“Yes, yes, I remember, but she didn’t speak to me all night.”
“Mama, that’s because when you have a drink—and I saw you drinking at least two glasses of champagne—you don’t want to have anything to do with speaking English. ¿Recuerdas?”
“So? What of it? I did everything I could to raise her correctly. I don’t understand why she doesn’t know how to speak Spanish, and I don’t see how she can expect me to remember English at my age. Even your father, whose Spanish was all twisted up, at least he always tried. You know it—and Isabel and Maria and Olga and Jacqueline learned it as well and speak it the way they sing, like nightingales.” She made a clicking sound with her mouth. “I don’t see why the others didn’t.”
“Ay, Mama. Sometimes you’re very harsh.”
And her mother shrugged. “What of it, I’ve lived this long. And what do I care, as long as I know they all love me.”
On certain evenings, the two were the image of felicity, Margarita tending to her schoolwork and reading in the parlor, novels mainly; her mother sitting nearby, scribbling one of her verses on a yellow pad which Margarita bought for her, or reading from a book—most often, as she got older, Life on the Planet Mars. But sometimes when her mother was restless and just wanted to talk and talk, Margarita would lose patience.
“Please, Mama, a little peace and quiet.”
On one of those nights Mariela interpreted her daughter’s longing for silence as some kind of censure, and, approaching her, said, “You’re feeling sad, aren’t you, my daughter?”
“No, Mama. I’m just reading.”
“Oh, my darling, you can say that, but last night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about the tragedy of your marriage with that fellow Lester.”
“Mama, no.”
“And I was thinking that you would have been happier if you’d stayed with him than to end up one day in this big and lonely house with me.”
“Mama, you know that’s not true. I’m not unhappy.”
“Yes, yes, I know that you will say these things to make me feel peaceful, because you’ve always been a good daughter to me. But there are times when, in order to get along, one wants to forget the truth. Your father, for example, was a very, very good man, but did you know that for many years he always had a little bit too much to drink, nearly every day…”
“We knew that, Mama.”
“…And that every day I would kneel down before my bed, praying to God that He help the poor man, and to this day I thank God that, for all your father’s sadness about life, he ended up being so fortunate. And sometimes, child, when I think of all our suffering, all the hours I spent here worrying about you, I always regret most that you let that good man Lester go.”
“Mama, I didn’t let him go. He was very bad to me.”
“No, child, you say that now…”
“I’ve always told you so.”
“No, child, you’re saying that now because it brings you peace in your advancing years, and I know that you tell yourself that so you will forget all the good between you and what you lost.”
“Mama, I think it’s time for you to go to bed. I don’t like it when you start up like this, and you know we’ll just have a bad fight.”
“But, child, it only upsets you because I’m speaking to you from my heart.”
“No, Mama, you’re telling me this because I am in a quiet mood and you want me to speak to you about everything in the world. And when I’m this way you think I’m ignoring you, when night after night we speak for hours, and all I want to do is to be tranquil in my house, and yet you always want to bring something up to agitate me.”
Her mother, looking down, was shaking her head, and whispered, “If my mother were alive, God bless her soul, I would listen to her for years.”
Margarita, taking hold of her hands, said, sighing, “Mama, Mama, look at me.”
But her mother went on staring at the floor and a tear rolled from her eye.
“You know that Lester was bad to me,” Margarita said to her. “That was nearly thirty years ago. Don’t you remember that nice lady, Miss Covington?”
“Yes, the poor woman.”
“And how Miss Covington would take us down to the Ladies’ Society in town and how impressive she was in her womanly dignity?”
“Yes.”
“Well, one day she told me never, never to take abuse from a man—and men can be very abusive toward our kind—and even though I nodded and said yes to her, I went on with that man, and do you know why? Because I looked at you and Poppy and I thought that marriage meant everything. And don’t get me started talking about what he did to me. I’ve told you a hundred times, he was cruel.”
At that, her mother looked up, “But didn’t he take care of you?”
“Yes, but there are things you simply don’t know about.”
Her mother, composed, thought about it. “I don’t know what the man did to you, but whatever it was, I don’t believe it was truly part of his character. You were his wife, and as I’ve always told you, no matter how many times I felt like going back to Cuba in the days when your father changed, I really never once thought of leaving him. We had partaken of the sacrament of holy matrimony and, as you should know, that contract was not written just for the civil clerks of this earth, during this poor lifetime of ours, but for the clerks who preside over eternity.”
Her mother’s turn of phrase delighted Margarita, making her smile.
“As for your husband, who knows what the poor man was thinking during his abuses.”
Then, “Don’t forget,” she added, “that you could never bear him a son.”
With that, Margarita excused herself, heading up into the familiar and comforting surroundings of her old room. Waiting to hear her mother’s troubled ascent up the stairway, she heard her opening her bedroom door and with a loud “Ay!” tumble down on the bed. She’d usually help her up the stairs and into bed, but after their conversation, she wanted her mother to know what it would be like to roam the halls without her. She listened to sighs and yawns and, through the space under the bedroom door, noticed the dimming of the light. Her mother slept in the same bed as she used to with her husband, and beside it was a lamp, which she turned off before laying her head on the pillow.
Satisfied that her mother was asleep, and feeling a little agitated, Margarita returned to the fine novel Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. She read for an hour and sleep started to come to her eyes. And with resignation, for she hated to leave the book, she turned off the light. But she could not sleep, thinking about her mother and all her years with Lester.
A flutter of emotions ran up through her rib cage as she remembered the first time Lester had brought her back from a speakeasy in the days when he would sit in a restaurant with her and, slipping his hand under her skirt and into the elastic material of her underdrawers, finger her and say, “Oh, my little gypsy.” They then headed back to Cobbleton to their house—long since torn down—and they undressed down to their underclothes. He always loved to have her kneel on the bed, her rump raised high, the creases that her undergarments made against her flesh and the pubic hair that spilled out of the material exciting him. He would sometimes nip at those hairs, pulling one or two out with his teeth—she’d hardly felt more than the plucking of an eyebrow hair—and then, rubbing his erect member, as her father’s book would put it, against her buttocks, he would pull the delicate cloth of her underwear down over her legs and make his way into her vagina. But one night, for whatever reason, he had wanted to probe her bottom, and while it had felt quite all right at first to Margarita, who squirmed and “ohhed” and opened her thighs wide, she could not anticipate the rough shove of Lester’s thin but very long penis into her. When she cried—with pain—he stroked her hair and said, “My darling!” And when she, feeling a muddy discomfort, had said, “Let’s wash ourselves and do it the normal way,” he had thrust and thrust again, until, coming, his semen had ball up inside her.
“Let
’s not do this again,” she said to Lester.
But he wanted to, again and again, though she never liked it.
***
Generally, however, mother and daughter got along tranquilly enough, Margarita ever patient, as she knew that soon, that year or a few years hence, her mother would be taking her leave of the world. And besides, the older woman seemed quite content to spend many a day off in the field, under a tree, writing. It had always been a subject of curiosity for Margarita that her mother kept her all-consuming work to herself, never leaving her notebooks around the house but hiding them at the end of the day somewhere in her closets. Over the years she’d heard snippets of the verse, her mother bursting with pride at a recent line and sometimes reciting a portion of one of her musings in Spanish to Maria or one of her other Spanish-speaking daughters. But she never handed her daughter the notebooks, guarding them as if they held the contents of some secret life which even her oldest and closest daughter could not see while she was still alive. And on the few occasions when Margarita had crept up behind her to take a look at the work over her mother’s shoulder, the old woman clapped the notebook shut and said, “Mi vida, you’ll have plenty of time to read them when I’m gone.”
In addition, she seemed quite enchanted by the efforts of the American space program to put a man on the moon. Of all the items that would come on the evening news about the Vietnam War, the progress of the President’s Great Society programs, or the occasional bit of information about Cuba, she seemed most fascinated by the NASA space launches. Whenever astronauts went into orbit around the earth, she would spend the evening out on the porch among the moths and fireflies, just looking up at the sky, as if she might see the orbiting craft. Perhaps she had been influenced by her book, Life on the Planet Mars, but she was certainly convinced that once the Americans landed on the moon they would find life, if not entire civilizations. She had, after all, come into the world before the invention of the airplane and television, and into her maturity at a time when it was not at all unusual to read in a newspaper articles with titles like “Men on the Moon, Will They Be Like Us?” More than that, though, Mariela Montez was convinced that God in making the universe with love in His heart would certainly allow that love to go everywhere. Looking up and daydreaming, she imagined that in those very great distances there were other places with flowery gardens along whose paths young lovers walked hand in hand—for what other point could there have been for El Señor to have such a large universe and to light the heavens with spectacular stars and to send comets like Halley’s spinning across the sky, or to send meteorites shooting radiantly through the atmosphere, if not to remind us that His power and goodness have no limit?
Sometimes she would sit for hours just looking up at the moon. She prayed to God that she live long enough to learn what the astronauts would one day discover. (Certainly winged, nearly transparent angels, floating above the lunar surface.) Such diversions gave her much comfort and it was only occasionally that Mariela would feel her solitude. Every so often, after Sunday Mass, she and Margarita would go to the Catholic cemetery and she would stand before the Celtic cross that marked Nelson O’Brien’s resting place to say a prayer and to leave some potted flowers, the woman sadly sighing as she walked along with Margarita past all the tombstones in that metropolis of the dead where Kate O’Brien also resided. Then they would head for the ice-cream parlor, now operated by the Friendly’s chain, and she would devour a big breakfast of syrup-drenched waffles or, simply, an ice-cream sundae. And sometimes on a Sunday they would drive out to visit her daughter Irene and her family or Patricia, and before having a late-afternoon meal they would play canasta. Occasionally, they would all come over to the house on Abelmyer Road, and Irene would take over the kitchen, and Mariela would revel in the company of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the littlest ones playing in the halls of the house and bringing much joy to her heart.
— Margarita’s Love from Cuba —
One day, a 1966 Chrysler pulled up to the house, and out of that automobile emerged the sturdy, thick, and gray-haired form of Luis Vasquez, the Cuban gentleman of whom Margarita had first become enamored in Spain years before. Back in the 1950s, Margarita and Luis would meet once a year on secret trips away from Cobbleton and Havana, in Miami Beach, holing up in a hotel room for a week at a time, where they’d frolic like young and indecent lovers. They’d made an agreement—“no involvement”—but each year they greeted each other with the same fervor, running into the other’s arms and kissing endlessly with their first embrace. With shutters closed to the sunlight, Margarita could hardly wait to take off her dress and slip, Luis kissing and biting everything he could reach, Margarita blushing and laughing with joy. And when he’d lower his trousers, they would fall on the bed, devouring each other with the same adamancy as they’d known in Spain. Back in 1954, Margarita looked like Ava Gardner when she met Luis in Valencia. She was fifty-two years old at the time, he fifty-three or fifty-four and balding. They dined the first evening, talking, but the second night he stood gently kissing her against a park wall. Pressing close to her, against her feminine center, with the ardor of a much younger man, he muttered, “Eres muy mujer.” Later they went to his high-priced hotel, El Palacio, and Margarita, who had not made love to anyone outside of her husband and a forlorn soldier during the war, so opened herself to Luis that night that they made love seven times—not counting when she took his filling penis into her mouth and made him come that way. Forget that her breasts had become pendulous and that in a little game they played she would sway them before his mouth and he would try to catch them with his lips.
They kept these annual appointments until the Cuban Revolution came along (in that troublesome country of her mother’s birth), turning his life upside down. He had been the owner of a garage in Havana and the manager of a General Motors dealership, and when the government nationalized that business he found himself out of work. For two years Luis wrote her letters, asking for her love and for some basic amenities—and she sent them, toilet paper and cans of beef and shirts and trousers and underwear, aspirins and Alka-Seltzer, too. He was one of those Cubans who escaped by boat, arriving in the Florida Keys one dim night in 1964, and living in Miami for a time. But through old connections in America, he relocated in the town of New Elm, Connecticut, where General Motors had a parts manufacturing plant. Once he’d settled into his new life in Connecticut, Margarita would try to get away to see him. (During their first reunion, in 1965, Margarita removed her brassiere, and though she was old—sixty-three at the time—he kissed her on her unsightly varicose veins and when she felt embarrassed, saying, “Ay, but I’m so ugly now,” he continued to kiss her, saying, “No, no, my darling, you are still beautiful.”)
Since then, they would see each other every few months or so, and because it was hard for Margarita to leave her mother in the house alone, Luis would drive into town and take a room in the Main Street Hotel or in one of the motels out in the countryside and Margarita, slipping away on the pretense of marking some papers in school, would head out, spending the days with Luis in bed. But by the evening’s end she would come back to the house—a necessity that depressed them both, for she would miss the warmth of his body and the simple pleasant company of the man. So one day Margarita, tired of this kind of arrangement, told her mother that she was involved with a gentleman.
“That is a good thing, my daughter,” Mariela had said. “And who is this gentleman?”
“The Cuban fellow, Luis, I once told you about.”
“The one you were always sending packages to?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“And it’s an involvement?”
“Yes, Mama, I would say so.”
“And at your age?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Is he good to you?”
“Oh, yes, Mama.”
“Then invite him to the house.”
When he arrived, dressed in a leisure suit, carrying flowers
and a box of chocolates for Mariela, he sat in the parlor recounting to her mother the events of his recent life and his current circumstances. His family in Cuba wanted to leave and to that end he was trying to save money so they could get out via Spain, but he was still worried because he had reached the age of retirement and General Motors, though grateful to him for his many years of service in Cuba, was anxious to take him off its full-time payroll. He was stoic and a little bitter, but, just the same, tried to be as pleasant as he could—though the strain of his circumstances seemed apparent in the tiredness of his expression. “For some reason,” he recounted, “I don’t sleep very well in this country.”
He visited them several more times that summer, and because he was so attentive to Mariela and very Cuban and sad, she always welcomed him into the house and did not mind when Margarita and Luis would go off for a drive, returning in the late afternoon before Luis would either drive back up to Connecticut or head for a motel. On one of those afternoons, Luis invited Mariela for a drive along the beautiful country roads, and after visiting with Irene, who was not feeling so well of late because of her worsening diabetes (the poor thing, loving sweets so much), they went to the hotel for dinner, and that evening, when Luis got up to use the rest room, Mariela had leaned over and said to her daughter, “And where is he going to be staying for the night?”
“I think here in the hotel.”
And her mother surprised her: “Nonsense, I’ll have nothing of that. He can come and stay with us in the house.”
“Yes?”
“Why not, and for all I care, old lady that I am, he can stay with you in your room.”
“Mama, have you been drinking too much wine?”
“And if I have? My darling daughter, even in my old age I haven’t forgotten what happens between a man and a woman. Besides, you’re not exactly a young girl whose life is going to be ruined by a little fun.” And throwing up her hands and sipping a glass of hearty burgundy, she added, “When he comes back, you tell him that as far as I’m concerned he’s part of the family.”
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 45