Waking Up in Eden Read online

  Bill Klein had put an end to Doug’s fiefdom. Even so, Doug usually telephoned at least once a day, insisting to be put through to whomever he wished to speak to, wherever they were — intrusions that became flash points in the continuing power struggle between the two men. Both had huge shares of confidence and egotism, making their inevitable clashes seem titanic.

  Still, Bill and Doug regarded each other with grudging mutual respect. “Dead in the water,” Doug often said to describe the moribund Garden before Bill Klein. “We were dead in the water until Bill Klein came. He’s doing more things in one year than the previous director did in seventeen. Now we have a real chance to become world-class.”

  And if Bill valued Doug’s devotion and his energy, he counted at least equally on Doug’s generous donations. Between fending off Doug’s interference and trying to fit Dr. Klein’s schemes and dreams into reality, I felt I was in constant battle mode. Trying to coordinate a campaign with them was like trying to take two Great Danes out for a walk.

  As we cruised past browning California hills, my attention reverted to the task ahead of us as we turned off the highway at the Stanford University exit and began the climb to Bill and Jean Lane’s ranch.

  We turned onto a drive marked by a red mailbox, then climbed higher, past horse pastures railed with log fences. A Porsche was parked in a hilltop courtyard in front of a sprawling ranch house that commanded million-dollar views of the valleys below. A heavy carved wooden door looked like it had once adorned a Spanish mission. Jean answered our ring, looking girlish in casual slacks and tailored shirt. A woman servant silently served us soup, tomato salad, and fresh bread while Doug and I listened to Jean. After lunch we moved to the living room with its Western ranch furniture. Doug threw me a softball: “Look, Jean, we want to bring you up to date on the campaign.”

  I pulled out colored architectural drawings. A scientific research and horticulture building would serve as the heart of the Garden, I explained. A new visitor center complex would be built in phases as a new entrance to Allerton Garden. I unfurled a sketch of the little plantation house we planned to renovate. She sat on the edge of her chair, her eyes darting from one sketch to another. “Gee, both look so good. I just can’t decide which one we ought to do,” she said. Doug and I avoided looking at each other. We never mentioned figures but the papers were clearly marked with dollar signs. Two million to build the nursery center; half a million for the visitor center.

  A WEEK LATER, Bill Lane telephoned with the news that they would donate $500,000 to restore the plantation house, to be named the Bill and Jean Lane Visitor Center. Experienced donors, they asked for a pledge card outlining the terms of their gift and a schedule of payments. I faxed a letter of agreement.

  Bill Lane signed it with a big, bold pen, revising the payment schedule so that more money would come sooner.

  Over the ensuing months, Dr. Klein presided over noisy, almost party-like sessions to chart renovations of the sugar shack. Spencer Leinweber, a Honolulu architectural expert in historic preservation, flew over to unveil her latest drawings. We hired Mike Faye, who had done such a spectacular job restoring my own cottage. He answered questions about construction. John Rapozo gave his evaluation on excavation. Bill named Scott Sloan, head of the grounds crew, as project supervisor, giving him a new confidence and authority.

  Another of Bill’s master strokes, I observed. By involving everyone he fostered excitement, dedication, ownership. We were all pinning a lot of hopes on this little building. Sometimes I worried whether it would collapse under the weight of them all. Dr. Klein wanted a new gift shop to help pay for the NTBG’s expansion. A museum exhibit to explain our scientific mission. Bookcases mounted on wheels, so they could be pushed out of the way for evening lectures. A small café to sell cold drinks and sandwiches. A series of small gardens surrounding the center to give visitors a taste of the Allerton and Lawai gardens without having to go on a full guided tour. How were all these plans going to be crammed into 1,800 square feet? Faye projected that the building could be picked up, moved, and rehabilitated for about $150,000. I could almost hear the whirl of an adding machine racking up tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs.

  “We’ll just have to get Lucinda to raise more money,” John Rapozo told the group at one meeting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Last Harvest

  A BREEZE CAUGHT MY wide black straw hat, threatening to lift it off. Cars and people already jammed the narrow streets of Koloa Town, gathered for the annual Plantation Days Parade to celebrate the August cane harvest. Paniolos on horses pranced up and down the roadway, their mounts decorated with swags of braided greenery. Open convertibles carried rhinestoned teen queens. Hula girls danced and ukulele players strummed atop orchid-strewn floats. A flatbed truck carted an antique sugar locomotive once used to transport workers and cane. In the distance stood the gray metal buildings of the Koloa Sugar Mill, strangely quiet.

  Mill operators had announced they would shut down in a few week’s time. The last blow had come when Pepsi canceled its contract. All two hundred workers would be out of jobs at harvest’s end. Established in 1835, the Koloa mill became the first successful refinery in Hawaii. Over the next hundred years, raising sugar was as good as growing money. By 1955, 1,282 sugar planters tilled the fields in Hawaii. Now only three plantations still operated in all the islands: one on Maui and two on Kauai.

  Experimental forays into agriculture to replace cane remained tiny. When riding Bo, I liked to nudge him into a canter through the hedgerows of coffee that had been planted as an alternative, although the idea had yet to prove profitable. Small truck farmers started asparagus beds and papaya. No one really knew what to do with all the former cane fields except build vacation housing. Top real estate agents and time-share salesmen made the only big money on the island.

  I spotted the Garden’s old Dodge silver sampan, festooned with bird-of-paradise spikes, ginger torches, and elephant ear leaves. Dr. Klein had insisted that the Garden enter the parade, a first for NTBG. As symbols go, it telegraphed that the Garden had emerged from its shell and joined the community. A dozen of us squeezed into the vehicle’s rear leather benches. The driver revved up and we moved off with ceremonial speed, falling in line behind the locomotive float. As we approached the center of Koloa, hundreds of people lined the road. A master of ceremonies announced our arrival at the judges’ stand on a gravelly microphone system: “And here we have the National Tropical Botanical Garden, folks. That is some car, isn’t it? Let’s have a round of applause.”

  Dr. Klein waved excitedly to people, then jumped off the sampan and waded into the throngs, shaking hands and passing out Garden brochures. At the Koloa community ball field, large striped tents held booths hawking Hawaiian crafts, teriyaki chicken, volcano-hot chili, shave ice, saimin, and long rice. Hula troupes and bands would perform all day. A giant plastic balloon of King Kong loomed over it all. But the edge of forced gaiety only partly masked an underlying sadness over the end of an era.

  Before Dr. Klein had arrived, entering a parade would have been out of the question. Garden staff even routinely turned away magazine and newspaper reporters. Now flattering articles about the Garden’s renaissance rained in by the dozens. National Geographic, Preservation Magazine, Sunset Magazine, and the Royal Horticulture Society’s Garden Magazine all ran big spreads. The Sunday New York Times national page led with a story about the Garden’s plant rescue. Tourists filled Allerton Garden tours to capacity. Progress in opening up the Garden could be seen everywhere. Over on Maui, the kapu sticks had finally been removed and plans were under way to open the garden. My own job grew easier after I happily watched the departure of the oppressive finance director who resigned to return to the mainland. I liked his friendly new replacement.

  As I became more settled and the job became more manageable, my affair with Cal the surfer ran out of steam. The passion had served its purpose but no romance or friendship had developed. Nor wou
ld it. Missing between us was a straightforward honesty that in recent years I demanded from all my relationships, whether in work or play. We lacked the essential ability to talk to each other. All of my best romances had begun in conversations that explored each other’s minds.

  The key to loving island life, my well-traveled new friend Mathea counseled, was to realize that there was no enjoyment difference between attending the opera in London or a potluck with friends on Kauai. Outsiders would ask, Don’t you miss culture? The theater, concerts? Although I didn’t attend the opera on the mainland, on Kauai I frequented the International Film Festival in June and the Prince Albert Music Festival in November that brought in young prizewinning concert soloists. A pile of us spread blankets under the stars in August for the outdoor Kane Hula Festival, which attracted men’s hula troupes from the other Hawaiian Islands to compete in sword-thumping, macho dances.

  My routine became stable, even predictable, not like at the newspaper, when I flew out the door in the morning and sometimes didn’t know when I’d get back. A long-held flirtation with the idea of adopting a baby from China graduated to a visit to an adoption agency in Honolulu. After decades of using contraceptives, I ruefully acknowledged that with approaching menopause, I probably didn’t have a fertile egg left. An adoption could be done in about a year. I had the cash from a small inheritance. I had the schedule, I had the agency. But did I have the will?

  A few weeks after the Koloa harvest parade, bills, financial records, and correspondence accumulated in a messy pile on the walnut desk in my cottage study. I picked up the sheaf of adoption agency papers, still blank. Filling them out and retrieving all the necessary documents would take weeks. But that was not what stopped me. Did I need to have a husband, or a child, to feel fulfilled? Or did I just lack the courage to construct a life that wasn’t quite what my mother expected or that others defined as the ideal? Was I at heart a conformist? Or did a primal mother-love cry to be answered, no matter what the cost?

  A baby would shake up my life to its core, with baby giggles and nighttime snuggles, sand castles and bedtime stories. Yet I remained ambivalent, conflicted.

  My generation of women was the first to have easy access to birth control and abortions that gave us so much freedom that more than a few of us forgot to fit children into our grand plans. What brittle irony awaited for women who postponed babies for career or fun, only to find that we couldn’t find any potential fathers, or our bodies let us down by turning infertile. These days, modern medicine allowed women my age to produce last-gasp babies of their own. They changed diapers while experiencing hot flashes, perhaps chaperoning field trips with a cane.

  I worried about the disappearance of quiet time. The arrival of small children turned a woman’s life into a train schedule: up at 6 a.m.; carrying a child out the door in the early light; shuttling to day care; picking up; fixing dinner; playing nonstop games and talking nonstop talk. Solitude, I had learned, was a luxury if it wasn’t enforced incarceration. It had become a deepening, gnawing need. It had taken me ten years to get used to living alone, and another five to like it. I didn’t mind, even longed for, an entire weekend without talking to anyone.

  I now experienced the oddly disconcerting feeling of being in the position to receive what I no longer felt I had to have. I definitely missed what children can bring but was no longer certain that my life lacked its own rich, if different, character. I put the blank application forms into a folder and slipped it into a drawer.

  I’d look at them later. Maybe.

  ISABELLA BIRD NEVER DIVULGED, in writing at least, any regret over her childless state. But she did give marriage a brief go. After her Pacific and Colorado adventures, Isabella returned to London and found a publisher, John Murray. Six Months in the Sandwich Islands appeared in print a year later. A second volume of her Wild West explorations entitled A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains quickly entered a seventh printing and became her most commercially successful.

  Once home in her quiet life in England, however, she relapsed into her former invalid self. A friend made in the Sandwich Islands visited and could barely recognize the carefree and daring explorer of a few months before. Isabella and her sister Henrietta became acquainted with a quiet doctor, Dr. John Bishop. Although ten years her junior, John and Isabella shared an interest in botanical histology — examining tissues under a microscope. The doctor began to court her, ever worshipful, reverential, and as loyal as a lapdog. Hardly the rough-and-tough Mountain Jim, Dr. Bishop was self-effacing and modest, with stringy silver hair plastered against his head, downward-slanted thick eyebrows, and a graying beard. “Very plain,” Isabella wrote. She confided to a friend that she was romantic enough to still hold out for a love match. Dr. Bishop’s effect on Isabella was a renewed determination to leave the country.

  In 1878, she set out again, for Japan. On the return voyage she stopped in the Malay Peninsula, where she chronicled the living habits of the Chinese; the trip led to two more books, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan and The Golden Chersonese. It was as if the Victorian conventions and strictures that constrained Isabella were so severe that her breakout rebellions needed to be equally acute, requiring her not just to travel but to trek to the ends of the world.

  In 1879 her beloved sister Hennie contracted typhoid. Dr. Bishop returned, hovering in the sick house, and when he broke his leg, he gave up his normal practice and moved in with the Bird sisters to supervise and administer care.

  Henrietta died. Isabella spun into paroxysms of grief. “She was my world,” she wrote. Dr. Bishop resumed his campaign to marry Isabella. This time she consented but barely concealed her doubts. Now aged fifty, she insisted on wearing black to the wedding. She invited no guests. A friend tried to argue Isabella out of dressing for the wedding in deep mourning but got nowhere.

  Marriage did little to improve her health. She developed a series of carbuncles close to the spine and was in deep, constant pain — surely an even better excuse than a headache to avoid conjugal relations? Eight months after their nuptials, the doctor contracted blood poisoning when operating on a foreign sailor suffering from a bacterial skin infection. Without antibiotics, it led to four years of crippling, degenerative health. As the doctor became incapacitated, he retained an uncomplaining nobility; at long last, Isabella declared love and devotion for him.

  After her husband died on March 6, 1886, Isabella grieved for a year. But then she hatched a plan. What better monument to her good husband than a series of memorial missionary hospitals in the Far East? She went to London to study missionary nursing, then quickly ran off to Ireland for five weeks, ostensibly to study the Irish question, traveling in open carts during midwinter. She revived, discovering again in Ireland what she calls “a sad fact,” that delicate and ailing as she almost always was, “a rough, knock-about open-air life” always brought back health and strength. “Oh! To be beyond the pale once more,” she wrote, “out of civilization into savagery? I abhor civilization!”

  She established a hospital at Islamabad, then that accomplished, she set out for a grand tour through Central Asia and Tibet, riding first on an Arab steed, then on the back of a yak, the half-wild ox of Tibet.

  In 1890, she undertook her most perilous and perhaps most remarkable journey, from Baghdad to Tehran, from Isfahan to Erzurum, across snowbound passes and bandit-infested regions never before traveled by a European. She was almost sixty years old. Back in England for only a few months, she then set out again for a three-year trip through China, Japan, and Korea.

  In 1900, Isabella turned seventy. She began lessons in advanced photography, conversational French, and cooking. Her only concessions to age were the purchases of a tricycle to replace her usual bicycle, and a small ladder for mounting and dismounting from the powerful black charger she rode through Morocco the following year.

  It was her last journey. From October 1903 until her death a year later, she lay confined to bed or couch. Although she unrealistically dreamed of another
trip to China, an internal tumor and heart disease finally consumed her. Her last months were spent in bed, surrounded by books and devoted friends.

  Nearly to the end, she lived the words she had written decades before:

  “I still vote civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In a Heartbeat Everything Changes

  THE HIGH-HEELED silk pumps that matched the beige cocktail dress lay buried in a shoebox on the top shelf in the cottage closet. Torture chambers after months of bare feet and sandals. Holding up suits and dresses against my body, I felt like an archeologist exhuming a past civilization. Dr. Klein had already left for North Palm Beach, Florida, a winter enclave for the wealthy. We needed to attend posh fund-raising parties but also sort out a mess at our Florida garden. Dr. Klein’s latest brainstorm had just blown up. With its expanse of lawn overlooking Biscayne Bay, The Kampong’s nine-acre estate in Coconut Grove was a Gatsby-like setting. It had only recently been deeded to the National Tropical Botanical Garden and, although it was a nice garden sitting on high-priced real estate, we hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. Dr. Klein had hired an event planner who busily rented it out for weddings and parties. Two weeks earlier, the neighbors nearly rioted in protest when a wedding band brayed blasts of loud salsa music late into the night. One neighbor, a Garden trustee as it happened, called the police. “With trustees like that, who the hell needs enemies?” fumed Doug Kinney. He cancelled all future parties.

  Bill and I hoped to calm everybody down, and then try to figure out how The Kampong could support itself. But he had another, deeper objective. Doug’s intrusiveness into Garden operations had become so irritating that Bill Klein was ready to quit. “Doug’s job as chairman of the board is to set policy, not oversee operations,” he steamed. “I’m going to tell him that I’m out of here if he doesn’t back off.” Bill promised that he would get Doug to stop giving me orders, too.