The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

  But the pilot was still there when they arrived, and Nelson, responsible and friendly, decided, after hearing of his accident, that it would be best for the young man to spend the night with them.

  “Then tomorrow you’ll feel rested before you take care of your business.”

  So later, cleaned up and wearing a fresh shirt which Nelson had lent him, the pilot, whose name was Curtis, joined the family for dinner. He sat beside Nelson at one end of the long table, and the two men, like old companions, spoke of “manly things,” their conversation turning to talk of war, the pilot having been shot down in France by the Germans, and Nelson having witnessed firsthand the war in Cuba between the Spanish and the Americans, when, a young man, he had gone down there as a civilian volunteer—company photographer—with the 1st New York infantry brigade.

  “’Twas ruination and death, I recall,” her father told him. “A pure despair such as the Lord should never allow in this world, tell you that.”

  It would be hard for Margarita to remember everything the two men discussed—only that they often nodded in mutual respect—for that had been so long ago and she, while recalling that day, was a very old woman. But she remembered that Isabel, Maria, and the twins were curious about her behavior, that while cuddling little Violeta, she would take a quick look into the pilot’s eyes and swear to herself that he was like a character out of a Sir Walter Scott novel, noble, pure and, in memory, bathed in a saintly light, and that she had wanted him to hold her, to take her off to some distant and beautiful place.

  “Well, sir, I work for this outfit, an aviation company based in Camden, New Jersey, the Daredevils’ Flying Circus. Most of us learned to fly during the war, and that’s mainly what we like to do. We stage shows here and there, mostly at state fairs and Fourth of July celebrations and such. I’m just a pilot, I can do loops and spirals, stuff like that. But we’ve got some fellows who walk out on the wings, and that always excites the crowd.”

  “And can you earn a good living that way?” Nelson asked him.

  “It’s okay, nothing special, but better than being out of work. If you can do three or four shows a week, you can make some money. The worst part is that we’re always traveling; it gets a little lonesome going from town to town and pitching a tent out in some field or living out of hotel rooms.”

  What else was there? Violeta threw up all over Patricia; Isabel washed her. Their mother, Mariela, listening in silence and smiling from time to time when the pilot looked over at her, had excused herself from the table, so that she could attend to the little ones. Their father yawned, and the pilot, speculating as to the cause of his engine failure, decided that some of the fuel lines had gotten jammed, or maybe his mechanic had forgotten about the oil, but listening, Margarita disagreed: the pilot had been lured down by the femininity of the household.

  — A Spring Night’s Idyll —

  Around nine o’clock that evening, when most of the electric lights and kerosene lamps had been dimmed in the house, Margarita, in a nightgown, left her room and went downstairs to the parlor. The pilot was sitting on the couch, looking through some old magazines, and seemed most preoccupied. The next day, he’d have to hire a truck to haul the airplane back to Camden and he would have to pay for it out of his own pocket. He had a Saturday Evening Post open before him and a clump of one-dollar bills spread out on the floor. He was worried about money, she about romance. Her breasts were very beautiful then, and though she would wear a corset and a slip, cleavage hidden, it was a time when the very suggestion of lingerie seemed outrageous and provocative to men. Before heading downstairs, she’d opened the top three buttons of her flannel gown. She stood in the hallway wetting her palm with saliva, and stuck her hand in her gown, rubbing herself so that her nipples stiffened like buttons through the material. She had gone downstairs to look for a book and, after finding her copy of Ivanhoe, sat across from the young and distraught man and, sighing, said, “It’s such a lovely night, but I just can’t sleep. Sometimes I like to take a walk in the field outside the house.” Then: “Would you like to join me?”

  And he did, following her out into the field and walking with her toward a fence at the edge of their property, where she asked the pilot if he would like to sit down on a pile of stones to watch the stars. And just as he sat beside her, the sky, as if cooperating, sent two streaks of light shooting across the horizon.

  “Did you see them?” she asked, and he nodded. “Yes, miss.”

  “Oh, but call me Meggy, if you like.” Then: “My, but I love this place! Do you know that when I was very little, before many of my sisters were born, my mother used to bring me out on warm nights to watch the sky. I was a kid when Halley’s comet came around, do you remember that? It was bright as anything and low in the sky and each night we would watch it until our eyes became heavy with its light. I didn’t know much about anything scientific in those days, but I used to believe that it came out of heaven. Do you remember that?”

  “A little. I remember walking with my father—he was a fireman—along the streets of our little town, and standing on a street corner and noticing that comet, bright as a Fourth of July sparkler, coming up over the roof of a house, and thinking, When will wonders end?”

  They sat for a long time, quietly, her hand settled just next to his, her hand waiting for his hand to touch hers, but that did not happen. And when he, yawning abruptly, got up and announced, “Guess we should be getting back,” she followed after him and asked, “Curtis, do you think I’m pretty?”

  “Yeah, I pretty much do.”

  Then she said, “And are you sure you want to go back to the house? Wouldn’t you like to sit out here longer?”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  That was all, until they made their way into the house and Margarita, fancying him and thinking that they’d entered the preliminary stage of a romance, bid him good night in their parlor—for he was to sleep on the couch, under some quilted blankets—her lips pecking at his right, stubbly cheek, her eyes closed, as she wished for more.

  Later, in the bedroom that she shared with the twins, Margarita settled in bed, and by dim lamplight started to read Ivanhoe again, until, having fallen asleep, she began to feel her nipples pinch the sheets through her gown and a quite pleasant sensation in her female center, so that, without knowing it, she passed the night grinding her hips into the bed and sighing—until her sister Isabel, hearing her, peered into the room briefly, for she thought that poor Margarita (with the crooked teeth that never allowed her to smile) was having a bad dream—in the same way that the sisters would sometimes hear their father, in his own bad dreams, moaning at night. She had gone in to dim the gaslight beside the bed, Isabel bending to pick up from the floor the copy of Ivanhoe that had slipped from her older sister’s fingers. And when she heard Margarita sighing again, she decided to waken her.

  “Are you all right?” Isabel asked her. “¿Todo está bien?” repeating the question in Spanish, the language she used when wanting to be more emphatic, or affectionate.

  “Yes! And now please leave me alone!”

  With that, poor Isabel felt her fair Irish face flush. (It was the big-boned, wide-shouldered, tall Isabel who had been born with the most Irish appearance and the old-fashioned Cuban morality and a tendency to get herself involved in everyone else’s business.) She left the bedroom as if a bee had stung the tip of her tongue, and feeling, as she would much of her life, a little unappreciated by her older sister, whom she considered too immature to make her own decisions. She had no idea that Margarita had gone to bed that night in a revelry of fabrications about the pilot, that in the name of self-amusement, and because she had perhaps become a little bored with Sir Walter Scott’s tales of knightly daring, she had invented or allowed herself to drift into a most pleasant and unladylike dream—the pleasurable memory of which would come to her even years later, when she, a much older woman, would turn to look at the glowing aqua-blue dial of an
electric clock and then into a mirror, remembering.

  — Margarita’s Dream, 1921 —

  She was wearing a diaphanous wedding gown and a veil that gave her the mysterious air of a harem girl, a Salome, her hair coiffed into a great wisp of curls, blossoms such as she had once worn at a May festival, sunk into the crepe of that veil. Her skin, olive-colored like that of her Cuban mother, had miraculously lightened, and her teeth had straightened. Her breasts, which she’d always considered much too large, took on the proportions of the breasts she had once seen on a statue of Aphrodite in an art book. In the dream, she and the pilot were joined in a long, impassioned kiss, prelude to their honeymoon—for, apparently, they were married—which would begin with a flight in his airplane. (She heard the musical twins at the tinny upright piano playing “Come, Josephine…”) He took her up through the clouds into the chilly heights, in loops toward the sun, and in bed Margarita was so convinced she was flying that her breath shortened, she gasped and had the sensation of falling headlong, piercing the atmosphere, like a pebble through water.

  Landing in a field, they found their honeymoon abode, a simple cottage. A private place, for not one of her sisters, nor her mother or father, nor the passersby on the road, nor guardian angels, nor the eyes of God were upon them. They could do whatever they liked: he carried her over the threshold of a bedroom, and through the window she could see cows and sheep grazing in the distance. At first they simply sat on opposite sides of the bed. And he started to speak softly, his voice quavery and uncertain: he began by making a confession. He had deceived her. He was not the good man that she had imagined. He wasn’t a virgin. He had been with other women, sophisticated women, tramps, who knew their way around a bedroom. In France, during the war, he had seduced the women of Paris and learned the secrets of love, and while he was telling her this, he could not help but run his fingers down the front of her lacy dress; and soon enough he was standing behind her, holding her breasts in his hands and pressing against her. That was when Margarita, exercising some restraint, broke away from him and cried out, “Let’s go running in the fields.”

  Soon they were out amid the dung piles and flies, and the cows sidled toward them with great interest. She would recall feeling a need for distraction, even though her loins ached for release (she was grinding into her bed), and so passed part of the dream picking flies off the cows’ heavy lids. He sat down on a bundle of hay and watched her. He told her, in his Arkansas twang, “I love you, doll.”

  From a hilltop they could see far into the distance—toward farms and a winding river, the fields covered with dandelions and daisies. He undid her dress and was soon suckling her, in the way she imagined a man would, his head to one side of her, so he could hold and suckle her at the same time, his neck muscles stretching. And soon she was feeling the long, slender bolt of flesh—his male appendage—which he’d let out from his trousers. (She imagined its appearance, deciding it would look like a six-week-old river trout, having seen different versions of that anatomy on hounds and country animals—her mother sometimes covering her eyes when, in the wagon, they would pass by two horses coupling in the field. She remembered many things in a simple moment: how she had once watched a quite proper lady in town turn purple and then faint at the sight of a Clydesdale horse spontaneously mounting another—and on the main street of town, not far from the church! And recalled the afternoon, some years before, when she had been naughty and gone off by herself to follow the river that crossed under the bridge near Tucker’s Pond; book and a little bag of fruit in hand, she passed some good and earnest young men—Tom Sawyer types, she had thought—fishing with crayfish lures; and moving along the mossy bank, she came to a place where the whitewater flowed and bubbled against the rocks. She could rest there, eat an apple, and read in peace without anyone to disturb her, for she had come to love her privacy and there was little of that in her household. When she reached her spot, she’d found that it had been commandeered by some schoolboys who had slung a rope up over the thick branch of an oak and were swinging naked in a long, sweeping arc over the water, their pink snout-hooded privates flying with them through the air. And there had been the time when she and Isabel, taking a shortcut through the town cemetery—where they liked to play “ghost” among the blackened and wind-weathered, half-toppled tombstones centuries old—made their way past the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century dead and were near the gate on a gray and dreary day when the groundskeeper, slightly addlepated, approached them, his demeanor normal except for the fact that he wore neither trousers nor breeches and allowed them—out of senility? mischief? insanity?—a good look at his lackadaisically hanging lantern of flesh, for that was what it seemed in that moment, the two sisters covering their mouths as if to suppress their cries of grief or laughter or surprise as they hurried off toward a path that would eventually lead them to the main road out of town and home. Those few incidents passed through her mind in this particular moment of fabrication.) But he never stopped kissing her breast and she never stopped touching him with her soft and elegant fingers and then he started to touch her, and not just her breasts but down below her navel, and she began to squirm, a sensation that warmed honey had been poured between her thighs overwhelming her.

  Then she was back in the airplane: from up high, aloft in the clouds and looking down, as she had years before when as a little girl she’d once dreamed of being transported by angels, she saw that the countryside, with its patches of brown, green, and clay red, the irrigation ditches and streams and rivers, farmhouses and silos and cross-hatchery of roads, resembled a wavery quilt or a great flag. As the plane continued to arch upward through the clouds as if to break through the roof of life itself (to arrive in some heaven of pleasant sensations), he turned to look at her, smiling and gallantly nodding his head. A long, silk scarf flowed behind him in the wind and he laughed, telling her, “Let me show you something, sweetheart,” and he pulled up on the throttle so that the plane rose steeply into the sky and then he brought it abruptly down, countering gravity and telling her, “Hang on,” and just then she sensed gravity dissipating. A book, Scott’s Ivanhoe, which had accompanied her into the dream, and a silver chatelaine purse with beaded fringe began to float off her lap during the dive; her hair also began to float and she had similar sensations throughout her body, her interior organs, her breasts, and every strand of her hair stretching upward as if to float free of all concern.

  In bed, she pressed her legs together so tight an insane rushing pleasure filled the length of her womb. She squirmed, she shook, she moaned, her bones slipping out through her skin and clattering about the room, and she felt herself falling backward as if she had stepped off a cloud. Then she opened her eyes, the mattress damp beneath her, and realized that when the shuddering had rushed through her, she had kicked off the merrylooking quilt and had almost rolled off the bed: she had given the sheets such a tug that she had wrapped herself in them like a Greek goddess, and because it was still so dark—the dawn would come in a few hours and there would be the cock’s crows and the neighing of horses, roused from their stalls, the sunlight edging slowly along the field—the moon through the window appeared in her half-sleep vision like a burning shield and she sighed, unable to rest any more that night.

  ***

  Making her way along the hall (and hearing through the doorway nearest the stairs the whispering voices of her mother and father, who sometimes spoke fitfully throughout the morning hours—about what, no one would ever know), she went down the rickety stairs to the kitchen, where she lit a kerosene lamp, and, sitting at a table, passed the rest of the night sipping buttermilk, eating apple slices and pieces of pan-fried, sugar-coated bread, and reading Sir Walter Scott.

  That fried bread’s aroma, a lilting thread of nearly crystalline or carmelized air rising to the upper floors (smoke curling in cat’s-cradle configurations up the stairs and under the doors of the rooms where her sisters were sleeping), roused the ever-plump and food-
loving Irene from her slumbers, and this sister, in a great flannel gown and with red ribbons in her pigtails, soon had made her way into the kitchen. And although she was half asleep, her eyes nearly shut, she, like a somnambulist chef or a spirit nostalgic for the earthly happiness of tasting a sweet upon its tongue, also sliced up some bread, fried it in butter and sugar, and sat beside Margarita, happily devouring this pre-morning snack, though without saying a word to her older sister. For her part, Margarita was used to this, having spent many an hour with Irene in the same sort of situation—that is, Margarita diapering, ironing, sewing, washing dishes, sweeping the floor, or intently reading a book or a magazine, while Irene assumed the posture of someone whose vocation in life was the savoring, mastication, and digestion of all pleasurable foods. That night, she remained beside her oldest sister, filling her belly, and then as abruptly—and as sleepily—as she had appeared, she took (as Walter Scott might have described it) “her lady’s leave.”

  Then Margarita sat alone, occasionally looking out the window for dawn, and happy when the morning star, Venus, that brilliant pearl of light shrouded by the morning mists and milk-white in its solitude, began to rise over some distant willows, a greenish water-stained luminescence burning around them ever so briefly, and she listened carefully for the puttering of a biwing aircraft engine, for she was at the age when she sometimes thought that her dreams, no matter how frightening or naughty, were premonitions, that over the aureoletically splendid horizon would appear the gallant and handsome pilot, up from the sofa and in the air, his heart enthralled by the prospect of seeing her again, his knees weak with desire, and his head filled with the promise and hope of love.