While they were sitting on the porch reminiscing about the days when they’d worked together many years before, Emilio his stalwart photography assistant, Nelson O’Brien muttered, “If you only knew what I’m feeling these days.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“It’s a strange feeling—I had some of it when I was a young man, but I was too foolish to see it. My head was too filled with the troubles of my little life. I just couldn’t appreciate anything.”
“What do you mean, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“There used to be this very kindly farmer who’d pass on the road, a Mennonite fellow I always remember for his happiness. He’d always stop to speak to one of the girls, and, looking about on a nice spring day, say something like, ‘This is the work of the Lord.’ And lately I’ve been telling myself, ‘It must be so, for what does it have to do with me? Did I invent a twig, or one of those sweet birds?’” Then suddenly excited, he said, “Can you imagine if we had to make all this for ourselves? I wouldn’t have the slightest notion where to begin, would you?”
Emilio shook his head.
“Well, there it is.”
Getting up, he said: “Now, boy, when I’m gone, take care of your mother and the others—you know, you’ll be the man of the family.”
***
He would see his father the other way. For he would seem fine in the morning, but by the late afternoon would sit for hours in his pajamas, staring at the television, as if it were on.
***
During that visit, Emilio began to feel renewed tenderness toward his mother. Knowing of his travails, she had always told him, “I’ve prayed for you, son.” And she was happy, for the gossip of the family had been conveyed to her: “I have one aviso for you: if you’re in love, believe in it.”
Many hugs, a nearly back-crushing embrace for his father, sweet kisses for his mother, more kisses for his sisters, and back, back to California and the purest love and pain of his life.
— The Time Margarita Had—Gone to Spain, Years Before
Margarita had graduated from the Proper Trust College in Philadelphia in 1952. During the war and afterward, she had studied education, slowly, with the idea of teaching one day, and then drifted, after meeting a Professor DeLeon, head of the Romance Languages Department, into studying Spanish literature, her head filling with the words of the great Spanish writers of the past. (Many years later, as if in a film, their spirits came to visit her at night—Quevedo pacing the floors and picking at his goatee, mulling over an idea; Cervantes employing her as an amanuensis as he dictated long passages of Don Quixote.) Her studies were difficult (“You can speak and read Spanish, my dear,” Professor DeLeon had told her, “but you must go beyond what your mother taught you”), but working each night with a Spanish dictionary, she gradually started to understand the complexities of the language.
When she graduated, there was a little celebration in Cobbleton, and then a much grander one with her sisters in New York, at which her most prosperous sisters—Helen, Maria, Olga, Jacqueline—drank much champagne and made her a gift of a thousand dollars.
It would take her two years to make her way to Spain. First she moved back to Cobbleton, finding a job in the local high school, where she taught civics and Spanish. Then she found an apartment in town, enjoying her life of solitude, for she would often tell herself, after the debacle of her marriage to Lester Thompson, that she did not need a man to find happiness. Margarita visited with her mother and father two or three times a week and made frequent trips to see her sisters in New York and her sister Sarah in Philadelphia, where she and her lawyer husband lived an uncomplicated and prosperous life with two children, dark-skinned but very pretty girls, who were being kept from the cruder forms of prejudice by being sent to private schools and by the amenities of a Chestnut Hill neighborhood where very few children ever insulted them (though they may have thought to), and where urbane society respected the accomplishments of her husband, a partner in a law firm.
She concerned herself primarily with the well-being of the family, wishing them much happiness (and daydreaming about the life of her movie-actor brother out in Hollywood), and was quite content to come home to her apartment at the end of her day, her head buzzing from her efforts to teach her largely indifferent pupils, the sons and daughters of farmers, something about the Spanish language, both the conjugations of the verb estar and something of the history of Spain and of the countries that Spain had settled. (“Does anyone here know about Puerto Rico?”) She’d take a hot bath, read a book. She was not lonely, having decided that the company of books made for a much easier and perhaps happier experience than the company of men. Here and there, a man would ask her out, especially in New York during her visits, when her middle-aged beauty and her femininity would draw the attention of men on her outings with her musical sisters and Gloria to nightclubs and restaurants. Even in Cobbleton, a most conservative place, where an unmarried woman of fifty was considered, for the most part, an old maid—a woman to be pitied—there were men like the owner of the town haberdashery, a widower, who would come out and stand at his door to greet her if she happened to be walking down the street. And one of her fellow teachers, a Mr. Richards, who taught arithmetic, a lonely man, was always asking her out, Margarita always politely declining.
She did not care. Her marriage to Lester Thompson, and the supreme effort she once made to be a good wife during their years together, left her with a yearning for independence. Self-doubting—after all, she had been incapable of bearing him children—she sometimes drifted into generous appraisals of the man, wishing to God that things could have turned out differently. On the other hand, she would think about Lester with his young wife, making love on the chaise longue of their town house in Philadelphia. (She had visited him once, in 1949, and he and his surroundings seemed quite prosperous. Even so, he fell to his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, saying, “Oh, Margarita, I’ve missed you so much.” And even though he was married, he opened her blouse and kissed her breasts, and with the authority of a man who was quite acquainted with her anatomy and how Margarita would quietly moan before she came, he stuck his hand down into her undergarment, his fingers working the bulb of her pleasure furiously. She liked the sensation, and his passion, but she pushed him away, leaving his house and never seeing him again.)
She was fifty-two years old when she arrived in Spain, and the first thing that touched and saddened her was the poverty that seemed to be everywhere, for Spain had hardly begun to recover from the Civil War of the 1930s and everywhere on the streets of Madrid she saw cripples, men and women alike, who’d lost a limb during the fighting years before, and this made her think how destiny had protected her. If her great-grandfather had never journeyed as a soldier to Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century, she—instead of sipping cocktails in some speakeasy in Philadelphia with her husband in 1937, listening to jazz, or idly sitting about reading fashion magazines, a little bored, in Cobbleton—could have been one of these unfortunates.
As she traveled about, taking in the tourist sights of Madrid and heading south by rail into Andalusia, with guidebook and camera in hand, she would begin to daydream in the heat—the sight of some distant tower looming over an olive grove inspiring the thought that at the time of that tower’s construction, seven hundred years before, her ancestors lived somewhere in Andalusia, perhaps as farmers, and this would fill her with a kind of pride, a feeling that part of her spirit belonged to this place. Although she also took pride in the fact that her mother was Cuban, she sometimes found herself feeling more emotional about Spain.
Of course, there were things that bothered her: the Guardia Civil, with their machine guns and intimidating air; the fetidness of the toilets; the sometimes grueling heat, the deadness in the middle of the day, when everything closed down and there was no choice but to go back to one’s hotel for a siesta. In the beautiful Moorish city of Cordoba, where she spent a morning lost among the forest of columns i
n the Grand Mosque, she stayed in a pension, baking in the heat of the midsummer sun, the room so hot that she could neither nap in the daytime nor sleep at night. Despite the scrubbed tile floors, the air was heavy with dust, and she found herself parched and craving ice cream and snow. She had not liked that. And there had been the incident at the rail station in Aguilar. She had finished using the toilet facilities in the station and was planning to sit in a café, to await the next train, when a short, wiry man with a crow’s flitting eyes had come up behind her and grabbed her bottom, and when she turned around, the man was holding in his right hand what certainly appeared to be his penis, a short and stubby device which neither impressed nor frightened her, so that when he asked, “¿Te gusta?” she said, “No! But I’m going to find a policeman.”
(An odd experience, almost as odd as the time in New York, while visiting her sisters, when she and Helen went for a walk in Central Park and were caught in a sudden downpour, and as they were making their way out of the park, they came across a man ecstatically masturbating onto a bush.)
Despite the occasional inconveniences of the journey, she not only took in many of the tourist sights but luxuriated in the pleasure of conversing day in and day out in Spanish: about the political situation in Franco’s Spain, a subject which came up with everyone she spoke to; about life in America; and, inevitably, about why she was traveling alone.
She would remember that journey for the evening in Valencia where she met her dear Cuban man, but she would also recall with fondness how, while traveling along the southern coast, between Málaga and Nerja, she experienced an unexpected moment of elation.
One evening, as she was dining in a restaurant, its balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, an Englishman in a tan suit, with the clearest blue eyes, a Mr. Norris, struck up a conversation with her. (She was a little surprised to realize she had not spoken English in three weeks.) Drinking a dusty red wine and lulled by the reflection of stars on the sea, she and Mr. Norris nearly pursued a romance—but the poor fellow drank far too much wine. Not that she minded his company. Small talk about London, England, a civilized city which she had never seen, ended in his suggestion that she join him, as he would be motoring north to Barcelona. But she’d turned the man down, and the Englishman, ever a gentleman, excused himself and made his way back to his pension, falling on his bed from drunkenness and disappointment, for he hoped to bring the pensive and marvelous-looking American woman back with him.
Some Spaniards in the corner of the room had been watching her, the younger men whispering among themselves, and on her way out, they invited her to join them in a glass of brandy. While sitting with them, she asked the young men if they happened to know if there was a stretch of beach where a person might bathe alone, as she put it. And one of them, a fellow named Diego, told her about a little beach where people sometimes went to do just that.
The next morning she packed a lunch and a bottle of wine. She wore a ruffle-skirted sundress and a wide-brimmed sun hat which fluttered in the breeze, low-heeled shoes, and dark sunglasses, and looking very much like Ava Gardner, she tottered with some difficulty along a labyrinthine path by the water, climbing rocks and finding sandy tracks at certain points. And at last—it took nearly an hour—she found a deserted cove with a stretch of pebble-covered beach. There she spread out a towel and had a glass of wine and a sandwich made with cheese and Serrano ham on a good, hard-crusted bread, and when she finished lunch, she stripped off her sundress, her cumbersome Maidenform extra-support bra, and her panties, and charged mischievously and triumphantly into the water, naked. She floated on her back, her full, taut-nippled breasts, puckered from the sudden chill, quickly warming in the sun, the fleshliness of her body floating, thick black pubic hair coiling, rising, swirling in the gentle whorls of the sea. Eyes closed, she sent sweet kisses up into the Spanish sun.
— Emilio —
Margarita would also look back on those years and think about her brother, Emilio, and the way things turned out for him. Upon his return to California, he decided to give his heart fully to love and headed north to Alaska, where he found Jessica in a distracted state of mind. She had thought about him constantly, too, and the letters they had written each other during their separation were so tenderly affectionate and truthful that, the very afternoon Emilio turned up, she closed her restaurant and the two retired to her little apartment upstairs and, barely able to restrain themselves, spent the next two days happily in her bed—this idyll broken up by short periods of sleep and dalliances in her tin bathtub, where they would scrub each other’s backs and play like children in the soapy water. He so lost himself in Jessica, had so crossed the line of promise and love, that as he pressed his toes against the engorged nipple of her right breast he told himself right then and there that he would dedicate himself to her well-being. Other women would not exist, and no matter how much temptation might come his way, he would resist, because each dalliance chipped away at love. He was so carried away with the goodness of her heart that, ever impulsive, he proposed to her, and she accepted.
It would take her several months to get her affairs in order, for she would have to put the restaurant up for sale and in the meantime leave it to friends to look after, making her way in the spring of 1959 to California to join the actor. In the meantime, Emilio had tried to revive his sluggish career. He’d even proposed bringing back the character of Father Byrne, and spent many a day tinkering with a scenario—in which no one was interested. He managed to find enough work, bit parts and cameos on different television series, to keep himself going, but he reluctantly admitted that he had long since passed his peak in earnings, 1954 having been his best year, when he’d cleared just under a hundred thousand dollars. He accepted that his days as a leading man, even in B pictures, were over, and found himself taking on character parts, three days’ work here, two weeks’ work there. And slowly he began to gain a reputation not only as being easy to work with but as an actor willing to take any role. His humility, which endeared him to many a director and casting agent, proved to be somewhat of a boon, for his agent called nearly every week with offers of work, enough to keep him busy for a long time.
It didn’t matter, for he would slip out of himself in a pleasant way into the total devotion of love. By the time Jessica arrived to join him, they’d already started to make plans—perhaps she would open a little business in Los Angeles, a restaurant for the stars, or go back to teaching. It did not matter. They were off on a perpetual honeymoon, these two. Emilio Montez O’Brien and his darling could spend hours together without saying a single word. Yet even when they went walking along the beach at Santa Monica holding hands, it was as if they were really locked in an embrace.
He was so ecstatic that his voice chimed with happiness. His sisters, especially Margarita, noticed their brother’s serenity and they all felt happy for him. And in Cobbleton his mother, Mariela Montez, curious about this woman, his font of love, would ask him, “When are you going to bring her to visit?” His answer, hopefulness in his voice: “When we come out to get married.”
They discussed it, the natural thing being that they go to her family in Minnesota, or have, as his agent suggested for the benefit of publicity, a splashy ceremony in Hollywood, but because of the advanced age of his mother and father, she agreed to a civil ceremony in the town of Cobbleton in the fall of 1959.
***
They traveled east together for another Montez O’Brien reunion, all the sisters and their families converging on Cobbleton, and happy celebrations taking place in the household. Even sister Isabel, after so many years’ absence, finally flew north out of Cuba with her family—things were changing in Cuba and the deteriorated state of her father’s health concerned her, too. (It was a beautiful reunion. Isabel fell into the arms of her mother, the two holding each other for a long time, memory of her life there flowing into Mariela, and many kisses passing between them. Then there were kisses for her father, who hardly seemed to recall who she could be
, and the joy of seeing her sisters—that they had all aged somewhat astounding her, but all in all, a happy time.) Jessica’s relatives came in from Minnesota, and a few friends from her days in Alaska made the journey, too, these folks staying in the Main Street Hotel. There was endless activity in the household, children running around everywhere, and Emilio’s mother, playing the grande dame, bursting with pride that this time her only son would be properly married.
Between the two families, there were so many people that the group shots, taken by a photographer, would resemble a high-school graduating class in numbers. Emilio Montez O’Brien in a tuxedo; his lovely bride, which was how the local paper described her, sitting in the front row, with the parents of the bride, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks, beaming proudly behind them. Mariela Montez, elegant in a gown, gazed intently into the camera; her husband, Nelson O’Brien, distracted and trying to hold his own, also in evening clothes. (And the others? Margarita holding flowers; Isabel and her husband and three children; the musical twins, Jacqueline and Olga, in organdy gowns, their agent beside them; then Maria with an older gentleman, a certain Fabrizio Balzaretti, an operatic tenor with a nineteenth-century air. On the other side, Helen, her husband, and their two sons; then Irene, her husband, and three plump children—no longer teenagers, but anxious as ever to get to the buffet. Sarah and her lawyer husband and one of her two children; then Patricia, her husband and children; then Veronica with her son—her husband, working hard as ever, could not attend; then Marta and Carmen, in from California with their husbands; Violeta with her minister husband and three young children; and Gloria, wearing a furtive, slightly embarrassed expression, with her Macy’s love. Then you had to account for Jessica’s family, which consisted of three brothers, their wives and children—thirteen in all—and an uncle and aunt and two of their boys, as well as a few cousins and old friends who’d decided to attend the wedding.)
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 40