Waking Up in Eden Page 20

  I pulled a heavy suitcase from the back of a closet. I wore a swimsuit for the job. After loading the suitcases into the car for the drive to the airport, I was sweating. I took a last-minute shower before departing.

  A UNIFORMED MAJORDOMO at the Seminole Club, an exclusive community for the wealthy in North Palm Beach, informed us that Mr. Kinney was at home. He offered to telephone for us. Bill and I waited in a room of overstuffed chairs and plaid, preppy furnishings. Doug arrived and we went into a room of bridge tables. Expansively, Doug greeted a number of men, retirement age like him. Most of them wore polo shirts with an embroidered head of an Indian on the breast, presumably a Seminole.

  Bill pulled a written agenda from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and started smoothly ticking off accomplishments. When he arrived at the Garden only three years ago, all its Hawaiian sites lay hurricane-damaged or closed. He reopened all four to paying visitors and had begun similar efforts for The Kompong. We raised more money than any time in history. The annual budget was balanced. Already we had lined up $4.5 million of the $10 million campaign. Annual gifts netted $2.8 million — up $1 million from the year before. Construction had begun on a new, full-fledged visitor center. A new horticulture center would be next. Reconstruction of the Allerton estate house was nearing completion. A Ph.D. scientist was just appointed to a newly created chair of horticulture. A renowned biologist had agreed to a post as visiting scientist. We attracted a bounty of press clippings. Our new publications won awards, including best in the nation from the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. . . .

  Doug interrupted, “You’ve had a fabulous year. No question. The Garden is just popping with excitement.”

  “Doug there’s even more going on than you know,” Bill countered. And then he moved in, General Patton sending in the right flank. Now that Doug had volunteered his approval, Bill listed instances when Doug had meddled with staff. The Christmas card Doug wrote to Rick Hanna telling him to change computer connections at the Garden, without Bill’s knowledge. The instructions to women on the staff to coddle one of the Garden’s old-lady donors. His attempt to choose the visiting scientist, ignoring Bill’s wishes.

  It was all very cordial. Even-voiced pleasantries over egg salad. There were no ultimatums or threats. Doug took it with ease.

  I doubted it would change one thing.

  After lunch, Bill and I made the ninety-minute drive from Palm Beach to Coconut Grove. In the privacy of the car, I complimented him. “The written agenda was really masterful, Bill, to get Doug to acknowledge the positive accomplishments. How’d you think of that?”

  “Experience, my dear. Experience,” he said. As we rehashed the lunch, he grew philosophical. “All in all, Doug and I did pretty well together as a team. I know if I had my way, I’d plan everything to death. Doug wants everything done at once. We balance each other.”

  Something about Bill Klein invited confidences. “One thing I’d like to do is try a less aggressive and competitive approach to work,” I told him. “I’m a warrior.”

  “I am, too,” he said.

  “Yeah, but there’s a spiritual side of you that makes you sort of like a great white chief. I battle too much. Using a machine gun when a fly swatter is all that’s necessary. I mean, come on, this is a botanical garden.”

  I had his full attention. He turned and said urgently, “Don’t. The great temptation is to think that because this is a botanical garden, things will be easy and you don’t have to fight. Don’t believe that for a minute.”

  THE KAMPONG WAS a beautiful relic of Old Florida, built by plant explorer David Fairchild, often called the father of American botany. In explorations around the globe in the early 1900s, Fairchild collected and introduced to America seventy-five thousand plants. He single-handedly revolutionized the American diet, importing hundreds of new fruits and vegetables that are now commonplace, including soybeans and rice from Japan, cucumbers from Austria, figs from Algeria, sweet potatoes from Barbados, mangos from Indonesia, and a hardy Russian durum wheat able to withstand the harsh winters of our northern great plains. He transformed America’s landscape with flowering cherry trees, now synonymous with spring in the nation’s capital. He organized the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction.

  “Press on,” was his motto.

  In 1926, Fairchild and his wife, Marian, bought the nine-acre Coconut Grove property, which they named The Kampong — Malaysian for village. After Fairchild died in 1954, The Kampong was sold to Dr. Catherine Sweeney, a wealthy intellectual deeply interested in botany. In 1986, she bequeathed the property to the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii. The gift created an opportunity for the institution to successfully petition Congress in 1988 to change its name to the National Tropical Botanical Garden.

  Dr. Klein hired a new director for the center, Tom Lodge, an environmentalist and author of a book about the Florida Everglades. Lodge sketched plans to open The Kampong to regular visiting hours and build a tiny visitors’ kiosk and badly needed parking.

  This evening, strings of white lights twinkled over The Kampong lawn and outlined a large tent on the tennis court, creating a fairyland setting. Weather forecasts warned of a freeze. Guests arrived in wool jackets buttoned up to the neck. A few of the more experienced Florida doyens trailed fur coats. I shivered in a new icy gray Armani silk suit I had bought on sale in Honolulu. One trustee’s wife surveyed me from head to toe and sniffed, “I guess you didn’t know we dress up here.”

  When I told Bill Klein about the comment, he guffawed. “Wait until I tell Janet about that. You look mah-velous, just mah-velous.”

  This was a first for The Kampong, a goodwill dinner for one hundred guests we hoped to cultivate as potential friends and donors. “This is a historic night!” Bill told the guests in his after-dinner speech. He spoke passionately of his new vision for a reawakening at The Kampong, one that would allow it to take its place as an important site in the development of American botany.

  After dinner I joined the stream of departing guests, falling into step with Doug Kinney. We walked along the lighted swimming pool. “Bill Klein talked too much,” he grunted. “As usual.” Doug got into his big black sedan for the trip back to North Palm Beach. Bill and I drove to the Hotel St. Michel, an elegant older hotel in Coral Gables. We were in high spirits, gossiping and comparing notes on the night, which we agreed was a big success.

  At the hotel, we walked up the carpeted stairs, parting on the landing to head to our rooms on different floors. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he called.

  “We should leave at nine o’clock so we can get to The Kampong on time,” I reminded him.

  I telephoned Bill’s room at 8:30 the next morning, but received no answer. Maybe he’s having breakfast, I thought, and went down to the hotel restaurant. I couldn’t find him there, either. If he had gone jogging, he needed time to shower and dress. I walked down to the lobby and paused at the small, old-fashioned registration desk. Right then, the desk clerk handed me the phone.

  “This is the emergency room nurse at Coral Gables Hospital. William Klein is here and asked me to call you. He fainted when he was jogging, and a rescue squad vehicle brought him in.”

  I knew Bill had had emergency heart bypass surgery a few years before. But he seemed in good shape, always exercising and watching his diet. I used my cell phone to cancel our morning meeting, then drove to the small community hospital where an ambulance had taken him. The ER physician escorted me into a small area with curtained patient beds. He spoke with professional clarity, “We think he’s had a heart attack, but he seems to have stabilized now. There seems to be some occlusion of the veins. He said he had been having tightness in his chest for a few days. I’m not a cardiac specialist, and this hospital doesn’t have the facilities to do a catheterization. I recommend that we transfer him to another hospital. Immediately.”

  Bill lay flat on his back, bare-chested and hooked
up to several monitors. He had big, bloody scrapes on his forehead and along his chin, from the fall. He ran a tongue along his teeth. “I’ve broken a tooth,” he said. I didn’t see any breakage, but blood stained his teeth.

  I took his hand in mind. He was lucid and somber.

  “Bill, who was your heart doctor in Miami?” I asked.

  He struggled to speak, and whispered a name. I had to bend my ear down to his lips to hear.

  “Don’t like him,” he said softly. “I want the best cardiologist in Miami. Have them go on without me for this afternoon’s meeting with the lawyers.”

  I still held his hand when a nurse walked in. It was a big hand, a strong hand, freckled from the sun. But pale and very cold. I asked the nurse to bring him a blanket.

  “I am cold,” he said, noticing for the first time.

  “His blood pressure dropped, lowering his temperature,” the nurse explained. She disappeared, then returned with a blue blanket, which she tucked in around him.

  “I’ll be back,” I promised. I dialed Doug Kinney’s North Palm Beach number. My voice must have betrayed alarm.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “Coral Gables Hospital.”

  “Shit,” he exploded.

  “Bill may have had a heart attack. They’re trying to transfer him to a bigger hospital that can do a catheterization.”

  When I called Janet, it took several rings before she answered, sleepily; it was only 5 a.m. in Hawaii. She was upset, but we talked about the Miami hospitals. “Tell him that I love him very much and I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Tom Lodge, the director of The Kampong, arrived, joined by Mike Shea, the Garden’s longtime corporate counsel. Silver-haired and in a dark blue lawyer’s suit, he looked very un-Miami-like, lending a reassuring formality to an uncontrollable situation. The hospital located its cardiologist, Dr. Rosale, who came out to the concrete sidewalk to talk to the three of us.

  “I don’t think he’s had a heart attack, but we’re afraid he will have one,” he said. I wanted to talk to Bill again to let him know we were here. Dr. Rosale warned, “We’ve given him a lot of drugs to stabilize him, so he might be groggy.”

  Bill didn’t look so good. His skin had turned gray, and he was less alert. I bent down to his ear and whispered Janet’s message. He nodded.

  “Maybe they shouldn’t move me,” he said, his voiced strained with pain. A nurse came into our curtained corner and said, “We need to do some more tests. Can you turn on your side?”

  “I can do it,” Bill said heavily, but the effort was great and he winced.

  The nurse asked for health insurance information so I drove back to the hotel to try to find it, then sped back to the hospital. As I walked up the emergency room entrance, Tom Lodge and Mike Shea stared at me strangely. “There’s been a turn for the worse,” Tom said tightly. “The doctor came out a little while ago and said his heart had stopped twice.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I stammered.

  Dr. Rosale walked out of the glass doors. He approached us, shaking his head, his face wearing an odd expression. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” I seemed to see the scene played again, in slow motion, its colors blanched into black and white.

  “What?” I demanded. “He’s dead? He’s dead?”

  “We’ve been working on him for half an hour. It’s no good. There was too much damage. You should call his wife.”

  The doctor led me into the emergency room, through shiny, brightly lit hospital corridors to his private office, a darkened room with heavy black furniture. Janet answered on the second ring. “I’m packing and getting ready.” She sounded upbeat.

  “Janet, it’s bad. Bill died a few minutes ago.”

  The difference between her cheery greeting and the next sounds were something I would like never to hear again. “Did you give him my message?” she asked. We talked a few minutes, then Dr. Rosale gave her a lot of details that she probably neither remembered nor understood, but he did it kindly. He handed the phone back to me.

  I heard the quiet click of the door shutting as the doctor left the room.

  CALM. CALM. I MUST be calm, I repeated silently. I set up my laptop in the small Kampong office. Janet wouldn’t arrive until the next day; meanwhile, arrangements had to be made with a funeral home. Friends and trustees had to be called. A press release had to be written. We called Georgia Tasker, The Miami Herald’s garden writer and a Klein fan. She immediately set to work on an obituary that ran on Page One in the next day’s paper. Two friends at The Philadelphia Inquirer arranged for a prominent obituary there, as Dr. Klein had been a local celebrity. My former editor, now at The New York Times, made similar arrangements. Whispered conversations and hunched-over phone calls began that day. Who would replace Dr. Klein? One wife of a Garden trustee wife arrived at the office. She gave me an appraising look and asked, “Lucinda, what are you going to do now?” I could see in her eyes what I had yet to fully realize until that moment. I didn’t have a future at the Garden. I was a Klein hire and, without him, expendable. The anti-Bill forces would seize power.

  I drafted letters and public statements that would go out with Doug Kinney’s signature, mourning Dr. Klein’s death and explaining interim measures to maintain stability. But I knew that in a matter of a heartbeat everything had changed.

  Three days later, I worked at my Kampong desk while Doug Kinney met in a closed-door session with Kampong staff. “Doug requested that you not attend,” one trustee stiffly informed me. Several staff members wandered back to the office, indicating that the meeting had ended. I expected Doug to greet me and probably thank me for the crisis management of the last three days. After five minutes, I realized that he was not coming. I walked across the open-air foyer into The Kampong dining room that was used for meetings. Doug was seated, his back to windows shaded by half-closed blinds that cast bars of light and dark over the table. Slanting light washed half of Doug’s face in golden sun. The other half lay in shadow.

  He did not rise or say hello when he saw me, but appraised me coolly. “I’d really like to see those letters you drafted,” he said.

  My face froze. I saw that the uneasy checks and balances of power between Bill and Doug were gone. Doug ruled alone, unfettered. “Sure, I’ll get them,” I said and turned around to go back to my desk. I returned and handed him the papers. Doug sat silently and read them. I remained standing, as he did not invite me to sit down.

  “Fine,” he said. Then he rose and walked briskly to the door. I had to run to catch up with him, like a puppy clutching at his pant leg. He looked down. “The person I really feel sorry for is you,” he said sadly. “You two were so close.”

  “Doug, I didn’t die,” I told him.

  PART FIVE

  Resolution

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Macbeth

  A GREEN ARMY TRUCK rumbled up to Garden headquarters. A ragtag group of reservists dressed in camouflage tumbled out and unloaded rifles. Two sported long hair, another a beard. Several had to leave their flak jackets unbuttoned over middle-aged guts. Dr. Klein had served in the Air Force, so when Janet inquired about a military funeral service at the Army office in Lihue, the desk sergeant eagerly volunteered to provide a twenty-one-gun salute. “We don’t get much call for those,” he confided. Looking over this motley group one could understand why. Their bedraggled battlefield outfits injected a comic note into the somber proceedings.

  Two hundred people gathered on the hillside outside Garden headquarters for the memorial service. Both friends and foes delivered eulogies. Doug Kinney called Bill “a botanical general. . . .” He was the best business friend I ever had,” Doug said.

  Rick Hanna described Dr. Klein as “a possibilitator — he sees the possibilities and makes them happen.”

  “Lucky is the man who dies at work,” I read from Epictetus.

  The reservists fired three rounds of rifle shots.

  Tributes ran in newspapers
and botanical journals, national and international. Dozens of former students, many now heads of their own botanical institutions, wrote letters to Janet Klein about her husband’s far-reaching vision and the impact he’d had on their lives. In all, a total of six memorial services were held to accommodate all those who loved Dr. Klein: one each in Denver, Philadelphia, Miami, and Hana, Maui, and two on Kauai, one on the hill for the Garden trustees, another down at Pump Six, where the garden crew, dressed in work clothes and boots, bowed their heads. The Hawaiian men presented Janet with elaborate orchid leis to cast on the outgoing tide, Hawaiian style.

  After that tearful service, employees milled around Pump Six, not wanting to disperse. Janet Klein pulled me aside. “Lucinda, will you help me with these?” she asked, the leis in her arms. We were far from the beach, so we walked to a small bridge across the Lawai Stream that fed into the Pacific. Below us shallow water flickered over stones and shoals. “We’ll toss them together,” said Janet. “They’ll eventually reach the sea.”

  We swung the leis high, then watched as they fell to the water below and crumpled against rocks. Ribbons of currents carried them away.

  In the days and weeks after Dr. Klein’s death, Doug Kinney took over the Garden, running it by telephone. “I’m in charge,” he announced.

  Bill had groomed Chipper Wichman, the young director of our Limahuli Garden on the north shore, to succeed him, pushing him to hone his management skills and connections with other botanical institutions. Chipper didn’t possess a Ph.D. but brought perhaps more weighty credentials — passion, a connection to the island, and a charismatic charm that inspired great loyalty from his employees. He had inherited the one-thousand-acre Limahuli Valley from his grandmother Juliet Rice Wichman, one of the first Garden trustees, but had felt so strongly that it deserved to be a public institution that he donated the property to the NTBG.