— The Last Days of—Nelson O’Brien, 1962
Emilio’s troubles persisted through his father’s last days, when, eighty-four, Nelson O’Brien got into the habit of rereading A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and his photography manual, books that had been in his possession most of his life. Every morning would find him sitting out on the porch, fully dressed, those books open on his lap, and he would switch from one to the other and lean back and close his eyes, happy with memories. And though he would join his wife, and at times his daughter Irene or Margarita or Patricia, who’d be visiting the house for lunch, or take a walk with them in the field, he would mainly find himself transported far away, like a child daydreaming.
He would often think that it was 1896 again and that, instead of sitting on the porch of a house on the outskirts of an American town in Pennsylvania, he was once more making his way with his sister Kate O’Brien, carpetbags packed, onto a ship in Dublin Harbor. Or thinking that she might still be around, he would wander in the hall looking for his sister Kate, and then remember that she had died in 1897 and grow sad; or, remembering his journey to America with his young bride, Mariela, and their newborn daughter, Margarita, he’d recall the clutter and discomforts of the Fourteenth Street customhouse in New York in 1902. The long lines, voices echoing, the random examination of baggage, the hurried processing of certain passengers, mainly American citizens, rankling him because, although he and his wife were exhausted and wanted to rest, they had to stand in a line for over two hours—not a single gentleman offering his wife a seat on one of the benches lining the walls. And at the customs desk he’d had an argument with a burly official, an Irishman who, while expressing sympathy for the young couple, kept on saying, “You must go to immigration.” He remembered that their papers were in order—they both had their passports and proper visas—and since Nelson was a man of property and apparent means, he could give the official a twenty-dollar gold piece—and they were spared further discomfort.
Or how they had boarded a train at Pennsylvania Station for Philadelphia, where they took another train, and by two in the afternoon they stepped off on the platform in the town of Cobbleton and were pleased to discover that the sun, on that dreary day, was trying to peek out of the clouds.
And there were gaslights burning in the lobby of the Main Street Hotel, where they would spend their first night. The hotel, on whose balcony a military officer had once given a rousing speech, overlooked the saloon and a row of simple houses and a general-notions store, and the street itself was deserted save for the occasional passing horse and carriage. The town was desolate, the sky gray, but it was America!
They’d occupied a pleasant enough room, with sweetly patterned wallpaper, and the management were quite accommodating about a basinet for the child, whom Mariela bathed.
That first evening in Cobbleton, they’d gone to the hotel dining room to have a meal of roasted chicken, scalloped potatoes, and apple pie. On the dining-room walls, among the quaint ink etchings and watercolors of the Pennsylvania countryside, there was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, whose face his wife had never seen before. The waiter and hotel clerk addressed them as “you and your missus,” the hotel clerk looking directly at Nelson and averting his eyes whenever Mariela looked back at him.
How hard and confusing it must have been on you, my darling.
While he’d smiled obligingly at the waiters and the clerk, she, always carrying herself with an aristocratic posture, could not. Of a mischievous bent of mind, she had told him that night so long ago, “To hell with these unrefined people.”
But that night when he’d brought up a bottle of sherry so that they might celebrate their arrival and offered her a little glass to calm her nerves, she was shaking with distress and wanted to forget everything, perhaps go back to Cuba. And she told him so, in a rapid, biting Spanish which echoed through the hotel halls.
“Now calm yourself,” he’d said. “You’re being a bit of a child about things. This is a grand country, and a wonderful community of people live here.” He had told her this in Spanish. “You just have to get accustomed. It took me some time, my darling, but you will see.”
He’d speak to her tenderly and in her language, no matter his errors, when he wanted to calm her down.
In the flush of the sherry’s warmth, like sunlight, she said to him, in a joking manner: “Yes, my husband, but why here and not some interesting place like Paris?”
“Uh? What nonsense is it that you’re talkin’? We’re here now and maybe for good.” And, as an afterthought: “And you have to start speaking English with me. Otherwise, I won’t say a word.”
That night, he could not sleep, the baby’s colic keeping both of them awake. So he’d watched Mariela breast feeding their daughter, watched her changing diapers and, in the darkness, rocking the baby in her arms, as she would with all their children.
***
And Nelson recalled how the next morning he hired a horse and carriage at the local stable to take them to their new home. With the equipment and possessions they had brought from Cuba, they made their way through the countryside, past Fitzgerald’s farm, and Dietrich’s, and Tucker’s Pond, and came to his house, off the road, on a slight incline and surrounded by oak and maple trees, the sky hectic with coloration.
Shutters dangling, the roof in disarray—a crow nested above the cocoons and spiderwebs of the porch.
“Well, this is it,” Nelson said to Mariela.
A skeleton key that he had hidden some years before opened the door.
They stood in the parlor, and baby in her arms, Mariela looked out through the dust-covered windows, the house filled with drafts and the drapery jostling and billowing in the wind, America looming in the distance.
Then those first days of their new life: Mariela attending to the baby, and Nelson setting out to make repairs, sanding the pinewood floors and coating them with resin. He caulked leaks and replaced shattered panes of glass, climbed up on the roof and with a helper from town hammered in new shingles. In the storm cellar, he found the skeleton of a fox. When a trunk with Mariela’s clothes and personal effects, smelling of camphor and the tropics, arrived from Cuba, she filled a closet with her muslin and cambric dresses and, among other items, her bonnets decorated with birds and seashells set in the brim, as was the fashion at the time. They lived simply. They bought a cradle and wash-basin and spittoons, a pedal-driven, curlicue-framed Singer sewing machine, kerosene lamps, brass candelabra, and mirrors. New lace-trimmed curtains, a lacquered pendulum clock, a few dolls, a rattle for the baby.
— Those Memories, — among Many Others
And in his last days he would spend much time roaming about in the hall, the light brilliant through the windows, Nelson a little confused.
He’d remember so many mornings and afternoons when, as he opened the door to that house in Cobbleton, one or another of his daughters would come charging into his arms; and now, lingering in the hall, he would feel something was about to happen.
He’d start to shout, to tremble, waiting for the moment when his wife, Mariela, would hold him, repeating, “Cálmate, cálmate.”
He would nod and sit quietly for a long time.
One of those days, she was touching his face and acting most kindly toward him when he felt the impulse to use his old photography equipment. And although it was much work and he had no plates and the camera was no longer operable, he took the equipment out into the yard and planned a grand portrait of his wife. She was used to these flights of fancy. She wore a white-and-blue dress that he had always liked, and her hair in a bun. A passerby on the road would see an old man posing an old and patient woman in the yard, but that passerby would have no idea what Nelson was seeing through the camera lens: the sunny yard of a photography studio in Santiago de Cuba, circa 1900, and, seated before a tiled wall on a stool, a pretty woman with long black hair falling over her shoulders, an oval face serene with intelligence, the lady wearing a simple white dress with a pleated
skirt and puff-shouldered, butterfly sleeves, a yellow bow at her waist.
“Now smile, my dear,” Nelson said, all those years later.
And because she never smiled while sitting for a photograph, he said, happily, “My lord, Mariela, you haven’t changed one bit.”
Then, behind the black cloth, he squeezed the pneumatic bulb for the last time in his life.
***
A few hours later, there came a rap on the door, but Mariela Montez did not hear it, and because she was concentrating so hard on her writing, he did not want to disturb her. So he got up, and when she asked him, “Where are you going, my love?” he’d told her, “Someone’s at the door.”
“Oh, I didn’t hear.”
There, before him, stood two official-looking gentlemen in black suits and derbies. One he recognized as the man he had worked with for many years in Ireland when he was a boy, a kindly photographer named MacPhearson, and the other—he could place his face—the town undertaker, a man named Quinn.
“Good day, sir,” they said to Nelson. “A beautiful day, isn’t it, with the sun shining and birds singing?”
“It is.” Then: “And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
And with a heavy Irish brogue, the smaller of the officials, MacPhearson, said: “We’ve traveled a long way to fetch you.”
“And do you mind telling me why?”
“Well, sir, if you must know, to take you to the Land of Promise.”
“I thought as much. Do I have time to speak to my wife?”
“Certainly. Come, Quinn, and let’s smoke a pipe.”
While the two men adjourned to the porch for a smoke, Nelson approached his wife and with great effort knelt down before her and, gently taking her hand, told her, “I know I haven’t always been the most demonstrative sort of fellow with you, and I haven’t always been attentive, and now I just want to tell you that I’ve always loved you, for all my moods. Siempre te he querido, mi vida.” And he rested his head on her lap and felt her stroking his head. And then she said, “Would you like to hear what I’ve been writing?”
“Oh, yes, please.”
“It’s a little nothing, but it goes like this,” and in a steady, soft voice, she read her poem in Spanish:
Birds are singing today,
a conference on Love.
Sensitive flowers,
dreaming in the Sun.
Where do they come from,
with their darling melodies
and their powers to beautify
our days?
And happily she added, “It’s my third verse this morning.”
“Well, it’s very fine, indeed.” And getting up, he leaned over her and gave her a kiss and said, “Very fine, indeed.”
Then, as he walked to the door to join the waiting gentlemen, there came over him a terrible dizziness, and when he turned to his wife, the sunlight around her was so brilliant that it seemed as if it would swallow up the world—and it did.
— Heaven —
At the time of his father’s death, Emilio had just finished a bit part in a cowboy movie, The Man from Tucson, in which he played a desperado; and just as the family was trying to contact him, he felt the impulse to go away again. He was in a saloon somewhere in Arizona, killing time while a mechanic worked on his car—the starter was giving him trouble—and he sat around from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon, downing shots of whiskey and listening to country music out of the jukebox. About halfway through the afternoon he’d started to remember his wife and how happy they’d been and recalled that other saloon near the Seattle waterfront where he’d listened to the tale of a monk on a mountain hearing the voice of God, and he wished to God, if there was a God, that He whisper into his ears and explain very carefully His reasons for the way some lives turned out. And then, fortified by drink, he experienced a pleasant few moments reimagining the heaven he had been taught about as a child, with pastoral fields and angels winging their way through the clear blue sky, and he laughed.
It happened that two priests were passing through that same town and were in the saloon, having a meal and a few beers, and as the afternoon wore on, Emilio eavesdropped on their conversation. When they got up to pay their bill, he said to them, “Hello, Fathers. I don’t mean to barge in on your discussion, but I happened to overhear you mentioning something about a religious retreat up in Colorado, and I was just wondering if you would mind telling me where this retreat is, beause lately I’ve had an interest in such things.”
And one of the priests, thinking that the man seemed vaguely familiar—he once took a class of schoolchildren to see a double feature of the Father Byrne films during a snowy afternoon in Chicago—cordially conveyed the retreat’s location, near Boulder, Colorado, adding that it was a place where priests and monks and also laymen could go for spiritual solace. They’d been there several years before and met the monk Thomas Merton, the priest reporting that it had been an illuminating experience.
“Is it, Father,” Emilio had asked, “the kind of place where a man might find peace?”
“It is, God willing.”
And with that they bid the actor farewell and made their way into the dry heat of the day.
So he sat there drinking and told himself, with a drunkard’s logic, that these priests had appeared out of nowhere, like angels of God, and with the name of the retreat house, St. Joseph’s, and their directions scribbled on a napkin, Emilio, weary and seeking escape, resolved to drive to Colorado so that he, too, could hear the voice of God.
***
He drove northeast, and, many hours later, presenting himself to the father superior, he was admitted to the community, provided he make a donation and observe all the rules, particularly pertaining to the ingestion of alcoholic beverages. The retreat, at the foothills of the Rockies, consisted of a church, a central banquet hall, where a rule of silence prevailed, and a number of log cabins spread here and there, as well as a formal garden, with its patches of herbs and dying flowers and statues of Christ and the Holy Mother. Mass was said every morning and there was communal prayer. For one hour each day, between four and five, the rule of silence was lifted and the thirty brothers and priests and monks gathered to converse—he assumed, about the goodness of the Lord.
My God, but he tried. Each day arrived with the promise that as he walked in the garden or took a solitary hike up into the mountains, some great insight about the fortunes of his life would come to him. Counseled by a monk, who’d sensed the man’s troubled heart, that spiritual contemplation would be much helped by a fast, Emilio did not have as much as a morsel to eat for five days, sustaining himself with water, and though he felt light-headed and “cleansed”—for he had been poisoning his system for many months—and would sit in a quiet place, the longed-for inward illumination did not come to him.
On the fifth day of his fast, he was feeling most discouraged after nearly two weeks in the place. He participated in the prayers, invoking the names of the Father and the Holy Spirit again and again, trying to tap into his mother’s faith and straining to hear, amid the birdsong and the rustling of trees in the breeze, the whisper of faith, but pain still filled his heart. He decided to take a long hike, following a path that after some two hours would lead to a small chapel with a view of the surrounding mountains and hills—the glory of nature all around.
Many clear streams cut down through the hills—the water so pure that one could drink it—and as he made his way along the path, after an hour or so, he heard laughter and voices in the woods around him, male and female voices crying “Wheee!” and “Come on, don’t be a ’fraidy-cat!” and the sound of bodies splashing into the water. Curious, he followed the sounds till he came to the edge of a clearing, and standing quietly behind some bushes, he saw a sort of grotto, over the top of which flowed a waterfall, emptying into a pool below. He also saw three teenage boys and three teenage girls, some atop the rocks and ready to jump in, others already in the water, swimming about�
�they, innocent as the sunlight, with healthy and unspoiled faces, were all naked. He watched the prettiest girl in the group, a tall, athletic brunette, her breasts gleaming with the damp of water and sunlight, pubis dripping wet, leaping off and doing a somersault in the air, legs tucked up and the femininity of her bottom protruding, during her tumble into the water, out into the world. And it nearly killed him, not because she was so beautiful, but because in so many ways she reminded him of his beloved wife, as many an infant reminded him of his own, breaking his heart. He watched them jumping, squealing, playing tag in the water—how beautiful women were, all thoughts of the Lord out of his head now—and he, with a prayer book in his bluejeans pocket, saw one of the boys standing up to show his girl, a blonde, his “boner.” “Looky here, Lynn!” he’d cried out with the joy of youth, and she had answered, splashing him with water and squealing, “Get that thing out of here!” And it occurred to Emilio then and there that, for all his efforts, a life dedicated to the spiritual ascent into the enclave of heaven was not for him.
Hungry and craving a drink, Emilio made his way back through the woods toward the retreat, and he packed his suitcase and, reporting to the father superior, thankfully made his donation—and drove that late afternoon the twenty-five miles or so to Boulder, where he settled in a hotel for the night. In a restaurant whose walls were covered with cowboy memorabilia, he devoured a meal of steak and potatoes, smothered in gravy, and drank down a bottle of red wine, a disastrous way to break a fast, as the next day he would dearly pay for it with the worst headache and cramped stomach of his life.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 42