A flash, the shot taken, years later an item for an old woman’s or an old man’s trove of memories.
***
That was the good that Margarita remembered—the happy celebration. The bride and groom stayed in Cobbleton the next day, for they were in no rush to go off on a honeymoon, having lived one for several months. Then they spent a few days in New York before heading back to California. The sisters themselves were elated with the reunion, though Margarita was a little lonely, for the man she’d fallen for in Spain was back in Cuba, and love somehow seemed too far away.
— Their Brother’s Happiness —
Her brother’s greatest moment of happiness would have nothing to do with the movies but came when, a year later, in 1960, his wife Jessica gave birth to a little girl. They named her Mary Isabel O’Brien, the baby inheriting, he thought, her mother’s beautiful and soft eyes, her face cherubic and pleasing, skin smelling ever so sweet. Surprised by his love for the child, Emilio doted on her, his bachelor’s house completely changed. He’d covered the walls of the guest room with a pink swan-patterned wallpaper, hung mobiles from the ceiling, filled the shelves surrounding the crib with stuffed animals. He did not mind her spittle, her lack of coordination. Even the unmanly business of changing her diapers amused him, his enormous hands ever careful not to hurt her. When she cried, he would feel an even greater alarm than his wife, and lurching from his bed, half asleep, he would make every effort to calm his daughter and then sit, despite his drowsiness, watching his wife suckling the child. He’d even feel titillated—for he’d always loved her breasts—and at three in the morning the child’s feeding often ended with the actor and his proud masculinity reengaging with his wife, the couple, enchanted, feeding on each other’s tongues and lost in some world where only love and nothing else thrived. He was so enthralled that afterward, when all they could hear was the occasional ticking of a clock and, in the distance, the motor of some automobile on the boulevard, he would swear, loving her and his daughter, that they should have another baby.
(And another and another, each thrust saying to him.)
A more devoted father or husband could not be found, Marta and Carmen, aunts to the child in from Anaheim for occasional visits, would report to the family. What else could they say after watching their handsome brother playing with the tot as she crawled along the floor or teaching her to speak or pointing out the simple wonders of the world; why, the man, reformed and good, tranquil and happy, would rush home from his day’s shoot to spend time with his wife and daughter.
What he reveled in was life, simple life—the goodness of bringing such a new joy into the world.
In time his movie star’s edge faded away to a more practical aura, and the new clarity in his eyes and his professional demeanor continued to be popular with casting people and directors. He was prospering, no part too small or unbecoming for him to play as long as he could continue to earn a living.
He was always taking photographs of his wife and daughter. When his sisters came to visit, he posed them out in the yard under an orange tree, his daughter dressed in lace on the lap of one or the other. (Yes, he would have photographs of Margarita, Maria, Olga and Jacqueline, Marta, Carmen, and Gloria posed in such a way, their expressions happy.)
There was more. Tired of making pictures, he and Jessica, naked in bed, would talk about opening their own business in Hollywood, a restaurant for the stars—as he knew many of them and counted some as his friends. She, her hair in braids, would nod and tell him, “My darling, anything is possible with us.”
***
It was a happy time for their brother, and yet, in retrospect, sad.
Mary Isabel was about a year and a half when Emilio decided to take his family on a vacation to Sonoma County. They would stay in an inn, and when they were not driving around taking in the sights, they’d ride horses at a ranch. And they would drive around to different vineyards, tasting many wines, their skins by the late afternoon so oozing the fragrance of the vine that bees tended to follow them. (They’d wrap the baby in a blanket, say “Cootchy-coo” and tickle her delighted chin.) They had been there for three days when Emilio’s agent called to say he was needed to work for a few days in Los Angeles, a well-paying job, a small but good role in a Yul Brynner picture—would he be able to do it? They had planned to vacation for another week, but Emilio, thinking about the money and the security of his family, decided to take the job and perhaps extend his vacation afterward. So he drove to San Francisco and flew to Los Angeles, his wife and daughter staying behind.
It was a Wednesday night. Jessica and Mary Isabel were asleep in a room that overlooked a great expanse of the countryside, a beautiful room in which the morning light seemed nearly celestial. At around two in the morning, a gentleman, also on vacation, lingered in the downstairs salon and, fatigued from a great wine-tasting tour that day, dozed off. Dreaming that he had dropped his cigar to the carpet, he was relieved to find himself waking just in time to put out the smoldering glow in the rug. He collected himself and poured the remnants of a Scotch-and-water over the mess; he would write a note offering to pay for it, he told himself, or forget it entirely. And so he retired to his room. But about an hour later, the antique floorboards of the structure, built, as a plaque described, in 1868, began to get warm. Then the line of heat prospered, and a fire began to teem through the walls. Within a few minutes, the hotel, thick with smoke, was ablaze.
There would be articles about the fire, demanding better fire codes, and an investigation would take place, and listed among the thirteen victims of the fire would be a Jessica and a Mary Isabel O’Brien.
***
Emilio, his agent by his side, in the hospital morgue to identify his wife and child, a doctor of forensic medicine lifting off a sheet and exposing their faces. Their bodies were intact, death coming by asphyxiation, their eyes closed, expressions surprisingly serene. There was a smile on his daughter’s lips; perhaps, snuggled in her mother’s arms, she had been having a lovely dream about sweets, or about playing kiss-daddy’s-nose, when the walls had started to ooze smoke. And his wife—he stood looking at her for a long time, before the doctor and a deputy led him away—perhaps that night, before falling asleep, she had been thinking about him and all the years they would have together and all the hours they would be able to frolic in bed, the pleasure of his tongue on her breasts.
All he could ask the doctor was: “And they didn’t feel anything, did they? I mean, they weren’t awake.”
And the doctor said, “No, sir, they were in their beds. They didn’t know.”
Emilio was wearing a raincoat and dark glasses, his head lowered, when, as he left the hospital entrance, a photographer took his picture. He’d raised his arm to conceal his shattered expression and reeled around, shouting, “Come on, can’t you leave a man alone?”
The photographer, a novice with a local paper who’d gotten a tip that a movie star’s wife and child had perished in the fire, stepped back, stunned and ashamed. But the photograph was published, first in the local papers and then widely across the United States. An article using that photograph had appeared in one of the Los Angeles newspapers, headlined “A Hollywood Tragedy.”
***
When they received his call, Margarita flew out to join him, as did Gloria. Marta and Carmen came in from Anaheim. The funeral was held in Minnesota, he numb with grief and inconsolable. When it was over, coffins lowered into the ground and the business of life resuming, Margarita returned East with her sister Gloria, saying to him, “Remember, God will preserve you.” And: “Don’t forget, we will always have each other”—unaware at the time that she would see little of her brother in the coming years.
— Lost Happiness, 1962 —
Although he tried to maintain a discipline in his life, one afternoon at around four, after several months of somber self-control, Emilio left his bungalow and, weary of his ebbing pain, his head filled with tormenting memories, he got into his automobile and m
ade his way to the gaudy, neon-lit Sunset Boulevard Bar & Grill and in quick succession drank down three vodka martinis. By five, he’d started another round, and a woman sitting on a stool whom he’d hardly noticed before, a woman with bleached-blond hair, began to take on the allure of a goddess. She, too, had been trying to forget some desolate event in her life and, plastered, watched the actor and smiled with a haven’t-I-seen-you-before glare in her eyes. She looked about thirty-five and was a little washed up when it came to love, but all the same, Emilio, pulling out a wad of bills and dropping them on the bar, told the bartender to get the lady a drink. And she, delighted to have yet another highball, pulled up her stool beside his. He looked her over. She was wearing a tight red cocktail dress. Her breasts were large—she opened the first two buttons of her dress before joining him—and she had nice legs and an almost pretty face.
“So what’s your little secret?” she asked him.
And he’d shrugged and sipped from his drink, saying, “Nothing. What’s yours?”
And she went into this long “Do you really want to hear it?” tale about once having high hopes about a career and love, and being dragged down by one man after the other, as in a movie script. And just before getting maudlin, for, like every other person in town, she had wanted to be a movie star and had never made it, she leaned close and placed her hand on his thigh, asking him what he did with his life. And he responded by sliding her hand up toward his crotch, and she could not help appraising, with a squeeze, that hearty bundle of fiber and nerve. That’s when he said, “Listen, why don’t we sit over in the corner,” and there, in a booth, they ordered more drinks and a couple of hamburger platters, and she started to figure out who he was—“I know you. You’re the guy who played that Father Byrne fellow!” They started to nibble on each other’s lips, then they drank a lot more, and at around nine-thirty she returned from the ladies’ room and sat down beside him, against the wall, and with a little smile on her face said, “I’ve got a little secret. Can you guess what it is?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Now just look.”
And she took the hem of her skirt and rolled it up like a scroll, little by little, until high on her thighs he saw the beginnings of her pubic hair, and she laughed. Then she rolled her skirt down and handed him her purse, saying, “Now look inside.”
Snapping the purse open, he found a pair of lacy white panties. She told him: “They’re yours.” And then: “Let’s get out of here, honey.” And that’s what they did, making their way, one auto following the other, to his bungalow, the night spent in a crazy romantic tryst, the two drinking and kissing and all the rest, their drunken and rubbery bodies against each other, and Emilio, for a few brief moments, forgot his pain.
He became physically acquainted with other women and got drunk nearly every night for months, so that in time he started to change, the same way his friend Errol Flynn, once the handsomest man in Hollywood, had changed, the beauty of his youth giving way to a heavier, more worldly, ruined appearance. (Poor Flynn had died in 1959, and his last film, Cuban Rebel Girls, had been a terrible failure.) But this didn’t seem to make any difference to the women who saw him through the eyes of innocence or of drunkenness. He was a frequent star guest at many a dive in Hollywood, the owners, flattered by his presence, giving him free drinks. And when he wasn’t working and would feel the impulse to lose himself, he would go off on one of his trips, driving up along the coast—toward Alaska?—or south to weather-worn and dilapidated beach hotels along the ocean, and sometimes down to Tijuana, where he hung around saloons and got into all-night card games, staying until he’d decide to sober up long enough to check in with his agent, calling from some honky-tonk bar about work, and head north, resolved to straighten himself out.
At the beach, he’d lie out on the sand watching the kids hit the surf, and endear himself to them, buying them cases of beer. And he’d set himself up for a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old girl, torturously beautiful and womanly in her bikini, to press corruption charges against him. (A sixteen-year-old’s nipples in his mouth, their sweet and youthful taste enchanting him, his hands around her young hips, he, blurry with drink, would lose himself in the splendor of her body.) He hadn’t gotten into trouble with young girls yet, but if he did, what did he care?
He was well liked enough that some of his Hollywood pals tried to get him into AA and he attended a few meetings, that item getting into the newspapers, but mainly he did not understand the twisted logic of their meetings, nor why he should give alcohol up. His drinking had not made the tinderbox walls of that inn go up in flames, and giving it up would not bring his wife and daughter back. At least when he got very drunk he lost himself in a cavernous space inside his head, there both forgetting and remembering the death of his wife and daughter.
He would have his women and his drinks and the hell with it all, for he considered himself a bit too much on the feminine—emotional—side when it came to feelings. (He’d have a drink at two in the morning to get rid of his terrible headaches, have drinks at six to make the sunshine a little more radiant and to make the drive to his agent’s office or to a studio, if he happened to be working, a little more pleasant. And if he had work—though as time went by, jobs would come to him with much less frequency—he’d have a few drinks in the dressing room to help him through the day, his bleary eyes, picked up by the camera, exasperating the directors. And then more drinks throughout the day.)
Even so, he would wake up on many a night, like the insomniac character he had almost played for an episode of the fantasy television program, The Twilight Zone. (Yes, that wonderful episode about a desperate man who believed that if he closed his eyes to sleep he would never wake again.) He would get so blind drunk that he’d forget his lines, and he looked like death, and with the actorly aplomb of a trained grizzly bear, he was hired for jobs only when old friends, who were aware of his troubles, put in a good word for him, as long as he did not cross them up, which he often did.
***
He was only vaguely aware of what was going on in the outside world. His sisters wrote and telephoned, but their letters and conversations turned to air. That his sister Irene was suffering from diabetes was a blur of a few lines; that her son Kevin had been hurt in a car accident on his way back from a dance meant nothing. Patricia counseled him to have faith in his own future, for she intuited that he would find happiness once again (as she had foreseen his tragedy: years before his wife and daughter died, without knowning exactly what would happen, her mind had sensed an acrid scent like that of burned cork, wood, or rubber when thinking about them), but her words seemed to him no more than the ramblings of yet another sister feeling sorry for him. He cared little that Veronica, out in Illinois, was having trouble with her husband, whom she loved very much but who’d gotten absorbed with a young woman working in the construction-company office, and Veronica, with two teenagers still at home, didn’t know what to do about it. Nor did he focus on the fact that his mother, in her beautiful and simple letters, written out carefully in English in her minuscule script, spoke of her husband’s failing health and told him that she was praying for the peace of his soul. Nor was he even aware of the travails of his sister Isabel in Cuba, disenchanted with the new government but loving her adopted country, her heart sick at the idea of having perhaps to leave one day, as her husband was concerned about the future of their children under the new system. And he did not know that his sister Helen’s oldest boy had joined the Marine Corps and gone as a military adviser to Vietnam, where, during the act of advising, the pinky, index, and middle fingers of his right hand were blown off when someone passing his barracks in Saigon lobbed in an explosive device which wounded him and killed two others. Or that his sister Helen, the beautiful high-society dame, was so shattered that she started to go to a psychiatrist and take tranquillizers and her beautiful and aristocratic face, the face of the girl who’d never known very many troubles in her life, suddenly begun to show
the strain. Nor did he particularly appreciate the efforts of Marta and Carmen, who came up from their jobs at Disneyland to cheer him—or, in any case, to try to keep him sober. (Because he loved them, he would pretend not to drink, resenting their visits but seemingly perfectly calm and reasonable, until his moods would sour, and he would send them out of the house, and they would leave in tears. He would remember the next day that something bad happened between him and Marta and Carmen, but what he couldn’t tell.) Margarita had told him that on a certain Sunday evening the Chanteuses would be appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing a few songs, and he looked forward to seeing them, as he was proud and loved them very much. But by the time they appeared, after the comedian George Carlin and before the acrobats of the Moscow Circus, they had been reduced to some blurred image of what he remembered the sisters to be. He did not know that it was them, and in the middle of their big number he got up to refill his glass (vodka and ice) and decided in the kitchen to call that nice humpable starlet he had met the other day, screwing up the number so that when he finally got back into the living room his sisters were gone and Gunsmoke, on which he’d once appeared, came on. And there were his conversations with tender Gloria, who would call him at three in the morning from New York, even though she would have to get up by seven-thirty to head for her job in the payroll office at Macy’s, her voice loving and concerned—but he did not particularly remember them.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 41