When We Left Cuba(15)
“Do you ever feel like you’re forgetting it?”
“Cuba?” he asks.
I nod.
“Sometimes,” he answers after a pause.
“It’s like that for me, too. Each day I wake up here it feels a little farther away.” It’s easier confessing these things to him than to my own family. Cuba is in its own way a difficult subject for all of us, any mention of Alejandro’s death avoided by all. For my parents, there’s the added complication that prior to his death, they’d cut off all ties with my brother due to his anti-Batista activities.
“I worry I’m forgetting Alejandro,” I admit. “I woke from a dream the other night and couldn’t remember the sound of his voice or his laugh. All of our photographs are back in Havana. Will I eventually forget what he looked like?”
Eduardo squeezes my hand. “It’s normal to feel that way. Even harder still when we’re away from home, from the places where he lived, the things he loved.”
“That, too.”
And at the same time, even as I’m loath to admit it, perhaps it makes things a bit easier, too. At least the ghost of my brother isn’t haunting every room in our house, every street corner.
“Do you remember him?” I ask.
A sad smile crosses Eduardo’s handsome face. “I do. I remember when we were kids running wild around Miramar. I remember the time we both fell for the same dancer at the Tropicana. I did everything I could to win her, but of course, I didn’t stand a chance. Maybe because he was a Perez, but probably because he was so damned charming.”
I smile. “He really was. He lost some of that, though. After the attack on the Presidential Palace, he was someone else entirely. He never laughed like he used to.”
My brother killed in his fight for Cuba’s future, and while he was passionate about the cause, he was at his core a kindhearted man. He didn’t have it in him to take a life and not be shaken by the ramifications of it.
“You never felt the same way he did, did you?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Eduardo brushes a strand of hair behind my ear.
“You were involved in those efforts to remove Batista from power. You’re doing the same now with Fidel. But you never went through the”—I search for the right words—“self-loathing Alejandro experienced. How do you believe in the movement, in democracy for Cuba, and not hate the privileged society that caused it, the society we are part of?”
“How do you?” he counters.
I’ve never been the idealist my brother was. For all I objected to Batista, I never denounced my family like Alejandro did. I could never absolve us as entirely innocent, but at the same time, I couldn’t consign us to the role of villains, either.
“It’s my pragmatism, I suppose,” I answer.
“You’re a survivor. For yourself, your family, your country. That’s how I do it. I figure it’s going to take all of the energy I have to remove Fidel from power. I’ll deal with the rest of it later.”
“The note will come due for all of this eventually, won’t it?”
Eduardo smiles sadly. “It always does. The trick is finding someone else who will pay it.”
chapter five
My social calendar is full in the week following my meeting with Mr. Dwyer, the two parts of my life so distinct. In public, I am the carefree debutante. In the few private moments I am allowed, I wait and worry over my arrangement with Mr. Dwyer. My mother keeps me busy in her never-ending quest to find Isabel and me husbands. To that end, she’s fixated on Valentine’s Day.
Everyone who is anyone in Palm Beach commemorates Valentine’s Day in a singular fashion: the Palm Beach Heart Ball, a charity event to raise money for the American Heart Association, chaired in previous years by Mamie Eisenhower herself. Considering the past guest list has included members of the illustrious Kennedy family, entertainers like Ed Sullivan, and sports stars of the same ilk as Joe DiMaggio, she couldn’t have asked for a better occasion for her daughters to “see and be seen”—and to raise money for charity, of course. This year’s chairwoman, the wife of a wealthy industrialist and a permanent fixture on the Palm Beach social scene, has outdone herself, and the stakes my mother has riding on this evening are great indeed, her eyes wide and calculating as though she has the personal net worth of each man in the party tucked somewhere in the recesses of her mind, their marital status jotted down beside the extraordinary sum. In Cuba, she was tenacious, but in Palm Beach, matchmaking has become her vocation.
We walk into the ball, a line of sugar queens, arranged by age, which auspiciously happens to coincide with the speed with which our mother hopes to see us married off. Isabel is first in line; she wears a Dior gown we’ve only repurposed once—an impressive feat given our current finances. Technically, she’s still engaged—her fiancé, Roberto, is back in Cuba—but he was hardly our mother’s first choice before, given his modest means, and I now imagine she’s ready to jettison him from Isabel entirely whether Isabel wishes it or not.
I’m next, wearing a red gown in a nod to the holiday and my own inability to blend in with the background. Husband-hunting or not, there’s nothing wrong with making an impression. And if a handsome senator happens to commemorate the holiday in the same fashion, well, there’s no harm in looking nice.