The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

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  Margarita could remember the sweet endearments whispered in Spanish coming from her mother and father’s bedroom at night, and that her Poppy had long ago made a decision about the language of Spanish in the household—it wasn’t that hearing it annoyed him, just that he thought the daughters would be better speaking his proper kind of English. But he was not a bully and often said nothing when their mother spoke with them. Once, when Margarita was six or seven, he had called out to her, a little sadly (or drunkenly): “You, come ’ere, won’t ya?” And when she did, nervously sitting beside him on a wicker chair on the porch, he told her, touching her face and brushing aside her bangs of thick black hair, “I’d been noticin’ lately that you’re always talking in Spanish, a fine language, and that’s all right with me, but so as you don’t get confused, I want you to know that I expect you to address me always in my tongue, and that’s English, you understan’? And that’s for your own good, ’cause in this country it’s been my observation that Spanish will be of little use to you, certainly useless as far as gainful employment and one day finding yourself a husband. I won’t snap your head off if I hear you speaking it, but just remember it might hurt my feelings to think that you aren’t respecting my wishes. And one more thing, darlin’, I’ve heard you chatting away in Spanish with Isabel and Maria, which is your business and fine with me, but don’t you ever think that you’ll be pulling a fast one in terms of secrecy around me, because I spent four years down in Cuba way learning to speak that language, and even though it hasn’t any value to me now, in this country, and except to talk with your mother sometimes when she doesn’t understand some things in English, I promise you that I can understand every single little word you say—so remember that.”

  — She Rarely Came Across—Anything from Cuba

  In that house, with its many cluttered rooms, they could sometimes sense that there was a great difference between their mother and their father, as if two atmospheres, one Irish and one Cuban, emanated from them. In that little upstairs room where their mother would sit and sew and think, there was a box, near a basket filled with spools of yarn and fabric bunting, in which she would keep letters from Cuba, and another box in which she kept a stereoscopic viewer and a cache of stereoscopic plates of nineteenth-century scenes from Cuba, which she had found for sale in a Philadelphia antique shop on a day when, in the spirit of imbuing a sense of patriotism and national history into the sisters, Nelson had taken the family to Independence Hall for a look at the cracked Liberty Bell (where, if the truth be told, after the day’s tour their Poppy had slipped out at night from their hotel suite, heading off to one of the three hundred or so speakeasies in the city). Later Mariela was enchanted with her discovery, for the stereoscopic viewer and slides, when held up to the window light, made those images—“A typical Cuban wagon, called a volante,” “Statue of Carlos III at the entrance to the Paseo de Carlos III, Havana, Cuba,” “Bridge spanning Canímar River,” “Slave posing in stocks,” “Sugarcane Harvest,” “Row of Royal Palms,” among many others—seem three-dimensional. Sometimes she would gaze through the viewer and with her eyes closed imagine, for example, that she was standing on the stone roman-arched bridge that crossed the Canímar River, birds chirping about her, lianas and trumpet flowers and bent palms, lovely and woolly-headed, reflecting in its water. And although she had access to the cartons of her husband’s photographs of her family taken in Cuba (among many subjects), there had been something beguiling about the discovery of such photographs in Philadelphia. During her days in Cobbleton, she rarely came across anything about Cuba: cigar ads in the windows of the tobacco shops; a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt posed in jodhpurs and his Rough Rider uniform, tassel-handled sabre in hand, a “Bully for me” expression staring out into the world, nicely framed in the post office; a few paragraphs in the school textbooks that her daughters would bring home, with references to the Spanish-American War, which from curiosity she would examine, the pen-and-ink drawing that had appeared on the front page of the New York Herald in 1898 of the battleship Maine exploding at night, as if struck by an immense comet; and in the geography book, Cuba grouped with all the other countries south of the border, its description warranting seventy-two words—she’d counted them one afternoon. And there were, of course, advertisements, especially after the First World War, that concentrated on the American tourist trade: “COME TO HAVANA AND YOU CAN BET ON A CUBAN-STYLE GOOD TIME!” And after 1919: “Forget about the Volstead Act in Cuba!” and on those same pages, usually in the Philadelphia papers, cruise schedules to Cuba out of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Miami, the Great White Line being most prominent. Its ads used an illustration of a towering, many-porthole steamship in New York Harbor, chimneys wafting perfectly circular smoke rings, and crowds below thronging to get aboard. And on the business pages, if she had looked, as did her husband, who owned some shares of Cuban—American Sugar, she would have found numerous stocks, the word Cuba in their listings: Cuban—British Rail Corporation, First National City Bank of Cuba, Cuban Electrical Inc., etc. When it came to music, she would hear a ragtime piece out the saloon doors, the “Cubanola Glide,” and never know that it was about Cuba, as it sounded like so many other rinky-dinky piano rags of that time, and in the days when Nelson had the house wired for electricity and purchased, like half of the country, their very own Atwater Kent superheterodyne crystal-radio set, she might cruise the stations and come across a performance of the Havana Symphony conducted by the composer Ernesto Lecuona, his splendid melodies borne on a spectrally guided wavelength, the music fading in and out, the voice of an announcer commenting from radio station CMCQ in Havana in a storm of staticky convolutions and atmospheric pops, as if spirits, capricious and loud, were gushing, whistling, and shuddering like the winds—the voice announcing the words “de la Habana, Cuba,” sounding as if it were coming from far away, as far away as the planet Mars.

  But that was all, for the most part, of Cuba for many years. She tried to keep the notion of it alive in her daughters, especially the oldest, describing to her with true sweetness the substance of her family’s life there before the war in 1895 had disrupted it, a serene petit-bourgeois life, her father Emilio Montez—after whom her only son, Emilio Montez O’Brien, would be named—being a farmer and merchant of sufficient means. He owned two farms and a stable in the city of Santiago, the farms razed to the ground during the war, the horses butchered for their meat by the Spaniards, the carriages “militarized” for use as transport, and the man and his family, who had once known a more or less comfortable existence, reduced in status and wealth. Her stories of her life in that household before the war, with her maids and laundresses and liveried carriages, and cooks in the kitchen, among so many other amenities (the pilfered furniture, the confiscated jewelry), sometimes lingered in the minds of the sisters, so that at night, when thinking about their mother and her past life, the life she had lived before any of them was born (“From the Darkness you had come, and to the Darkness you will go,” Margarita would think years later), they would feel certain changes taking place in the household. Even though they were living just off a road called Abelmyer, some few miles outside of a small Pennsylvania town, the notion of Cuba, like their own femininity, exerted a powerful pull. Sometimes at night they would think about their mother’s Cuba and they would have the sensation that the rooms of the house had been turned into a rain forest, that orchids were budding out of the walls, that lianas were hanging off the ceiling beams, that one could hear in the distance the ocean and smell the sea foam—all coming on waves of unconscious speculation, thoughts buzzing in the halls and floating through the doors and from mind to mind of each sleeping sister, arms wrapped about one another, the sisters flinching and breathing loudly—a sigh in the middle of the night—Cuba in the air, the atmosphere of a house in the tropics, sunlight glaring through the windows though it was the dead of darkness.

  There was also, at the same time, the Irish influence of their fath
er, which certain of the sisters, most particularly the younger ones, more closely identified with. It was a more understandable mystery, as they had very few ideas what Ireland was like. Though their father was not a talkative man, at least the nature of his language, English—they knew nothing of the Gaelic tongue—did not mystify them the way the Spanish spoken by the older sisters with their mother did, falling upon their ears like the nearly Babylonian chitchat of songbirds. The name O’Brien had been their main legacy, that and fair complexions and the freckles that burst over their faces in the spring and the blue eyes and the feeling that far away, in a distant land—not Cuba, however—there were others like themselves. It was a world far beyond, about which they knew nothing, the principles of its history, as with Cuba, reduced to a few names from schoolbooks, the most prominent being that of Parnell, and the lore of the place remembered by the shamrock and the talk of “the little people” and notes out of the books which would say things like “And it is said that if one kisses the Blarney Stone, then that person will be blessed by luck.” And they had those few visual clues as to what their father had left behind in Ireland—no photographs save for one, of a beautiful young woman, life brimming within her, kept on the wall in a gold-leaf oval frame, their Aunt Kate, Nelson’s sister, they’d been told, with whom their father had first traveled to America in 1896, and then there was that print, of a lovely house in an emerald meadow in the early-morning mist, the print captioned, “A house, Shannon, Ireland,” which the daughters had presented their Poppy for Christmas one year, 1922. Yes, the most glorious of Christmases in memory, more glorious than any of them would ever know as adults, the pine tree which their father cut down from the forest nearly a living, breathing creature, with magical powers, annually garlanded with colored beads and handmade ornaments and store-bought crystal angels and tulip-bulb candlelights—the tree, the fireplace, the table covered with pastries and other treats, a dream.

  — Sometimes His Spirits Were Low —

  Even during the days of his greatest success, when he’d come home with bags of caramels and teddy bears, his spirits sometimes sank so low that he would fade from view, as if he were willing himself away. He could sit in a room swarming with life—her sisters by the piano, or dancing before the Victrola to the scratchy recordings of Bix Beiderbecke and his Wolverine orchestra, or sewing dresses or making quilts and having the time of their lives gossiping, or at the center of the clamor of their meals—even amid the bustle of such activity, her Poppy managed to convey such loneliness that he often seemed a ghost who had happened by, to observe, from an unimaginable distance, the doings of life and earthly happiness beyond him. He’d always have to battle against his own worst instincts—as he truly did love this world, for all its flaws—and he would seek diversion, losing himself in his various hobbies. Having become a great appreciator of science, he had over the years accumulated, for his own amusement and the family’s, all kinds of projecting devices, magic lanterns and kinescopes, music boxes, Edison & Co. cylinder players, then wind-up phonographs, and then a number of electrically run devices, the most impressive being a simple house fan which helped to cool them off in the summers. He simply needed to remain busy: when he was not fiddling around in the shed that he had set up with his photography supplies behind the house, developing prints or simply sitting about reading manuals, he was out on the road looking for work, or else making his way to Philadelphia, where he would pick up some of the latest films from a distributor. And when he was not doing that, he dallied in bed upstairs with his wife, either snoring away or making love, for year by year the babies came into the world; and when he was not doing that, he would pass the time before the fireplace, contemplating the colorless, music-less world in which he sometimes lived.

  Publicly cheerful and exuberant, he was the kind of fellow to slap a man on the back with a greeting, or to commiserate sorrowfully at some bit of bad news. Many a customer and friend in the region where he traveled selling his goods or taking photographs was gladdened by the sight of this man, with his gallant manners and his colorful mode of dress, and he would often be seen in a brown derby whose brim he would decorate with pins of a patriotic nature: the Statue of Liberty, a wavering American flag, a World War I doughboy, bayonet raised and ready for action. Known in town for his cheerfulness, his happy “Good mornin’ to ya” and “Isn’t it a nice day,” and for his thick head of reddish-blond hair, his bristly and regal handlebar mustache, which he’d grown to help conceal a row of misaligned teeth, he moved through that world concealing not only the teeth but the true and private nature of his being, which the sisters knew. His personality, if it could be called that, was more of a construction based on the memories of a few kindly men he had known, cheery sorts, who, he’d noticed, attracted friends easily. And in his youth, despite his awkwardness—he could not dance, he would bump into chairs, and could not tell jokes well—he had decided that with strangers he would present himself as the most guileless, humble, and friendly man in the world. Such cheerfulness—the strain of digging down deep for the kind of sunniness that would endear him to others—often left him exhausted, and when he’d come home, a dog could mangle his trousers cuff and he would end up petting “the darlin’ little thing,” changing, it would seem to the fourteen sisters, the very nature of his face. By day, his face seemed wide open, accessible, jolly emotion in his blue eyes, his cheeks puffy with optimism; but when he opened the gate on the white picket fence and passed through the fanlighted entrance to his house, he seemed to become a severe-featured man, shadows forming under his eyes and the general drooping of his spirit tightening his jaw. Wrapped suddenly in a wiry anxiety, and never wanting to argue with or shout at his playful daughters, he would take refuge in silence, and as he had on many such evenings over the passing years, he would ask himself about the progression of his life, thick with emotions, doubts, and love. That he had so many daughters both delighted and troubled him, for he had always wanted a son, and although he bounced his youngest girls on his knee, he could never, for the life of him, look them in the eyes with a glance or expression that said “Everything will be all right,” or that he was completely content with their sometimes overwhelming femininity.

  — Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener —

  Oblivious to the cause of his suffering, he would take a sip of his evening tonic, the curative potion called Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener, a dark, syrupy liquid which came in a curvaceous amber bottle and whose ingredients were listed on the label in a diminutive curlicue script as “sugar, Persian tar, honey, Arabian and Persian opiates and other miracle tonics.” Two tin cups of this drink had been his nightly companions, “his little friend in time of need,” since 1912, when, on a chilled and disheartening afternoon, he had first sampled its health-restoring and cheering properties. On that day, while driving his Model T Ford along a country road, its trunk filled with the household goods and medicines that, as a sideline, he peddled to farmers, torpid factory workers, and townspeople, he came down with a shortness of breath, a fierce burning pain in the back of his neck, and a severe case of spiritual dropsy that left him feeling a terrible sadness about life. Later the sight of a crippled sparrow struggling along the side of the road, its beaked head gasping for air, startled him and he pulled over to the side and, in the drizzly gray of the day, tried to revive the bird in the warm palms of his hands. When the bird continued to shake and then stopped, because it had died or was too frightened to move, he tossed the poor bird aside and threw open the heavy copper-hinged trunk that he kept on the back seat, and began to search for something to lift his flagging spirits. That day he pulled out an amber-colored bottle of Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener, cautiously swallowing three mouthfuls and feeling skeptical as he did so. But soon his skepticism faded, as the medicine did indeed begin to lift his troubled male spirit, and soon he was back on the road, impressed by the potion. As the label claimed, his aches had faded and his feeling of “life fatigue” lifted away, turni
ng into an appreciation for the vastness and diversity of God’s good universe. The cold drizzle seemed suddenly to fall in sanctified sheets of wavery angel hair, and the plump bottomed clouds, which had seemed thready with darkness, were now livid with veins of silver light. Suddenly the prospect of knocking on a poor farmer’s door with the intent of selling him an item he might not necessarily need did not trouble him. In fact, that afternoon he was the grandest salesman who had ever lived. Friendly, open-eyed, and with his Irish brogue charmingly garrulous, he sold a set of silverware, a mandolin, a pair of boots, and much, much medicine. In a celebratory mood, he later took a few more swallows of that potion and decided to buy himself a twenty-four-bottle case of the relaxation heightener, and did so every six months or so, continuing to enjoy its salubrious effects, until 1938, when the manufacturer went out of business and those magic bottles were never seen again.

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  And she remembered the winter day during the Great War when her Poppy told her about the circumstances that had brought him, many years before, to Cuba, and the commencement of his love with her mother. That had been on a day when a storm had moved westward across the Delaware River and swept over their county, bringing much snow. It had first appeared as a bottom-heavy mist of clouds against the sylvan skies, and within a few hours the temperature had so dropped that a bluish ice had started to form on the pond at the edge of their property, tree branches sprouted tubes and nodules of ice, and the inside of the windowpanes became so frosted over that one could write a name on them with a finger. Cold enough that the sisters wore mufflers and gloves inside the house and they thanked God that in the corner of the toilet room there sat a potbellied wood-burning stove.