The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

“It’s beautiful,” he had cried those years ago. “Beautiful.”

  AN UNEXPECTED LOVE

  — A 1923 Romance —

  Two Years had passed since Margarita had made the short-lived acquaintance of the aviator, and she was walking along the main street of Cobbleton toward the movie house one day when she noticed that a new store, something big like a five-and-dime but which would sell fancier items, was moving into town, taking over the space that had once been Collier’s stable, a store so large that its windows were brought in on logger’s trucks and a crane had to be rigged to lift them out and lower them into place. For weeks, trucks had brought in all manner of fancy and mysterious-looking merchandise. Shiny new counters were set up, and in short order “Help for Hire” notices were posted and soon the young ladies of the town were lining up for sales-clerk positions.

  By that time, the last of the fourteen sisters, frail Gloria, had been born, and Margarita had grown a little wary of crying infants. So many years of being around them, most of her life, and too many hours of reading travel brochures and romantic magazine stories as well as all her favorite books, including her mother’s more difficult one about life on the planet Mars, had brought her to the point where she wanted a change. In the last several years, she had become something of a flapper, and although she was a little too heavy for that fashion, her alluring voluptuousness, quivery in the silver-sequined skirts that worried her parents, attracted enough attention from young men that she thought herself quite successful. At the same time, she had started to confuse a certain bearing, a cultivated air, with haughtiness. She believed that if a young woman like herself was to find happiness, it would be through the cultivation of what charm schools would call a ladylike perfection. She was quite attractive in her own way, despite the liability of her Cuban looks, but she fretted about her appearance. Some days, she would detest the tint of her skin, the curliness of her hair, and spend hours before the mirror searching out the little moles that were the evidence of her imperfection. Wishing that she could cut away those little slips of nature, she would become so moody that not even the invigorating prose of a good book would remind her there was much more to her than what men might find winsome and enchanting.

  Like any young woman with an interest in joining the world, she had sought to improve herself and one day began to read The Ladies’ Home Companion, coming across a most persuasive advertisement for a book entitled Lady Esther de Beauville’s Encyclopedia of Etiquette. It cost one dollar and the day it arrived, some two weeks later, she focused her energies anew, studying the book as if it contained a remedy for her feelings of feminine and immigrant inferiority. With great eagerness she read about the proper posture, how to hold one’s head, and, to her shock, she learned that it was no longer improper for a young lady to shave her legs—hers bristled with matted black hair and that very afternoon she hid herself in their bathroom, covered her legs with her father’s lathery shaving cream and, with his straight razor, a bottle of disinfectant, tincture of arnica at the ready, carefully shaved herself from ankle to upper thigh. Then she plucked a few stray hairs from between her eyebrows, covered her face with a cold-cream treatment, and hid in her bedroom for hours, waiting for beautification.

  There was also an unrevised section in that book about the pursuit of romance, which seemed, in Margarita’s opinion, to hark back to more innocent days of courtship, the 1880s, when the first edition had been written. She had laughed, reading that the way a young lady might properly make the acquaintance of a man was to signal her interest by dropping a handkerchief behind her, a handkerchief that had been doused with a few drops of a fragrant eau de toilette; or one could signal a prospective suitor with a fan, clapping the fan open before one’s face and then closing it slowly, smiling. As to clothing, she read: “A lady should be reminded that the less one reveals, the more alluring she becomes.”

  This, as a young woman, she did not agree with, as she wanted, despite her bookishness, to become fashionable like the modern youth of the day and sometimes lamented that her own female splendor—the roundness of her hips and fullness of her bosom—excluded her from many of the tomboyish, sleeveless, tassel-hemmed dresses that the flappers in magazines and silent films wore. And though these models, thin and wiry, seemed the opposite of herself, she decided to make her own fashionable dresses, taking the patterns from magazines. She got herself a cloche hat, and shocked the household one day when she marched into a beauty salon and had the beautician pare away the lovely mane of black curly hair that for many years had reached down past her shoulders, affecting what was then called a bob hairdo, with bangs that fell to just below her brows, that cut continuing along the contours of her head, so that its shape resembled a helmet. It was a long time before the family liked it. Her mother, Mariela, whose own hair was long and curly (except when she tied it in back in a bun, her homage to her Cuban mother, whom letters always described in terms of ailments), lamented her oldest daughter’s decision, as one of her great pleasures was occasionally to shampoo Margarita’s hair with an egg and soap, afterward resting Margarita’s head on her lap to brush it out. She had gasped at what she considered a mutilation of her daughter’s hair. While their father, Nelson O’Brien, did not mind it, Isabel and Maria were exasperated (perhaps they had wanted a similar hairdo and were jealous), and the others, from Helen down to the oblivious Violeta, then two years old, did not care.

  As the first to cut her hair in a fashionable way—and destined to be the first in so many other things—Margarita had set a precedent for herself. She’d even left the movie house for a time, had stopped working with her father in his photography business, and had gone off to live for six months in Philadelphia, boarding with an elderly woman and attending a secretarial school, where she learned to take shorthand, do basic accounting, and type. She had gotten a job in downtown Philadelphia with a dress manufacturer, but found herself depressed by the darkness of the office and the poor conditions of the factory, which mostly employed Italian immigrants (with whom she would chat happily in Spanish, one of the reasons she had been hired). Confused and a little homesick (before her eyes, the very same woeful scenarios she had seen during her years at the Jewel Box had been played out in the factory: good, hapless girls drawn by necessity and hard times into the arms of their immoral employers and everybody knowing it but unable to change things or not caring, women weeping, women getting sick from pregnancies, sicker from greasy, back-alley abortions, and fired if they complained), she had quit when one of the girls in the sewing department, pregnant by one of the floor managers, got thrown out onto the street. She soon returned home.

  Standing in line among the other girls, she had learned with them that the new store was going to sell electrical appliances, the town having been slowly wired for electricity over the last twenty years. There were racks of electric lamps, fans, toasters, blenders, electrical massage machines, electric washing machines, and even refrigerators, which few but the very rich seemed to own. That day, out of curiosity and boredom, she went to interview for a job and learned that the store was owned by the Thompsons of Belvedere Estates, Pennsylvania—a railroad-fortune family, which had branched out from the transport business into commercial trade. A portrait of the visionary elder Mr. Thompson was set upon a wall above one of the counters, and a gold-lettered slogan printed on a shiny cherry-red banner across the wall reading, “Electricity: The Way of the Future!”

  She had not gotten a job that day—the few positions having been filled before she’d even had a chance to interview—and she returned to the mundanity of her life without giving the grandeur of the shop or the implications of electricity much thought; but a few weeks later, she and her sisters were walking through town to meet their Poppy at the photography shop, when they found him in front of Thompson’s Electrical Appliance Department Store, head lost under his black cloth as he photographed the manager of the store, the younger Mr. Thompson, who had moved into town and had taken a house on one of the bette
r streets of Cobbleton. Posed in front of the store, impeccable in a worsted English suit and hand-made shoes from New York, he seemed perfectly tailored and elegant, and stood there with a chapeau claque, or collapsible top hat, in hand, grinning for the camera. And the young women who saw him were stricken with joy because he was as handsome as Douglas Fairbanks and had that actor’s well-tanned jauntiness. He was a tall, dark-eyed, quiet man, perhaps thirty, and had about him an air of sophistication and prosperity—a charming fellow who smiled and waved at the crowd of curious passersby who had gathered to watch. But he’d also seemed impatient as Nelson O’Brien (a little soused, if the truth be told) fumbled with the camera and plates.

  The picture appeared in that week’s edition of the Cobbleton Chronicle, in an article that celebrated the arrival of Mr. Thompson and the store, in whose back room Nelson had taken a second photograph—of Mr. Thompson in his cramped, lamp-lit office, pensively sitting at a paper-covered desk in a vest and striped shirt with sleeves rolled up, the caption reading: “Mr. Thompson, an all-around good fellow with personal qualities and attributes that all young American men should aspire to.” Beyond that, Margarita knew little else about him, no more than what the other women knew: that he seemed to possess an almost lordly self-assurance, as if he were a European count or an Oxford don. Mr. Thompson walked from his house nearly every morning around eight to open the store—arriving there before his clerks and the salesgirls—and later slipped out to have his lunch at the hotel (the waiter there reporting to friends that he liked the same meal every day, a thick New York sirloin steak, rare, and two baked potatoes, sauerkraut, and a bottle of sugar-sweetened seltzer, no dessert). He would sit inside, reading the New York and Philadelphia newspapers that had been brought in on the train, dining from twelve noon to one, and then make his way back to the store, congenially tipping his hat to passersby and, most alluringly, sometimes nodding (but ever so respectfully) to the prettier unmarried young women of town.

  For Margarita’s part, she never paid him much attention. She had been, like everyone else, a little curious about his private life. She knew that he was always receiving invitations to dine in the houses of the better families, and that from time to time he would take a train into New York, where he had business dealings. And she had seen him coming to the movie house—where, as usual, she worked in the evenings and on the busy weekends, the direction of her life baffling her—with one or another society girl on his arm. Dressed in a freshly pressed suit, he would wait in line, impassive and cool even in the summers, among the ladies with their rose-colored fans and the men wiping their brows with kerchiefs, his skin giving off the scent of lemon cologne. She thought him older, and though she sometimes cried at night, she was not that lonely for a man, as she had her books and her sisters and the love of the family, exasperating as they could sometimes be (as when the littlest ones would run charging through the movie house screaming, or push open the bathroom door while she was sitting on the toilet, gingerly going about her business with the demeanor of a bawdy angel squeezing out an excess of light).

  — The Movie Shows —

  During the movie shows, when she sometimes worked in the projectionist’s booth, she would laugh at the theatricality of the vaudeville performers who came in to sing a few songs before the movies began—jugglers, a magician, a tap dancer in blackface, baggy-pantsed comedians, many of them in the style of Chaplin. Her sisters Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline would perform a few popular songs of the day when the mood struck them, piano, accordion, violin, and voice their sonorous instruments, always successful with the crowds. And on nights when their regular pianist failed to come in, Maria took to the piano and worked from sheet music, playing in accompaniment to the films (tunes like “My Little Mountain Maid,” “Hitchy Koo,” “Oh, Baby Mine,” “Dublin Daisies,” “The Peek-a-Boo Rag,” among others). On those nights, she sometimes noticed which young couples were happy, and those who were just keeping one another company. She put Mr. Thompson and his dates into this class, for he seemed bored with them, and sometimes her own daydreams would begin (those late-at-night daydreams, she would remember years later, of a man touching her body, and no one in the world knowing it, her own fingers would touch herself, out of boredom and desire).

  He had attended perhaps two dozen programs before she realized that whenever she worked the lobby he tended to glance over at her. The night they had shown Elmo Lincoln in Tarzan of the Apes, she had been behind the candy counter when he had gone back to buy some sweets, and it was there, as she went about the business of scooping out a cup of caramel-coated peanuts, that Mr. Thompson, watching her, broke into so broad a grin that she could not keep herself from asking, “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing at all,” he told her. “You simply remind me of someone I once knew. In France.”

  “In France? I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  “Then perhaps you will.” And he looked at her with such earnest longing that she blushed.

  And when she had given him the cup, she said, “Well, monsieur, will that be all?”

  He laughed. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Then, pausing: “What’s your name?”

  “Margaret.”

  “Ah, Margaret. Mine’s Lester.”

  And that was all that had happened at the counter. He slipped back into the theater and she had watched him, thinking many things—that she liked his voice and the clarity of his eyes and, even if he was a little old, his handsomeness, and above all the air of self-assurance he had about him, the idea that he had ever been to France—perhaps as a soldier during the war—intriguing her. That’s what she was thinking about when the crowd began to leave the theater and she saw him again, turning from his companion, one of the Willis sisters, a banking family, giving her a quick, discreet nod and smile. That had been all. Margarita joined Isabel and the other sisters, who had attended the show and were closing down the theater. Then the following week she arrived to find waiting for her a carefully penned note in an envelope in which was also enclosed a business card, the note asking to see her.

  Dear Margaret,

  I hope you will forgive the liberty I’m taking in addressing you so informally, but ever since I’ve come to this town, I’ve often been gladdened by the sight of you. If you are asking yourself why, allow me the privilege of a few hours of your company to explain. Would supper at the hotel on Main Street this coming Sunday evening, say seven, be convenient? In any case, hoping for the best, I will be waiting.

  Yours faithfully,

  Lester L. Thompson

  She’d keep that note with her, among other items, until she was very old, and it would amaze her, those years later, how such a simple note—a few sentences written in a courteous and gentlemanly tone, could so change her life. She’d remember that for days she hoarded that note, reading it over and over again, a kind of nervousness coming over her. While reading his quite elegant and refined script, she could hardly believe that so prosperous, handsome, and apparently erudite a man had taken an interest in her. What did he want and what, she had asked herself, did she have to offer him? That week, before their first “date,” she slept fitfully, for she was at the age when proper young ladies begin to think about marriage. Dallying in the bathtub, she would lean her head back, touch herself, and imagine a man’s lips kissing her body—a man cupping her breasts in his hands and biting her nipples until they were sore. Then she saw Lester, no one else, and decided that she would go.

  — Their First Date —

  Twenty-one years old, she had gone, with nervous apprehension, to meet Lester, her father driving her into town. Her father had been pleased—for he always worried about the future of his daughters, and having photographed Mr. Thompson, had judged him a “gentleman.”

  “Have a good time” was the sentiment in the household, and that had given her confidence. Yet, when her father had driven her to the hotel and she had gotten out of the car, giving her Poppy a kiss goodbye and promising to
be home by ten, and made her way to the entrance of the hotel, she felt as if she were walking a long, long distance—toward her future.

  She was wearing a pink tassel-fringed dress that night. She’d dispensed with a corset, noticing that when she lifted her arms in that sleeveless dress, a good portion of her breasts became evident. She wore a slip underneath instead, having decided that if he found her “charming” it was because of her feminine attributes. Mr. Thompson, sitting in the corner of the dining room, was elegant in a blue-serge suit; he smelled of cologne, and his cleanly manicured hands enchanted her. He had risen to greet her and had surprised Margarita by taking her right hand and giving her a little kiss on her knuckles, bowing. Then they sat in silence while the waiter brought them water, soda pop, and two plates of salad and a potato soup. Margarita, ever cognizant of Lady Esther de Beauville’s advice on the proper way to eat meals (how properly to sip soup, for example, the soup spoon always tipping toward the opposite rim of the soup bowl, away from one’s self, so that if a splash should occur it would not stain one’s dress), did her best to comport herself like a lady, and struggling through her own initial silence, she simply sat smiling at Mr. Thompson, her hands shaking slightly. He’d only seemed to notice her eyes, however, watching them intently, and smiling back every so often as he’d dab the corners of his lips with a napkin.

  “Well, now,” he’d finally said to her. “If you’re feeling as awkward as I am right now, one part of you wants to run out of the door.”

  “Oh no, it’s just that I’m so surprised that you’ve asked me out,” she said. “Really, I’m enchanted. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in ages.”

  She picked at her food.

  “It’s the same for me: you know one gets tired of a certain kind of girl, and by that I mean the kind of girl whose values are a little twisted, I mean girls who’ve had everything and are a little bored with life.”