The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

  But it took him nearly two years to realize this ambition. Gutting that theater and refitting it with new seats—that is, new secondhand seats—and with carpeting, he officially opened the Jewel Box Movie House in 1914, the year that the Patricia who lived was born. A special room was outfitted above the balcony with a slot window, and a great canvas screen raised above the stage, on which played the first feature film ever shown anywhere in that town—a four-reeler called From the Manger to the Cross, a New Testament epic that had been “made in Palestine” by a certain R. Henderson Bland, the posters for said film featuring, for all the world to see, a triumphant Christ rising into heaven. Charging ten cents a head, with Margarita selling tickets and Isabel as usher, Nelson O’Brien, dandy in a black long-tailed suit with top hat and striped cravat, had made a speech that night, thanking the people of Cobbleton for attending: “You know me as the fellow who takes photographs of your babies, and as the official photographer of certain civic events and other affairs—I thank you heartily for allowing me that privilege—but tonight I am here to welcome you to this silent-film exhibition. What you are about to see is a very special picture, famous all over the world, I’ve been told.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I just want to say that I hope all of you enjoy the evening.” And as a spontaneous reflex he called upon Mariela, waving her up onto the stage from her seat in the front row.

  She had only two words, “Gracias, gracias,” before sitting again.

  As the film played, the family and the audience much enjoyed themselves. Christ, whom they’d always known as the hanging figure on a Cross, or suffering in an altar panel (or as a statue, the object of a prayer), was shown at his birth, and then, after some time (after walking on the Sea of Galilee, after being tempted in the desert for forty days by the Devil, and after his triumphant arrival in Jerusalem), carrying his Cross up to Golgotha, the hill where He would be crucified. Then Christ in a great robe and in a halo of light, a spirit to his disciples, as real as the Christ who had appeared to them in their dreams, all so beautiful.

  During the first months of exhibition, Nelson was also to show the films of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, William Faversham and Charlie Chaplin. He brought in some local musicians, a pianist and violinist to accompany the films, and a minstrel troupe to entertain the audience before the movies started. (They would sing “Fido Is a Hot Dog Now,” “Down in Jungle Town,” and “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”) He showed The Vixen, with Theda Bara, The Wharf Rat, with Mae Marsh; and sometimes a film by his old friend Harrington.

  — A Saturday Night, 1921 —

  Movie tickets cost fifteen cents, the program that day being a number of short one- and two-reel Laurel and Hardy films, one Chaplin, two Keatons, and a romantic melodrama starring John Barrymore. She would get there around four o’clock to begin selling tickets for the five o’clock show—a stack of magazines under the counter inside, Colliers Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Romance, a cigar box (Havanas) where she would keep her change, the dollar bills going into her pocket, and the family making money. Her father would arrive later to greet the audience officially, as he did every weekend night, and with him would come his wife if she felt up to it, and certain of the sisters, walking to town if the weather was nice, for it could be a pleasant, chatty, lantern-lit stroll along the country road on a balmy night—and exciting when a truly popular film was playing, an actor like Rudolph Valentino (whose picture their father kept in the window of his photography shop, among those other photographs of local subjects) attracting crowds who’d come in automobiles and wagons from towns around, everyone waving hello and with wagonloads of school kids singing: a festive atmosphere, the sky cheery with stars—eyelets in the deep blue, as one of those old-time crooners might sing. Margarita would be waiting for the patrons: men in bowlers and derbies, wearing waistcoats, while their ladies wore taffeta and cotton dresses, the more fashionably young, razor-cut Romeos in camel’s-hair coats and pleated trousers, fellows from the “good” side of town showing up with their dates in their knee-length tassel-hemmed dresses, hair bobbed (as she would have liked to have bobbed her hair, instead of keeping it long), with multi-looped fake-pearl necklaces and silver lamé or cloche hats, pulled down snug over the eyebrows for what they called the helmet effect.

  And yet Margarita, with her large, expressive blue eyes and exotic looks, exerting the female influence, attracted much of her own attention, certain of these young men giving her a wink or later slipping out during the show for a smoke and approaching her to see if she’d like to take a spin in one of their sportsters—“You know, maybe head out for a picnic next Sunday down by the riverside where there’s a pretty nice view, huh?” And she would smile, shrug, and say in an accent slightly touched by both her father’s Irish brogue and the trilling r’s of her mother’s Cuban Spanish, “I must think about it, but do come back,” since she distrusted those whom she’d seen with their dates. She’d sigh, selling those tickets, “Good evening, ma’am,” “Thank you, sir,” and smiling at some of the things she heard coming from the boys—“Ah, you’re fulla balloon juice,” and “Don’t rubber me now”—phrases her mother would never know.

  ***

  She was passing the time in this way and greeting her father’s usual customers—one by one they came, the Fitzgeralds, the Dietrichs, the Emersons, the Dunbar family. Along, too, came Miss Covington, the Romance-language teacher from town, and one of her mother’s few friends, the one town lady who was a frequent visitor to the house and who had, in the days when her mother first arrived, gone out of her way to befriend her, and the handsome priest, Father Mancuso, to whom, from time to time, Margarita, in a spirit of mischief, would make bawdy confessions (“I don’t know, Father, but last night I dreamed of running naked through a house”), his presence stirring within her good Catholic soul a bit of naughty sinfulness. And then would come Mr. Roig and his family, and of course, driving up in his employer’s touring car, Mr. García and wife, whom Margarita always let in for free.

  Then the family would turn up, her father leading them, the littlest ones remaining at home with one of the older sisters, or with their mother—though she loved those silent movies about romance with titles like A Woman Betrayed and Love’s Lost Hope, love stories, often tragic, set against the backdrop of glamorous New York salons and mansions, beautiful, virtuous, and ambitious women—good girls from poor backgrounds marrying handsome society gents, as would happen to Margarita. The sisters would take their places behind the candy counter, selling honey-roasted peanuts in paper cones and sourball candies to the customers, the others filling up a row near the front of the theater, where the family customarily sat, so that between films, if they so liked, the musical twins could get up and perform a duet at the organ, their sister Maria singing along with them, the family happy.

  Usually, Margarita would remain in the ticket booth until about six, and then, closing up, join the family inside. But that evening, as the sun had started to set, a great clamor had arisen on the street—the horses in the stables bolting and neighing, kids running along and banging pots, automobiles honking horns—for, buzzing over the buildings of the town, was the Sopwith Camel, pulling along a brightly colored banner, an advertisement: “Come See the Daredevils’ Flying Circus at The Pennsylvania State Fair! June 7–June 14, 1921.” Drawing crowds into the street and out of the theater, the airplane circled overhead and then made its way west, the buzz diminishing and the plane shortly out of sight.

  And Margarita, recognizing the craft, for a moment relived her initial hopes about the pilot, heart racing and, if truth be told, a certain desire for release aching in her bones. But when the biplane left town, she resumed her ordinary expectations of life, finishing in the booth a magazine story recounting a chance love affair between an Italian noble posing as a peasant sheepherder and an American society girl on vacation on the island of Capri, and just as the text described to her how, while they were standing together on a terrace of Tiber
ius’ villa, the count, “in a magnificent, soulful whisper, told his new love: “Ti voglio bene”—which in Italian means “I love you”—and took the woman into his arms… Isabel came walking down the street and, approaching her older sister in the booth, said: “The aviator, did you see him, sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, did you know that not an hour ago he came to the house to visit?”

  “Yes?”

  “And he’s invited us all to go flying with him one day at the state fair.”

  “All of us?”

  “All who want to. Mama is not too happy—she lives in ancient times, sister—but he told us that when the county fair comes to Monroe we are to be his guests.”

  And, looking at her sister’s expression, Margarita realized that she, too, must have daydreamed about the pilot.

  “It’ll be fun, won’t it?”

  “Oh, sister, I think so…”

  Later, as she sat listening to the pipe organ, watching the ghostly figures of an elegant Manhattan couple dancing across the floor on the Jewel Box movie screen, she imagined the Mediterranean, the silvery rippling sea and the olive trees growing around Tiberius’ villa in Capri, tried to imagine what it would all look like from the vantage point of the bi-wing craft. Around ten that evening, while walking back along the road, the air so fresh, the way lit by a lantern, she had looked up and watched a series of meteors breaking through the atmosphere—it was a time when the night skies were so clear, before they would be diluted by too many earthly lights—and in the streak of falling stars, she saw the pilot’s face.

  — Her Flight into the Clouds —

  She came to think of him as the handsome man from heaven, not as Curtis, and the day the family went to the fair, a few weeks later, she had awakened feeling wet between her legs and not from her monthlies but from a sweet sensation, as if a ball of candle wax had coiled and expanded inside her; shed touched herself until the ball was released and then, a little saddened, for the experience would always make her feel that way, even in old age, she sat appraising herself before a mirror and became quite glum, because she was nowhere near as beautiful in reality as she was in her own mind, nothing like the ever-elegant ladies of the magazines nor as pretty as certain of her own sisters, particularly Helen, who was a natural beauty. She derided her crooked teeth—they’d grown in after the manner of her father’s, twisted about by the introduction of too-large rear wisdom teeth—and she wished she didn’t look so much like her mother (a part of her glorying in it, for on good days she fancied in herself a resemblance to the courtesans of a Queen of Spain or of a flamenco dancer, such as she had seen in the movies—enchanting vamps with Syrian princess eyes and Pharaoh’s daughter’s lips—while on other days she sometimes wished she could close her eyes and look like Clara Bow or Theda Bara or Gloria Swanson or Lillian Gish). Dallying before the mirror, she had tried on different dresses before settling on a navy-motif smock with stripes about the sleeves and neckline and white felt-covered buttons down the front—nearly frumpish, save for the fact that this dress was sleeveless and therefore inviting to men, who could catch a glimpse of her curvy breasts, even if covered by a camisole. And wanting to make herself truly sexy by wearing a bit of ox-blood lipstick, which good girls avoided, she compensated, biting down on her lips until they took a darker coloration.

  At the fair itself, they stood in a crowd eating cotton candy and applauding, first a rodeo, a contest for best cows and bulls, and then turned their attention to the sky above the hippodrome tent, where the aviator’s bi-wing craft flew in a formation of similar planes—flying in loop-the-loops and tumbling in free fall, flying upside down and then nearly atop one another, daring acrobats hopping from the wings of one plane onto another. When the air show ended, the sisters made their way to the makeshift landing field, where the pilots, standing before their planes, signed autographs for the crowds of children around them. Waiting patiently, the oldest sisters—Margarita, Isabel, Maria, the twins, Helen, and even ten-year-old Irene—finally got a chance to greet the aviator who had spent some few hours at their house, and he thanked them again, and offered to take each up for a ride. The other pilots were doing the same, but for a charge—a buck a head—the seats behind the pilot filling with giggling adolescent girls and stoic and manly show-off boys. One by one, the aviator took the sisters into the air and Margarita, thinking that she would be the last to go up, watched each of her sisters lifting off from the ground and being carried up through the clouds (each climbing out of the plane happy and exhilarated, even Isabel, who could not keep from laughing, and each remembering that afternoon many years later, the kind of event that would crop up in the midst of a holiday evening, during a reunion when Maria might mention, while sipping a bit of brandy and throwing her head back in reflection, “Do you remember that hand some aviator who took us all up into the air? My God, what a day!”), until it was her turn. “Are you ready, Miss Margarita?” the pilot had asked her. And she had blushed, saying yes, and, remembering her dreams of elation and flight, followed his instructions and put on a helmet and goggles as her sisters had done, strapped on her belt and, waiting for the lift upward to heaven, closed her eyes.

  Before lowering his goggles, he winked at her and shouted over the engine’s loud hum, “Won’t be able to say much, once we’re up, but just relax,” and she had convinced herself that the actual flight would follow her dream, that they would soar over the countryside and he would land in a quiet place, but what actually happened was this: the craft lifted off the ground and did indeed climb up toward the sun, but the slightest indication of the plane looping or tilting on its wing began to affect her balance, as if a bead of mercury were shifting in her ear and over the softest organs in her abdomen; through her stomach and large intestines seemed to flow a glutinous matter, which, shifting about inside her, induced in her such a feeling of nausea that all she could do was swallow, hoping that she would not lose the contents of her stomach and her wishes for love. A few times he had looked back and she had grown so teary-eyed that he had asked, “Are you okay? Miss?” And when, after climbing some five hundred feet higher, so she could see how the earth began to curve in the distance, how Cobbleton and the patches of farm property and the railroad tracks and rivers flowed in obvious and simple patterns—as in the dream—she started to call out to him, “Curtis, I think I want to land now,” he told her, “Okay, miss,” and slowly brought the plane back down, gliding in, nose up, to a proper stop, the pilot hopping to the ground and helping the quivery-legged Margarita onto the field.

  It was all for the best: she went off to one of the fair outhouses to vomit, the prospect of romance and kisses behind her, and the aviator, surprising all, introduced the sisters, who were grateful for his generosity, to his fiancee, a little blonde, a sweet farm girl whom he’d met some time ago at another fair.

  — Two Sisters:—Maria in Photographs, Irene on a Bike

  The earliest known photograph of Maria Montez O’Brien, the third-oldest sister, was taken sometime in 1908, when she was two years old, posed by her father in the lap of her mother in the studio of his shop, the tot resplendent in a baby bonnet and lace dress, her lovely brow revealing in that moment a wary appraisal of the world around her—her father, as it happened (Margarita would remember), shaking a rattle to make sure that she looked at the camera and to prevent her from kicking about, her eyes intense and in fact focused not upon her father but through the shop window, watching a man, sleeves rolled up, fiddling with the engine of his milk truck. At the age of three, the short-cropped hair had grown out and her little hands were clutching her mother’s hand, and while she had not yet suffered any trauma in her life and had begun the discovery of music, the ongoing business with the delicate etiquette of toilet training gave to her sweet mouth something of a twist, nearly anguished, for out of the Arcadian bliss of her daily routine, playing with dolls, entangling her fingers in her mother’s and older sisters’ hair, kissing her father, came a new
discipline which, on the evidence of her disenchanted expression, did not make her happy. On the other hand, at the ages of four, five, and six, Maria, posing now alone and with her other sisters who were joining the family, especially the twins, Olga and Jacqueline, with whom she would always remain the closest, began to resemble the “mature” Maria, as she had now started to enjoy all the tasks at hand, especially when it came to teaching the littler ones about the daily necessities of life, her expression saying, “Though I am petite, I already know how to take care of things.” By eight, her face started to suggest the splendid refinement of the elegant woman she would become, her hair having grown long and kept in a ponytail behind her, the slope of her high and serene forehead suggesting the virtuous nature of her future personality, angelic. And pride, too, because Mrs. Vidal, her music teacher, had already singled her out from the dozens of potential music students in Miss Peterson’s grammar school in Cobbleton for her “special” talent—the woman hitting a middle C on the piano and having Maria hold that note for a long time, and, taking her through a scale of ascending half steps, making the discovery that she had the voice of a nightingale. At ten, she had given her first recital for the Ladies’ Society, singing an engaging “Ave Maria” at Christmas during a pageant, this young diva, no longer posed on anyone’s lap, not on her mother’s nor alongside Isabel or Margarita, but standing by the piano, an expression of accomplishment and separateness and a beaming smile on her face, for she already knew that she was going to bring pleasure to the lives of people. At that time she, the most devout of the sisters, truly believing in God, and having made her First Communion in Father Mancuso’s church, would take on the air of someone unafraid of death (for death would take her into the mansions of heaven). By age thirteen, the onset of puberty rendered her face drawn, implying a terrible moodiness. Other photographs from those days show her in the company of the twins, who had already begun to blossom musically under her encouragement, their poses, standing side by side, predicting the careers that would keep them together for much of the rest of their lives. But at sixteen, in 1922, there registered on her face a recognition of her own limitations: it was in the autumn of that year that Nelson O’Brien, on the recommendation of Mrs. Vidal, had taken Maria to the Philadelphia Institute of Music to audition for a special operatic program, where it was determined that she, the poor thing, while having a pleasant mezzo-soprano voice, good for the works of Massenet and Gounod among others, did not have enough of a voice to consider that life professionally, so that the photographs of that year conveyed a terrible disappointment, eyes squinting, face downcast. She would recover, taking solace in the pure enjoyment of bringing along the twins, who, despite their operatic-quality voices, would never consider outdistancing their older sister’s accomplishments. Early on, they had decided that their fates would be intertwined—and they would be, as the Three Nightingales, the Chanteuses, queens of Philadelphia and New York and small-town cabarets and musical reviews, eventually enjoying a fair livelihood that would take them often to the ports of Europe on cruise ships.