The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Quickly! I’ve been waiting forever, and you say it’s happening quickly?”

  She was so adamant that Arnold finally agreed to take another, more comfortable, well-lit apartment a few blocks south of where the Chanteuses lived. Arnold should have been happy in their new life, for they could frolic in bed and do exactly as they pleased, but he would head back to Canarsie after work, on the pretense of clearing out things, to spend the evenings listening to his mother’s old Benny Goodman records, and he would work himself into such a state that he would be unable to move. On each of these nights, he would come back with shopping bags filled with his mother’s records and with the little bric-a-brac that she used to decorate her apartment with—porcelain hounds and glass animals and photograph albums of Arnold and his mother posed in the park and out at Atlantic City, and her favorite cushions and dishware and coffee mugs, and some of the linens from their cluttered closets, among many other things. He brought home so many of his mother’s possessions that the new apartment became gloomy with her presence.

  Arnold began to reveal his nocturnal proclivities—remember that before their marriage Gloria had not slept a single night with the man. He tended to sigh and wake up in the middle of the night, a lost expression on his face. Devastated, he would sit in the living room by the window in the dark, as if he felt ashamed to sleep beside his new wife, and he would remain there until Gloria got up and brought him back to bed. This went on for months, until Gloria, on the verge of walking out, called her oldest sister, Margarita, in New Elm, pouring her heart out and relating the oddness of her marital circumstances.

  Listening attentively, Margarita said, “Oh, my darling sister, you must be strong. You cannot allow your timidity to overwhelm you. Arnold is a good man—you realize that. Only remember that he has just lost his mother, and, like all mothers, she was a powerful woman. Remember how we all dreamed about Mama after she died, when her spirit was very strong.”

  “Yes?”

  “What you must do, mi vida, will be difficult. He must get rid of the apartment in Canarsie, even if it only costs sixty-three dollars a month. And you cannot allow him to bring any more of her things into your home. If he objects, you must be prepared to leave him, because if it goes on in this way, he’ll just get worse and worse. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sister.”

  “And do not be afraid, because you will always have your family.”

  That very evening, with Arnold out of the apartment, Gloria resolved to stand up to him, a necessity that made her feel nervous, as she loved the man and did not want to lose him. But when he came home later that night, she was already in bed and dreaming. She’d never met his mother, and knew her only from photographs; yet she dreamed that Arnold’s mother was sitting in the living room, and when she got up, she saw his mother’s ghost as a young and pretty woman in a dotted 1930s dress, hitching up a young boy’s trousers and covering his face with kisses, and that woman, noticing Gloria’s presence, looked up and said, “He was the love of my life.” And that was all, for she then felt the weight of Arnold’s body on the bed beside her, and waking, she told him about the dream and he told her that he had been having many dreams about his mother but that lately her presence was becoming fainter and fainter in those dreams. That night, while going through her effects in Canarsie, he’d felt such gloom that he’d told himself, “This has got to stop.”

  And with the resolve of a new husband living in this world, Arnold said: “Listen, I know it’s time to move on.”

  And he left the shadows of mourning and not only promised Gloria that he would get rid of the Canarsie apartment but pledged himself to the rejuvenation of their flagging love.

  — My God, How the World—Had Changed

  In those days, Margarita Montez O’Brien liked to pass her time reading magazine articles about the advances of women in the world and was most pleased to see reports of their progress. Women were coming forward, making more money, getting better jobs. Divorce was up—she knew that. She would read long arguments about abortion—a great subject of national debate when she was nearly ninety—and quite simply thought the debate foolish. Life was beautiful, and it might be said that a soul was spontaneously generated at the moment when the male sperm fertilized the female ovum. But she doubted very much that the politicians could even conceive of a soul, few, in her opinion, having souls of their own. The body and soul moving through life, their felicity, was what counted, and as far as she was concerned, there were too many lost souls in the world. She had come to believe in destiny, not cruelty, and certainly not in the murder of unborn children, but she knew that many, many children came into the world despite the benevolence of the Lord, to live out miserable lives.

  Religious, she would tell herself that God had inspired the decisions that a woman took to—and she hated the word—abort a child.

  And if compassion was the guiding spirit behind those marchers protesting the existence of abortion clinics, such as she would see on television, why were they not out protesting the destitution of the poor and hungry, who, in recent years, were everywhere? And much worse off than she had ever observed during the Depression—for those hoboes always seemed to have some inkling of hope for the future, she thought, a sense that things would get better. (In New York, while walking down Broadway to see a show in 1933, Maxwell Anderson’s Both Your Houses, she would see gentlemen, dressed in suits and ties, selling pencils or apples on every corner, fellows who would ask the more prosperous for a line on a job. And during a stroll through Central Park’s Sheep Meadow she’d seen a shantytown of makeshift crate and burlap and cardboard dwellings, and many unfortunates living there, but there were also soup kitchens in every church, in every Salvation Army storefront, and the Red Cross would set up a tent near Columbus Circle, among other locations, to look after the poor. Hooverville shantytowns were everywhere—she would see them in the countryside—but those poor, she would tell herself, did have hope.)

  Look at Veronica, who ended up marrying a “hobo,” now a prosperous man in Illinois, if no longer her husband.

  On a recent trip to visit her sisters in New York, she had watched a man staring at a beautiful girl walking down Broadway near Seventy-eighth Street, her body quivery in tight clothes, and the man shouting, “I can’t take it anymore!” And as he undid his trousers Margarita and Maria both thought he was exposing himself to masturbate an ardent erection (Maria had looked away), but the man crouched down with his underwear around his ankles and relieved himself in the middle of that crowded thoroughfare. And it seemed that she could not walk ten feet along a street without having some beggar ask her for change (she always gave). In her more pensive moments, it would occur to her that cities like New York were quite akin to the English cities of the Industrial Revolution, the sweatshop-filled, corrupt, waif-ridden London that Charles Dickens, whom she much admired, had written about. Where was the compassion for these people, bereft of any confidence about life?

  Speaking of Charles Dickens, she once expressed a rare criticism of her sister Irene back in 1985, during a Christmas visit. Irene and her husband had brought three children into the world, two boys and a girl, and they in turn married and brought eight more into this life. At the time of Margarita’s visit, they were all gathered in the house and greeted their Aunt Margarita with much love. And one night, after a grand meal, they sat down before the television to watch A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim. They had all cried over poor Tiny Tim’s plight and been outraged over Ebenezer Scrooge’s unwillingness to help, and, later, delighted when Scrooge, having experienced the visitation of three spirits, changed, becoming the most benevolent of men, they cried again. Then Irene, sniffling still, watched another program in which President Reagan had announced, for the sake of the country, further cutbacks in social programs, which Irene and her husband applauded.

  “Irene,” Margarita asked, “how can you be so sorrowful about Tiny Tim, in a movie, and then accept what this President is t
elling everyone? He is Scrooge at his worst, and yet you sit there nodding in agreement. Really, I’m surprised at you.”

  And Irene, who loved Margarita very much and who could not recall a single argument with her, countered: “Are you saying, sister, that the world is the same now as it was back then, and that we, the common people of this country, should pretend that we’re all so rich that we can take care of everyone? Back then, at the time of the story, poor people like Tiny Tim didn’t ask a penny of anyone, while now all the people who don’t want to work ask for everything. It’s not the same. As Mama used to say, sister, ‘If you work in this country, you can have anything you want!’”

  And she turned to her husband, waiting for his nod.

  “Furthermore,” she added, “that was just a movie. And even though I don’t know very much about Charles Dickens, I bet if he were alive today he would not be going around giving his money away. He was rich, and rich people are cheap, as you know, sister, and the point of that story, which makes everybody so sad, is that it would be a much nicer world if rich people weren’t so stingy, but that’s no reason for people like us to have to pay. All the President said is that things have gotten to the point where charity and giving all our tax money away doesn’t change a single thing. You think I wouldn’t give money to help a poor little boy like Tiny Tim? I would. But do you think that I would if Tiny Tim turned out to be a fake? That’s what he’s saying, there are too many fake Tiny Tims running around, and it’s about time we took stock of that.”

  “Oh, sister,” Margarita said, shaking her head. “Oh, sister.”

  — In the Library —

  She would always think about the children at the library, children in the thick of a new life, boys in striped turtlenecks and football sweaters, girls in neat, creaseless dresses, with their countless questions about the world, lying about on the carpeting and on cushions as she would read aloud to them.

  She took this job on a volunteer basis in 1987, four days a week, her hours ten to six. It was a peaceful place, filled with the radiance of sunlight in the spring, a refuge from the cold in the winters. And there were books everywhere. When the library was empty, she would pass the time reading, her taste leaning toward history and biography, especially about women. She was particularly fond of Lytton Strachey, his Elizabeth and Essex, Queen Victoria, and Eminent Victorians among her favorites. But she also read with great pleasure the heartbreaking Mary, Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser, and the lives of many others, Virginia Woolf, the poor thing, and Emily Dickinson, Amelia Earhart, and Madame Curie. Sometimes she would linger by the classical section, which existed because a retired professor of archaeology from one of the nearby Connecticut colleges bequeathed to the New Elm library his dog-eared editions of Martial, Seneca, and Plutarch—his many-volume Lives of Noble Romans taking up a shelf unto themselves—books that with their cradle-to-grave narratives always left her with the impression of having drifted through time. In the summer, locking up the library and walking on the street toward her car, Margarita experienced moments when she would look off into the brilliant sunlight and see in the elongating shadows of people in the distance the intimations of human life in a place like ancient Rome, or, for that matter, like Cuba, where her mother was born.

  Tending to paperwork and returns, or sometimes reading, she looked forward to the arrival of the tots, little children left in the care of the elegant elderly lady. With her slackened and drooping neck and her heavily veined hands, she may sometimes have frightened them, or perhaps she suggested to them an ancient queen or an enchantress or a witch, though a good one, with kindly eyes, who could, with the wave of a wand, turn straw into gold, or awaken from a deep sleep of a hundred years the subject of a spell. She must have seemed beyond this world, though she wasn’t, walking in some field of their imagination and biding her time among the angels and the flowers.

  When they left with their mothers, she would search the shelves for books to read to them the next day: Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, and Little Nemo in Slumberland, The Little Prince, Charlotte’s Web, and Babar, among so many others. But her favorite was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  That book always fascinated her, perhaps because it was one of the first stories she had ever read, or simply because it brought back her memories of those days so long ago when she was a young pupil, with an Irish father and a Cuban mother, at Miss Peterson’s school in their town of Cobbleton, Pennsylvania.

  There was a day Margarita would always think about. It was mid-morning in Miss Peterson’s school, the fall of 1910, and she, eight years old, was up in front of the room, before the teacher’s desk, nervously facing her classmates. The children were taking turns reading selections from their favorite books. Of course, the children were cruel, for as soon as Margarita, one of “those girls from up the road,” said, in a halting manner, “I’m going to read from Alice in Wonderland,” that wondrous book in her hand, some of her classmates laughed. And her face turned red and she began to feel weak in the knees and wanted to run away: but that was not Margarita Montez O’Brien.

  Wanting to do her classmates one better, she’d put aside the book and started again: “I’m going to read from Alice in Wonderland, but I’m not going to use the book.”

  Having committed the first chapter, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” to memory, she recited it without a pause. In her early confusion with language, she drew some laughter with her mispronunciation of certain words—mangling, for example, “curtseying,” which she confused with “courteousling,” or saying “thoomp! thoomp!” for “thump! thump!” and tripping over others. But as her recitation continued for what to a child was an epic length of time, ten minutes or so, she began to impress even the brattier and unkinder of her classmates. They quieted down and applauded her, along with the rest. Miss Peterson gave her a little box of gum-backed golden stars—most children received only one star—and an apple, telling her, “This is for being such an intelligent little girl.” That afternoon she walked home with a row of stars stuck triumphantly on her pensive and delighted brow. She had devoured the apple.

  — Blessed Are the Children —

  One afternoon a week she tried to teach the children Spanish, if they were so inclined, and another she set aside for the young children of New Elm who spoke only Spanish, reading stories first in English and then in translation. Grateful mothers were always bringing her gifts and inviting her into their homes, “the poor old woman” always in their thoughts.

  Her favorite season was Christmas. She would teach the children to cut out silhouettes for a mural, something she had learned from her mother’s friend the butler García many years before, and she presided over the children’s decoration of the tree with homemade or store-bought ornaments, these gatherings of boys and girls reminiscent of Christmases in the house of her youth. And it pleased her that the children of New Elm were for the most part happy, though every so often there would be a child hopelessly entangled in the problems of his home.

  Of Margarita’s kids, there was one boy, a runny-nosed, nervous child of seven or eight, Billy, who already possessed an air of disappointment about life. His mother would leave him in the library a few times a week, to get rid of him for the day, usually because she had gotten up too late and didn’t want to put herself through the embarrassment of taking him to school. “Now, you sit there and learn something,” she’d tell him. And to Margarita: “I’ll pick him up before closing.” Then, his mother gone, he would sit quietly in the children’s room, waiting for the elderly librarian to bring him candy (she did) and to call him over by her desk, where she would read him a story or try to show him how to cut out a silhouette, the boy working aimlessly until he started to shred the paper.

  The poor child; she knew that something terrible was happening to him—what, she could not say. But she did know that his mother was out of work, on welfare, and that when she came back to get him around closing time, she was often drunk.

  T
hinking about those days, she would recall two occasions around Christmas when the boy’s mother did not return. The first time—it was late November—she had waited until seven, and then, uncertain about what to do, she called the sheriff’s office, where the kid, trembling and crying, ended up spending the night on a cot. The next morning, unable to imagine how anyone could leave a child alone, she called the Social Services department of the town, asking that they look into the boy’s life, but they said that with the hard economic times and cutbacks and such, they were short-staffed, and besides, the boy’s mother was within her legal rights as long as there was no evidence of physical abuse. “Yes,” Margarita replied. “But I can see by the way the boy carries himself, and by his sad expression, that he’s not being cared for properly. Something should be done, don’t you think?”

  And Miss Jenkins, the Social Services representative, sympathetic but a little jaded, answered, “Yes, but what?”

  On the second occasion, a week before Christmas, a heavy snow was falling over New Elm and Margarita, with the boy by her side, waited in the library again until seven, but that time, instead of taking him to the sheriff’s office, and after many unanswered calls to the boy’s mother, she decided to bring him home with her, ordering in some Chinese food and letting him sit in front of the television to watch an old movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Then she scooted him into the shower and put fresh sheets and warm blankets on her living-room sofabed, and later, wishing him the best in life, she bid this somber boy a good night.