Waking Up in Eden Page 13
We went back to the hall and looked into the small bathroom where she had died on the floor. The room reeked. Breck turned up the heat and went to get my bag from the car. After the overnight flight from Hawaii, I needed sleep. Most of the relatives would arrive tonight or tomorrow. But first I got down on my knees and scrubbed the bathroom floor.
The morning after the funeral service, a dozen relatives gathered to scatter the ashes in the quiet memorial garden next to the Universalist Church. No sun penetrated the flat, gray sky — just the kind of winter day that Mom hated. Eighteen inches of snow shrouded small trees and shrubbery in ghostly forms. Breck and our brother-in-law, Max, wielded shovels to break through a crust of ice to find a suitable place for the ashes. They shoveled away snow from under a scrawny, leafless Japanese maple, the same spot where only two months before we had sprinkled Dad’s remains. Dad loved Japanese maples so much that he used to drive around town in autumn to jot down locations of the trees with the brightest reds, then return in spring to pick up seeds to grow in coffee cans. When Breck and Max reached bare earth with their shovels, they revealed the pure white grains of Dad’s ashes, stark against black dirt. Then Breck turned the shovel around to use it as a sculptor’s tool. With a couple of decisive strokes, he carved the hole in the snow into the shape of a heart.
“Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” intoned the minister. Each in turn, we dipped a hand into a cardboard box of nearly weightless ash. I scooped up a tablespoon or two of gritty powder and cast it back and forth, to form a layer of fine gray over the particles of white.
BACK ON KAUAI, the early winter darkness caught me by surprise. I hadn’t anticipated that the sun would set early, even if the weather didn’t change much. For once home before dark, I took Sam for a walk down the long yard. The setting sun washed the plateau a varnished orange. Palms cast long black shadows, tinged with coolness, like a New England fall.
I strode up the small hill next to the cottage. Sam nibbled grass while I stopped in the green shadows to listen to the shama, a Hawaiian mockingbird, its cascading song lilting from branch to branch. Of course, the inevitable had happened. I had taken Sam for a checkup, and the moment the vet saw the brown, gray, and black fur, he said, “Oh, it’s a girl.” Turns out that mutiple coloring is a sex-linked female trait.
“Good thing you went into botany and not zoology,” I ribbed Dr. Klein.
Now, as I reached the line of macadamia trees at the center of the yard, I turned back to call: “Sam, Sam, the jungle cat.” Her head bobbed up, ears alert, one paw cocked like a bird dog. Then she came trotting low to the ground.
Hawaii, with its year-round breeding temperatures, fostered bounties of fleas, so for curative measures I bathed Sam. First I’d fill a bucket with tepid water, dip her, lather her up, then rinse her in the bucket again before holding her under the shower faucet for a final rinse. I can’t say she ever liked it, but she loved her fresh-smelling coat. Steve Perlman said he shampooed his cat every weekend and the cat loved it so much that he’d jump into the outdoor sink.
I continued to walk farther down the long lawn until I stood under the giant mango tree where the tip of the plateau opened to a view over two valleys to the sea. As I headed back to the cottage, my faraway brass student lamps cast comforting orbs of golden light through the windows like beacons.
Night descended so thickly, so completely, that once inside, I rarely left again until morning. I would have given anything to be able to call a friend and talk. But because of the six-hour time difference between Hawaii and the East Coast, all my friends and family had long gone to bed by the time I left the office. I climbed the steps to the front porch and opened the cottage door. I smiled at the transformation that had been wrought. The cottage had changed from a place where no one would want to live to a comforting retreat, a lady’s colonial plantation camp, full of light and air. The outdoors seemed to spill inside.
Bits and pieces of my previous life melded with the new surroundings. The blue and white Chinese rug created a frame for the white canvas-covered sofa and chaise. I had upholstered two chairs in a faint white and blue plaid and covered pillows in blue and white toile print. Here on Kauai I picked up more blue and white pillows, quilted silk with Hawaiian themes of coconut palms and pineapples, swimming sea turtles and leaping dolphins. Deep red and blue antique Oriental carpets glowed like stained glass against the painted slate-colored floors. A dark wood Chinese armoire and two coffee tables with a Far Eastern motif salvaged from the cottage’s original furnishings helped create a South Seas theme.
The massive purging of possessions I had undergone in Philadelphia had simplified life. No fancy dishes or fussy furniture. I had brought only a few remnants of elegance to contrast with my primitive surroundings. Crystal and silver perfume bottles and embroidered sheets added some glamour. I propped on top of the armoire a gold-framed oil painting of a Connecticut autumn scene that I had bought cheap at auction and didn’t care if the tropical climate ruined it. Some doubts crept in about the degree to which this scheme bespoke of New England. Those misgivings vanished when I visited the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As I walked through the wood-frame house that had been shipped in pieces from Boston around Cape Horn in 1820, I recognized New England dark furniture. Straight backs and hard seats emanated moral rectitude against tropical indolence. I had laughed when I saw the toile curtains.
I could have left all my possessions behind. But like the first Connecticut missionaries who settled in Hawaii, I drew comfort from the power of a few familiar belongings. That’s why we call them belongings, because they give us a sense of belonging to something when we’ve left behind one life and have no compass to guide us through the next. I liked dining at my Queen Anne dining room table from my great aunt Elizabeth who had lived in the Connecticut countryside. I often touched the wood jewelry box my father had carved for me.
As darkness fell, the banks of windows turned into black mirrors, entombing the cottage. I hustled into flannel pajamas, socks, and a robe. Although winter brings sunny mornings and usually a perfect eighty degrees by 11 a.m., nights grow chilly up here in the hills, with temperatures falling occasionally into the fifties. Like most houses in the islands, the cottage had neither heat nor air-conditioning, so I closed all the windows to keep warm. I slept with both blanket and comforter.
Evenings I crawled home exhausted. Too many foreign realms overwhelmed me: the strange flora of this hothouse climate; the mellifluous Hawaiian names in the almost consonant-less language; a new house; new routine. With so many conversations required in the office and so much work to be done, my days were very long. The sudden deaths of both parents left me in a state of gray funk. Every night I meant to write at least five thank-you notes to people who had made gifts to a scholarship for medical students in honor of Mom and Dad. Yet grief wearied me so heavily that I couldn’t write a one. I hadn’t enough energy to make dinner. That night I popped an envelope of popcorn in the microwave, poured a glass of milk, then carried the paper envelope to the couch and ate popcorn lying down while watching the old movie South Pacific — filmed entirely on Kauai.
With familiarity, I watched as World War II Navy nurse Nellie Forbush wavered over the decision to marry the handsome island plantation owner Emile, so different from anyone she knew in Little Rock, Arkansas. She learns that Emile had killed a man in France before he fled to the South Pacific.
“What are you running away from, Emile?” she asks.
“Who is not running away from something?” he answers.
Nellie returns to the Navy base, where the handsome young lieutenant Joe Cable from Philadelphia agrees with her that life here is too strange, too different. He sings the nostalgic song: “Far, far away, Philadelphia, PA.” I remembered my own forsaken Philadelphia. Armageddon had arrived at the Inquirer. Another downsizing buyout was offered, and more than twentyfive writers and editors, including several of the top brass, took it. Corporate headquarters dem
anded another increase in profits. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. Nor had I any reason to return to Connecticut anymore. Now I really was marooned.
Sam snuggled close to me on the couch, waking briefly and stretching out her front legs in a request for petting. I complied. With regular meals, Sam’s dusty gray coat had deepened into a deep gloss. I stroked her black-bottomed feet, one palominocolored paw, and tiger-striped face. Dr. Klein had hooted: “That cat moved in on you so fast you didn’t know what hit you.” Turning serious, Dr. Klein added bluntly, “I’m worried that your social life revolves around your cat.” Privately I felt that I could do worse. He and Janet constantly invited me along on their island activities. We drove up to Waimea Canyon — the gorge that ran from the high peak to ocean, its sides banded in shades of red mineral — or into Kokee State Park, Dr. Klein lecturing on tropical botany. They roped me into a benefit dinner at Wilcox Memorial Hospital and concerts and plays at the Kauai Community College auditorium. On new-moon nights we drove out to the Navy base for the astronomy club stargazing events. Sometimes I hiked with Rick Hanna and his friends up into the misty rain forest on the Pihea Trail or through the fog drifts over the spongy Alakai Swamp, an incongruous marsh over the island’s high-elevation aquifer.
Mostly, though, I hadn’t the zest to start building a new life. As South Pacific concluded with its happy-ending sunset, I turned on a Beethoven CD and lay back on my chaise. Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” How true, although Dr. Schweitzer obviously never had a garden. Sam climbed up and over me to her pillow roost, and settled against the back of my head. We closed our eyes.
THE ALARM RANG in the dead of night to wake me in time to watch the Leonid meteor showers. I climbed to the top of the ridge on my cottage property, then sat on a low beach chair, wrapped in a terry cloth robe and sipping coffee. The cocks crow all night, not just at dawn. I can hear the deep lowing of cattle grazing on nearby farms. I live alone on five acres of darkness, on a small island in the middle of the Pacific. People ask me if I am afraid, but I’m not. The police blotter column in The Garden Island newspaper provided more entertainment than cause for alarm, with its accounts of loose horses, cockfights, and often comical altercations. Crime seemed far away. I struck a match, surprised at the enormous sound in the deep silence. I pulled a smoky drag on a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked for a couple of years, but in times of upset it provided a quick fix. It made me feel close to Dad. We used to joke that his blood consisted of a brew of cigarette smoke, scotch, and black coffee. He liked the stars, too.
Sam ran up the lawn to join me and climbed on my lap, assuming her favorite petting posture, forepaws hooked over my knees, back presented for stroking. The night skies offered some of the best stargazing on the planet. Far from lights of any major city, or even neighbors, galaxies swirled in brilliant profusion. The Southern Cross sank low in the sky. A moving point of light, like a plane, evaporated. Comet? Perhaps, but too slow. Then a streak of light fell vertically from the Big Dipper, like a drip. Definitely comet.
I missed Mom and Dad, longed to see their faces, hear their voices, know them beyond the identities I had assigned them as parents. Bill Klein said he had experienced the same phenomenon after the death of his father. “It’s as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are,” he said. Memories tumbled together. Mom met Dad during World War II at the University of Minnesota Hospital, my father a psychiatric intern, my mother a student nurse.
My mother was a first-generation American, her mother and father German immigrants who arrived separately, met in Chicago, and married, probably unwisely in my grandfather’s case. His three daughters suffered his rages and would remark that he never should have had children.
My parents rarely spoke about their childhoods. Once my mother told me about the shame she felt about having to live at home while attending the University of Minnesota Nursing School. The poor students ate their homemade lunches on a bench where they hoped no one would notice them or their brown bags, a searing brand of poverty. My aunt showed us the location of one of the many cheap apartments she and my mother had lived in as children in south Minneapolis. Certainly Mom would not disclose that secret. But she had class. An expert seamstress, she used Vogue patterns to conjure up a wardrobe. While Mom was getting dressed in her mustard tweed suit to chauffeur us to doctor or dentist appointments, she permitted us to forage through her blue earring box. All the wiles of womanhood were contained in that box along with tiny turquoise knob earrings and a heavy set of faux pearls and rhinestones. Later, when I inherited the box after her death, I realized it was only a plastic case lined with rayon velvet. I kept it, all the same.
Dad had almost as humble beginnings. His father kept a dry goods store along the main street in Sterling, Kansas, a town whose locations were used for the film Picnic, a tale of escape from small-town restraints. Dad told how days would go by during the Depression without his father selling even a single handkerchief. Dad won a Summerfield scholarship to the University of Kansas, then advanced to Yale Medical School. His brother, Richard, ended up at Harvard Law. According to family legend, when Uncle Dick graduated from law school he announced he would travel west until no one had ever heard of the name Fleeson, a reference to my interfering great-aunt Doris. The joke was that he settled in Bellingham, Washington, as far west and north as one could go.
Aunt Doris Fleeson was the family celebrity, a famed journalist and World War II correspondent for the Woman’s Home Companion — the only publication she could find to hire a woman — and a longtime national political columnist. She was president of the Washington Press Club, the precursor to the National Press Club. Whenever in Washington, I’d visit her picture hanging outside the second-floor ladies’ room of the Press Club. That was fitting, as she had forced the U.S. Capitol Press Galleries to install women’s bathrooms, unheard of when she first started covering Congress. Tart-tongued and bossy, she had tried to push Uncle Dick into running for Congress. My father just ignored her, so sadly I never met her.
My parents’ ascendancy to professional rank and middle-class comfort represented more accomplishments, over more serious obstacles, than any of their children would achieve. Careers, five children, fifty-two years of marriage.
In the 1950s, Mom and Dad enthusiastically settled into postwar prosperity in the small suburb of Hopkins, Minnesota. Dad was a neighborhood hero called to the scene when a kid broke his leg. At the school fair he manned the popcorn machine and escorted me on the cakewalk. In probably my father’s boldest moment, he bought a sleek racing sloop and dashed about Lake Minnetonka. In his second boldest move, he left the University of Minnesota to help build a new medical school at the University of Connecticut. I had just turned thirteen.
We desperately missed the Paradise Lost of Minnesota. My father wore gardening shorts to their first Connecticut neighborhood cocktail party, a glaringly gauche move as the other men dressed in suit and ties. Worse, when invited to take a yacht club sailboat out for a spin on Long Island Sound, he turned the boat turtle, damaged the rigging, and slunk home embarrassed, never to be invited again. Not many got close to him. He never talked about his disappointments, although we all knew about them, as he would withdraw into near silence, sometimes for months. More and more he descended to his basement workshop, where he carved beautiful chess sets of cut and polished stone. The projects went on for decades, until he started keeping a scotch bottle down there, and my mother made him promise not to use power tools in the evening hours anymore. My mother dealt with Connecticut by becoming the executive director of a social agency — but like my father, at night her drinking hours grew longer, the brooding darker. I quit my own nightly martinis several years ago when I recognized that I was following the same pattern. I escaped that genetic Molotov cocktail, but narrowly.
All of us seemed to slink around in those years, as things started going wrong. One brother abandoned hi
s wife and three small babies, leaving my parents to help with their raising. We lost another brother to mental illness. Great balls of sadness descended, and the family solution was to pour alcohol over it all. Galactically dysfunctional, one brother called us. I remembered what Zorba the Greek said when asked if he was married: “Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe.”
For me, the move to Connecticut occurred just as I entered teen years, a time that magnified the need for social acceptance. It took years to recover from my disastrous first day at school, arriving at the bus stop decked out in new wool plaid vest, corduroy skirt, and uncool white ankle socks. I quickly learned that junior high girls wore light cotton summer clothes well into chilly October, until the day when the group, en masse, made the seasonal wardrobe change. And never ankle socks. Only penny loafers, barefoot.
Sartorial blunders aside, we were lonely.
Neither of my parents adopted pretensions or materialism. They valued education, common sense, fairness, fulfilling responsibilities, returning library books on time, hard work, and Democratic politics. My parents had aged without my paying attention. Just three years ago, we had all convened at an Arizona dude ranch to celebrate Mom and Dad’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He smoked a cigarette astride a horse, looking like a prototypical Marlboro man. We all smoked. You could have more than two drinks at the Fleeson house and smoke all you wanted.
After Dad’s funeral, Mom insisted on driving me to the airport for my 6:30 a.m. flight to Hawaii. All of the relatives had already left. Snow crunched loudly under the tires in the freezing night air as we passed snow-covered fields and dark farmhouses. “That was a nice send-off,” she said. “We did him proud.” The Universalist Church minister really revved up for the service. Two of Dad’s medical school colleagues delivered inspired eulogies. During that rushed week, I slept on the living room couch because relatives crowded into Mom and Dad’s small retirement house. Late one night, I shivered in my nightgown outside the closed bathroom door, waiting my turn. The door opened, and my sister Libby came out, also in her nightgown. Mom, in a long nightdress, opened her bedroom door. In the dark, Libby and I wrapped our arms around Mom. We each pressed a cheek against her cheeks. “My girls,” she murmured. “My sweet girls.”