The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  He walked her back to the restaurant, where she kept a small second-floor apartment, and it was then, with a brisk wind blowing, that she asked, “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re the actor fellow who played Tarzan.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “I don’t think so.” She looked in his eyes. “They’re the same. You’re him, I know it, even with that beard and your heavy clothes. Which is fine with me—but what on earth are you doing here?”

  When he did not answer, she said, “I want to hear this, sir. Come inside for a beer.”

  She opened the restaurant door and put on the radio and they sat talking and drinking beer until three in the morning.

  ***

  In the last two months that he remained in Alaska, they were to spend many such evenings talking. She found out about his debacle, the source of his recent woes, but it did not make any difference to her. She saw him with the eyes of a practical, good-hearted woman who had once taught Sunday school and, like his mother and all his sisters, truly believed that there was a God in heaven. No matter how often he said to her, as they stood on the brink of a serious romance, “I feel like poison these days,” she counseled him that he was only human. “Everyone in the world has bad breaks. And who knows, maybe these things happened so we could meet.”

  They were serene, resisting somehow the temptations of comforting each other in bed on the chillier nights. He discovered, working on the platforms on the open sea, that as the season grew colder the elbow joint of his arm, damaged in Italy during the war, would begin to ache—something about the way the joint healed, a doctor once told him. But he was determined not to fall easily in love again, and though they would sometimes spend hours kissing on her parlor couch and a sort of delirium would come over him, he would not take it any further. But he looked forward to seeing her, even if just to sit nearby while she read to the children, and there were days when they would embrace endlessly, losing themselves in each other during those simple moments of wordless contact. Her influence was good for him, and instead of waking up in the mornings and feeling he was poison, he came to believe he possessed a good heart, after all.

  Like a St. Augustine, he realized that vanity had driven him in his affairs with women, his history with them suddenly unimportant.

  His time in Alaska was nearly over. The oil company would be closing down the works for the winter and he had been let go. By then, he had started to think again about getting away, not because he did not care about Jessica, but because he wanted to know if his emotions were true.

  She liked to go to church with him, and even though he grew fond of the kindly words the preacher said, he went only because they would sit together, that was all. (Like his mother, he found Protestant services vaguely disappointing.)

  On the last Sunday of his life in Alaska, he had gotten up and shaved the woolly beard that he had grown in his time there, a few scant traces of gray in its weave, and when he met her that morning, she had cried out, “My God, you look ten years younger!”

  They went off to the service and later spent the afternoon cross-country skiing, for the ground was covered with snow, the exercise warming their loins. That night, he presented her with a watch that he’d ordered from Anchorage, and she gave him a Bible inscribed “For my love.”

  ***

  In Seattle, two days later, he happened by a saloon, and it occurred to him that he had not been drunk in five months. At a nearby table was a contingent of rather pious-looking fellows, sweet-natured young men, laughing loudly and oh so joyfully drunk—but they lacked the gruffness of bar drunkards. Emilio finished a bowl of soup and asked, “What are you fellows celebrating?”

  One of the young men said, “We’re monks sending our friend Brother Joseph here off to his new life.”

  Another voice: “Yes, he’s leaving us Benedictines, traitor that he is, to become a Trappist!” And they roared.

  “Come and join us,” said another, and Emilio, with nothing better to do, pulled his chair over and listened to the stories of the monks and their cloistered lives. (“If our superior knew we were here reveling, oh, my God!”)

  “The thing, my friend,” said one of the Benedictines, “is that in God’s Kingdom there are levels of devotion and discipline, and within His Kingdom we Benedictines can’t match the discipline of the Trappists, but Brother Joseph here”—he was a red-cheeked fellow of about thirty, with a righteous but extremely drunk air about him—“has decided to pursue such a level of discipline that he will certainly one day ascend to the highest realm of heaven.”

  “Not so, not so,” said Joseph. And he leaned close to Emilio to convey the reason for his decision. “I was on a religious retreat, up on a mountain. No one was around and I heard, after three days of solitude, a voice whispering to me, ‘Come closer into my fold.’ And I realized I had heard the voice of God.”

  And he blinked and nodded and lurched back into his seat, and another monk mischievously conveyed the essence of what his life would be: “So our good brother must keep a vow of silence, except for two days of the year—Christmas and Easter—and even then, such earthly pleasures as the drinking of a bottle of beer will come once on each of those days, and that’s why”—and they all laughed—“we’re here filling the good brother with enough beer to last him for one hundred years!”

  Indeed, it was so. There were some twenty empty bottles on his table, and Emilio said, getting up, “Well, I wish you the best of luck, my friend.”

  And he bought them a round of drinks and later that night, as he rested in bed in a hotel near the harbor, he felt intrigued by the combination of memories (two among many)—his friend from Alaska, Jessica, telling him, “I feel you are a good man, no matter what anyone else has said,” and the simple image of a monk high on a mountaintop hearing the whispering voice of God.

  — With Errol Flynn —

  His return to Los Angeles was met with a bit of luck. Delighted to hear from him again, his agent had gotten him a few weeks on a film in which he played a courtier in the epoch of Elizabeth I. By that time the press no longer hounded him. And the studio people, if not the public, seemed to have forgiven him his unsavory divorce. He was happy to be working on a new film, but afterward there were few worthwhile offers and for the first time in years he began to think of a return East or back up north to Alaska. Writing letters to Jessica, he’d receive her loving answers with joy, and after a time he thought to bring her down to California to join him and the uncertainty of his life.

  Work was slack, however, so when in the June of 1958 his chum Errol Flynn offered him a part in a film, Emilio was most interested.

  “I’ve got this picture planned, I think we’ll call it Cuban Rebel Girls, or something like that. I’ve had my eye on what’s going on down there, have you?”

  “Well, a bit. I’ve got a sister who lives there, but I haven’t always kept track of things.”

  “Your loss, my friend. See, in Cuba,” Flynn said, “there’s been an uprising taking place over many years. It goes back a long time, and the latest hero, if I can call him that, is a fellow named Fidel Castro. Now, I’ve read up on all this stuff. One of their biggest heroes was this black fellow named Maceo, Antonio Maceo, who was once called the Bronze Titan. That was in the old days, when the Cubans—that is, the descendants of the original Spanish settlers, with some Negroes—were trying to throw off the yoke of Spain, back around the turn of the century.” Flynn laughed. “And they’d been having these piddling wars for years, since about 1868, the whole thing coming to a froth in 1898, when you Americans with your Teddy Roosevelt sailed down there, taking the spoils.”

  “My father was there.”

  “Was he? Even so, my friend, things have boiled with discontent since then, and now there’s this fellow, an insurrectionist, who’s giving the current government a hell of a run for their money.”

  “I’ve heard as much from
my sister.”

  “So I’ve written a script about the whole dilly, and I’ve got a little money and I thought of making this picture about some Americans who get involved in the bloody thing. Can’t go into more details, chum, but I promise you the script is all the way there. I wrote it myself and I’ve got a good part for you. Are you interested?”

  — Back in Cuba, 1958 —

  The shoot, filmed largely in the Florida Keys, with some location work planned later in Cuba, was a fiasco. Emilio’s role, that of a demolitions expert from the Deep South, ended up on the cutting-room floor. Mr. Flynn’s companion at that time, Beverly Aadland, a seventeen-year-old beauty, played an American beautician determined to help the Cuban insurrection. Unfortunately, in Emilio’s opinion, she did not know very much about acting, and the script was so bad that, even though Flynn, whom he admired, had asked him to stay on, Emilio Montez O’Brien jumped ship.

  And there he was, in the Florida Keys, so, after a few days’ rest, he decided to visit his second-oldest sister in Santiago de Cuba. He called her from a Havana hotel and took a train east from the city—no gunshots which signaled revolution, though the train would stop for two hours at a time, on its chugging route, for no apparent reason, perhaps military personnel searching the cars for suspicious-looking passengers. When he finally arrived at Santiago’s central station, he whiffed an atmosphere of seaside and bakeries that seemed vaguely familiar from the time of his youth when he had visited that city in 1932.

  He had not seen Isabel since he was a boy of seven, and remembered her as an immense and sweet, matronly Irish-looking blonde, but the woman who greeted him on the platform, covering his face with kisses and saying, “Ay, my brother, my brother,” was a whorl of flesh, and with her graying hair in a bun and her tropical-patterned dress, she seemed to have turned into an almost grandmotherly Cuban. Walking with him up the steep hills to the old family house on Victoriana de Avila, she seemed to know everyone—all the shopkeepers, the fruit sellers, the lottery venders, and the ladies leaning out their windows, chatting happily with them, saying, “This is my brother from America.”

  She had three children: two boys, one in Havana working as an attorney and another in Georgia studying engineering, and a daughter of fifteen, a lean and pretty brunette with her mother’s blue eyes, whom she introduced saying, “Luisa, kiss your uncle hello.”

  And there was his brother-in-law, the pharmacist, Antonio Valdez, now retired but famous in the family for having rescued Isabel from an old maid’s life. He came shuffling into the parlor, fresh from an early-afternoon nap, tall, heavy, and bald, his intellectual eyes growing wide. And he embraced Emilio. “Welcome, my boy.”

  He felt relieved to hear the pharmacist speak quite good English, for Emilio, as they knew, did not speak Spanish, and it had impressed him that even their daughter, though not as conversant in English as her mother and father, knew enough to carry on a rudimentary conversation and to ask her movie-star uncle if he had ever met the actor James Dean, whose picture she kept on her wall. And not minding the question from his niece, he had lied: “Oh yes, he’s a very nice fellow.”

  They’d eaten, that day, a large and heavy meal consisting of dishes that actors would do best to avoid, his arrival marked by a roast crispy-skinned piglet and rice and beans, and they had talked afterward out on the rear patio.

  “This, Mr. Movie Star brother whom I love, is the house where our mother once lived. This is Victoriana de Avila Street. Most everyone who lived here has died. Do you remember your aunts from the time you visited?”

  He shook his head.

  “Or their husbands?”

  “No.”

  “Surely you must remember them from the time you were little and they would take you out for walks.”

  He thought hard. “I remember this garden, where I would play.”

  “Oh Lord, don’t you remember anything else?”

  “Yes, the walks with you and Margarita.”

  But he also remembered that the little room just off the patio, with a rattan couch and flowery pillows and a vague scent of eucalyptus, was where he would sometimes nap; and that one of the bedrooms off the parlor was where his grandfather had died. And his mother telling him, while they were out on that patio, that she had spent many hours of her courtship with his father, around the turn of the century, sitting on these very same sinuous wrought-iron, plump-cushioned chairs. All this amounted to a vague connection with the place, this house in a provincial capital in Cuba, a country he hardly knew about except from some reminiscences of his father’s about his days there during the Spanish-American War, or from his mother’s encomia about the good household in which she had been raised, and articles about the Cuban Revolution which more often than not he would skip. And for a moment he wondered what his life would have been like if, instead of returning with his bride to the States, his father, Nelson, had decided to remain, making Cuba instead of America his new country. No doubt he would have looked very much the same, but his head would have been filled with Spanish perhaps and his demeanor and his heart might have been different, for he noticed an open emotionality to the people.

  Isabel herself had changed, becoming more Cuban than her sisters in the States, and proud of it, for she told her brother, “I love this place and the people here. They have brought me much happiness.”

  He would take walks with his brother-in-law after meals, and that kindly man, ever on the lookout for subjects of common interest, was delighted when Emilio brought up boxing. “Have you seen Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring?” Emilio nodded. “Yes, once in New York.” This afforded his brother-in-law, Antonio, the opportunity to go into his knowledge of Cuban boxing, mentioning Martin Perez and Paquito Miró, Ramón Cabrera, and other fighters whom Emilio had never heard of before, fighters who were a part of his brother-in-law’s happy memories of being a young man, when he would travel all the way to Havana to see the fights in the Arena Colón and at the Cuban Lawn Tennis Club.

  Antonio considered himself something of an amateur sociologist and could easily slip into interminable lists of great Cuban singers, radio personalities—which actors performed in soap operas on the radio and which of those shows were the most popular—and ballet dancers, classical musicians, composers, dance bands, actors and television performers, and poets and novelists and playwrights and baseball players. And then he would launch into Cuban history, detailing the great men who helped make it, such as the Cuban general Calixto García, a hero in the war against the Spaniards, a man who survived a gunshot wound to the head and wore a cotton plug in the scar, so that it would not coo like a bird in the wind. With few exceptions, Emilio had never heard of any of them, but as they walked along, it was as if his brother-in-law was intent on impressing on Emilio the fact that Cuba was thick with culture and art, and that it should be a source of pride for him that his mother was Cuban.

  As to the current political situation, with Castro fighting Batista’s men in the hills, he would shrug. “Whatever happens,” he told Emilio, “we will find a way to carry on.”

  Emilio would go wandering through the streets of Santiago, the same way he used to roam about the city of Naples, and on the way he would wander through the workings of his own heart, hearing the voices around him and imagining how, perhaps years before, his father, an Irishman, once also heard foreign voices around him and at a certain moment, with tripod and camera in his arms during a hike up the steep hills of the city, he’d been enticed to stay and had pursued his destiny of meeting a Cuban woman named Mariela Montez. And years later his movie-actor son would have the privilege of standing by a stone wall looking out, pensive and filled with wonder, over the splendid harbor of the city.

  — New York—Cobbleton, 1958 —

  On his way back to California, when Emilio stopped off in New York, his sisters, in their usual way, welcomed him. He was relaxed and dapper, spending a happy week stepping out with them to make the rounds, to see Broadway shows and plays, and to retu
rn, with his sister Gloria by his side, to his old haunts, Greenwich Village and theater-district pubs and restaurants, where he encountered friends from his New York years: stage actors in their ever-struggling incarnations as waiters and bartenders, some successful and prosperous in the new medium of television, or now the stars of successful shows; others, defeated and anxious, weighing on his heart. And he came across ex-lovers, who, after so much time—more than ten years—remembered their liaisons with sweetness, for now they were passing beyond their youth, and life for many of them had crossed the threshold of early promise. At thirty-three he felt the most admiration for the character actors, like his friend Thurston Gould, who after years of struggle had finally become well enough known among producers and casting directors to be earning a modest but steady living. And those who encountered Emilio Montez O’Brien were newly touched by how a kind of serenity had come over him, for in those days, when he thought about the future, he was feeling optimistic again. With luck, he would make a few good films, maybe even get a part in a television program like Playhouse 90, and he even began to consider a return to the stage, as he always enjoyed the heartbreaking conviviality of an acting company, with its myriad intrigues, romances, and camaraderie.

  At the same time, while he considered these possibilities, he felt his heart being pulled northwest again to Alaska—for not an hour passed that he did not think about Jessica. But before heading home to California, he had decided to visit his family in Cobbleton first.

  ***

  His father, Nelson O’Brien, having entered a senatorial old age, was enjoying a contemplative and more or less solitary retirement in Cobbleton. Though Nelson O’Brien, tottering about in the field, would still attempt to take pictures, he’d long ago closed his photography practice, and a few years back, when his family lost interest in the movie house, freed himself of the Jewel Box, which had seen better days, selling the building to a young businessman who owned a drive-in near Quarryville. In the first days of that new life, he spent many hours in his shed, organizing the numerous photographs he had taken during his lifetime into groupings for posterity (Cuba, 1898–902; The Family, 1902–1935; Farm life, Pennsylvania, 1902–940). Slowly he’d become, or so it seemed, indifferent to the life around him. Busy in his musings, he left family affairs to Mariela, for whom the telephone had become one of the great amenities of existence.