The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

by Oscar Hijuelos

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Nelson O'Brien runs the Jewel Box Movie Theater in a small Pennsylvania town where he and his wife, Mariela, raise their one son and 14 daughters. Through the eyes of Margarita, the eldest daughter, the lives, loves and tragedies of the Montez O'Briens' and their complex family relationships unfold. While reflecting on the life of Emilio, her doggedly masculine brother, Margarita also ruminates on the nature of femininity, family, sex, love, and earthly happiness. Lush, erotic, and gorgeously written, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien is a masterwork by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

THE HOUSE in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien lived, radiated femininity. Men who passed by the white picket fence—the postman, the rag seller, the iceman—were sometimes startled by a strong scent of flowers, as if perfume had been poured onto the floorboards and ground. And when the door to the house—a rickety, many-roomed Victorian affair some few miles outside the small Pennsylvania town of Cobbleton, with teetering beams and rain-soaked clapboard façade (and with gables, rusted hinges, and a fetid outhouse on a foundation that tended to creak during heavy rains, a roof that leaked, surfaces splintering everywhere)—when their door opened on the world, the power of these females, even the smallest infants, nearly molecular in its adamancy, slipped out and had its transforming effect upon men. Over the years a thick maple tree, standing out in the yard, had been the scene of numerous accidents: men were thrown from their horses or, begoggled and yet blinded by what they may have taken as the sun, skidded their Model Ts, their Packards, their sporty sedans off the road into a ditch, axles bent and crankcases hissing steam.

Even their Irish father, Nelson O’Brien, photographer and the owner of the Jewel Box Movie Theater in town, sometimes noticed the effects of their feminine influence on himself: this gentleman would move through the rooms of the house feeling a sense of elation and love that sometimes startled him; on other days, he had the air of a lost sailor looking out toward the edges of the sea. Struggling with his thoughts, he’d try to understand just what his pretty girls were thinking, and he, a brooding man, aware of life’s troubles, did not know what to make of their gaiety. Sometimes, when his daughters were gathered in the parlor, he would walk by them slowly, as if passing through a corridor thick with silk curtains that had been warmed in the sun. And he would find himself sitting on the couch with one of his little daughters on his lap, playing a silly game like “smack-your-Poppy-on-the-nose,” or easily spend a half hour trying to teach baby a single word like “apple,” repeating it until he would pull from his jacket pocket a watch on a chain and, noticing the time, make his way out into the world to work, leaving his quivering, exuberant daughters behind. And they would call out to him or follow him to the door, and when he got into his Model T to drive into town or along the country roads to some job, they would gather on the porch, waving goodbye to their father, who at such moments would experience a pleasant befuddlement.

Once, around 1921, when Margarita Montez O’Brien, the oldest of the sisters, was nineteen, an aviator brought down his biplane, a Sopwith Camel, in a hayfield about a quarter of a mile west of the house, a dizziness having come over him just as his plane was passing overhead, as if caught in a sirenic beam of influence that flowed upward from the parlor, where the sisters happened to have gathered in chaotic preparation for a midday meal. He had been flying west over the fields of grazing cattle and sheep, silos, barns, and farmhouses, a banner advertising the Daredevils’ Flying Circus trailing behind him, when they heard his engine sputtering, the propeller jamming in the distance, and out their window they watched him drop down through the clouds, his craft much like a falling and sometimes spinning cross. And because they hadn’t seen very many airplanes in their lives, they had rushed outside to their porch, along with everybody else in that part of the countryside.

At that time of the day, some of them were sitting around on couches, studying their schoolbooks, yawning, laughing, sewing, while others were stretched out on the rug before the fireplace, trying to contact the spirits with a Ouija board or playing rummy or Go Fish, good American card games. Still others were in the kitchen helping their mother (hers was the voice that, sighing, one heard every now and then as she would cross a room). And the twins were practicing—Olga playing the piano, Jacqueline the violin, and the third of the musical sisters, Maria, singing, everything from “I’d Rather Love What I Cannot Have Than Have What I Cannot Love” to “The Sheik of Araby” (or, as a joke, to announce the arrival of their father, “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay”). And others were scavenging for chairs, preparing the children’s table for the toddlers and pulling the long oak table, with animal feet and lion knobs with brass rings through their noses, away from the wall and setting each place with its proper utensils, plates, and glasses—all this work for a single meal, momentous.

There were thirteen sisters then—counting little Violeta, four months old, who had been born in February of that year, colicky and quite adept at waking the house up in the middle of the night, when she’d scream out for her tired Cuban mother’s milk; and excluding the fourteenth sister, Gloria, who would be born in 1923. The oldest of the sisters, Margarita—or Meg, as her Irish father called her—had been born aboard a ship bound from Cuba to the United States in 1902. Then coming into the world with a scowl, Isabel had been born in 1904, in that very house, like the others, and was named after the queen who had ruled Spain at the time of Columbus. And then Maria, the third of the sisters, was born in 1906, Maria whose effortless and nearly weightless birth had filled her mother’s belly with light and the candle-like warmth of grace. Mariela would name this daughter after her own mother, Maria, in Cuba, as she too was a beautiful and graceful presence who would never bring harm to others. And little Maria would be blessed with a nearly divine singing voice and with so good a disposition and such humility as to have the air of a saint or an angel culled from the choirs of the Lord. Then came the birth (and death) of Ebe, who lived for five days and passed away in 1907 because of a draft from the window, coming down with a fever which she, poor thing, could not overcome. Because of that trial, Mariela wanted to name the next daughter Dolores, but the following year, perhaps because of a curious conjunction of the planetary spheres, melodious with astral harmonies, the twins Olga and Jacqueline arrived, among the sisters the two who loved each other the most in their cribs and wailed and cooed in harmony, banged and kicked in time, and were most aware of the musical nature of things. Olga was named after a Russian ballerina whose picture had once appeared in a local advertisement for a ballet company that was to perform in Philadelphia during the weeks of her impending conception, and who was shown pirouetting on a point of light, impressing their mother. Jacqueline was so named simply because their mother had liked the ring of the word, sounding Parisian and worldly and auguring, to her mind, a good life. These were the mellifluously cooing daughters whose presence, with Maria’s, would inspire music in the household, for their father, Nelson O’Brien, would one day buy them a weighty upright piano, an accordion, and a violin and they would learn to play and sing, their first teacher a Miss Redbreast, for piano and violin, and the elegant and most Parisian Mrs. Vidal for voice, so that the house would fill with lieder and popular songs—“If Money Is Friendly, It Ain’t on Speaking Terms with Me!” They would hum as babies and later sing, these two sisters, along with Maria, one day forming the musical trio that would be known as the Three Nightingales, the Chanteuses, and finally, and more simply, as Olga, Maria, and Jacqueline. The following year their mother rested, but in 1910 she brought Helen into the world, the little female, or “mujercita,” as her mother called all the babies, naming her after the glittery label on a facial ointment, The Helen of Troy Beauty Pomade, said to eradicate wrinkles, to soften and add a youthful glow to the user’s skin—a fortuitous choice because, of all the sisters, she would be the most beautiful and, never growing old, would always possess the face of a winsome adolescent beauty. Then in 1911 the ever-plump, from the cradle into life, Irene was born, and then Sarah in 1912, pensive and a little angry, the first of the fourteen sisters to feel as though her older sisters were aunts. She was the first of the daughters whom their mother relegated to the care of the others, and she spoke fewer words of Spanish than her older sisters and tended to feel lost in the house when they started chitchatting in the parlor. Then came another girl, who strangled on her umbilical cord, and she was called Patricia, and that name passed on to the next girl, born in 1914, Patricia, the ninth living sister, who because of her namesake’s misfortune came in the wake of grief and seemed terribly aware of shadows and fleeting spirits—sometimes spying them in the hall, in the windowpanes, and in the mirrors. She’d hope for a glimpse of that other Patricia, who frightened and castigated her and who would over the years bring her to the edge of an affable, spiritist eccentricity, so that one day she would live in a nondescript house in northern New York State, in a community of spiritists, and hang in her window a little sign reading, “Fortunes Told.” Then in 1916 Veronica was born and she was named after the saint who had covered Christ’s bloodied face with a veil. She was the sister who would perceive the suffering and torment of men in this world and who would like a strong man to protect her, even if she would confuse harshness and abruptness of action with strength, as if it would be her destiny to wipe the bloodied face of a husband who was to bring unnecessary pain into her life and the lives of others. Then Marta was born in 1917, then Carmen in 1919, and poor Violeta in 1921—pleasure-bound and promiscuous, happy and delighted with the pleasing complexities of her body, the sister who liked to linger the longest in the bathtub, touching herself and pinching her breasts so much that they grew the largest, whose nipples would become famous with her lovers for being so cherry-red, and whose left labia had a mole, which intensified the pleasure of love.

These were calamitous sisters, ambitious sisters, sisters who stood by the windows at night weeping over the moon; they were sisters who cut out advertisements from the newspapers for pretty dresses and sat in front of an old foot-pedaled Singer sewing machine making lace bonnets and lace-trimmed dresses. They were sisters who had once sat dreaming about the Great War; sisters with arched eyebrows, who undressed quietly, their skirts and undergarments falling softly to the floor, whose toes turned red and breasts taut-tipped, nipples puckering when they bathed, sinking into the water; sisters who played the piano, stoically practicing their scales and daydreaming about a world in which music gushed and every blossom sang. They were small-boned or buxom sisters, sisters with moles and sisters whose infantile nakedness revealed the featureless beauty of angels, sisters whose bodies began to quiver voluptuously, some with the high and wide cheekbones of their father, those who would be tall, those with blue or hazel eyes or the dark eyes of their mother, and some who were petite and elegant, some whose eyes would suggest mischief and mirth: vibrant, sad, funny, and powerful sisters.

Their presence was so intense that, even at night, when slipping off into dreams, Margarita, the oldest, sometimes could not escape them. Not that they were always physically there, but while sleeping she’d come across them in other manifestations: as wiry ivy, entangled and dense on a wall, as a piece of rope knotted many times into itself, or as a spool of yarn being pummeled and drawn through the legs of chairs and tables by a playful cat. She sometimes found herself imagining the night sky and counting out the stars over the horizon, and two planets: Jupiter, her father, the Irishman Nelson O’Brien; and Venus, the morning star, her Cuban mother (as, in life itself, her mother had an affinity for looking up and watching for heavenly motions from the porch of their house). And she often dreamed about flocks of birds and schools of fish, and buzzing hives, herds of cattle and sheep. Weather vanes spun, porch chimes rang, flower petals fell from the clouds, a dozen (or more) moons rose. Sometimes she dreamed of roaming through a house much like the one in which they lived but with an endless number of rooms whose doors opened to another succession of rooms, each dense and crowded with the rudimentary objects of Margarita’s and her sisters’ lives. (Some rooms, she would remember years later, were cluttered with dolls—china dolls, bisque-headed dolls, rag dolls, Marie Antoinette dolls—and sometimes, just when she would begin to feel queasy, knowing that in fact her sisters were still all around her, the dolls simply hopped to their feet, turned into figures of flesh, bone, and blood, and, as in a fairy tale, became, quite simply, her sisters.)

Even while innocently attending to their business, the Montez O’Brien sisters were able, whether in a crib or in the bud of their troubling, alluring femininity, to produce such disturbances as to make even an experienced pilot (a veteran of the campaigns of France during the Great War) grow lachrymose and, without knowing why, lose control of his aircraft. As farmers stopped before their plows, kids climbed trees, and housewives with aprons on and plates in hand gazed up at the sky, the aircraft’s shadow passed over the quilted earth, a jagged, wobbly, T-shaped phantasm breaking up and subdividing each time it passed over a fence or sloping rooftop. Then the engine stopped altogether and the Sopwith Camel dropped down in a blunt glide toward the ground, where its tires blew out from the impact and its wings clipped a haystack, the craft rolling along a field, scaring away the grazing animals and sending the crows and blackbirds out of the trees, before it tumbled over on its side.

When the sisters, among others, arrived at the wreck, the pilot had already made his way out of the plane, zigzagging like a drunkard around hay mounds and limping past the most docile cows with sad beetle-brown eyes and fly-wracking tails. He was wearing a brown, wind-worn leather jacket, a helmet, and aviator’s goggles, his handsome brow smeared with engine grease. Overwhelmed by delirium and a desire to sleep, he found the sight of the sisters, who’d surrounded him, too much to resist. Soon the powerful Isabel and the rotund and ever-hungry Irene were helping him back to the house. There he collapsed on the parlor sofa and fell asleep.

Later, opening his eyes (he’d dreamed about swimming through a dense, nearly gelatinous water thick with wavery plants and blossoms), the aviator, weary and a little startled, suddenly found himself in the center of this household. Female molecules, the perfume of their bodies, the carbon dioxide of their breath, left him light-headed, and the excitement of the landing and subsequent sleep made him voraciously hungry. It did not help that Irene and Maria, two of the most natural cooks in the world, were in the kitchen preparing fattening and delicious food, inexpensive but enlarging, as these sisters were fond of using heavy cream and butter and liked to fry potatoes and onions and chicken and had become specialists when it came to making big pots of Irish-style beef stew, which was really like a Cuban concoction called caldo gallego with a broth base. And even though their mother had never been one to dwell on the finer details of cuisine, often daydreaming and burning the bottoms of pots, these sisters displayed great natural talents in this regard, knowing their sweets and fats and herb-spiced sauces. As a result, there was always great industry in their kitchen. They made applesauce with boiled raisins, pancakes with sugar, flour, and butter. Muffins and cookies, long loaves of the hardiest breads, all came from their oven—foods which, like the sisters’ collective personalities, had a pleasant effect on those who passed into the house, so that even their father, who tended to think women “fat,” especially when they were wide of hip and heavy in the chest, could not resist picking around in the kitchen cupboards and pantry boxes. The foods he ate, despite his reservations, were so flavorful that he would often astound himself by the servings he wolfed down, as if the naturalness of such consumption seemed to contradict the steely aloofness of being a man. These meals were not only delicious and fattening but they were rich in affection, as the sisters poured not only butter and sugar and blueberry and blackberry sauces over the pancakes they served, but they inculcated the very substance of this fare with such natural tenderness and love that one arose from their meals filled with a sunny optimism, a desire to laugh, and a generally cheerier outlook on life.

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.”

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 under-drawers 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 nature scenes from magazines, transfer those pretty 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.

LATER THAT afternoon Mariela and Nelson returned from an excursion to a nearby town. 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 legh