forget him before he goes off into his uncertain future), had been pitching a baseball game with some actor friends in Santa Monica when a hard-hit line drive caught him on his right knee, and he was laid up, with smashed bones and torn ligaments, for three months. His bad luck worked to Emilio’s advantage—it was as if a prayer was being answered. In California, the producers, exhausted and in the crush and panic of pre-production, told their casting people to find a last-minute replacement. With most of their contract players tied up in other movies, they decided to look through a portfolio of faces, many of them from New York, choosing a few whom they might bring out for a screen test.
One of their scouts, a woman, knew Emilio as the romantic lead in an Actors Equity Showcase the year before and had been impressed by his naturalness. By that time, he’d been in twelve plays, none running more than a few weeks, but he had received some good notices, the most positive citing him as “an earnest and athletic-looking actor… possessed of an inward quality that might one day invoke pathos.” And though he had, to that point, no outstanding success onstage, he learned to comport himself like a professional, and had slowly developed the kind of presence and charisma that women liked. Strong in heart, he seemed vulnerable and self-effacing; and, above all, there was something so earnest about him that the female scout from M-G-M would think him Cooperesque.
One morning, as Emilio was dressing for a day-long stint as a temporary file clerk in a midtown office, his agent called him to say that M-G-M wanted him to test for a role. Doubtful, he did not say a word to the sisters, but made his way downtown to the agent’s office, where he was presented with a copy of the script. He sat out in the hall with the screenplay unopened on his lap, hoping to find on the first page the name of a Hollywood director he much admired. (His three favorite directors were Preston Sturges, John Ford, and John Huston, one of his favorite films being Mr. Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, which had played for two weeks in his father’s movie house, the Jewel Box, in 1942. Whenever he could, Emilio would watch that film intently, studying the casual, natural acting style of Joel McCrea. He enjoyed the director’s urbane and lighthearted version of the Depression, and daydreamed about doing the role of Sullivan, dreamed about taking to the freight trains to experience firsthand—even though he knew that he was watching a movie—the calamity-ridden landscape of America.) But there was no great name on the screenplay, and it even struck him that the script for Gallant Heart was a little weak.
Its lengthiest lines were the monologue, which his agent had underlined in pencil: “Becky, I’ve come here tonight to say goodbye. And not just because I’m shipping out tomorrow, but because I want you to know the real truth. Ever since the time we were children, it seemed as if you and I would always be together. In all those years there’s not been a single day when I haven’t treasured our precious love, but I figure that since I might not come back, I may as well level with you. I’ve been what those big-city magazines call a playboy, in my own way. I’ve been disloyal—don’t want to say with who or when, but that’s a fact. And even though I know this breaks your heart, I tell you now so you don’t get your hopes up while I’m away. Now that I’m going off, it’s time for us to grow up, you and me. Well, goodbye—I won’t be looking back.”
He sat with the script for two hours. It was summer and a great heat was rising off the Manhattan streets, and he had begun to feel so fatigued that when his agent came out into the outer office, saying, “Come on, Emilio; what have you got to lose?” the young man, then twenty-four, agreed to fly that very evening to Los Angeles.
Back in the apartment—none of his sisters was home—and in the heat of the day, he packed som
e clothing. He made one telephone call to his family in Cobbleton, reaching his mother, but he hung up unconvinced that Mariela had understood everything he said. His flight was scheduled for 6 p.m., with a changeover in St. Louis. At four-thirty, when Olga and Jacqueline walked in the door, he tried to explain, but there was a tightness in his throat, from nerves, and he was afraid of missing the flight, as if that might unravel his stroke of good luck. Dallying in the hallway, like a soldier off to war, he related the possibility that he might have a part in a movie, and the twins had smothered him with kisses. Later Gloria came home, and asked, “Where’s Emilio? Hasn’t he come in yet?” And they had told her, “He’s gone off to California to try out for a movie.”
“Yes?” In the bathroom, running the water in the basin, as its sound seemed to keep her company, she remained there, sitting fully dressed on the toilet for a long time, wanting to be alone, and then the thought of her brother’s turn of good luck, his chance in life, his big break, took her breath away and she began to shake, sighing over the intimation that his absence that day was the beginning of a much longer separation.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 33