The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

  She was telling herself, Blessed are the children of this world, and slipping into a sweet 1920s you-will-live-forever sleep, when she heard the crash of a porcelain lamp in the living room; then the breaking of glass. When she went into the room, she found the boy tearing to pieces one of her favorite photographs of herself and Maria, from the 1940s. Compassion was a great rule of hers, and so, without anger, she asked him why he pushed that lamp off the table and why with a single swipe of his hand he had sent many framed photographs flying to the floor. And because he told her, “I’m afraid of the dark,” she spent the next few hours sitting in a rocking chair beside the sofabed, the boy asleep and her own thoughts drifting.

  It was around three in the morning when the police arrived, with the boy’s mother, drunk and agitated and shouting about how some old bag had kidnapped her baby. The officers, sympathetic to Margarita, tried to calm the boy’s mother down, and in the end, after the mother had threatened to prosecute Margarita for the abduction of a minor, and the poor child had been taken away in the sheriff’s car, into the oblivion of his future—his mother repeating, “Goddamnit, boy, don’t you know I love you!”—the deputy made it a point to tell the librarian, “Listen, I see this kind of thing all the time. She’s drunk and she’ll cool off by tomorrow, and for another, I don’t think there’s anyone who would fault you for your kindness. But for your own good, in the future I would keep my nose out of other people’s business. Now good night, Miss O’Brien, and Merry Christmas.”

  ***

  (On the other hand, she would remember another incident involving the folding sofabed, when one of Helen’s grandsons, a boy of about seventeen, traveling to New York from his first year in college in Massachusetts, stopped by New Elm to visit his nice Great-aunt Margarita. He called her from a service station on the highway, asking if he could spend the night. “Of course, my dear Edward. Of course, you can.” But when he showed up at her door, he was in the company of a girlfriend whose presence surprised her. “Is it okay if we sack out together?” he’d asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But do be quiet.”

  Bed noises kept her alert that night, and in the morning, when she was accustomed to the happy chirping of birds and the distant hum of a bread or newspaper vehicle on the quiet streets, she had gone downstairs to the kitchen and heard distinctively sexual sounds. Standing in the hallway, she had the impression that if she walked straight down the hall another five or six feet and peered into the living room she would catch these children in some act of unbecoming behavior. But she cleared her throat and closed the kitchen door with a slam, so they would know she was there. And then, in her determination not to meddle, she took a long shower.)

  ***

  In those days, she organized some of her mother’s better poems into a kind of chapbook, finding a Hartford vanity publisher to put them together in a volume of some hundred pages, her mother’s poetry appearing in the original Spanish on one page and on the next translated (as best as she could manage) by Margarita. Three hundred copies of this book, which she’d titled Happiness Consumes Me, As If in a Song, by Mariela Montez O’Brien, were printed, and one Christmas, late in her life, Margarita had the pleasure of opening a UPS package of these books, the ink smelling good and the tidy print making each book look like the work of a consummate professional. She had one good friend in the town of New Elm, a Puerto Rican woman named Lupe whom she’d met at the senior citizens’ aerobic class in town, a sprightly and rambunctious woman in her early seventies, plump and given to wearing too-tight clothes. As she unwrapped the package and withdrew the first book, she decided to give the first copy to her friend—Margarita writing on the title page, “From Margarita (and her mother, Mariela), with love and felicitations for my friend Lupe.”

  She mailed a copy of the book to each member of the family. In California, Emilio received it and sat out on the patio of his house reading it carefully, his eyes darting between the Spanish, which he could still barely understand, and the translations on the opposite page. His mother’s soul, it seemed to him, was filled with love: religious and mystical, and ever aware of the niceties of life. He was happy, by God, so happy that he wanted a drink, under whose influence he would better appreciate and imagine her presence, but he resisted. In the living room of his house—it was 1988 or 1989—were the thirty-eight-year-old woman (he was in his sixties then) and her little daughter who had moved in with him. A happy story: In the way that the family’s history seemed to repeat itself, Emilio Montez O’Brien, former movie star, and photographer in the mold of his father, had been sitting in his shop one afternoon, waiting for clients, the way his father had so many years before in Cuba. He would leave most portraits to a staff of assistants, but when this woman walked in with her daughter, Emilio happened to be there.

  “And what is your name?”

  “Diana Rebolt.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Well, I used to be in the business. But I’ve got my daughter, see. It’s her eighth birthday, and I thought—”

  “Yes?”

  “—that I would bring her in.”

  “And?” he said, playing with the lens.

  “Here we are.”

  “Well, very good, very good, indeed.”

  Emilio took their portrait and the next day he delivered the photographs to her house, near Newport Beach. After so many years of being complacent about the opposite sex, dates here and there, he felt delighted by her.

  “You seem very familiar to me,” she had said to him. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  “If you watch bad movies on TV, you have.”

  And he stayed all afternoon, telling her about his film career—his greatest performances, he said, coming in the long-forgotten Father Byrne pictures. (One night he’d noticed that his first Father Byrne film was going to be played on the nostalgia channel, and he called her. She watched him as a handsome and noble priest, and decided he was good, and at midnight she called him back, saying, “You were wonderful.”)

  He dated her for a year, and as he grew attached to the little girl, it was not long before Emilio, happy in his old age, asked them to move into his bungalow, and when they did, a powerful domestic bliss came over him.

  ***

  Margarita tried to place her father’s more historical photographs with universities. Certainly, they were of historic value, at the very least. In her spare time she wrote letters to many a university and college, the letters of response saying that, while the copies of the photographs were generally “most interesting,” the Spanish-American War was “much tilled” territory.

  No, thank you, they said, the oldest daughter of Nelson O’Brien lowering her head.

  — Her Prospects for Marriage —

  “Why is it that you don’t get married again?” her friend Lupe used to ask Margarita. “Don’t forget that you’re young, so what if you’re ninety, you still look like a young chick. And let’s face it, old age can be a terrible time for a woman to be without a man. Who knows? Maybe the fellow would be amusing, and you’d have someone to go to the movies with, do things like that. You know, Margarita, I’m not going to be around to keep you company forever. Why not think about it? I’m sure there are plenty of widowers out there who would love to be with a beautiful woman like you.”

  Lupe to Margarita, in 1992.

  ***

  She was sometimes tempted to wear a short skirt, like the young girls at the local mall, or a loop-ringed zippered skirt, and once, strikingly out of fashion, she put on a pair of go-go boots and fishnet stockings, which she used mainly to disguise her varicose veins. But one look into the mirror made her feel so undignified that from that day on she decided to accept the simple elegance of her old age, wearing senior-cut dresses and flowery blouses.

  ***

  When Luis died those many years before, she told herself that another love affair was out of the question—even if Lupe, ever exuberant, advocated a late-life love (“Look, th
at handsome old man is staring at you”). Besides, she had relished her own free time. Being the oldest of the fourteen sisters, she wanted to become a bon-vivant duchess of the Old World, one of those highborn ladies about whom she had read (with envy) since childhood, finding comfort and enlivening her own daily routine with the memories of her trips to Spain and Italy. At the same time, a sadness would come over her as she realized that there was not too much time left in her life.

  Resigned to the steady unfolding of her days, she made one more trip, at the age of eighty-eight, which to her mind was going to be epic and revealing, a trip to Ireland, the land of her father. But by then she’d started to have trouble getting around and, despite the nimbleness of her mind, decided to depend on a tour. What she wanted was to travel over with one of her sisters, Maria perhaps, or with her brother, Emilio. She called him to suggest this, but her brother at the time was deeply in love and preoccupied with his new romance—thank God—and he turned her down. And Maria, with engagements here and there, said, “Let’s wait a few months.”

  So she signed on with a tour, and as her plane arrived over Shannon, in the west of Ireland, descending toward the marshy flatlands, she told herself, as if approaching a sacred altar, that she would kiss the ground. But when the airplane landed, she emerged into a terminal that resembled a shopping mall, the tour guide waving a green flag: “Now stick with me, will you.”

  After an hour to shop in the airport stores, they were led onto a bus.

  Bunratty Castle and Limerick were their first two stops, and then they made their way into the interior, past Tipperary, into the midlands. As the tour bus drove them along the countryside with its many bogs and streams and canals, pastures and farmlands, Margarita, looking out through the window, daydreamed about her father’s life many years before, the sight of a young man on the road, cap pulled low over his brow, inspiring in her a vision of her father as a young man, and she nearly cried. On their third day out, toward dusk, with heavy clouds hanging low in the sky and a storm imminent, they came to an inn, its walls musky and old, in the town of Kilbeggan, where they settled for the night. A few troubadours sang to the group before their meal, and though she hardly ate her food, a steaming plate of stew, she allowed herself the pleasure of drinking three mugs of Irish ale, which put her in a happy and relaxed state of mind. Later she retired to a room that she shared with sweet Mary Dolan, from Boston, and although the thunderclaps and heavy downpour and flashes of lightning lasted through the night, Margarita—or Meg, as her father sometimes called her—settled peacefully into her bed.

  Tucked under a blanket, warm and comfortable, Margarita closed her eyes, every so often opening them, as if she would see on the wall a message from her father that would tell her just what she should be feeling on her visit to the land of his birth. She liked the Irish people, linking them to the Spaniards, for they and the Irish had raided and interbred with each other for centuries. She liked the openness of their faces, but she did not like Mary Dolan’s snoring. She liked the fact that the Irish were in her blood and reflected in her blue eyes, still so clear after so many years. She waited that night, as she would on all the other nights of her trip, to feel the spirit of Ireland flow into her.

  However, she’d had a sweet dream in which she saw her father. He was sitting in the corner of the room, old and tired-looking, in a derby and bow tie and stiff waistcoat, scraping a piece of wood against the mud-caked exteriors of his boot. Now and then he would look over at her and smile, his crooked teeth showing. And while she thought him part of a dream, when he whispered “Meggy” and then smiled again, that had been enough to make her get up in the middle of the night and, at eighty-eight years of age, ask, “Poppy, where have you been?”

  And he told her, “Purgatory.”

  “Is it terrible?”

  “Well,” he said, “it rains fire constantly. And there are fierce animals to be wary of. They’ll bite off your limbs if you’re not careful. And you always have a terrible thirst. And one more thing, you can’t take photographs. Yet you don’t mind it at all, the way you do on earth, because you know that one day you’ll be leaving for a better place.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  And like a character in an old superstitious tale, he told her, “I’m here because you’re dreaming about me. Your love has brought me to you.”

  “Poppy, I do love you, I always will.”

  And she blinked and, just like that, he faded away.

  It had been a wishful dream, for she did not recall telling him, while he was alive, how much she loved him, during the many years of his life.

  No unusual incidents after that. The storm faded by mid-morning. For eight more days, on the bus touring the rest of Ireland—down around the Ring of Kerry to Glengarriff, over the treacherous Connor Pass, and around the beautiful West Cork area and back—she continued to dream about her father. And again and again, while gazing out the bus window, her partner for the trip, Mary Dolan, sitting beside her, found herself feeling a certain emotion. For all the Irish beer mugs, all the T-shirts and sweatshirts with Celtic-lettered “Ireland” logos, for all the Blarney Stone key rings and St. Patrick’s medallions that she would buy as souvenirs for the children of the family, and for all the times she had felt some satisfaction overhearing Gaelic (wondering if her father knew that language), she could not look on a simple scene—a young man passing on the road with his daughter, a woman beating a rug in her yard, a farmer shepherding his sheep, a country priest walking with his hound—without thinking of her father, and his early life, Irish, the mysteries which separated them.

  — With Lupe —

  Sometimes she’d get dressed up and with her friend Lupe go off to the local college to attend lectures, readings, and the occasional cocktail party. She made friends at these gatherings, one of whom was a certain Professor Perkins, a retired linguist, who could drift effortlessly from Castilian Spanish to Catalan, French, Italian, or Latin. They’d have dinner together, from time to time, Lupe coming along, the drift of their conversation eluding her. Mainly they’d talk about the past, say about Roman times, and how, for example, one could fly to Italy, take a train out of Rome, toward Brindisi, and have lunch and drink Chianti in Sulmona, where the poet Ovid had lived. And there were the parties, much crowded with professors and intellectuals, some unhappy and some ecstatic about their lives, that would enchant Margarita but bore Lupe, everyone behaving cordially and some, drunk with wine, eventually pouring their hearts and minds out. She’d remember one conversation about Cuba, in which a certain professor, a Bohemian-looking fellow named Malcolm Ives, went on and on about the glories of the revolution. He tended to describe the Cubans who’d left the island as socially irresponsible, cowardly, and rigidly opposed to the “noble experiment,” as he called it. (On one of those occasions, the erudite Professor Perkins, overhearing the conversation, joined them, observing that a nineteenth-century slogan among the Cubans of the independista movement had been “Siempre fidelísim” or “Forever faithful,” adding that it was now “Siempre Fidel.”)

  Although Margarita had some interest in what was going on in Cuba—because of how it had affected Isabel and Luis—she was split in her opinions and could never really believe that the changes over which Mr. Castro presided were for the good. She found it nearly impossible to let go of the version of Cuba that she constructed out of her mother’s memory and the few brief (and now) distant glimpses she had nurtured over the years, so it came down to a simple emotion, a wish that people not be hurt. And at those parties she would learn about the books of Latin America—the novels of García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Cabrera Infante, and José Lezama Lima, among many others, that she might read.

  And her good friend Lupe? She would endure those evenings and signal their end by yawning and by patting her lips as if she were an Indian out of the movies.

  — In New York, Late in Her Life —

  During her visits with her sisters in New York, she someti
mes caught the eye of an elderly man while strolling in a museum with Helen or shopping in Bloomingdale’s (which her mother, the humble Cuban immigrant, had liked in her later years, when she blossomed after the death of her husband), but she found it a little cheap to strike up an acquaintance, at her age, with a stranger.

  (That did not stop her, some evenings, from resting her body in the tub and daydreaming about the days when a man would possess her and she would feel a certain terror and elation.)

  She’d travel to New York mainly to see the family—nothing more complicated than that—and was always happy, after the heavy schedule of visits and dinners and arguments and laughs and moments of complete boredom, to get back home.

  When she stayed with Helen on Park Avenue, things were better. She’d have her own bedroom and Helen, always out to impress her oldest sister, would treat her to operas and Broadway shows. Afterward they would come back to her quiet and roomy apartment, its walls covered with gilt-framed paintings from nineteenth-century England (“Those days of the fox hunt, how I envy the men who lived in that time,” she’d once heard Helen’s husband say), the furniture thin-legged and impeccable. The evenings would end in the quietude of the pantry, where they would sit having coffee and Hungarian pastries, and Helen, happily entranced with her sister’s companionship, would overcome her troubles.

  She’d remember one night when Helen’s husband was away on a business trip and she accompanied Helen into her bedroom. It was a long walk from the living room, down two hallways and through many french doors, past countless fireplaces and pleasantly arranged chintz furniture, on and on, to the great bedroom, with its many-curtained windows, which looked out on a garden fitted with timers so as to light up the evenings like the sun. They spent the night together, Margarita hugging her and feeling for the solitude of her sister and Helen desperate for the days of the past, saying, “Sister, can you remember how noisy our house used to be?”