Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  Praise for The Girls with No Names

  “Burdick has spun a cautionary tale of struggle and survival, love and family—and above all, the strength of the heart, no matter how broken.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Burdick reveals the perils of being a woman in 1913 and exposes the truths of their varying social circles. The first-person narratives place us into the minds of each woman, exposing her fears and hopes, and the strength needed to live through another day.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Burdick’s carefully researched narrative shines a light on the untold stories of countless real women, and fans of Joanna Goodman’s The Home for Unwanted Girls will be consumed by the fast-paced plot and well-characterized, sympathetic girls at the novel’s heart.”

  —Booklist

  “The lives of women in early-twentieth-century New York spring to life through Burdick’s deft sketching. A spellbinding thriller for fans of Gilded Age fiction.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “I’m shocked I’d never heard of the House of Mercy, the asylum for fallen women at the center of Serena Burdick’s beautiful novel. A mesmerizing tale of strength, subterfuge, and the unbreakable bond between sisters.”

  —Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light

  “Burdick weaves a stunning story of sisters, friendship, secrets, and ultimately survival. I fell in love with the courageous Effie and Mable and will not soon forget their stories.”

  —Jillian Cantor, USA TODAY bestselling author of In Another Time

  Also by Serena Burdick

  The Girls with No Names

  Girl in the Afternoon

  Find Me in Havana

  Serena Burdick

  For Nina

  Serena Burdick graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in California before moving to New York City to pursue a degree in English literature at Brooklyn College. Author of the international bestseller The Girls with No Names and Girl in the Afternoon, she lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  * * *

  Big Sur, 1966

  Cliffs

  Mother,

  In August, Big Sur crackles with drought. Grass dries to a crisp and turns gold as ember. Rattlers lay in wait. Fat insects purr, and banana slugs languish. The air is ripe with eucalyptus, their slender, green leaves blanketing the canyon paths. Poison oak claws the hillside. This is not the season of lemon trees or emerald hills or crisp sunshine. Summer on the coast is a season of bone-chilling fog.

  Overlooking the Pacific, I stand on Nepenthe’s stone patio, the restaurant’s windows spilling light around me as I watch the gray mass of fog crawl and heave up the cliff. You would have liked it here, Mom, but we never drove up the coast together. We never had the chance. I close my eyes as the fog settles over me, damp and soft as a whisper. Below, the surf thunders against the rocks, and I feel the sway of the sea in my legs and picture myself stepping over the low stone wall and lifting my arms into the air. The ocean will catch me, release me, hollow out my body and wash it up on the shore like an empty shell.

  I need a shell. Hard skin. A barrier against the world of missing you.

  How is there no you left? No Mom. No Wife. No Movie Actress. No Singer. There are photographs, and moving pictures where you swing your hips and make funny faces, but I cannot touch or smell or feel or speak to this two-dimensional version.

  I want an explanation.

  Memories root and twist inside me, blossom, grow thorns, beautiful and gnarled, but the truth remains hidden, and I am left with the image of the bathroom floor and the weight of you in my arms.

  I do not want this to be our last memory.

  Opening my eyes, I take a deep breath, let the cool wetness lie over my tongue. Next to me, a fire crackles in the open hearth warming one side of my leg. I think how outdoor fires do this, warm only one side of you while the other side freezes. I wear a short skirt without pantyhose, white tennis shoes and a tight, knit sweater. The guests have all gone, the movie stars and bohemian artists, the former donning glitter and fur, the latter beads and loose-folding fabric, each hoping to authenticate themselves in originality. Each failing.

  “Nina?” I jump at the sound of my manager’s voice. He stands in the open patio doorway of the restaurant polishing a wineglass. “Your ride is here.”

  He looks at me kindly, unconcerned. He doesn’t know anything about me. I feel the warmth of the fire on my backside and think how cold it will be in the hollowed-out redwood tree where I sleep.

  “I’ll just wipe down the tables,” I say, stalling. I don’t want to face my ride any more than I want to face the cold night on the forest floor with the insects.

  My manager is a slender, vigorous man who looks as if he’s been breathing ocean air since birth. “It’s late.” He smiles. “You go on home now. I’ll take care of the tables.”

  Walking away from the restaurant, the stone path slick with moisture, I dig my doll from the bottom of my bag and tuck her under one arm. She has a cloth body and a plastic head with blue eyes that open and close when you tilt her. Her plastic head is dotted with dark holes where her carefully arranged hair used to be. On her stomach is a scar—held together with a safety pin—from the time I cut her open and pulled out the stuffing.

  Bret waits in his mint-green Volvo with the engine running. He is smoking a joint and doesn’t open the door for me. I slide into the passenger seat and he leans over and gives me a sloppy kiss, his hand pressed to the back of my head as if this is something romantic. His tongue tastes of stale smoke and alcohol. “Hey, baby,” he breathes into my face and passes me the joint. I take it, inhale and try to stifle a cough as Bret maneuvers the car onto the dark road.

  We met five months ago when I first arrived in Big Sur. My friend Delia and I had eaten a handful of mushrooms and were dancing around a bonfire at a beach party when Bret slipped into the wavy, illuminated light of my vision. His embroidered shirt rippled over his chest and I thought he was something supernatural. The next morning when I woke up beside him on the beach, he’d turned solid. He was nothing more than a thin-chested man with a tangled beard and skinny legs sticking out from his cutoff jean shorts.

  Bret hooks the car around a sharp bend, and the wheels kick up gravel that makes a sound like thunder under our feet.

 
“You’re going too fast,” I say, pressing my hand flat against the passenger window.

  He grins and steps on the gas, a man who likes to challenge a woman. This is familiar to me. I watched men challenge you your whole life, each one of your four husbands, in their own way, pushing you to the edge. Despite your effort to understand them, to please them, it was, in the end, your unwillingness to be controlled or possessed that got you killed.

  The car takes another corner, and the cliff drops to my right at a precarious angle where sumac and sagebrush cling to the edge. People love Highway 1 for its beauty. They think it cuts a benevolent path along the ocean cliff for our pleasure. What I see is a snake luring us with its curvaceous body, a thing of nature waiting for us to step on it so it can strike and fling us off.

  I squish my doll’s head in, making her face look like something in a distorting mirror. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I say, watching the doll’s features slowly inflate and pop back into place.

  Bret’s profile remains neutral, his eyes on the road as he reaches over and strokes my thigh. “Don’t be like that, baby. This is good.”

  I’ve tried to break up with him before. I don’t know why he won’t let me go, or how he can feel anything for me when I feel nothing inside. After your death, they sedated me because I was angry and didn’t behave properly. Now, I do what I can to sedate myself.

  “I mean it. I’m done.” I shove his hand away, and this makes him angry.

  He puts both hands on the wheel, grips it with white knuckles, his eyes forward, his jaw clenched. “What the fuck, Nina?” he says.

  The headlights strike the road. Yellow lines blink past like winking eyes.

  His anger scares me. “I’m sorry,” I say. I’m not good at this. Charming men. Giving them what they want. Doing what I watched you do, for the good ones and the bad. You appeased the good men, hoping they’d stay with you; placated the bad ones, hoping they wouldn’t hurt you. With each husband you tried a little harder, stayed a little longer, so certain you’d get it right.

  If Bret is any indication, I won’t get it right, either. Looking at him, his hard profile reflected in the dashboard lights, his scruffy beard and long hair curling at the base of his neck, he reminds me of the rebel soldiers in Cuba.

  This is not a memory I want. “Bret, I really can’t do this. Please, pull over. I need to get out.”

  “You don’t know what you need.”

  The arrogance in his voice disgusts me, the anger I’d been tamping down with drugs is now rising in my throat. For all his meditating and chanting and seeking enlightenment, Bret is a prick. I am twenty years old, you are dead, and there’s no one to tell me what to do anymore. You are not here to laugh it away, or tell me to chin up, to silence me or put me in a mental institution or stick me in a boarding school. “Fuck you, Bret!” I shout. “Pull over. I want to get out.”

  “Fuck me?” He speeds up, swerves the car near the shoulder of the road, gravel and dirt hitting my window and ricocheting off the glass like buckshot.

  I suck in my breath and grip the door handle. “Don’t do that!”

  “Do what? This?” He swerves again, and all I see, for a moment, is empty, black space.

  What I should do is calm him down, convince him I’m sorry and that I won’t break up with him. Stop the car, and we’ll talk about it, I should say, but a part of me wants him to do something drastic. To pull the trigger for me.

  We are crossing Bixby Bridge. The fog has receded, and I can see all the way down to the dark strip of beach where the waves crash and foam like a giant frothing at the mouth. I know, in that split second right before Bret takes us over the edge, that he’s going to do it. It’s not the plunge into water I’d imagined on the patio at Nepenthe. I am not sailing peacefully off the cliff with my arms out but trapped in a metal box that jerks to the right so abruptly my head smacks the window. I expect free fall, silence, stillness, but the air is sharp and compact and splintered with glass.

  And then you are in my arms, your face flushed, your dark hair limp on your wet forehead, vomit ringing the corners of your mouth. “Help me,” I plead, even though you are the one dying. “Don’t go,” I cry. “I need you.” But I have already hit bottom, and the world has gone quiet.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  Birth and Revolution

  Daughter,

  I am right here, Nina. I have not gone anywhere. I see you in the newness of your adulthood, and I will see you after, when you’ve come into the full force of yourself. I will watch you struggle to work the memory of my life into your own, to try and resolve our ending.

  I did not set out to hurt you. When you were born, I gazed into the gray-blue of your infant eyes, touched your softly wrinkled forehead, your miniature nose and lips with a swell of longing. I wanted to wrap you back into myself, to protect you from any future that might harm your unworn heart.

  It is June 14, 1946. I am eighteen years old. Newly married—hurriedly married. I have been in New York City for less than three years.

  It was not the smell or noise or pace that stunned me when I first arrived here but the lack of color. New Yorkers, it seems, are too busy to paint their walls. They abandon brick and stone and cement to their natural pigment, fill their streets with black cars, their sidewalks with black coats, hats and umbrellas. They dress in gray and brown, and a drab arrangement of squares called plaid. I miss skirts that sweep up the blue of the sea and the yellow of the poui trees, fabric that holds the curve of a woman rather than boxing her in.

  “Only turquoise and pink for you,” I whisper, easing your arm from the tightly wrapped blanket and peeling your fist open. Your fingers latch around mine, quick as a crab, and from the foot of the bed your abuela smiles.

  “Mi hermosa nieta,” Mamá says, moving closer and running a finger over your forehead. There is no hum or singsong to her voice, her tone and smile a practical one. You are not what Mamá wants, but now that you are here, she’ll love you with the same efficiency she loves all of her family.

  From the twelfth story of St. Joseph’s Hospital, I can see the East River, a flat wash of gray running into a tower of metallic skyscrapers that shoot upward into a colorless sky. Puffs of black smoke rise from the ferryboats like bad omens. It is a city drawn of charcoal and pen. I want to dip a brush into the pink of your blanket and the gray-blue of your eyes and fill your world with the colors of Cuba, the colors of home. Because I cannot do that, I press you to my breast and sing:

  Take me home to Cuba,

  Cuba, where you’ll sing to me

  Cuba, where my heart lies free

  And the handsome fellas, wait to tell us

  Of their love

  Where the sea shines blue.

  And green.

  Cuba where I’ll stay

  I am nine years old when I first sing in a Havana nightclub to a room of satin dresses, shiny suits and slick pomaded hair where the effort of all that luster is dulled under a veil of smoke. Women prop their arms on round tables, the lamps tinting their white gloves orange, while men lean back in chairs as they sip iced drinks and suck cigars whose ends glow like click beetles. Last week, my sister Danita and I caught seventeen click beetles. Our jar was as bright as a lantern, and we marched around the house announcing our success at the top of our lungs, putting our eldest sister out of sorts as she was rocking our baby sister to sleep.

  Tonight is the first time I am singing without Danita, but it will not be the last.

  I cup the microphone with both hands and sway my hips from side to side with all the energy my small pelvic bones can muster. I wink and grin, the bemused adult faces laughing at a little girl pretending to be a woman. I play it up, jutting out a hip, cocking a shoulder and tilting my chin in mock seduction. There is a cheer and a whistle, and I raise my eyes to the back of the room where potted palms spread th
eir wide green leaves against the wall. That’s where Mamá stands watching, her arms crossed over the front of her brown polkadot dress. From her expression I can’t tell whether she is pleased or annoyed.

  Earlier that afternoon I watched her pull her dress from the back of her closet and shake it from its hanger. “After six babies this beauty still fits.” She smiled, shimmying her hips, her silk slip rustling like paper around her knees. “Never let the babies go to your waist. Men won’t look at you if there’s not enough there, and they won’t look at you if there’s too much.” She tucked an authoritative finger under my chin and lifted my face. Her dark eyes, deep set above her smooth cheeks, sober and resolute, as if it all came down to the size of my waist. “What do we say?”

  “A perfect balance.” I swung my hips. My starched white skirt did not rustle but moved as one unit. A doll on a pedestal.

  Mamá kissed her fingertips, flinging the kiss into the air. “Perfecto, mi hija.” Draping her dress over one arm, she tightened the purple ribbon holding up my ponytail. “Not too much swing. Not too much voice. Just enough to draw them in and make them want more.” With a final yank to my hair, she shook out her dress and stepped into it, her movements labored, her arms maneuvering their way into the puffed sleeves, thick and round as the drainpipes sticking out of the dirt by the side of our house. Reaching around, she buttoned the back and secured the narrow belt around her well-proportioned waist.

  Her solid body is beautiful to me.

  I glanced at my reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Heat buzzed through the open window, and a cloud of gnats settled over the glass as I practiced my smile. Earlier that day, Mamá told me that if I sang well tonight she’d hang the mirror in my room, a room I share with my sisters, but the mirror would be all mine. It is large, rectangular, the frame intricately carved of a pale wood like the kind that washes up on the beach. We still have expensive furniture from the time before. A house filled with beautiful things despite the peeling exterior and shriveled gardens.