“My God, but you’re a beautiful lady.” Flynn, dapper in a white suit and cream-colored shoes, bowed and kissed her hand.
In Ciro’s they dined and drank champagne, and when the orchestra played a sweet version of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” she and Mr. Flynn stepped onto the floor and the touching of their faces—for Mr. Flynn liked to dance close—induced in her a kind of splendid revelry, a thrill akin to the feelings she’d had when years before she had first laid eyes on the handsome aviator. She sighed, for there she was in the arms of a once-great movie star who in youth had been so devastatingly handsome that women fainted when he entered a room. But this Flynn was aged, his face heavier, more mature and engagingly rugged. What struck her most about him, however, was his sadness, an intense feeling of disappointment that he communicated through his alcohol-bleary eyes. And although she would never forget her delight in the man, she felt pity for him. There was a kind of absolute solitude about Flynn; he had the air of a man cut off from the world, and she’d wondered, watching Flynn and her brother, Emilio, if the lives of such men were, for all their fame, destined to be unhappy.
***
It was also in 1954 that Gloria, the youngest of the fourteen sisters, arrived on vacation with Marta and Carmen, the sisters loving not only the climate of California but the Hollywood life of their brother. They visited the set of his second Lance Stewart film, Desperation, and joined him at cocktail parties, where the sight of movie stars made them giddy. They enjoyed the seaside communities of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, and were so elated at seeing something new of the world that in a short time Carmen and Marta had begun to entertain the idea of moving out there.
During the time when their brother was at the studio, they were perfectly happy to drive off sightseeing in their brother’s convertible—he owned two automobiles—happy in the mornings as they’d pack a bag with their bathing suits and suntan lotion and sunglasses and sandwiches and wine, for a day at the beach. Accompanying them on these outings, Gloria, who thought the point of the visit was to see her brother, felt cheated by his absence. And while Marta and Carmen romped in the surf, dashing into the powerful California waves, fascinated by the colorful cabanas and the atmosphere of health and happiness of the Californians, Gloria would sit under a beach umbrella—for she thought herself allergic to sunlight—morosely passing the time with movie and women’s-interest magazines, waiting for the day to end, so they could return to their brother’s house.
He’d come back about seven in the evening, exhausted from the day’s shoot and ever preoccupied with the direction of his career, but he was still their movie-star brother and happily took them around. And on nights when they stayed in, he was content to enjoy a simple meal with them. He had been pleased to see that his sister Gloria, about whom he sometimes worried, seemed changed, more confident and mature. She was still attentive toward him and there were times, when crossing the room, that he was aware that she was watching him with more than sisterly fondness. At other times, when she’d be sitting on the couch and a sadness would come over her, and he would ask, “Gloria, is everything all right with you?” she’d answer simply, “Yes.”
Used to her life in Manhattan without him, she left her job in the doll factory to work in the bookkeeping department of Macy’s, which in those days offered its customers and employees many amenities. A guard would open a door for her when she’d arrive at eight-thirty each morning, and at Christmastime, she told her brother, the store would give her a bonus of a week’s salary and a turkey and a basket of candies and jams, all wrapped up in crinkly paper. But when she told him that she was happy there, her voice quavered. She had been delighted by the idea of seeing him again, of spending ten days in his company, but promised herself to maintain a proper and sisterly distance; still, there was much that she wanted to tell him.
She was then thirty-one and quite womanly. It had surprised him to notice that his frail and delicate sister had in the last few years filled out, become more buxom. As he sat up one night alone in the living room memorizing some pages of script, she startled him. She was on her way to the kitchen for a glass of ice water, wearing only a slip, her dark hair, which she’d often wear in a matronly bun, unraveled, so that it hung down over her shoulders. She appeared to be naked under her slip, for he could make out the shadow of her pubic mound and the pronounced roundness of her breasts, the darkness of her nipples, and her bottom quivering under the sheeny fabric. She yawned casually and returning through the room had said, “I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, brother.”
“Not at all.”
She then made her way back to the guest room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man’s sister to display herself. In fact, she had been sitting up, unable to sleep, fully aware that her brother was in the living room, and though it was true she was thirsty, before leaving the room she removed her brassiere and panties. She’d wanted him to see her, as if to say, “Look how your sister has become healthier without you.” She did not think about him in the other way that used to plague her many a night over the years, when she would remember how they had bathed together and slept snuggled in the same bed, so much so that she would feel a physical queasiness. Still, she would often take the cache of letters that he had written to her during the war and in his first years in California, filled with affection, and reread the pages until she felt she was full of the spirit of her brother. And whenever one of his movies opened in New York, or when she went home to Cobbleton and they went to the Jewel Box, she would sit watching his movies three and four times, and retiring to her bed, she would feel his absence intensely.
On such nights, she would lament her lack of what she would call physical charm and would feel tired of her own demureness and the way dear Mother Nature had made her too sickly for too long, and it was as if, on one of those nights, she had willed her body into a womanly fullness. Her sister Margarita during a visit to Cobbleton had noticed this and said, “My goodness, Gloria, but I do believe you’ve bloomed.” And though she considered it one of nature’s caprices, she sometimes told herself that it had happened so she could be more attractive to her own brother.
That’s what she had wanted to show him that night.
The change was evident enough. One late afternoon around Christmas the year before, the floor manager of the doll factory, a brusque and pushy man, invited her into his private office, where the bosses would gather on Friday evenings for a few drinks, which he’d pour out of a Four Roses bottle, to unwind from the week’s work. It was a claustrophobic place removed from the clutter of the factory, with its machines and worktables and barrels of eyes and doll parts, with four highly placed windows that looked out onto the gray walls of another building. That evening, when he asked her to join them, even though she had no taste for whiskey, she, flattered to be included for the first time in such a gathering, said yes.
After drinks, the bosses decided to leave the building together, locking up as they usually did, and when they reached the street, the floor manager, Mr. Bruno, a married man, insisted on walking her to the subway. He had never especially noticed her before, but that night he asked her, “How about going out with me sometime?” She had said no and thought that was the end of it, but for the next few days Mr. Bruno would call her at home, an edge of secrecy in his voice, asking her again to go out with him. And when she got back to work the following Monday, tending to her usual business, he started to ask her into his office. “Really, Miss O’Brien, I don’t understand why you’re suddenly so afraid of me. After all, we’ve been working together for a long time, nearly seven years, and you must know me as a gentleman. I don’t want to make anything out of the fact that I’d like to socialize a little more with you, and I don’t like the idea of using the fact that I’m your boss, but the way you’ve been so unfriendly makes me think you don’t like me very much, and I don’t think that’s very good for employer-employee relations. The fact is, I’ve never given you a hard time abo
ut all the sick days you’ve taken in the past, and I think I’ve been pretty reasonable about letting you off for your doctor’s appointments and such, but to tell the truth, your lack of gratitude has gotten me to think that unless certain things change between you and me, well, your days here are numbered.”
And he sat back in his swivel chair, smiling and raising his eyebrows, as if to say, “I mean it.” She passed that afternoon knowing just what he wanted, and being a creature of habit and accustomed to that work, she began to fear a change. She was making a hundred dollars a week and taking care of herself, and she had never been penalized for sick days, when she would wake up feeling too ill to make her way to the office. She liked that job. The owners had been generally fair to her, and it was nice to have access to so many dolls—she would take some home on the holidays and give them to the children in her building. But what he wanted her to do was unthinkable, and at three-fifteen in the afternoon she gathered her belongings, emptying out her desk, and tendered her resignation in a note that cited Mr. Bruno for his ungentlemanly behavior. She asked that her week’s pay, and the vacation days owed her, the amount of which she had calculated, be sent to her home address, and with that she bid her fellow employees goodbye, bid farewell to the dolls, and made her way out into the new maturity of her life.
— Her Love —
She’d wanted so badly to tell Emilio about her love affair with a nice man she’d met when she’d gone to work for Macy’s, a job she’d taken a month after leaving the factory. She did not like idleness, and while she could have gone back home to Cobbleton, she enjoyed living with Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline. In her new “incarnation,” she started to take better care of herself, even picking out sexier dresses and trying out different cosmetics. Part of it was that she had begun to enjoy the way certain gentlemen would tip their hats when she’d walk by, but she also decided that her infatuation with Emilio was a delusion, that she’d allowed herself to drift too deeply into territories that weren’t quite correct. She still loved him but decided she would be better off moving on. It was around this time, with her brother far away, that the idea of a romance began to interest her, and she’d promised herself to become less closed off to men.
One of the men in the store, a fairly prosperous two-and-a-half-percent-commission salesman in the furniture department, would make a point of often talking with her in the employees’ lounge. He was from Canarsie, in his mid-thirties, and always wore a white carnation in his lapel and bright red bow ties. With a natural and open way about him, and never using pressure, he was successful with customers, who considered him trustworthy. He lived with his widowed mother, a powerful woman who still regarded him as a child and would become inconsolable whenever he’d talk about moving out to find a life of his own. When he lost his father fifteen years before, his life had become a stormy affair, his evenings spent at home with his mother in silence, his heart filled with anger and regret. Little by little he’d confided all this to Gloria, and slowly, distracted and moved by his plight and by the way he had admitted so much to her and made her feel like a special confidante, she allowed herself to think more and more about him. And there was something else: just seeing him through the glass partitions of the payroll office, standing in the lines of employees on payday, would make her happy. And when they sat together at lunch-time, or went strolling along the congested streets, his physical proximity made her feel as if she wanted to go off into a private place and kiss him.
This young man, whose name was Arnold, helped her to stop thinking about her brother. Slowly, and at a cost to his life at home, he would sometimes date her after work. They would take in a movie or go to a nice restaurant, he always apologetic, as he was intent on getting back to Canarsie at a respectable hour. (“Otherwise, Gloria, my mother’ll have one of her fits.”) Meeting always in public places, they rarely ever kissed, and when they did, it was a fumbling, awkward process. He was timid and shy, and quite possibly even more frightened of a kiss than she. They had been going out for six months when it occurred to Gloria that the apartment on West End Avenue would be empty on the weekend—her sisters Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline off on a six-day cruise to Bermuda, on a job—and she invited him to visit her on the Saturday. She was to prepare him lunch and perhaps afterward they’d head out to a movie. She greeted him, and as he sat on the couch, hat by his side, she went into the kitchen to fix him a drink, where she made a sudden decision: a few minutes later, she entered the living room carrying their drinks, naked.
“Come on, my darling,” she said, and she led him into her bedroom, with its little shelves of dolls and plastic flowers and photographs of the family, and he followed her, overwhelmed and sweating, and there on the bed he, to that day a virgin, helped her to lose her virginity; and she nearly exhausted him with her passion, pent up for so long, her body exuberant; Gloria, shy and demure and a little remote, feeling as if she now possessed one of the healthiest and most desirable female bodies in the world.
***
Nothing more happened. That night in California when she had wanted to show off her woman’s body to her brother, she went back to bed slightly surprised at her own boldness and lay there listening for his footsteps in the living room and hall, as if on the way to his bedroom he might pause by her doorway and quietly knock, her fantasy placing him by the bed, where he would kneel before her and say, “I wanted to say good night,” and in this fantasy he would spy her breasts through her silk gown and, parting the top buttons, take one of her nipples into his mouth. Why she had been thinking these things, she did not know.
(The milk of her health, her new life, flowing into him.)
In memory she would see her brother, troubled, distracted, and ever courteous, pacing about with a script in his hand, needing love. When she thought about that, she would remember how divided she felt, telling herself that in her desire for him she had been a little crazy. She’d decided that her moodiness during her visit with Marta and Carmen involved her feelings about missing Arnold from Macy’s; but she sometimes appreciated the fact that Arnold, in terms of “manliness,” could not begin to touch her in the way that her memories and longing for her brother did. She lay in bed, lifting the hem of her gown up past her navel. She sighed.
For his part, Emilio was busy enough that each day seemed a prelude to the moment when the three beloved sisters would be preparing to leave, when their closets would be emptied of their sundresses, suitcases packed, when he would look about while eating a meal with them and notice Malta’s and Carmen’s deep tans, and comment one last time how happy he’d been that they had decided to visit him.
Having liked California very much, Marta and Carmen would come back for good in a few years, finding work down near Anaheim.
And Gloria would settle into an on-and-off-again romance with Mr. Arnold of Macy’s.
— In B Land, 1955 —
He’d taken on the role of Lance Stewart for the money, nothing else. The character, with his trench coat and colorful speech—“Look at the gams on that dame”—bored him, but he needed work. Despite the success of his first priest movie and the occasional good notice, he was never given a chance to act for a first-rate director, and the B-picture scripts he received—for he was now considered a good B actor—he read with a mixture of pity and contempt both for himself and for the poor writers who’d been forced to sit and produce such material. Not that he always felt dissatisfied, but as he moved from one film to the next, he had the feeling that he was on some kind of forced march, that it was his unpleasant destiny to linger in B land. He tried to test for some really classy movies—he’d played a small part that year in a Gary Cooper Western—and yet, as his days became clouded with work, romantic escapades, and weekend drunks, he sometimes felt that things were hopeless.
Drinking seemed to help for a day or two, and then his darker feelings would come back to haunt him. Sometimes he felt so disempowered that he would move through the tedium of his scenes with total detachment—i
t would seem that he was inhabiting someone else’s body. A feeling that he was leading a strange life came to him so often that he began to long for—and at the same time resent—the days of his youth, when he had luxuriated in the attentions of his sisters, when the world seemed an orderly, harmonious, sometimes raucous place. But hadn’t he begun to feel a mounting disappointment with the actor’s life?
A kind of shame began to come over him: despite his successes, for he was making a good salary and truly enjoyed some aspects of his profession, he felt the old desire to run off. His romantic dalliances, his earthly joy in bedding down some new and lovely woman, would satisfy him for a time, but he would greet each new, passing love with more and more cynicism and started to feel that his frolicsome partners were part of a disheartening trap. He was so troubled that he consulted with a then-prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist, Dr. Zeno, who’d listened to his story and, over a series of sessions, discerned that what Emilio was lacking in his life was a “true and fulfilling mature love.”
Listening intently, Emilio nodded, gushed appreciation, paid the doctor his heavy fee, and then, leaving Dr. Zeno’s majestic office, drove back to his bungalow to sit with his fan mail and drink down a bottle of gin. He’d remembered waking at three in the morning, thirsty and groaning, for his head ached and he would have to get up in a few hours for another day’s work. He’d been awakened by the voices he’d heard in a dream—his sisters’ voices calling to him as a child, “Emilio! Come here! Emilio, I have something for you!” voices filled with affection, voices beguiling and sirenic, their influence on him confusing but powerful, coming back from the incalculable distance of his past.
***
On Lake Tahoe, away from the heavy lamps and cameras of a movie set, a few months after his sisters Gloria and Marta and Carmen had gone home, Emilio was rowing out into the waters. With four days off from his latest film, he’d flown north with a young actress, taking a room in a lakeside hotel, where they spent most of their time in bed, drinking champagne and dedicated to their mutual pleasure. He made love to her three times one morning. (Her breasts were so full that after they had made love in every other way, she pressed them together so that they nearly had the amplitude of female buttocks. Having covered them with some sort of oil, she played a game: pressing her nipples down as he passed himself through, she would “kiss” him with each.) Then Emilio, needing to be alone, left her in the hotel room, taking a rowboat out into the lake.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 35