The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

  This the pilot felt when, swarming around him, the sisters served him a piquant lemonade and some leftover beef stew and potato salad, their eyes on each movement of his knife and fork, impressed by his knee-high leather boots, the half-moons of dust and oil on his brow, the boniness of his hands.

  In something like an Arkansas accent, he remarked, “I don’t recall having eaten anythin’ quite so tasty in a long, long time, ladies. I thank you.”

  He noticed, too, a pretty young woman across the room in an indigo dress with a red bow, and long black hair to her waist, Italian or in any case Mediterranean-looking—Margarita, with her blue Irish eyes, intently watching the pilot’s handsome face. When he looked at her, she smiled and seemed aglow, as she was sitting by the window, a book in hand, she would one day recall. In the natural light, form radiant, her quite beautiful gypsy-looking face was marred only by a slightly crooked row of teeth—her father Nelson’s other physical legacy to her—so that her smile was tight-lipped but pleasing just the same.

  Margarita had been reading one of L. Frank Baum’s Oz tales to two-year-old Carmen when the plane had started buzzing downward, and by then she was immersed in a dog-eared edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which she had taken from one of the cluttered bookshelves to be found here and there around the house. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the great stash of books that Margarita and her sisters, on her behalf, had collected after a fierce storm in 1915, when the old public library roof was torn away and such books as its humble collection held were carried aloft and scattered over the countryside and left for dead, as it were, their covers buckled, pages swollen and torn or lost, ink running, and text sometimes indecipherable. The sisters headed out with a wheelbarrow and baskets, picking the books out of puddles and fields and out of treetops and down wells and off barn roofs, in the end returning the best-preserved to the library, for which they were paid a penny apiece, and coming away with those books in too bad a condition for the library to keep—a hardship for the collection, but a boon for the household, and especially for Margarita, who loved books and thought that there had never been enough in the house. Suddenly they had gone from owning a dozen books—photography manuals, two Bibles (one in English, another in Spanish), an atlas, a Catechism (wonderful with its evocation of dark little devils and luminescent angels with burning swords and souls that, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, turned black with sin), and a few other books in Spanish which their mother brought with her in 1902 on her journey from Cuba, one of them entitled La vida en el planeta marte, or Life on the Planet Mars—to possessing several hundred warped, water-stained, mildewed volumes unsavory in appearance but whose presence, despite their flaws, had made Margarita quite happy in her youth. And there were also the books she would pick out from a barrel in front of Collins’ General Store in town, which sold for five cents apiece, obscure stories for the most part, written by retired schoolteachers and New England high-society matrons, with titles like The President of Quex: A Woman’s Club Story or The Life of Mary Zenith Hill, Explorer of the Heart, books in whose pages she would often find pressed flowers and old valentines—“For my love, thou art the dearest blessing, dearer than the sun”—and sometimes more well-known books inscribed by their famous authors—“With best wishes for a jolly Christmas, Rudy Kipling, London 1906.”

  Perhaps the docile way Margarita wiped his face with a lemon-scented handkerchief and looked him deep in the eyes, doting upon him, inspired the aviator to call her “kid,” as in “Thank you much, kid.” And while she, being the oldest of the sisters, felt complimented, at the same time it made her feel a little angry—a second-classness anger, a skin-darker-than-what-people-were-used-to-in-these-parts anger, a female-wanting-to-be-taken-seriously anger. And yet, because she liked him so, she thought of his daring exploits and how he had nice full lips, a hard jaw, a curly head of hair, all manly, like in those old army recruitment posters in the town hall, and she blushed.

  That was when the twins, Olga and Jacqueline, hoping to impress the handsome young man, stood by the upright piano performing “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine.”

  — The Parlor —

  In those days, the parlor reflected the creative longings of their mother, Mariela Montez, and the artistic bent prevalent among certain of her daughters. (In fact, without knowing so, the pilot had stumbled into the household in the middle of what would be known as their painted-glass years.) This creativity was expressed at times in song and in the cookery of the household, in the sewing of quilts and gay embroidery—farm scenes in general, but also, to honor the Catholic Church, scenes out of the lives of the Apostles and saints—and in other ways, for the sisters were forever trying to make the household a more pleasant place in which to live.

  When, for example, it had become second-oldest Isabel’s idea that more color would greatly benefit the ambience of the parlor, some years before, she had traded a week’s labor in the biggest general store in town for a thick roll of a flowery paper that turned that room, with its dark wood walls, into a cheery paradise of violet and marigold patterns. And with that wallpaper soon came a host of potted houseplants—spider plants and wandering Jews—which thrived in the morning and early-afternoon sun. And it had been third-oldest Maria’s idea to decorate those walls with prints of birds (beside the fireplace, one could find our willowy friends the bobolink, noble goldfinch, and hermit thrush), which had cost ten cents each at a church sale and which she had put in frames herself on a rainy afternoon, those birds sharing the walls with crucifixes, shadowy mirrors, images of St. Francis, the Holy Mother, and a few photographs—the professional work of their father, Nelson O’Brien, taken during his years in Cuba, around the turn of the century, alongside photographs of his daughters, one by one and in group shots, as they came, year by year, into the world.

  The sisters also sewed bright peacock curtains with florid trim, blooming with sunlight, and they had decorated the fireplace mantel with the bisque-headed dolls of their childhood. There was a clock with a reverse mirror painting of an idyllic Japanese scene, chiming on the hour—it was three when he’d heard it—and kerosene lamps and candelabra set here and there. Then a great cabinet piled high with plates and silverware, and beside that, an RCA horn-speaker phonograph machine, next to a stack of unsleeved metal and acetate recording discs. And there were hand-painted glass jars and vases which the younger sisters, such as Veronica or Marta, five and four at the time, would fill with wildflowers from the yard. The making of these glass objects had started a few years before his visit to the house, when Mariela Montez, bored and wishing for a diversion from the daily chores and trials of child-rearing, took an ordinary pickle jar and, sitting down in the kitchen with some mail-order paints, began to decorate it, producing with her inspired fingers crude but winning scenes of the tropics—green hills and overwhelming palm trees, with a backdrop of sea and sun. For the second, she made a design of flowers, like those she remembered growing out of the stone walls in Cuba, big bougainvillea and light blue roses, and this success led her to a third jar, which was a simple portrait of a house with a wrought-iron balcony, with some friendly people standing on its porch, perhaps a house such as she would see on the streets of her neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba. Each subsequent piece turned out better than its predecessor, and these objets d’art soon began to fill the house.

  That simple performance had inspired a craze among the sisters, and they soon took up the painting of jars. And once they covered all the jars in the house with birds and trees and suns and scenes of night, they went a little mad, climbing on chairs and bringing down the ball lamps and covering them with paint, so that the light in the household was diffuse with lime greens and cerises and pale blues. By the time they had nearly exhausted this proclivity, their father, Nelson, started to complain of headaches from the somewhat obscured lights, and so they had to undo the work with turpentine, returning to the painting of jars, selling the leftovers for a few pennies each at the fair.

/>   And there were bassinets and cribs everywhere, ironing boards and laundry baskets piled high with dampened underdrawers and diapers, menstrual “rags,” as they were called at that time, camisoles and flannel gowns, simple cotton dresses and dresses made of crinoline and muslin and lace. Bonnets and stockings which Helen or the plump Irene were stoically ironing as the pilot opened his eyes.

  He saw that the furniture was old.

  Although they were not poor, their father had always tried to conserve his funds, and while he had prospered during his years of life and marital bliss with his Cuban wife in America, he did not have much faith in the certainty of the financial future. Hence the fact that they owned very little new furniture, much of it having been acquired with the house at the time of its purchase many years before, in 1897, when their Poppy had first arrived from Ireland to seek his fame as a photographer, or bought cheaply at barn and church sales. Even discarded furniture was not beyond them, as the older sisters were constantly finding ways to beautify the most faded and cracked surfaces: chairs that had looked as if they would fall apart were fortified with wires and glue, and if the finish was drab, the sisters would paint them white or black and then, cutting out pretty scenes from magazines, transfer those nature pictures before applying a final coat of varnish. (At times, they turned out so well that the sisters would sell these pieces at the Sunday markets or at the big county fairs for a few dollars, enough perhaps to buy a slightly better class of shattered chair, which they would also transform and sell or keep in the household for their enjoyment, rockers with plump straw cushions and animal-footed love seats being especially welcome.)

  That afternoon Margarita, sighing, put aside her book and lost herself in speculation about the man; she knew that he was a “daredevil” with a flying circus, and that in his injured state he most certainly needed the attention and affection of a young woman like herself, and he seemed magnificent, stretched out on the couch, lanky and strong. He was wearing a pair of leather trousers, all gnarly and ridged in certain places, his maleness provoking in Margarita a strong curiosity as to what might happen if, alone in the house, she knelt beside him and gave him a tender kiss. She was, after all, at an age when she felt most curious about love and, if truth be told, a little bored with the mundanity of her life in that household. Mainly, however, she slipped back into her reading and did her best to keep the little ones such as Veronica and Marta from playing too noisily around the man. With great patience, and thinking that she and the aviator might become friends, she awaited his recovery.

  — Nelson O’Brien and His Beloved—Wife, Mariela Montez

  Later that afternoon Mariela and Nelson returned from an excursion to a nearby town. Their father, Nelson O’Brien, on that sunny day, had decided to take his wife, Mariela, along with him on one of his photography jobs. Hired to photograph a wedding, they had gotten into his Model T, loaded up with his tripod, his bellows-type camera with the Thorton-Pickard roller-blind shutter, his black trunk of chemicals and portraitist plates, and made their way down the road at nine in the morning, as it happened, their automobile disappearing in a cloud of monarch butterflies swirling around the apple blossoms. Their mother, who rarely had much of an opportunity to leave the house, and who was always concerned about her public appearance—she hated to go out without being elegantly dressed—made a very good impression at the wedding, comporting herself like a lady (in silence, for she did not much like to speak English). A small but voluptuous woman with beautiful eyes, an oval face serene and intelligent in its definition, a great head of dark hair and olive skin that gave her the air of a gypsy, she had worn an ankle-length bell-shaped dress with puff sleeves and a ruffled silk belt of her own design and a leghorn hat in whose brim she had stuffed artificial flowers. By the time they got home, the parlor was swarming with female giddiness and energy and Mariela was in a state of elation, for she had danced with her husband, Nelson, something else that was rare in those days.

  Furthermore, Nelson O’Brien had gone through the entire day in a state of unusually good cheer—no sadness or moodiness about him—and had remained completely sober, thanks in part to the Volstead Act of 1919, but also because he, in order to please her, had refrained from imbibing his usual substitute, a medicinal concoction called Dr. Arnold’s Relaxation Heightener which helped this kindhearted but sometimes doubting and frightened man through many a hard day of spiritual torpor and bone-aching depression.

  He was not enormous, perhaps five ten in height, tending toward a slight paunch, but big-boned; and with his ruddy face, reddish-blond hair, handlebar mustache, and Celtic eyes, he sometimes resembled those engravings of country folks from tales about old England or Ireland—the looks of a blacksmith or a carpenter whom one might find working, ever cordial, ever friendly, in a village square. The sisters would remember that he’d walk with a stoop to his shoulders, that he favored brown derbies, top coats and jackets, dark green Argyle stockings, button-fly trousers, pinstriped shirts with detachable collars, and plaid-patterned Teck-brand cravats, and that he would wear these outfits until the threading wore thin, long after they had gone out of fashion. (Years later they would laugh among themselves, Margarita remembering how on some mornings she would look out of her upstairs bedroom window to the yard, where, weather permitting, her father, Nelson, would perform his calisthenic exercises, a practice he had taken up after he’d read an article about prolonging life and good health that had run in the Cobbleton Chronicle sometime in the spring of 1920. Though he worked hard, his body had nothing of the stringiness one observed as a generality among men of the working class, gaunt and sinewy fellows whose arms rippled with taut muscle and bone, their forearms and wrists gnarly like the roots of great trees. Because of this he was often chagrined by the profile of his unclothed anatomy, due, he figured, to the inactivity of sitting upright in the warm seat of his Model T during his travels over the countryside, and perhaps to the soul-sweetening and gut-expanding ingredients of his occasional tonic—and while he had kept himself in good trim for much of his youth, age and his dietary habits added to Mr. O’Brien’s girth. So it happened that in his spare moments, most usually during the early-morning hours, when the fields started to burn with light, the sisters would behold their father going through the paces of a rigorous exercise routine: arm stretches and leg bends, push-ups and sit-ups, and much that involved the expansion of the chest and the sucking in of the stomach. These he performed in a sleeveless jersey and form-fitting black tights which gave him the appearance of an acrobat or a circus strongman: with his hair parted in the middle and his curly-tipped mustache, ends pointing straight toward heaven, he would go through this regimen with manly grunts, great heaves of breath, and so much exertion that he would sometimes frighten the birds, alarm the dogs, and cause much consternation in the household. His fair head would turn blood-red, his cheeks would puff out, his red-blond locks would dangle, beaded with sweat, and the sisters would swear that he was on the verge of a heart attack. And yet he always managed to survive this ordeal and with time acquired the somewhat puzzling physique of an oak door, and his footsteps seemed suddenly weighted with steel. Chairs and tables toppled over, china trembled in his wake, delicate flowers crumbled in his grip. And though he was not given to vanity, going about the task of sponging himself down in the cool bathroom as efficiently and quickly as possible, he was spotted, at certain moments when he thought himself alone, making a muscle in front of the mirror.) He spoke a slightly brogued English, his construction clipped as in “’Twas a lovely day,” or “’Tis a pity,” and a passable but sometimes forgetful Spanish (in the middle of the night) which he had learned down in Cuba around the turn of the century during the four years he had lived there, and which he came to use reluctantly, for he often made mistakes.

  That day, for the wedding, Nelson, splendid in a brown $12 suit with red cravat and suspenders, rode hatless, for he enjoyed the rush of the wind against his full head of reddish-blond hair, and in the pleasant sun
light as they drove along in his automobile, derby by his side, his cheeks and fair face had gotten some color. As Nelson entered the household, he carried a great box of hard candies and caramels left over from the celebration—and emptying his pockets, he withdrew not only some rice and a few cigars but two crisp bills, a ten and a fiver, as he liked to call them, his payment, excluding the cost of prints, for the day. Sober, he would regard his wife with amor—the kind of amor the oldest sisters, Margarita and Isabel, knew took place at the end of the evening, when they were all supposed to be asleep and not listening for bedroom noises, agitated springs, gasping, rocking movements, moans of pleasure, or any other such unparental sounds, drifting down the halls, as if they were wall-less and not a single cicada nor a rushing wind existed in all the world.

  Before such occasions, their father’s eyes became mischievous with desire—well, there were thirteen of his offspring in the world by then, weren’t there? Margarita would tell herself, the existence of all half-Cuban, half-Irish females much indebted to their mother and father’s bedroom conviviality and the fact that, for all their conservatism, practiced in many other areas of their life, they delighted in and felt enlivened by the act of love. They were in such good spirits that afternoon, laughing and speaking affectionately—he in English and she in the music of her Cuban Spanish—that, were it not for the pilot’s presence in their parlor, Nelson and Mariela might have escaped upstairs immediately to the canopy bed of their room (with its door that often squeaked open at the most inopportune times) for a “nap.”