chapter seven
The season drifts on, February turning into March, the social scene in full swing. We’re never really invited to the intimate events, the ones hosted by families that have wintered together for decades, are never admitted to the lofty inner circles people like Nick Preston occupy. I don’t know if he’s still in Palm Beach, or if he’s gone up north to prepare for the coming election, but either way, our paths do not cross again.
After Easter, many will move on to the next whirl, another set of parties and charity events, to northern climates where the temperature is more bearable leading up to the summer heat wave that will make Florida a less palatable destination. Glittering homes will be shuttered, their running handed over to caretakers, billowing white sheets covering the expensive furniture until it is to be dusted off in the winter for the start of the next social season. Some families will remain, Palm Beach their home year-round, but the traffic on Worth Avenue will slow considerably, society’s gaze shifting away from the locale that has been under a microscope these past few months. The newspapers will be filled with the same girls, the same families, different settings, new scandals.
My mother’s displeasure over the fact that we are to remain in Palm Beach long past what is fashionable permeates the walls of our house, her complaints filling the room, her ire toward Fidel occasionally turning toward our father, his insistence that we can’t afford another house, that he can’t send us up north to compete with the venerable families, that his business keeps us here, Cuba a fading memory in the face of the new fortune he seeks to build.
My mother’s religion is our family’s status, the social capital she accumulates not nearly as adroitly as our father rebuilds his empire, his world dominated by sugar and land, the money he hoards in Switzerland and other places, his mistrust of the government magnified by the audacity of Fidel’s actions. I choke on their messianic fervor, on the fever pitch in our house as my mother’s growing insecurity over our diminished position in society and our father’s need for more reach inexorable levels.
And then with the late April showers, it’s over as quickly as it started; the world to which my mother desperately hopes to gain an entrée has moved on without us, the majority of her daughters still unmarried, Palm Beach a veritable ghost town compared to the golden months.
We spend our afternoons in the sitting room once Maria is home from school, the three of us flipping through magazines, reading books, our mother sipping her afternoon cocktail and deciding our futures. We’ve had nine days of rain, too many hours spent cooped up inside the house. The waiting wears thin, manifesting itself in the sharpness in our tones, sisterly glares, a thickening frost covering the veneer of my parents’ marriage.
“I have a cousin in Spain,” my mother announces one afternoon from her perch on the settee. “You could visit her, perhaps. Her husband is a diplomat. Surely, you could attend some embassy parties. There’s your father’s sister, of course. Mirta has offered her help. Her husband’s quite wealthy, you know.”
She frowns, as though she’s just realized the flaw in that particular plan.
Our aunt Mirta, our father’s younger sister, came to visit us in Cuba a few times, but I always gathered my mother didn’t approve of her husband. For all his money, the American lacks the pedigree to satisfy my mother. No, there will be no trips to visit our aunt to marry us off.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Maria interjects.
“Don’t worry. No one is sending you away. You have ages to go before you’re considered a spinster,” I tease. “Enjoy it.”
“I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you,” my mother retorts. “At your age, I was already a wife. Had a child.”
Isabel is silent through all of this conversation, as though not speaking will render her invisible, and keep our mother’s attention off her.
My mother swallows. “Two more on the way.”
Surprise fills me. It is the closest she has come to acknowledging Alejandro since his death.
“You will be older next season,” she adds, sweeping past the moment, casting a worried look my way, as though twenty-three will bring with it a wave of wrinkles and gray hairs that will render me officially on the shelf. “Men like a younger girl. Before the bloom is off the rose.”
My mother was just eighteen when she married my father.
Maria snorts at the comment, and I’m glad this is all a joke to her, that she hasn’t had to face the reality of our situation yet, that our parents consider marriage to be the final goal for us, our success tied to the men we catch rather than our own merits. The realization will come, of course, likely when she is ready to advance her schooling, when she dreams of college or law school as I once did.
Our part-time housekeeper, Alice, walks into the room before my mother can continue telling me my golden years are behind me.
“Pardon me. Miss Beatriz, Mr. Diaz is here to see you. He’s waiting outside.”
Saved by Eduardo.
We haven’t spent much time together since the dynamite night—Eduardo’s been “traveling,” his whereabouts a mystery, but at the moment, I’ll take political intrigue over my mother’s marital machinations.
I paste a smile on my face and rise from the couch, setting my magazine down on the end table.
“I shouldn’t keep Eduardo waiting. After all, time isn’t exactly on my side, is it?” I say, shooting my mother a pointed look.
From Isabel’s position on the couch, a strangled laugh escapes.
“You saved me,” I tell Eduardo later when we are walking side by side on the beach.
“Did I? I think I like the sound of that. Would you say I’m your hero, then?”
I laugh. “I wouldn’t go quite that far.”
“Humph. What did I save you from?”
“My mother. Voicing her displeasure that society has moved on and we are still here in Palm Beach.” I cast a sidelong look Eduardo’s way as we walk along the beach, my sandals in hand, the skirt of my dress clutched in my fingers as the sand slithers between my toes. “I’m surprised you didn’t leave.”
“Where would I go?” Eduardo looks to the sea, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead. It’s grown longer since the season ended, the ends curling.
“New York, perhaps.”
His lip curve with distaste. He knows the game as well as I do. “Trying to marry me off?”
“Would you marry? You have to eventually, don’t you?”
He’s three years older than me, not so old that his single status is unusual, but not so young, either, especially in these uncertain times. It’s different for men, of course, their bachelorhood tolerated far more than our impending spinster status, but still, at the end of the day, we are all meant to marry, have children, live the lives our parents lived before us.
“Marry for love?” he asks.
“Love, position, security.”
Eduardo stiffens slightly, and guilt stabs me. We don’t speak of our reduced circumstances; our pride doesn’t allow it. For a man like Eduardo, it’s a great blow indeed. In Cuba, Eduardo’s family lived like kings, their wealth in the land they owned, the businesses, the horses, an empire built over centuries. There are rumors that his father took money out of the country in the yawning days of Batista’s presidency and before Fidel marched into Havana, but the bulk of their fortune is now in Fidel’s hands.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Would you?” he counters.
“Sell myself to the highest bidder?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes it feels like things would be easier if I did,” I admit. “For my family, at least. It would certainly please my parents.”
“Yes.”
“What will you do when we go back to Cuba?” I ask, changing the subject.
This is one of my favorite games to play.
Eduardo smiles. “Sit on the patio of our house in Varadero and look out at the water, a cigar in hand. Breathe. Admire the legs of the dancers at the Tropicana. Marry some girl willing to put up with me. Have children. Watch them play in the water and know they won’t live under the same fear we’ve experienced, that they will grow up in a world where they can put down roots, where they can hold on to something without the fear it will be ripped away.”
“You want a family?”
“I do.”
“I wouldn’t have predicted that.” Whenever I take Eduardo at face value, somehow he always seems to surprise me.
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one for entanglements, that you would view a family as more of a burden than anything else.”
I’m fairly convinced our father sees me, my mother, and my sisters the same way; he loves us, but we’re another thing to manage and care for, to fret over.
“I suppose it would depend on why I married,” Eduardo answers. “If I chose a wife to get me out of this mess, married some American girl with the right last name and the kind of connections that would ensure a lifetime of smooth sailing, it would probably feel more like a burden than a joy. Don’t mistake me; money makes everything easier, and don’t think I haven’t considered taking the easy way, but—”
“You’re a romantic.” The notion surprises me.
He gives an embarrassed little laugh. “Isn’t that the whole point? Why are we doing any of this if not for the romanticism of it?”
“I suppose I thought it was about reclaiming the things you lost,” I admit, momentarily abashed by the possibility that I’ve misjudged him, that this whole time I’ve chalked his motives up to his own self-interest, when perhaps there was more there, his intentions more altruistic.
“It is. But those things aren’t just the ones that can be bought. There are other things we lost, too. Ones you can’t put a price on or replicate.”
“No matter how much my father tries,” I mutter under my breath.
“I wouldn’t judge him too harshly,” Eduardo says, surprising me once more. “He has a great deal of responsibility on his hands. Without Alejandro . . .” His voice trails off. “Your father isn’t a young man, and now he has to ensure that when he dies, you, your sisters, and your mother are provided for. Most of the provisions he made for you in Cuba are probably gone. That must worry him.”
And there it is: perhaps more than any of us, Eduardo is the ultimate intersection of the pragmatist and the dreamer.
“You’re angry,” he adds, surprising me yet again. He sees far more than I realize.
There’s no point in denying it. Anger is my faithful companion.
“I’d hoped working with the CIA would help you,” he says. “That it would make the anger more bearable somewhat, at least as it has done for me.”
I always assumed Eduardo involved me because he knew I would be amenable to it and because my beauty and notoriety gave him a weapon he could use against Fidel. I never considered he was helping me, too.
Was that why he took me with him the night he picked up the dynamite? Did he notice how lost I felt in that ballroom after my dance ended with Nick? Or did he really just use me as a diversion to suit his own ends?
“It has helped a bit, I suppose,” I answer. “Have you heard anything from Mr. Dwyer? Anything about Cuba?”
“There are rumors,” Eduardo answers after a beat. “But one struggles with what to believe these days. With the explosion of La Coubre, they say Fidel is growing more paranoid. He’s convinced the CIA is acting against him.”
In early March, La Coubre, a French freighter loaded with weapons headed for Fidel, exploded in the Havana harbor. Many were killed, more injured. Fidel has proclaimed it an act of sabotage by the Americans, another grievance in a growing list of them.
“Were they responsible for the explosion?” It seems entirely plausible they would be, and at the same time, I am predisposed to disbelieve any words that fall from Fidel’s lips.
Eduardo shrugs. “My contacts say ‘no,’ but who really knows with the CIA? I’m not privy to all of their schemes. I’m useful to them in my own way, but unfortunately, not powerful enough to be treated as an equal.”
“What wonderful friends we’ve acquired.”
“At the moment, they’re the only friends who will have us.”
“Perhaps we’re foolish to put all of our faith in the Americans. There have to be others.”
“Who else? The situation grows more complicated with each day. Now the Soviet Union is involved, and they’re growing closer to Fidel; we’re caught between two giants. There’s increased concern about the ramifications intervening in Cuba will have on the tension between the Americans and the Soviets. It’s a mess.”
And even more, for Cubans it is an ongoing source of frustration and pain. Empires in one fashion or another have decided our history: first the Spanish, then the Americans, now Cuba lies in the balance of a proxy war between two powers.
“Do you think this plan will actually come to fruition? That they’ll really have some use for me?”
“The CIA?”
I nod.
“I do. It will likely come down to timing. If they can arrange for you to meet Fidel, how they can get you into the country and extract you. I know the Americans aren’t the best allies, but they won’t risk your safety needlessly, won’t risk the injury to their own reputation. With the current tensions between the two countries, they must be cautious.”
With my history with Fidel, my brother’s death, it will be easier for them to pretend I acted of my own volition, that I was motivated by anger and revenge rather than political machinations.
“Are you nervous?” Eduardo asks me.
“A bit. That I’ll get a chance, that I won’t.”
“Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse: feeling like you did nothing or failing in the attempt,” he acknowledges.
My gaze sweeps over the beachgoers sprinkled across the horizon. I seize on a mother and her two children playing in the sand. She barely looks older than me.
How differently would my life have turned out if I’d been born in this country, if I hadn’t come into a fractured and divided island caught in never-ending turmoil? Would I wear the same contented expression on my face as she does? Or is there more there under the beach tan and flash of white teeth, the matching pair of children? Do we all have secrets lingering beneath our skin, private battles we fight? Does she look at Eduardo and me walking together and see a young couple in love, envy me the handsome man, the freedom my childless status affords me?
“We have a few things we’re working on,” Eduardo says, tearing my attention away from the woman and her children.
“Things you won’t talk about.”
Like the dynamite we picked up.
“It’s complicated, Beatriz. There are some things it’s best if you aren’t involved in.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“No. Because the less people who know about our plans, the better. Fidel’s spies are everywhere.”
“I would never—”
“I know you wouldn’t. But we need to be careful. I’m trying to keep you away from this as much as I can, trying to keep you safe. Alejandro always sought to shield you from as much of it as he could.”
“And yet you’ve encouraged it. Took me with you to pick up those crates. Engineered my meeting with the CIA.”
“Because I know how much this means to you. How much you loved your brother, how hard you fought against Batista. You believe in Cuba and the dreams you have for her future. Besides, you’re Beatriz Perez. When have you ever wanted something and not gotten your way?”
“I can’t tell if you’re the only one who really knows me, who really believes in me, or if it’s just that you’ve never wanted something and not achieved it, and I’m the easiest route from one point to another.”
Eduardo laughs. “Maybe you’re the only one who really knows me then.”
He wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his muscular frame, leaning into me, and this time it isn’t my imagination. The young mother casts an envious glance my way.
“Perhaps it’s a bit of both,” he concedes as his lips brush the top of my head, the affection in his voice belying the unvarnished truth in his words.
That’s the thing about Eduardo—we are the same in so many ways, sometimes it’s like looking at a mirror, and I’m not always prepared to face the reflection staring back at me.