Oscar Hijuelos - The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez OBrien

The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez OBrien

Oscar Hijuelos

Copyright

The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez OBrien
Copyright 1993, 2013 by Oscar Hijuelos
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover jacket design by Misha Beletsky
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795337567

NELSON OBRIEN=MARIELA MONTEZ

A lot of people wrongly discount the quality of photographs produced by the type of camera I use, mainly because it is bulky and inconvenient to move. You have to fiddle with plates and chemicals and make sure that your subjects do not wriggle around or blink as they pose, for with this camera they must remain still. And some people dont have the patience. But thats a lazy outlook. Not to take anything away from the Kodak Brownie, mind youit makes pictures nice enough to frame, but this apparatus, in my opinion, captures not only the superficial qualities of its subjects but also, because of the time it takes to properly collect light, their feelings, as they settle on the subjects expressions; sadness and joy and worry, with variations therein, are collected on the plate.

Nelson OBrien to his son, Emilio, while explaining his preference for his archaic folding-bellows-type camera, with Thorton-Pickard shutter, in 1937

The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez OBrien lived radiated femininity. Men who passed by the white picket fencethe postman, the rag seller, the icemanwere 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 housea rickety, many-roomed Victorian affair some few miles outside the small Pennsylvania town of Cobbleton, with teetering beams and rain-soaked clapboard faade (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 OBrien, 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, hed try to understand just what his pretty girls were thinking, and he, a brooding man, aware of lifes 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 OBrien, 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 hadnt 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 practicingOlga playing the piano, Jacqueline the violin, and the third of the musical sisters, Maria, singing, everything from Id 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 childrens 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 glassesall this work for a single meal, momentous.