The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Mr. Monroe nodded. He did not wish to impose on his famous guest. So he said (stifling a yawn): “Well, it’s been great talking with you, Mr. O’Brien. I better get inside here, but before I do, I want to thank you again for coming out to Crystal Falls. I hope it’s not been too painful for you.”

  “No, sir, not at all.”

  “Just one thing. I noticed that you made the acquaintance of Betsy MacFarland. I don’t know what you or she said to each other, but, as I consider myself a friend of yours, I caution you that she’s quite a handful.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She’s beautiful, you know that. And even though she’s one of my daughter’s best friends, I have to tell you that she’s had a dozen boyfriends in the last three years. I don’t know much about her private affairs, but I can guarantee you she’s a bit of trouble, in my opinion.”

  “Well, thank you, sir. Good night.”

  “Call me Bill, please. No formalities here.”

  “Good night, then, Bill. And thanks again for your advice.”

  — Love —

  Arranging his schedule so as to leave before eleven, Emilio found himself driving out of town along the road that Betsy had mentioned in the instructions she’d written out with a gushing fountain pen on a napkin at the reception. At the juncture of Route 22, he could choose to turn left for the Interstate or right toward Route 17. And just as he thought he would be better off going back to California, he decided to visit her. It took him a while to find the house. He passed through flatlands, eighteen miles of fields thick with hay and wheat and goldenrod, then came to a sign reading “The Falls, 2 miles.” He followed that route, the road rising gradually into a locally popular recreation area, where streams and brooks cut through woods, and there was a small lake. As his automobile rose up into the hills, he saw Crystal Falls without knowing it, a rush of water cascading down over a ridge of jutting prehistoric rocks. He drove past that, to level land, where the farms seemed immense and the houses few. He drifted into a memory of a film he had liked very much, Sons of the Desert, which starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, two of his favorite comedians. (He was sitting between his beautiful oldest sister Margarita, perfumy and elegant, and the youngest sister, Gloria, in a print dress, and he was laughing and happy in the knowledge that his other sisters were also there, Gloria, ever so slight, shifting her weight against him whenever the audience laughed.)

  He could not help but think that he was heading for a fine mess, but he drove on. The house was situated high on a hill up a driveway that veered into a wood. He had stopped to examine nearly every mailbox along the way, and when he came to the name MacFarland, he paused, wondering if he should turn back. But a great longing prompted him on. When his automobile, a 1954 white Cadillac convertible, turned into the driveway, Betsy was sitting on the porch reading a magazine. As soon as Emilio stepped out of his car, though, a crazy elation came over both of them and he found himself charging up the steps of that house into her arms, and soon enough they were kissing and dropping their clothes on the floor.

  What ensued was so scandalous that Emilio, a B-movie star, imagining the carnalities of their meeting in a film, would have censored much of the proceedings. His large penis had never been [censored] and she, open and delighted, had never so cherished [censored], and she lifting her rump [censored] and he trying to make sense of a quivering muscle on the inner side of her thigh, [censored] and she, raising and lowering her head over him in the act of [censored], had never squealed with such delight, his [censored] maleness impressing her, and she had smeared baby oil over his body and declared, [Censored], rolling up the sheets afterward…

  They had been making love for nearly two days when Betsy, blunt as ever, asked Emilio, “Why don’t we go to California and get married?” And he, drunk for two days and elated with her body, said, “Never thought I would, but for you—yes.”

  ***

  During the court proceedings four months later, Betsy MacFarland’s lawyer asked Emilio Montez O’Brien if he considered certain sexual acts normal. And he named them.

  “I do, sir.”

  “And will you admit that you participated in these acts on a fairly regular basis?”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “And did you, Mr. Montez O’Brien, ever consider the discomfort of your wife on those occasions while performing certain hideous acts?” (A voice saying “Objection,” the judge instructing the jury to strike the word “hideous” from their memory.)

  “And were you aware that your bride was only nineteen years old at the time of your elopement?”

  “No, I thought she was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years of age. That’s what she said on the license.”

  “Why did you marry her in the first place?”

  “Because I was drunk.”

  “I see. But once you married this young lady, the former Betsy MacFarland, you saw that marriage as giving you the right to do whatever you felt like doing.”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “Will you deny that you would often force her to bed, as she has so sworn in her affidavit?”

  “No, sir, I thought that she loved me. That’s what she always said.”

  “And you loved her?”

  “Yes, sir, I believed so.”

  “May I then ask: If you loved your wife so much, putting aside the cruelties you subjected her to in the bedroom, why were you seen leaving the Pacific Beach Motel on three different occasions in the company of a young woman whose name, correct me if I’m wrong, is Mildred Miles. Do you deny that you were having a love affair while your good wife remained at home waiting for you?”

  “No, sir, I do not. We were working on a picture, and when you spend so much time together, a kind of bond forms and—”

  “These girls are easy picking, yes?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The trial went on and on, the details of Mr. Montgomery O’Brien’s personal habits making all the Hollywood newspapers, the worst calling him a Gigolo Movie Star, unfaithful husband, and “bedroom deviant,” the publicity harmful and intrusive and nearly as painful as losing the case, which wiped out his savings and left his wife, Betsy MacFarland, with quite a favorable alimony settlement. Perhaps she had, all along, entertained such an eventuality.

  At the time of their marriage, he hadn’t thought about the potential for disaster. Enchanted by her carnality and her small-town straightforwardness, he wanted to start life over with her. His friends and family had been astounded by the suddenness of his decision. (“And not even married in church!” his shocked mother lamented.) It didn’t matter; the sisters never got the chance to meet her, settling instead for a few photographs of Betsy that he’d taken of her in a two-piece bathing suit by the beach, the consensus among them being that, whatever his reasons, he must have been in love. And though he kept telling himself it was love, after a few months he and his bride were at odds, bickering about the littlest things. Alter the initial flush of their love, the tedium of being an actor’s wife began to weigh heavily on her; and when her husband came home after work, she was always ready to go out. And he would take her out, though after a while he started to feel weary of this. They would pass many a night sitting next to each other in some fancy club without saying a word. Soon their only communication took place in the privacy of the bedroom—though they would sometimes spend the night in a Santa Monica hotel, these last efforts at romance often tense. Then, like a fellow in a tabloid story, he started a little love affair with an actress, and like a tabloid wife, she hired a private investigator to tail him at night, and armed with evidence, she found herself a lawyer and a few eager Hollywood reporters to relate, though without any basis, her life as a “battered sex-slave wife,” a sweet small-town girl who left a happy life in Montana to run off with a movie star who promised her the world but gave her nothing but pain.

  The worst of it was that in the end, after losing everything, he felt like a marked man. It troubled hi
m that news of the trial and its seamy details would reach the family (as it did), and though he wanted to head home to seek consolation and a little privacy in the company of his sisters, the experience left him numb with shame.

  — An Odd Dream, 1957 —

  With an unfavorable public image, he went into a kind of seclusion. Scripts still came his way, mainly for horror films, low-budget nuclear-age stories that name actors would not touch and which he, having his pride, also turned down. For months after his much-publicized divorce, reporters would skulk around in his front yard and hound him like cheap gumshoes in the evenings when he drove to one of the big hotels to have a quiet dinner by himself. He did not feel like dating and on many a day could not keep down his food, so unraveled were his nerves. Early one Sunday morning, with birds twittering in the rosebushes of his yard, he awakened from a dream in which he was walking along a road when suddenly the sky, thick with clouds, sent a torrent of fish falling down all around him. He did not know what this meant, but it so unsettled him that he got out of bed and poured himself a glass of orange juice and vodka in the kitchen, and then another, a man walking about his living room in a pair of striped pajamas, wondering what to do with himself. He’d decided, feeling nostalgic for his youth, when he would head to town with his sisters to Mass, that he would go to church.

  A reporter had followed him, and as he left the service, a photographer took his picture walking down the steps—that shot appearing in the late edition of one of the local papers, with a caption reading: “The Contrite Montgomery O’Brien leaving the 11 a.m. Mass at St. Agnes.”

  During the peace of the service he remembered how going to church had once been a happy act, when everyone in the world had seemed good, and in Cobbleton he and his sisters would go to the ice-cream parlor after church, clean and sparkling and sinless, to have their malteds and cones and to watch passersby through the window. He’d experience something of that feeling while making the Father Byrne pictures, in which he looked devout and pious in priestly garb. Of all the parts he had played in the past eight years, he was lauded most for his portrayal of the priest. But now he seemed to have slipped into the opposite role, the villainous husband who would be punished simply for being a man.

  He decided to avoid people, at least for a time. Even when a friend like Mr. Flynn, with his own share of troubles, called to offer condolences and to invite him out with the gang, Emilio turned him down.

  Then his sisters called him, the telephone ringing many times a day. At first he was polite, recounting to Margarita, for example, the travails of his heart. “You know me, sister. I can put up with just about anything, but this business makes me crawl out of my skin. I guess I’m just not lucky in some things, and I may as well get used to being alone.”

  “That’s not so,” she said. “Don’t even think that, and always remember we all love you.”

  She’d urge him to visit the family in Cobbleton, but he always made an excuse—auditions, the possibility of a role, and exhaustion (but he was really just ashamed). Each of those calls ended the same way, with Emilio feeling worse than before, his manner and tone more severe, his patience, even with his beloved sisters, wearing thin.

  As for work, he got only one offer that interested him—from, of all places, Italy, where his notoriety put him in the company of a long line of Italian ministers involved in scandalous affairs. It was an offer to play an American businessman on holiday in Rome, and though he had corresponded with the producer and said he’d do it, the project folded when the film company could not raise the funds.

  Eventually he decided that just hanging around his bungalow—at least he’d gotten to keep that—would be disastrous, for in his solitude he tended to rely more than ever on drink.

  — North to Alaska —

  One day, he got into his automobile and drove to Seattle, then Vancouver, winding his way north to Alaska, where, enjoying his anonymity—Emilio grew a beard and was going by the name of E. M. O’Brien—he stayed for five months, earning a good worker’s wage as a member of the crew of an oil rig and much relishing his contact with the ordinary people of the world, with whom he had lost touch. There he made the acquaintance of another young woman, named Jessica Brooks, who was neither an actress nor a small-town girl but an adventurous dame who had traveled out to Alaska from Minnesota to open up a restaurant for the local workers. And there, during his meals with his fellow derrick workers, he would find himself drawn to her. She was a pretty blonde, kept her hair in pigtails, liked to wear flowery dresses, and had a beaming and sunny nature. But what struck him was that she reminded him of his oldest sister, Margarita, not so much in her looks—it took him a while to figure it out—but because she was bookish and tried to stay informed about the world. And now and then, when things were slow on his days off, on a Saturday afternoon, and most of the men were in the saloon starting to drink their way through the weekend, he would wander over to her place to use the pay phone to call East (for he always feared that some calamity might happen, requiring his presence). And more often than not, she would be off at some corner table, with a gathering of children around her, reading aloud from a book. He had been touched by this and by the shelf of books that she kept behind her register and on shelves in her office foyer. One day, he asked her how she had gotten into the habit of reading to the children, and she told him, “I was a schoolteacher for a few years before coming out here, and I guess old habits stick.”

  With women scarce in those parts and with so many single men looking for ways to spend their time and money, she was always being asked out, some of the fellows working up the nerve after an afternoon in the saloon, others leaning by the register as she counted out their change from a dinner bill. Emilio, content to sit quietly in the corner sipping coffee and reading a newspaper, maintained his distance, as in a film of that period. This, and the fact that he was the only man to ask her why she read to the children, had piqued her interest, and one Saturday afternoon after he called Cobbleton and started on his way back to the boardinghouse, she called out to him: “Mr. O’Brien, I’m taking the night off and was wondering if you would be interested in going over to the church hall with me this evening. They’re showing a couple of movies, and, well, I haven’t seen one in a long time. Would you like to join me?”

  He sat with a raucous crew in the restaurant until about seven-thirty. She left the running of the place to her waitresses, languorously bathed and got dressed up, meeting Emilio at quarter to eight in front of the church. A crowd of townspeople had gathered there, for there was not much else to do—there was a general store, a gas station, a saloon, and two restaurants along a broad strip of boardinghouses and residences—the night crisp, the sky lit with stars, mountains looming in the distance. The Protestant minister greeted everyone as they came into the church hall, piously nodding and genuinely delighted with himself for having arranged, through connections in Juneau, for the equipment and the films. Jessica Brooks and Emilio found seats on folding chairs toward the back.

  First for the children, as Emilio’s father did in the Jewel Box Movie House, the minister, working the projector, showed two cartoons, a Mickey Mouse and a Donald Duck, whose bright, happy colors brought a cry of glee from the children. Then, as he switched reels for the main features, Emilio and Jessica fell into conversation.

  Frankly curious about him, she asked: “And where are you from?”

  And he tried to tell his story without alluding to his more recent past.

  “Well, I ask you,” she said, “because you strike me as a little different from the rest of the fellows around here. I mean to say, you have a refinement about you that I haven’t seen in a long, long time.”

  What could he say to that but “And you do, as well.”

  By then the lights were brought down, and as a roll of drums sounded, Emilio, resting back in his seat, pressed his hand to his brow and could not believe that, of all the films in the world, the minister had gotten hold of Tarzan in the Land
of No Return, a film which he not only considered one of his worst but whose showing that night seemed likely to undo his disguise. As bad as he thought the film, however, the stock African footage in blazing color and the central plot of Tarzan rescuing a princess from a hidden city seemed to satisfy the audience. And even he admitted that, while he had not done much in the way of acting for the film, he looked quite spectacular (he’d put himself through a rigorous month of exercise in preparation). He wondered if Jessica noticed a resemblance between Tarzan and himself, but she said nothing about it at the film’s end.

  They stayed to watch a quite funny 1950 James Stewart movie, The Jackpot, but halfway through, Jessica leaned over and whispered, “I’m feeling a little tired. Do you mind if we go?”