The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Still, she did not allow this conviction to interfere with the daily maintenance of her health. Three times a week she would drive her station wagon into the center of town and make her way with sweatpants, sweatshirt, and sneakers to the Seniors Fitness Center, as it was called, for a half hour of aerobic exercise, modified, of course, for the older folks, who stretched and bent to Perry Como and the golden arrangements of Liberace. Afterward she might walk into the local Agway, lingering by the counter where some years before she had purchased one of her favorite books, The Audubon Society Guide to the Butterflies of the Northeastern United States, which had inspired her to observe more closely the leopard-winged fritillaries and monarchs that fluttered among the blossoms which she, with visored cap or brilliant, oversized sun hat, would plant in the early spring. And at the market, the big A & P off Route 9 just outside of town, she’d make her way with her shopping cart down the aisles, ever conscious of the diet that Prevention magazine recommended, filling her cart with lean and healthful cuts of meat and fillets of fish and chicken, and clear plastic bags of the most salutary vegetables—zucchini, lentils, carrots, and squash, among many others. She had stopped smoking twenty-two years before, except for an occasional puff if she happened to be around one of her less health-conscious sisters, and she did not drink more than two glasses of Premiat Cabernet Sauvignon a day—her favorite brand, a good bargain, too, at $4.25 a bottle—which would ease her into a lovely sleep, the sleep of bitterly cold New England winters, her body snug under the warm covers.

  Sometimes she would climb the stairs to her bedroom laughing, a little tipsy but still able to maneuver those stairs, a nearly invisible band of pinkish light skirting the corners of the rooms, and the wine taking the edge off her two greatest fears—loneliness and boredom. She would sometimes sit at a table in a small sewing room just off to the right of the landing, writing letters and telephoning the family. She had thirteen sisters, one brother, and eighteen nieces and nephews who had themselves brought thirty-one children into the world. Her telephone bills would include calls to New York, Illinois, Florida, California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—her usual inquiries about the lives, health, and happiness of the family.

  Being the oldest, she wanted to make sure that communication among them never dwindled, as she knew happened in many a family. And at times of crisis it was Margarita who would fly out to help. She did so back in 1978 when Veronica divorced her husband, out in Illinois, for, despite his age and his basically good heart, he had continued his philanderings over the years with one younger girl or another, finally shattering her resolve to keep the marriage together. (When she arrived, finding her younger sister in a bad way, gloomy and frightened of the future, Margarita said to her, “Do not be afraid, because you’ll never be alone. You can always come stay with me.”) And she went out to Anaheim in 1982 when Marta’s husband died, and Marta, in a most sorrowful state, repeated again and again, “My life feels as if it is over.” That was when Margarita, knowing what such pain meant, left the house and returned an hour later with three tickets to Hawaii, and she, Marta, and Carmen spent a week there, sitting under umbrellas, sipping piña coladas through bent straws, taking the sun, and watching the Pacific and the young people frolicking in its waters. On their way back they stopped to see their brother, Emilio, photographer of the stars, in Los Angeles. That visit ended with Marta’s arms wrapped around her older sister, and the younger sister, feeling sad, yet not as sad as she’d felt a few weeks before, saying, “My God, Margarita, you’re so good to me.” And Margarita said, “That’s because I love you.”

  The following year, there had been Jacqueline’s open-heart surgery, when the prospect of death entered the apartment on West End Avenue and the union known as the fourteen sisters seemed endangered. One afternoon, during a casual recital in the salon of their apartment, Jacqueline, resplendent in a velvet dress, happy with music for most of her life, and delicate as a flower, had simply collapsed, sighing, her violin dropping from her hands. Always in the best of health, Jacqueline, seventy-five and quite content with the sisterly life, had not seen a doctor in nearly thirty years. Her condition, a hospital physician said, required immediate surgery. Olga, her twin, maddened and feeling chest pangs of her own, made the call to Margarita in Connecticut, and she rushed down that very evening to console Maria and Olga and Gloria, joining them in their vigil of prayer (for they were all religious).

  The surgery was a success, and after six months or so, Jacqueline rejoined her sisters, Maria and Olga, in rehearsals, the apartment once again filled with the sonorous music for which, to a wide circle of cultured friends, it was much renowned. But, that crisis past, Jacqueline reassessed the meaning of love, and though she had been content for many years with the constancy of her life, she underwent a spiritual crisis. She suddenly wanted, after a lifetime of virginity—so the sisters thought—to know the physical pleasures of love.

  During one of their after-dinner recitals, a quite handsome singer of twenty-five, Ramón, a Spaniard from Málaga who took voice lessons from Maria, dreamily stared, and stared, and stared at Jacqueline as she played her violin. And later this young man pursued her, finding her, frail and uncertain, by the punch bowl, and he said to her in his Castilian Spanish, “Miss O’Brien, I cannot begin to describe the feelings in my heart when I look at you,” and he kissed her hand. “There can be nothing better in life than a dedication to beauty.”

  Then they sat off in a corner talking until very late that night.

  The next morning, with her hair tightly curled under a barrette and wearing much 1920s jewelry—it was early summer—Jacqueline left the apartment. Down below, the Spaniard waited for her, behind the wheel of a rented car, and soon they were driving north along the Hudson, making their way to Bear Mountain Park. There, during a picnic, the young man took Jacqueline into his arms, kissing her. That night she did not return home, the couple taking a room together in the lodge, a scandalous event.

  No one in the family would ever know if they went to bed together, but for about three months Jacqueline and this fellow kept constant company, and although both Maria and Olga betrayed their cynicism as to his motives, Jacqueline fell into the habit of referring to Ramón as “my young man.” Her revelry, however, gave strength to Jacqueline, and for that the sisters were grateful, though they were happy when the affair ended. On a stroll along Sullivan Street, after having dinner in an Italian restaurant, the Chanteuses saw Ramón on a street corner, necking furiously with a brunette. That ended the love affair, and Jacqueline, with a crisscross of scars up the middle of her chest, between the breasts which he might have kissed—the sisters did not know—never saw him again. With an embarrassed air, but a glint of mischief in her eyes, she rejoined the humble and unromantic life of their sisterly household.

  And there was her sister Helen, suffering from what Margarita would call upper-class idleness. When her son, Craig, came back from Vietnam with half his right hand blown off, he began to depend on his parents, retiring to the family house in Newport. Helen Montez O’Brien Anderson, a doting mother, worried that her son would turn out badly. But long since then, the young man, now nearly forty, had gotten out into the world, marrying a girl from Boston and studying law at Harvard (he had gone to Yale before he saw service in Vietnam), and although he suffered from bad nightmares, his union produced a young and healthy son, Craig Jr.

  By that time, Helen, ever beautiful, ever elegant, her social life spent among the very best of high society, was addicted to tranquillizers, the intake of which ordered her days. With her children gone from the apartment and her husband busy in his work—he was of retirement age but owned an advertising agency and was then coordinating a campaign for a nationwide hamburger chain—she would spend nearly every afternoon looking over her old photographs and the advertisements in which she once appeared, and appraising herself in the mirror, feeling despair, for it had struck her, at the age of seventy-five, that she was getting older.

  A
s youthful as Helen looked—for she would always have a young face and was still quite beautiful—her hours were so empty that she found herself longing for the days when she lived in Cobbleton with her sisters. She had other interludes, when she would swear it was 1957 and she would wake up thinking that at three-thirty she would pick up the kids from school, taking her son Craig to French lessons at four, and her boy Dennis over to the piano teacher on Central Park West. (That son Dennis, a lover of music, in adulthood would open a record store in Boston, specializing in classical music.) She had a car and driver then and would usually spend the time between lessons walking along Madison Avenue in the Seventies, going into dress and jewelry shops, the car following her slowly on the street. By five-thirty, she would have picked the kids up and headed home. (She missed that. Now she swam in a sea of Valium, whose effects she enhanced with two glasses of late-afternoon wine. On one of those afternoons, bored and a little angry about her life, she fired her maid and butler, and when her Spanish Institute teacher arrived for their 5 p.m. lessons—for she, too, after so many years wanted to learn Spanish—Helen, naked behind the door, told him to go home, saying, “You will be paid, in any case.” Afterward, while urinating in the bathroom, her eyes on a signed Picasso print on the wall, she decided that her husband married her because of her importance as an ornament, and in a fit she stormed through the rooms of the apartment, pulling off every painting and framed photograph from the walls, throwing them to the floor. (She spared the Picasso print in the bathroom and a lovely Florentine portrait by Piero di Cosimo in the hall.) Then, the apartment wrecked, she drank a quart of gin. At eight that evening, her husband found her sprawled naked on the eighteenth-century Persian rug in the parlor. (Her hair was still blond, for she dyed it, but as she lay on the floor, her pubic hair, between her legs, was curled and gray.) At three-thirty in the morning, her husband telephoned Margarita in Connecticut in despair.

  “She won’t speak to anyone,” he said. “Would you please come down?”

  So Margarita took the train into Manhattan the next day, and shortly appeared before her younger sister, saying, “Helen, why are you doing this?”

  And in that room crowded with the Chanteuses and Gloria, she opened her eyes and answered, “Because no one loves me.”

  “But we all love you, you must know that.”

  “Then prove it.”

  Margarita then imagined that if she were a man she would slip into bed with her—was that what she meant?—but she simply leaned over and gave her sister a kiss on the forehead and spent the hours of that day, and many others, trying to console her.

  ***

  By then, sister Patricia had moved to a psychic community called Lilydale in Upstate New York, her husband having died many years before and her kids now on their own. (Her older son, Henry, ran the farm on which they lived. Her other son, Harris, was in the United States Navy, and Clara had married a businessman and lived in Houston, Texas.) For many years, Patricia, having her visions of spirits and her intuitions about the ordinary events of life, subscribed to a spiritist newsletter, and in that newsletter she often read about Lilydale, a community for spiritists. When her good husband died, she moved there, renting a gothic house which overlooked the town’s small lake and put in her window a sign that read: “Fortunes told, Futures divined.” There was nothing lucrative about the business; in the peak season of July perhaps ten people a day would come to her, seeing their future for five dollars each.

  After she moved there in 1977, her most illustrious customer had been a soft-spoken Southern President whose political future she sadly divined. A rock star, performing in Buffalo, also visited, and her prediction that his next recording would be a number-one hit propelled her name into the newspapers. In 1982, she even received a phone call from a man claiming to be the current President of the United States—but she doubted that it was so. And yet her reputation as a psychic had grown: by the time she was seventy-five, in 1989, radio and television stations around the country would call and ask her about the future. She did many interviews, particularly after the CBS network aired a piece on her (in which she foretold the collapse of the Soviet Empire “in the next few years or so,” and the death of Fidel Castro in 1995, in retirement in Mexico, from cancer). “This elderly and plain lady,” the CBS commentator said, “may be ordinary-looking, but it wouldn’t surprise us at all if Patty, as she likes to call herself, really holds the keys to the future. From Lilydale, New York, this is Rod Owen.” Her minor-celebrity status, even at its peak, had not made much difference in terms of business. Though she could really read and see the most inward manifestations of personality and destiny in her clients’ hearts, she relied upon symbolic interpretations of their lives. To a young man whose fiancée was sitting in the next room, she said: “I see you standing before a ladder and you do not know whether you will go up or down.” She said this even when she knew he would die in a car collision a year later. To a pregnant woman, she said, “You will have a beautiful son,” though she saw him with a pistol, robbing a store in the future.

  She saw many people in those days—most just wanted to know that their lives would turn out okay—but though she could see their future, she came to prefer vague interpretations. She saw men riding on horses, nails being hammered into walls, a man—or woman—standing before a door, deciding whether he or she should open it. That’s what Patricia, the ninth-born of the fourteen sisters, would say, knowing a sorrowful truth but refusing to reveal it.

  ***

  Margarita was eighty-seven when she visited her younger sister in Lilydale. They had a good time, as sisters will, the two driving around and visiting antique shops and the local sights. While Patricia sat divining the future for a customer, Margarita would read a book.

  On one of those evenings, Margarita, curious and playful, asked her sister, “And what do you see for yourself?”

  “I know the exact day when I will leave this world.”

  “Not soon!”

  “No.”

  “And for me, what do you see?”

  Taking Margarita’s hands, her thumbs pressed into her pulse of life, she had said: “You are going to live to be unbelievably old.”

  ***

  In those years she got to spend some time with her sister Isabel—not in Cuba, however, but in her nephew’s house in Ft. Lauderdale, to where Isabel moved in 1980, the year of the Mariel harbor exodus. Isabel had always told the family that she would remain in Cuba to her dying days, but her husband’s death in 1979 left her alone in the house on Victoriana de Avila Street, and after months of solitude and many a day when she thought she would lose her mind from loneliness, she found herself packing a single bag and, leaving the house to an old friend, made her way west to Havana, where she joined the throngs Mr. Castro was unleashing on America. Within a week she found herself at sea on an overcrowded, dangerously listing cabin cruiser which the Cubans of Miami piloted, along with many other boats, to rescue the Cubans of Mariel. In a matter of weeks she became one of those Cubans who at an advanced age abandoned what in fact had become her adopted country, joining her lawyer son and his family in a new life. Of course, she was welcomed by the family. At her house in Ft. Lauderdale she would receive visits from the sisters, Margarita among them, and Isabel would on occasion travel north to see the family in New York and Margarita in New Elm. They would spend many a tranquil day together, often in silence, for they had loved each other for so many years that, like an old couple, they could sit out on Margarita’s sun porch without saying a word, until one of them would break the silence with a sigh and a sentence like, “Dios mío, do you realize that Mama would have been nearly a hundred years old if she were still alive?” Or: “Sister, do you remember when that nice fellow García used to turn up at the house in Cobbleton with his packages of plantains from New York, back in the days when there were no plantains to be found in the entire state of Pennsylvania?”

  “I do.”

  It was Isabel’s good fortu
ne to come back home to a new America. Why, Ft. Lauderdale and Miami were packed with Cubans, and New York had long become a Latinized city. Margarita and Isabel could drive over to the A & P and find, in the produce section, green and ripe plantains, and over in the frozen-food section, packages of frozen yuca—even in New Elm.

  ***

  And Gloria, in 1983, ended up marrying, at the age of sixty, her Macy’s beau, Arnold, after so many years. As long as his mother was alive, Arnold could never work up the nerve to leave that woman, but when she died, Gloria told him, “It’s now or never,” and within a few months of his mother’s death, the couple went off to City Hall, a nervous, frightened Arnold making his vows with Gloria in the company of the Chanteuses, Margarita, and a few friends from the department store. At long last, they made a vacation trip together—down to Bermuda—and on their return they set out to find their own apartment, though Arnold wanted to keep his place in Canarsie. For the first time in her life with Arnold, she stepped into that apartment and wanted nothing to do with it—his mother’s presence everywhere, an old lady’s scent, the very atmosphere so thick with her influence that for weeks Gloria dreamed about the woman’s dresses drifting out of the closet and wrapping themselves around her, suffocating her the way his mother had suffocated him. She told him, “I would rather go live with my sisters than stay here.” And she most nearly left him over it. “But the rent is so cheap” was one of his first arguments. The other: “All this seems to be happening so quickly.”