The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

  Then the mature Maria, aged nineteen and in love, for one of the two times in her life, with a plump tenor from a nearby town who would come to Cobbleton to sing duets with her in the parlor of Mrs. Vidal’s house, this fellow—what was his name? Henry Maine—a true talent, a year older than she and able to sing everything from German lieder to Italian bel canto with breathtaking finesse, the two twilling away amorously like songbirds and stealing (when left alone for a moment while Mrs. Vidal would answer the doorbell) little ennobled kisses, nothing with the tongue, that would drive Maria to the confessional in Father Mancuso’s church. Going through her days in a state of complete idyllic distraction, she would wait for Mrs. Vidal to inform her that he was back in town. The two of them fell deliciously in love and remained so, even though he was not a particularly handsome man—but a very good one. Like her, a Catholic and devout, he would sometimes walk Maria home along the country road to the house where the sisters lived, the two of them singing so beautifully that birds would follow them on the road. Later, under the supervision and watchful eyes of Isabel, they’d sit on the porch and quietly speculate about a future together, the prospect both exhilarating and troubling Maria, because to remain with Henry would take her away not only from the household but from Olga and Jacqueline, to whom she felt pledged. At night she would pray, asking God what she should do. She felt many doubts, even if he had conveyed to her the beautiful promise of pursuing an artistic life by his side. And although she knew he was being kind, as her voice was not as good as his, they made plans to marry one day and commemorated this by posing for a photograph in Mrs. Vidal’s studio. With a simple Kodak Brownie camera, circa 1926, Mrs. Vidal herself, loving to keep photographs of her students and always having a soft spot for Maria and her musical sisters, took the shot—a photograph that found the twenty-year-old Maria possessing the serenity and apparent happiness of a young and pretty woman who in those moments dwelled in Paradise, light brilliant around her, the crystal flower-filled vases of Mrs. Vidal’s parlor aglow, a scene of earthly joy. A year of felicity for Maria, of too much hope and distraction, and then another of disappointment when Henry, sitting with her on the porch of the house on Abelmyer Road, told her that he would be journeying on scholarship to study voice in Berlin and that at the end of the year he would return to join her. Six months of heartsickness and longing passed, until, as such stories go, the bad news arrived: not that Henry had fallen in love with someone else but that Henry, whom the birds followed, had fallen into the depths of Lake Constance, in southern Germany, and drowned. Photographs of Maria from that time on show the very same expression she had in early youth, when the logic of the world was not clear and her eyes, gazing out timidly, seemed wary.

  ***

  Better to consider the love of Irene, the seventh of the sisters, with her most elegant name. Cherubic, good-natured, and chubby as an infant and as an adolescent (how she loved it when the butler García would show up with those bags of plantains that they could fry to crispiness in a large cast-iron pan), she had always been lavished with many sweets and foods and with sisterly affection. As she became a young woman, those beautiful features were swallowed by the moonlike roundness of her excessively fleshed-out face, and she lived for meals and was most happy to sit in her room eating one-cent sweets and spoonfuls of sugar or of honey, the idea of falling in love with a man never occurring to her except when she read magazines and would envy those young women whose boyfriends and husbands brought them chocolates. She would daydream about love, not so much for the sweet kisses and embraces of a man, or the roses that romance was said to bring, but for the boxes of dome-shaped, swirl-topped Belgian chocolates with maraschino-cherry centers, marzipan delights, chocolates with coconut centers, chocolates stuffed with citron and nuts.

  Still, by the time she reached her early twenties and, plump as a sultan, she decided to find herself a man and, to do so, aspired to a more lithe form, subsisting on paltry meals and becoming, for the first time in her life, foul-tempered and unhappy. That was when her father, Nelson O’Brien, took pity on her and bought her a bicycle, an Atlas “strong enough to support the world,” and it was on this vehicle that she began to ride along the country roads for the sake of exercise (these roads during the bad times of the Depression, with their bands of the hungry and poor, often making her sad). She’d worked in those days in the movie house, often behind the candy counter, and afterward would take a long route home, and although she did so for a year, weather permitting, this exercise had very little effect, save for the thickening of certain muscles—in her thighs and legs. She was on the brink of despair when one day, crossing the bridge near Tucker’s farm, she happened to collide with another bicyclist, this bicycle, also an Atlas, conveying on its bending frame a young man as immense and porcine as herself, a fellow in a black top coat and schoolboy’s beanie cap, whose pockets, as it would turn out, were stuffed with sugar cubes and candies. Tumbling over—as in tandem they were too wide to pass each other—they had landed side by side. And while she had escaped with only a few bruises on her rump, coccyx aching for days, the fellow’s trousers were badly torn and his thick knees were bleeding.

  Beside herself at having hurt the young man, Irene attended to him like a nurse, tearing from her slip two pieces of cloth, and there, kneeling before him, ministered to his wounds—and most happily so, in an idyll heightened by the clamor of the birds and the sweet springtime breeze and the smell of flowers in the air. In the sunlight (all such speculations about love—love that could only be guessed at, toyed with, enjoyed from a distance of time—were drenched with light, for love, as their mother always said, filled the heart with light) he seemed noble, and because he was so good-natured that he did not complain but thanked her instead, when they had lifted up their bent bikes, they sat for a time under a tree, more or less pleased by each other’s corpulence, as in this circumstance neither felt shame. They talked. His name was Pokapoulos, a Greek fellow, and he lived in a nearby town, some ten miles away from Cobbleton, and was the son of a butcher, and he, too, confessed that he loved to eat, though that spring afternoon he admitted to an interest in the veterinary arts and wished that, instead of chopping up animals, he could cure them. She felt touched by his tender, heavy-jowled face and by the way he looked at her. He had told her, “You’re a swell gal for not being angry at me, when it was really my fault—I shoulda stopped and let you pass”—and just then he pulled from his pockets some hard candies, which they both happily devoured, beginning the introduction to their love.

  He started to visit with the family, always sidling in through the door and bringing parcels of meat with him, to her father’s delight—for Nelson O’Brien loved his steaks thick and juicy—and when he would stroll with her, or keep her company in the kitchen while she helped cook the evening’s meal, he was always attentive and complimentary to her. “My, but you look pretty today,” he would tell her, and, as in a fairy tale, made her feel so happy that she began to forget about the troubles of the world—that beggars would come to the house asking for food, their mailbox marked with a white painted X, signifying “This family will give.” When he ate with the family, tasting her cookery, his eyes would water with delight and he would look on her with nothing less than complete adoration. And though it would be hard for any of the sisters to think that Irene and this fellow were acquainted with the romance of heated embraces, they, when alone, would engage in long bouts of succulent, tongue-swallowing kisses, tongues tasting of sweets and nut breads and steak, entwined and thick with the blood of appetite and the promise of an all-devouring consummation. That would take place after three years of mealtime conviviality, during a honeymoon which they would spend in a country inn near Lake George, New York, a Swiss-style chalet known for its view of the Adirondacks and attendant waterway and for its quail-stuffed pastries and all-you-can-eat dessert buffet.

  The romance, of course, was more complex than what a sister like Margarita might ascertain. It was filled with its
pains and, as well, with its moment of sexual passion, hard to imagine but inevitable, the two generously layered bodies blissfully joined and moving through the thickest field of sensations, with hungry bites and long appraisals of tasty bodily morsels, with the promise of a happy future and many satisfying meals.

  — Nothing Was Sweeter:—How the Other Side Lived

  Nothing was sweeter, Margarita would recall on her days alone, than to be a young girl in the spring, nothing more pleasant than to rush down the stairs into the arms of her father when he’d come home at the end of his day’s work, or, when she was very little, to be carried along a country road on his shoulders, the work of the Lord all around them, or to sit and watch with great curiosity as he went about his business, fiddling with the accordion-like camera as he posed her and the family for a portrait or as he took photographs here and there in the countryside, certain of those jobs giving him access to the houses of the wealthy, who seemed to live in another world, with their great lawns and tennis courts and chauffeurs and wardrobe rooms and dolphin-mouthed waterspouts in the bathrooms and flush toilets! And Carrara marble statues of Apollo, English paintings on the walls, and floor-to-ceiling libraries (most impressive, a sweet papery smell of the past thick in the air)—that general atmosphere of pure and uncompromised gentility reminiscent, to her mind, of the aristocratic lives she’d read about in books. (She thought this even though she had once heard García, on a night when he was angry about not getting a raise and after having had one too many glasses of wine during a visit to the family, say crudely, “These people behave as if they don’t have assholes!”) Nelson used to take Margarita and Isabel and a few of the others along for company, and later, when she was older, he’d take Margarita along as his assistant—work that she much enjoyed, as she would then see how other people lived, from the poorest farmers, who paid her father with hens and baskets of fruit and sacks of corn and potatoes, to those of much greater means, whose hired help oftentimes let them in through the pantry and service entrance. But that was not so bad—how many times did it happen that the help, seeing the children, would call them into the kitchen and serve them feasts of pastries and sandwiches. Years later, she had to laugh remembering one occasion when she was sixteen and the plump Irene, then seven, was left alone in a kitchen on an afternoon when the pastry chefs and cooks were preparing for a banquet, the head cook or chef having made the terrible mistake of telling Irene, “Now, you can eat whatever you like, dearie.” Within an hour, Irene had managed to eat much of a leg of lamb, delicately prepared with rosemary, garlic, and a basting of honey and wine, as well as a dozen puff pastries—chocolate éclairs and cream-filled napoleons, the cook astonished and shouting: “My God, no wonder you’re such a fat leetle gurl!” and Irene confused but happily sated. On such occasions, Margarita’d get a chance to see how the other half lived, loved to sit outside on the grounds while her father prepared for his work, watching tennis games, badminton, croquet being played. Looking about, she’d love the feeling the high wrought-iron gates gave her, the long shadows of their tipped spires racing across the sloping lawns, the bursts of intermittent sunlight pouring through the private forests of the high, high trees, whose birds, it seemed to her, were especially elegant. (And through those corridors of shade she would see furtive does peeking.) Fountains such as the bell-cup Russian-style fountain that she once saw on a desolate estate near Quarryville made her feel as if she were in a dream or in another world (say, the planet Mars), for the fountain had been designed with fine-timbred bell cups which resonated in different glasslike tones—a water-driven glockenspiel, though she did not know the phrase at that time—and seemed to play without end. And she saw estates with their own private chapels and in one instance a genuine medieval garden with peacocks, who moved tranquilly, as did their masters, oblivious to the more mundane sufferings of life. But there were also occasions when death somehow lingered in the halls and she would know that in one of the myriad bedchambers, up one of the stairs and just beyond the landing, off one of the marble atriums, there would be a room with a tubercular or polio-racked child to whom no amount of money made a difference.

  And there were occasions before the First World War when her father was hired for debutante parties held in grand houses with many-chandeliered rooms and he would set up his equipment in a room off the dance floor. Using floral arrangements placed on a pedestal or a table, with velvet curtains as a backdrop, he would photograph young couples, the inheritors of the earth, carefree and well-coiffed, the ladies beautiful in their silk gowns and Belle Epoque, many-layered ballroom dresses, the gents in tails, enchanted with one another’s company and the fact that their lives were so good.

  There was always much food to eat and most of the time those employers were gracious and accommodating toward the photographer and his daughters; more rarely, there might be a twitty son or spoiled daughter to start an argument with Margarita or to point out that she and her father or whichever of her sisters had come along were not proper guests—however, that was more the exception.

  Still, parties were parties, and her favorite, at least in memory, were the harvest balls held in Cobbleton—about that time of the year, with the trees turning and the first chills that made sleep so blessed (sisters’ rumps pressed together in their beds, wrapped in flannel gowns, feather mattresses warmed by bricks heated on the stove, for it would get very cold in the evenings), and the special clarity of the night sky with the stars shifting in position (and perhaps because it was on an autumn night when she was very little that her mother had pointed out the brilliance of the planet Saturn)—and the hayrides, organized by the Chamber of Commerce and by the Protestant churches. The sisters, on equal footing with the other girls of town, would wait their turn to take the ride from the square two miles up the road to Mayor Heinrich’s farm, where, in his barn festooned with hanging lanterns and decorated with crepe paper and cloth banners, they would have doughnuts and milk and soda pop and feast on pumpkin pies before riding back to the town hall, where a dance would take place. As usual, the timid farmboys and the sons of railroad and factory workers, hair slicked down with spit and Brilliantine and a smell of wheat sticking to their clothes, stood on one side, and on the other, the young ladies of town, seated in rows and seeming a little bored (within them, family groupings of sisters, some families having five, some twenty, as was the case with the Schneiders, with their Goldilocks hairdos and unfortunate apple-shaped faces, stout derrieres, manly gaits, and sour demeanors, the poor things), until the string band started to play and so began a program of square dancing and traditional country waltzes, the Montez O’Brien sisters, even the littlest ones, ever anxious to partake of the festivities, and waiting, waiting until they would grow impatient with the timidity of the boys and break ranks with the other girls, who already considered them too different for their own tastes, marching across the floor to initiate the proceedings—so that soon just about everybody would be dancing. And on those autumn nights, in those years before he had his success with the movie house, their father also worked at the harvest balls, taking photographs (some of them trick shots with witches brooming across the pock-faced moon in the background), and his pictures would appear in the local newspapers, and prints would be sold to the community through the offices of the Good Citizens’ Club.

  By the time Margarita was approaching womanhood and the movie house had opened, her father had gotten into the habit of seeking a kind of solitude at night, saying little to the sisters—of course showing them affection, and always having the strength for the rituals of love with his wife—but as the years passed, he seemed to need more and more time alone. The evenings would often find him sitting before the fireplace with a tin mug in hand, watching the embers (clustered, feathery, snowy-gray, and crumbling like wings) of the birch and elm logs dim and glow, as if they were softly breathing, his shadow thrown immense and wavery against the walls behind him, his mind moving through clouds of manly pensiveness, and muttering to himse
lf about the passage of time and the world amounting to as much as those ashes, everything, every living creature, turning to smoke. Although he would read the Chronicle, full of its farmers’ news and the doings of society, and from time to time give out some order, or lord over the organization of yet another nightly ritual, the pushing together of tables and the collection of chairs so that the family could dine together, he was in many ways an absent being, almost a ghost in his indifference to household affairs, which, from his point of view, always seemed the same: the daughters assisting his wife, their chitchat, and some of it in his wife’s tongue, Spanish, sounding to his ears like the forest twitter of birds in the trees, noisy, lively, melodious, and territorial.