By Judy Bolton-Fasman
When my Cuban–born mother married my much older American father, she was thrilled to say goodbye to the cold-water flats and acrid subway stations of the Brooklyn to which she had immigrated. Over a half-century later, I walked the streets of Havana where my mother had dreamed of a rich life in America. Her fantasies of a star-spangled, Doris Day-Rock Hudson life included the two-story colonial in suburban Connecticut in which she eventually lived.
I looked for that same sort of luxury that my mother said she grew up with in Old Havana on la Calle Mercéd 20 — my mother’s house, the storied address of my childhood. For me, all things Cuban began and ended there. It was the place where my mother would be young forever. It was the place where my grandparents shut the door on twenty-five years of possessions and walked away forever. It was the place where my mother said she shined the marble stairs better than the maid. This was my mother’s world and when I knocked on Number 20’s heavy door it was the last moment before I fully understood that she had invented her comfortable Cubana life — a life that featured a tony apartment house where my mother and her family occupied both floors. She said there was a maid’s room where Amelia the housekeeper ironed the delicate house linens.
A pregnant woman answered the door and I stepped into the small, dark place that almost certainly had not changed since my mother lived there. The four-room apartment was crowded with maroon brocade furniture. A big screen television, the focal point of the living room, broadcast in garish colors and ran without the sound. Like my parents’ bedroom on Asylum Avenue, the place felt existentially noisy with so much stuff crammed into that small space. The furnishings were obviously gifts that their relatives in America brought them. Continue Reading…