The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  There were nearly weightless movements within the house at that time, his mother and father shuffling about in pajamas and day dress, going about their daily business with the bewildered acceptance of people who have managed to live so long—by 1958, his father would be eighty, his mother seventy-four. With the exception of Margarita, who would sometimes stay with them (she had a little apartment of her own in town), they were often by themselves during the week, alone until the happy time of Sunday when the sisters would swoop down to visit them. Irene would bring her family, and Patricia, with two of her children and her hayseed husband, would come for dinner, and during an afternoon the house would be full again and bursting with life, as it had once been.

  — Carmen and Marta’s—Life In California

  Some of the daughters lived too far away to make regular visits. A year before, Carmen and Marta had finally made the decision to leave Cobbleton and had flown out to Los Angeles and taken a bus to Anaheim, where their cheerful personalities helped to get them jobs as ticket venders at Disneyland. And they settled there, delighted by the California climate and the merriment of the theme park (one grand thrill, an employee banquet in Cinderella’s castle, where they shook Mr. Disney’s hand). Living in a garden apartment on the periphery of town, each of the sisters would in time find a husband. One was a Cuban souvenir-shop manager named Carlos, in Mr. Disney’s employ. Marta met him when this man, a widower, noticed her, a woman quite Cuban in appearance if not demeanor, whom he imagined to be somewhere in her thirties, though she was past forty, walking along Main Street toward the Magic Castle. Stout, good-natured, and courtly—he had left Cuba for Hollywood many years before, hoping to make it as a film actor—he would see her going by and move out to his doorway, past children wanting to buy Mickey Mouse toys and bags of caramelized popcorn, calling out, “Oh, miss! Oh, miss!” He managed to speak to her often and they got to know each other and after a time began to plan quiet dates out to the drive-ins, where, as always with potential lovers, he related his circumstances and she her own. Carmen’s future husband was a regional conveniencestore manager named Chuck, who lived in Anaheim and drove about the area in a Studebaker “Woody” station wagon. Involving himself in good causes around the city, he’d turn up every so often at Disneyland with groups of orphaned children in his care for the day, and with Boy Scout troops. Thick-necked and with a crew cut, he dressed in a tie and jacket regardless of the heat and the eye-tearing fumes that would roll off the freeway and hang in the still air near the entrance to Disneyland. She must have talked with him a dozen times before he showed up one day, noble and disarming, with a bouquet of fresh-cut roses, saying, “What time do you get off, if you don’t mind my asking?” She told him six-thirty and he returned and they drove over to a good restaurant, the Welcome House, and there, over a lobster dinner, squirty and smothered with ketchup, he told her the story of his life. The son of a mail carrier, he had grown up in Sacramento during the Depression and seen action as a Marine during the war, afterward going to work as a clerk, then assistant manager, then manager, then regional manager of the U-Drive-In department-store chain. “And now,” he told her one night as they were parked, watching the stars, “I’m ready for something more.” These sisters, like Veronica in Illinois with her contractor husband and kids, would come to visit once a year.

  Others, like the sisters in New York and Sarah in Philadelphia, visited every month or so.

  — Violeta —

  And there was Violeta, who, for all the bawdiness and insolence of her bobby-sox nature, had settled down with a good man of the cloth, a Presbyterian minister. She had met him in 1951 at the ripe age of thirty, the glory days of her scurrilous GI and civilian romances behind her—none ever turning into the love that she wanted. One day she noticed the new minister in town, a temporary replacement for the more elderly Reverend Muller, then recovering from a heart attack. She was working in the movie house and despite her Catholicism, out of curiosity and some intuition, she started, to her mother’s shock, to attend his services. (Better than none at all, her mother would think, as Violeta was a little lax about going to Mass on Sundays.) Sitting in the front pew, she’d raise her pretty head with such devoutness that the minister, up on the pulpit before his congregation, would glance toward her. Outside the church, where the Reverend would greet his flock, she would approach him, complimenting his sermons mightily, her skin perfumed and her eyes bright with interest. She would also turn up at the church’s Saturday-afternoon teas at his parsonage, affairs attended by the more elderly members of his flock, these gatherings ending when the Reverend would lead the group in prayer. It was after one of these teas—though this can only be guessed, all of it a mystery to the family—that Violeta dallied late one afternoon, the two talking quietly into the evening. The next thing, the sisters heard from their mother (and from Patricia, and Margarita, and Irene) that Violeta had taken up with the Reverend Farrell, a man, as it turned out, who had spent most of his childhood in a Presbyterian home for orphaned children. Dedicated and grateful to the church for saving him from the streets of Boston, where he was born and abandoned, for all his thirty-odd years he had never listened to the calling of his own heart, until Violeta had come along.

  (He was not troubled that she was a Catholic. He did not know if his parents were Catholics, whether he was an Irishman or a German or a Pole, just that his name, Thomas Farrell, had been pulled by the orphanage director out of a telephone book.)

  As for the allurements of the body, however careful Reverend Farrell may have been about his saintly sense of propriety, he, at the end of his tenure in Cobbleton, asked Violeta to accompany him to his next parish, which was in Baltimore, where, with some of the sisters in attendance, they were hurriedly married, for, by the time she left the household in Cobbleton, Violeta was pregnant. And though their mother, Mariela Montez, admitted he was a good man, he had perhaps sinned and, having sinned, was to arrange a discreet ceremony, held without fanfare or the trappings of a large wedding, early in the winter of 1952.

  Violeta sometimes came to visit, happy and fulfilled, with her three children—the sisters could only imagine the pious carnality of their couplings—and Mariela and Nelson eventually blessed this marriage between their Catholic daughter and their Presbyterian son-in-law, knowing that they themselves, coming from such distant origins, had in a different way done the same.

  (In all those years, their second-oldest daughter, Isabel, though intending to, never once visited Cobbleton. Each time she planned to, some catastrophe would come along: Antonio broke his leg while climbing a ladder to replace a bulb in a ceiling lamp; or one of her best friend’s sons drowned; or a week of storms caved in the pharmacy walls; or she was laid up with kidney stones; and on and on. Each of those years brought the many enchanting letters that Isabel wrote her mother in Spanish. Somehow the time had passed quickly—and beyond this, the happiness of her days had left her quite satisfied, this satisfaction bringing with it, to some measure, the inability to move.)

  — A Planned Journey —

  For Mariela, after so many years of familial service, their freedom meant an opportunity to do the things she’d always wanted to do. Satisfied for a time with the fulfillment of her own creative proclivities, she would spend many hours of her day writing poetry, which, as she got older, seemed to circle back more and more to the beatific time of her youth and to personal musings. She also dedicated herself to religious devotions that would benefit the lives of her children and the souls of the dearly departed. (Having survived her two sisters and brother, her mother and father, she prayed for them daily. She had survived the butler García, who passed away happily in Puerto Rico in 1952, and prayed for the happiness of his soul in Paradise, too. And for that of Miss Covington.)

  Each night, when they retired to bed, she would remind Nelson how they once used to talk about traveling together. That, with her urge to see all the children, brought about a plan to drive around the country, fulfilling the prom
ise of their early years. At first he, solitary in old age and having done his bit to raise a family, was reluctant. “God, woman,” he’d tell her, “can’t you see I’m too old for that kind of thing?”

  But in the end she prevailed, and Nelson, coming to like the idea, bought a sturdy Ford convertible for the trip. Now, finally, she’d get to see the expanse of the country in which she had lived for so many years, and he would get to visit those American cowboy places he’d always dreamed of as a young man. They planned a route that would first take them to Philadelphia and New York, and then to Baltimore to see Violeta and her family. From there they would visit the capital, Washington, D.C., to see the Lincoln Memorial, photographs of which always moved Nelson (Lincoln pained by the troubles of life, stern and yet compassionately understanding of his place in history), imagining that their hearts would burn with pride, for they were both citizens now. Then, after driving north to Newport to spend some time with Helen and her family, they would double back and head west to Illinois, where Veronica was living with her husband and her two children. Their idea was to keep going, through the Western states (where he was almost certain they would encounter buffalo and Indians), ending up in California, where they would be reunited with their son. (But that was not all she wanted. Why couldn’t they fly, as so many people were doing, down to Cuba? Or why not make a journey to Europe, first to Spain and then to Ireland?)

  They were to have begun their journey late in the spring of the previous year. But one afternoon, during the winter, while shuffling across the living room in a pair of flannel pajamas to answer the telephone, Nelson felt a faint, nearly imperceptible twitching in his brow and a burst of prickliness within, as if a small nodule in his brain had gone to sleep, and in a second this already doddery man began to feel the world grow more faint about him.

  Picking up the receiver, he greeted his daughter Maria and was alert enough to hand Mariela the telephone. (“Hola, mi hija,” Mariela cried out.) And while she sat speaking first with Maria and then with Olga and Jacqueline, Nelson had the sudden compulsion to build a fire, to compensate for the sudden chill in his fingertips. Laying down some birch and pine logs, he took to his favorite chair and watched the fire rising, the embers glowing and dimming and the smaller twigs crackling, the minutest sparks bursting in the hollow of the darkness, and he laughed, saying, “Oh, my Lord,” and, in one of his last moments of lucidity, realized he’d suffered some kind of stroke.

  Not wishing to spoil their journey, he said nothing about this, and though he seemed a little more distracted than usual, they went ahead with their plans, Margarita and Irene taking their mother into town to buy some comfortable travel clothes, joyful sunhats, and tennis shoes, so that her feet would not get tired during their walks in the most scenic places. For his part, he tried to maintain a certain orderliness in his affairs, packing a suitcase very carefully and then, forgetting that he had not just returned from some journey and feeling pleased that he had kept his clothing so neat, dutifully unpacked, putting his shirts and trousers and other items back in the closet and dresser where he had, not an hour before, found them. Another day, he decided that they would need money for the journey, and he set out to the bank in town, but, approaching his new 1957 Ford, was startled to find that it was not his brand-new 1908 Model T, the dashboard with its radio and automatic gearshift and space-age wheel baffling him. And he sat for a long time, vaguely recalling that he seemed to know something about that automobile, but what he could not exactly say. Then he suddenly remembered how to drive, took his automobile into town without incident, withdrawing a thousand dollars from his passbook account, and, elated, took the familiar turn in front of the town hall and headed toward Farmers’ Grossing, the countryside as sweetly familiar as always and reassuring, except that it seemed to go on forever. By the time he recalled that his house should have been no more than five minutes up the road, he had been driving for nearly forty-five minutes in the wrong direction. With that, he pulled over and, backing into a farm road, retraced his route, thanking God when he finally reached the house, which for a moment no longer seemed to exist.

  The next morning, a Sunday, while taking Mariela to church, he imagined that the sky had filled with beautiful, clanging bronze bells, and, looking up (a flock of geese overhead), instead of straight onto the road, he nearly steered the auto into a ditch. Later Mariela noticed something else: Nelson standing outside the church, speaking with the Fitzgerald family (Sally and Pat being friends of their younger daughters, and their father, Jimmy Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Cobbleton Emerald Society), her husband breaking his sentences into his slightly brogued English and into Spanish. The next day she took her husband to the doctor, even though he did not want to go. (For most of his life, he had been in reasonably good health and in all his years in America rarely went to a doctor for himself. He’d bring a doctor into the house when his daughters were sick with flu or mumps or the croup, and when his wife went into labor or did not feel well during some of her pregnancies, but that had been many years in the past. Whatever the ills he suffered—shortness of breath, occasional discomfort in the chest, the ebbing feelings of an unidentifiable guilt—he would simply make his way to the pharmacy and buy one of his favorite tonics.) Now suddenly he found himself being examined, a light probing the pupils of his eyes, a hammer tapping his knees, the doctor’s index finger moving in a line before his nose—and in the end the doctor said, “He’s probably had a minor stroke.”

  They put him into the Cobbleton infirmary for a few days’ surveillance, and on being released, he was prescribed several medications to reduce his blood pressure.

  Mariela, beside herself with fear, asked, “What is he suffering from?” and the doctor told her, “Nothing more than old age, really.”

  ***

  So they’d never made their cross-country trip, and by the time their son, Emilio Montez O’Brien, came to visit, Nelson’s condition had worsened.

  Somewhat more shrunken than he remembered her, Mariela Montez was overjoyed to see her son, caressing his handsome face over and over. And although she dyed her hair and seemed much younger than her seventy-four years, so many days alone in the house with her husband had given her the air of a slightly weary caretaker. And when Emilio first approached his Irish father, it took Nelson a while to understand that this strapping man was the flesh of his flesh. Then he became quite happy, slapping his son on the back and welcoming him into the house. The evening of his arrival, Margarita came to see her beloved brother and it was she who pointed out, after dinner, that in the past year or so Nelson O’Brien’s mental faculties had started to slip away.

  “Maria told me about Dad, but I had no idea that it had slowed him down so much.”

  “Yes, and it’s sometimes a little hard for Mama. Some days he walks about the house looking for someone; other days he sits before the television set watching and not moving except to use the bathroom—at least he hasn’t lost that. And sometimes he cries for no reason, or decides to go walking in the fields. One night, in the middle of a bad rainstorm, he got out of bed and went to the shed to get his old-fashioned camera and stood out in the rain for hours, photographing heaven knows what. It was so dark that he couldn’t see the house and somehow wandered into the woods and only found his way back when Mama woke up and went out to look for him with a flashlight. They both caught very bad colds.”

  (That night, awakening suddenly and finding the bed beside her empty, her heart palpitating, Mariela searched through the rooms of the house and in a panic put on a raincoat and, getting the kitchen flashlight, searched for him in the field, bravely venturing into the thicket of trees behind the white fence and descending downward, the ground muddy under her, roots tripping her, elms and oak trees everywhere, their dripping branches entangling her. But she had kept going because he was her husband, and though she could not see very far even with the flashlight, slashes of rain cutting through the light, and though the whorl-knobbed trees seemed fierce, sh
e called out to him, “Nelson! Nelson! Where are you,” until she heard his voice, “I’m here!” Following that voice as best she could, she found the poor man drenched and shivering, his camera and tripod clutched in his arms, and she took him by the hand, saying, “Come with me, my poor foolish love,” and led him out of the darkness and back to the house.)

  “On some days,” Margarita continued, “he will speak only in Spanish to Mama or to me if I’m around, and when you’ve finally gotten used to it, he’ll suddenly forget it all. Sometimes he’s perfectly fine, the poor man, and with embarrassment he’ll say, ‘If I become too much of a burden, please send me away.’ But Mama will have none of it—‘I don’t care if he spoils his trousers,’ she’ll say. ‘If he dies, he will die in this house.’ And, brother, it’s good that you are here, because nothing, and no one, lasts in this world, and it is certain that our Poppy is going to die one of these days.”

  Emilio remained with the family for a week, accompanying the old man on his walks in the fields, his father dressed in a suit with a shirt and bow tie and wearing a derby, hiking along with a wolf-head cane, for a hip had started to pinch him painfully. His presence seemed to do his father good, and he never forgot his name, Emilio. They’d walk along and his father would find a particularly beautiful cluster of violets in the field and, picking some, whiff their scent and, with his brow creased, tell his son, “I’ll miss all this.” Or if a bird alighted on a branch, its feathers bright, with a worm in its beak for its young, he would stop Emilio in his tracks to watch carefully, and say, “Quietly now, these birds are highly nervous creatures,” his mouth breaking into a childish smile. He seemed delighted with the littlest things—a brook in one of the fields or the friendliness of a farmer’s hound, snout prowling the ground for scents, tail wagging. He’d say again and again, “I’ll miss this, boy. And you, and all the others.”