The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  But that evening he’d found the world pleasant, and though at first he missed the resolve with which he had decided, on an impulse, to go to St. Joseph’s, by ten-thirty, as he was having an equally ruinous double Scotch on the rocks, his brief time at the retreat house and his attempt to resolve the aches of his heart through the resuscitation of the spirit, like so many other things in his life, had already started to slip away.

  — California and New York, — July 1962

  Pitcher of martinis in hand, he was awaiting the arrival of friends. Now, a few hours after he’d gotten back from his most recent trip, the telephone rang and Emilio learned of his father’s death.

  “Well, brother, I’ve been trying to call for a week now, with bad news. Poppy’s gone.”

  He did not know what to say.

  “We tried to reach you, over and over again by telephone, and we sent telegrams”—they were down by the mail slot, with letters and bills, in a pile that he had not cared to glance at. “And Marta and Carmen went to your house, looking for you. We called your agent, but she said that you had been shooting a movie in Arizona. We just couldn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”

  “And Mama?”

  “She’s holding up very well, surprising us all, but of course she’s very strong. She’s been asking for you.”

  A flush of embarrassment, much shame. It sobered him.

  “And what can I do now for the family?”

  “Oh, lord, come out. Now you’re the man of the family.”

  ***

  Full of sorrow, Emilio turned up at the house in Cobbleton after his long absence and laid his head on his mother’s lap, weeping.

  But she was so gladdened, despite the circumstances, that her son had come—“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mama”—that she simply rocked him in her arms, repeating, in her best English, “We’re just happy that you’re here with us now.” And for a few days Emilio, pensive and sober, seemed a part of the family again. On the third day he drove to the cemetery with Margarita to his father’s grave and stood for a long time before it, stricken by life’s total uselessness. The cemetery brought other memories back to him—flames shooting through a tinderbox hotel, his little girl and wife perishing—and so he told Margarita, dropping her at her apartment, that he was going to spend the afternoon looking for a present for his mother.

  But he, the new man of the family, after browsing in local shops, even going into the five-and-dime, headed over to the hotel and dallied at the bar for several hours, signing a few autographs and throwing back a number of whiskeys. When he got back to the house, he was nearly staggering, and though his mother’s bones ached, she got out of her chair and grabbed her movie-star son by the ears and slapped his face, saying, “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why?”—in Spanish—“¿Por qué?”

  And she pulled at his hair and tried to haul his heavy bulk into the bathroom, wanting to wash out his mouth with soap—and felt truly defeated by the fact that she did not have the strength of a man. Out of frustration, she filled a pot with water and poured it over him.

  “Wake up and take care of yourself, boy. God will take care of the rest.”

  Focusing his eyes on her, he announced, “I’m tired, Mama. Maybe I need a rest.” And as if nothing had happened, he gave her a sweet kiss and headed upstairs to one of the bedrooms to nap. Waking shortly before midnight, he was in the kitchen, looking for something to drink. The only thing he found was an old, unopened bottle of Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener, whose contents he dispatched, and soon, as his father used to, he was roaming in the yard, his mouth open as he looked up at the sky, reeling and turning in circles and feeling some odd communication with the old man. The events of his past were swallowed up by the luminous benevolence now all around him. Why, he could close his eyes and swear that, opening them, he would find his father and mother in the yard having a barbecue, his sisters in attendance, the family posing for photographs with the blessedness that had once been his little girl. The wind blowing against his face, he’d swear that it was his daughter’s hand touching his nose and chin, and when he looked up at the splendid blue haze surrounding the moon, he thought of the innocence of Mary Isabel. Then the feelings of elation ebbed and he went back into the house, again looking everywhere for something to drink—Margarita had taken out of the house what few bottles of wine and liquor they’d kept in cabinets. And he passed half the night trying to put everything back in its proper place, awakening in the early morning on the parlor floor, his mother sitting in a chair across from him. “Ay, son, don’t do that to yourself.”

  For months after Emilio left for California, Mariela’s prayers asked God to restore him. Beside her bed, Mariela kept a tarnished crucifix, a statue of the Holy Mother, and a receptacle with an image of the Holy Spirit, a dove, for blessed candles. In bed she prayed for her son; she asked God to protect him, to send into his life an angelic presence, a woman to help him through his difficult days. He was a good son, calling her on the telephone every so often, but his voice was slurry and hard to understand, his English often incomprehensible. She would lie awake nights, speaking to Nelson, who, in her mind, was not dead, and he would appear to her as a sad whorl of knots on the timber wall. She would speak to her father and her beloved mother. She’d remember Miss Covington and ask her, “What can I do?” Miss Covington, a benevolent woman, would speak mainly about Mariela’s rights to pursue her own life, even without a husband. (“Above all, my dear, you must put out of your mind the unpleasantness of your life.”)

  She prayed and prayed, and one night the angels, as many as the stars, came flying into the room, and God in His wisdom directed one of them to intercede in the life of her son.

  ***

  Mornings, given the strength of his mother’s prayers, would find Emilio newly determined to change his ways. Having watched his career slowly dissipate over the past few years, he would go for days without so much as one drink, trying hard to forget the feelings that plagued him. But he was hiding out; that was how he saw his life. And in the evenings, when he would retire to bed alone, there would come over him an inability to sleep—for abstinence left his nerves wrecked—and just like that, the actor would get dressed, put on his sunglasses, and set out in his automobile for some bar, where he would sit drinking until four in the morning, until the bartender would roust him out. Like the character played by Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, he endured more than his share of humiliations. A bunch of farm boys in town for a good time, their faces glowering, picked a fight with the former movie star; or he was kicked out of a fancy restaurant because he dropped his third glass of wine on the floor and, in a fit, turned over the table (“Monsieur, you must leave”); or, waking one morning in a strange apartment with a woman whose name he could not remember, he thought to himself, My God, and tiptoed his way out.

  For all that, he was lucky. He had never been pulled over by the cops for being intoxicated, or gotten into an accident—though some nights he would drive without his headlights or zoom at seventy miles an hour along the winding roads of the Hollywood Hills—and he would thank God the next morning to have made it back to his bungalow (or awaken parked along some road) without having hurt anyone, his greatest nightmare. On some of these binge days he would drink so much he’d forget he was Emilio Montez O’Brien and that he had fourteen sisters. Sometimes he would make like Lance Stewart, private detective, and call himself Lance. Or he was Johnny Rogers from one of his war pictures, or Craig Higgins from that film Desperation, in which he played a jilted husband. And sometimes, walking along the beach in his bathing trunks, trying to find a good place to watch the pretty surf girls and the tides, he would swear he was the most muscular and beautiful man in the world—after all, he had played Tarzan in two movies—and would feel like standing on the shore giving Tarzan’s jungle yell.

  He might forget for hours at a time the dense pain he felt in his heart for the loss of his wife and child, but blinking his eyes as he rested in bed, he woul
d remember Jessica putting the baby in the crib and then crawling in beside him, whispering, “We’re having a happy life, aren’t we?” And that he’d wanted to take her and the child, when she was of traveling age, to Europe on a grand tour, his head filled with memories of beautiful Italy and his heart craving the sights of France and England and all those other places he’d never been. He had wanted these things not only for himself but for them. Then he’d swear that he could hear Jessica humming in the garden and race out, thinking that he would find her in Bermuda shorts, watering the flowers, little Mary Isabel playing in the grass. They would not be there.

  And he suffered from all kinds of aches—stomach, liver, kidney aches—and when they got really bad, he would lay off for a few days and then, feeling all cleansed, empty his liquor cabinet.

  On one of his worst days he looked up and saw his father, Nelson O’Brien, fiddling with his camera in the back yard, and he stumbled out, opening the sliding doors to find that his father was Mr. Perez, a gardener hired to plant some new bushes.

  Things would get all swirly around him, as in those B pictures where a man is cracking up and, spread at the center of a spinning hypno-disc, he falls through an abyss of darkness, voices and distorted faces everywhere around him.

  ***

  And then it happened. He woke one morning, his arms and legs and head covered with bandages and wired up in traction, in a hospital. Flowers in vases set here and there in his room.

  He asked a nurse, “What happened?”

  “Well, Mr. O’Brien, as best as we can figure, you were up in the hills one night—and very drunk, that’s what the lab tests say—changing a tire along the road; or maybe you were trying to flag someone down to get you back into town. You must have been standing in the middle of the road and some kids, joyriding in the hills, did not see you. You got pretty banged up, mostly broken bones—both your legs and your right arm, which, incidentally, the doctor reset. You had a protruding ulna, I suppose from an earlier injury. But that’ll be all fixed up now. And you had a concussion, but a minor one—lucky for you that those kids just swiped you.”

  “And how long have I been here?”

  “You’ve been here a week,” referring to his hospital sheet.

  “And did you notify anyone?”

  “Well, you had the name of a place called St. Joseph’s written on an old napkin in your wallet. And the name and telephone number of a lady called Jessica—”

  “—Brooks.”

  “We tried that, but it was disconnected. Finally we got the name of one of your sisters in New York from an agency here in L.A. Five of your relatives are in town.”

  “Five?”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t remember who they are, but they usually come during visiting hours, at four in the afternoon, to inquire about you.”

  This had been at 11:30 in the morning. He waited and waited until the hour of four, when in they came: his sisters Margarita, Maria, Marta, Carmen, and Gloria.

  “Thank God, brother,” they shouted, kissing his un-bandaged hand.

  “Dios mío,” Maria had said. “We were worried to death about you when we heard. All of us prayed.”

  ***

  It took Emilio months to heal. He hired a nurse to help him in the house, for he was dependent on a wheelchair, and from time to time he received visitors, actor friends and his sisters Marta and Carmen, who would come up from Anaheim to visit him. His hours were spent, for there was not much else he could do, reading the books—novels, travel books, and a Spanish grammar—that Margarita brought him. Otherwise, he passed much time on the telephone, especially with his mother, who, gushing love, and happy with his forced sobriety, spoke admiringly of his strength. Though she never wanted to see him suffer physically like this, she was convinced that God’s hand was in all of it. As He sent troubles into the world, so did He intercede to put men on the straight path in life: “You don’t have to believe me, son, but it’s the truth. You were being protected that night of your accident. Because Dios decided to put an end to your suffering, and He may have been harsh with you, but how else could He bring you out of your torment? He did so because of our prayers and because He is good. Now, never forget that, son.”

  ***

  All that was true. It was as if he had awakened from some other life.

  He managed, when he was finally getting around again, on crutches and then with a cane, to get his hands on some booze. One of his movie chums brought a couple of bottles of vodka over, but when he took his first sip, it turned his stomach and he threw up. He tried it again, and it burned his gullet. Then he took another sip and found the taste so vile that he poured the bottle out down a sink, and though he tried again on other days, his old temptations coming back to him, his disgust became even stronger. He found himself regarding drink the same way he regarded the old distension of his arm.

  ***

  He gave up on the profession of acting—but did not like the idleness of his days. With some money, about fifty grand, that he’d managed to save over the years, he started at the ripe old age of forty to look into a new means of livelihood. For a time he kept himself amused by practicing his old sleight-of-hand tricks and thought about putting together an act—but while performing here and there in schools, for children, to try it out, he felt a little ridiculous dressed up like Mandrake the Magician, with collapsing top hat and flowing black cape. Some old friends almost talked him into investing in a restaurant, a la Preston Sturges, who had done so in the 1940s, but as Mr. Sturges had been ruined, Emilio, despite offers of help from Irene, who loved to cook, decided against it.

  One day he picked up a camera. He had been thinking about his youth in Cobbleton and the many hours he used to spend beside his father in his shop and going about the countryside, and remembering Nelson O’Brien’s serenity when he set about his work. And in the same way that a glass of whiskey once brought him closer to his father, he found that looking through a lens did so, too. At first he took it up as a means of passing the time. He would drive south and into the desert with some fancy equipment, taking photographs and feeling at peace with the world. He accumulated the materials for a development lab, which he set up in a closet, and while dipping some negatives into the chemical solution, he found himself experiencing a sense of communion with his own family history, the old sensations of belonging again accruing in his heart like lights and shadows rising to the surface.

  So, as if he had the blessing of his father, Emilio Montez O’Brien, former movie star, found himself a storefront on Wilshire Boulevard and, placing some advertisements here and there, embarked on a new midlife career. His name, Montgomery O’Brien, was remembered well enough among the Los Angeles community. Old connections in the movie business began to hire him for promotional photography, and magazines, finding his former stardom alluring, would assign him to shoot photographs of the stars in their homes. He photographed Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster (an old friend), Lauren Bacall, Gary Grant, Bette Davis, and Gilbert Roland, among many others. And the high-society folks out in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, enchanted by the splendidness of this former movie star, thought it prestigious to have Emilio, sober as wood, at their gatherings.

  A FEW MOMENTS OF EARTHLY HAPPINESS

  Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago…

  —from Lewis Carroll’s

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  — Cobbleton, 1967 —

  Living in Cobbleton and teaching high school at sixty-five, Margarita still wanted to leave that town. She often thought of going to New York to live out her retirement years with her sisters in their West End Avenue apartment, or of moving up to Connecticut,
where her Cuban lover, whom she had met in Spain, and who was now an exile, lived. But after Nelson died, Margarita, ever loyal and dedicated to her mother’s well-being, resigned herself to remaining by her side, and she gave up her apartment and moved back into the house, taking two rooms on the upper floor, one for her favorite furnishings and keepsakes, the other the room she had once shared with Isabel.

  In that room, the dresser drawers, with their 1920s scent, were still filled with old camisoles and slips and cloche caps and stockings and underwear, and on the shelves were some of their childhood dolls and certain of the books that she collected as a young girl, with their pressed flowers and antique valentine cards tucked inside, just as she left them. Then there was the mirror before which she had stood naked as a young girl, proudly examining her body. That mirror, neglected for so long, must have been happy when now, as a woman of advancing years, Margarita, preparing for a bath, would stand before it again, her body so much more weathered by life, her legs covered with varicose veins (these coming to her like a mockery during the days when she first had to endure the discomforts of menopause, with heart palpitations and a heat so severe that she would break out in a terrible sweat), and her breasts less firm but with nipples that still hardened, even at her age, when, dampening a finger, she would pinch them until they swelled. Later, in the privacy of the bathroom, she would fill the tub and rest her body in the warm and consoling water. And as the water drained out of the tub, she would pull the curtains closed and turn on the shower, enjoying the intense spray on her belly and down below, where it was all tangly with gray and black pubic hair, her femininity, in old age, feeling as good under the force of that spray as it had in her youth.

  Sleeping on her old brass bed, she would have uncanny dreams at night and swear that she would awaken and find herself a young girl again, the rooms of the house filled with a chaotic and ever-busy configuration of sister beings. On some mornings, when she would join her mother for breakfast before heading off to school, she would remember the days, during the painted-glass years, when the feminine influence of the house was so strong that automobiles would sometimes run off the road and skid into the thick oak tree in their yard, and once an aviator, his plane’s engine losing power, brought his plane down in a field. (Though she liked to think that he’d been brought down by the allure of the women who once lived there together.)