Waking Up in Eden Page 5

  The Allertons were gay, although the Garden’s official histories never acknowledge that fact. Garden tour guides don’t even use the code phrase “long-time companions.” I thought the subterfuge silly and arcane. But it was a different world when the Allertons arrived on Kauai, bought the property, and spent their last decades carving this wonderland out of the jungle. Robert, the wealthy heir to one of Chicago’s stockyard fortunes, had entered middle age when he met John Gregg, a twenty-two-year-old orphan. Employing a protective camouflage, they posed as father and foster son. Their Hawaiian garden became their refuge and hideout. So the NTBG still calls them father and son, the elaborate masks they selected.

  Nothing else in Hawaii even begins to match Allerton Garden, with its amphitheater-like valley into which the two gentlemen poured gleanings from their travels of the world — sculpture from Italy, China, and Thailand, and plants from tropical zones everywhere.

  When Robert died in 1964, his obituary noted that few on Kauai really knew him. Yet for years the locals whispered stories about these two odd gentlemen. Cane workers spotted them from the cliffs above and reported that the Allertons wandered around naked. They threw parties, sometimes for men only, and they dressed up. I may have been plunked into paradise, but I couldn’t suppress the reporter in me. I sorted through archives and quizzed Rick Hanna, who as Garden librarian was resident collector of Allerton memorabilia, looking for clues about who they were and how they lived. I couldn’t understand why two refined, cultured men had abandoned Chicago for a rural sugar plantation island. The common wisdom holds that Hawaii is a place for people who are running away from something.

  Since John Allerton’s death in 1986, the estate remained remarkably unchanged. Criminally so, I thought. A maximum of fifty people came for escorted tours each day, so few that their presence in the immense grounds was hardly noticeable. I privately felt it was a miracle that even fifty showed up. Many tourist maps of Kauai did not note the garden’s presence. Wherever I went on the island, I was met with ignorance about its existence. “Oh yeah, isn’t that private, for rich haoles (white people) from the mainland?” people asked.

  I followed behind as Dr. Klein led our guests past a gurgling cascade of water that spilled over a wall of lava rock into a deep pool. Climbing up a narrow stone staircase, we came to the most photographed of the Allerton garden rooms. Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, watched over a mossy reflecting basin wearing a blank smile frozen in stone. A white wooden temple unveiled alcoves displaying fey stone statues of naked adolescent boys. “Water is the soul of a garden,” Dr. Klein told the group. “The Allertons had astutely or ganized the estate around dozens of natural and man-made springs, beginning with the Lawai Stream that runs down the middle like a spine.” We stood at the edge of the Diana Room and looked out over the stream to a grove of stately fifty-foot-tall royal palms that rose like Egyptian columns. “Fresh water from the hills above the valley,” continued Dr. Klein, “feeds the many fountains, pools, and dripping rock walls. It was with these fountains that the Allertons allowed their imaginations, as well as their classical inclinations, to run riot.”

  Then down the steps and onto some of the other tour highlights: the Three Pools; the Shell Fountain that spilled water from giant shell to giant shell down a fern-shrouded hill; the Mermaid Fountain with its bronze nymphs poised at either end of an undulating shaft of water that glinted in the golden afternoon sun. Tourists liked to hide between the giant roots of a Moreton Bay fig, the cozy nooks used in the movie Jurassic Park as a nest for dinosaur eggs to hatch.

  “In no way does Allerton Garden resemble a natural Hawaiian landscape,” lectured Dr. Klein in the voice of a professor who retained a childlike enthusiasm for his subject. “It is an unleashed fantasy of nature, a Chicagoan’s view of a paradisiacal jungle. It is jammed with tropical greenery and flowers from all over the world.”

  I lagged behind the group but could hear his voice: “An obscured view heightens the mystery. The genius of Allerton Garden lies in its vistas enticingly veiled from view, its miles of paths and worn stone staircases that beckon to hidden trails and valleys. . . .”

  Al most nobody builds gardens this size anymore. The grand du Pont gardens of Winterthur and Longwood Gardens and the Filoli estate south of San Francisco are able to keep their gates open only because they are tax-exempt institutions supported by a paying public. To aspire to garden on this scale requires not only a great fortune, but patience. The designer must put aside his need for hurry and self-gratification, and look ahead one hundred years to forecast how his plan will look in full maturity.

  The Allertons’ vision will only be sus tained if kept alive by our staff gardeners. For without them, predators would take over. Even so, a few plant tendrils spilled over the walls. Dr. Klein fingered a curl of vine, and even from a distance I saw his eyes twinkle. I knew what was coming — one of his favorite lines. He delivered it perfectly. “In the best gardens, like this one, God seems to be winning a little.”

  Dr. Klein seemed happiest when he was here in his domain, expounding on what the garden meant to us humans. To him, the garden was the supreme achievement, a work of art and a place for serious scientific inquiry. Within its green boundaries it housed painting, sculpture, mosaics, and fountains. Its transformational quality inspired music and served as a setting for its performance. A Noah’s Ark, he called it, as the garden collected some of the earth’s most endangered flora and was also a laboratory for studying biology, evolution, and the very mysteries of life.

  The group moved ahead and disappeared out of sight around a bend in the path. The visitors were enthralled by Dr. Klein and wouldn’t miss my absence for a while. I loved this time in the garden, when the staff had all gone and silence descended. All I could hear was a whisper of palm fronds. The tension between voracious jungle and managed design on such a large scale felt almost like a physical presence, and quite overwhelming. The very same philodendron vines grown as houseplants on the mainland here produced gargantuan, elephant-eared ropes, barely caged behind rock walls. I had seen gardeners hacking the growth back with machetes that seemed too puny for the task. I crunched along the cinder path to my favorite spot, a maze of tropical blooms in the Cutting Garden. Tall spears of pink and crimson torch gingers created a fragrant, impenetrable jungle. Near the ground, waxy orange heliconias sprouted like Martian mushrooms. As I penetrated further, I saw a beefsteak heliconia hanging overhead, its blood-red mass the size and shape of a rack of ribs. Try working that into an arrangement.

  Early in my tenure at NTBG, I gleefully came here, machete in hand, greedy to pick my fill. Before I could produce even one slim vaseful of gingers and heliconias, I had to hack away a forest of tall spears. I never did it again.

  The Lawai Stream widened and pooled along the approach to the Allerton guesthouse. Its two-story veranda and white columns could have been lifted intact from a Mississippi bayou. Since Hurricane Iniki, Rick Hanna lived here in solitary splendor, as permanent resident and part-time watchman. Tucked into a cleft in the rock hill, the guesthouse had been spared by the hurricane but offered few amenities. The kitchen consisted of a refrigerator and hot plate, with running water for washing dishes provided by an outside garden hose. No television or radio reception. Rick parked his car, a creaking old Dodge Dart he called Martha, a mile away at Pump Six and used a handcart to carry groceries and laundry. But in return he resided within a stone’s throw of Lawai-Kai as lord and overseer of the most luxurious location I’d ever seen.

  Bob the peacock spread his glinting feathers for me as I neared. Bob had probably lived on the Marriott hotel grounds twelve miles away, but had been whirled to Allerton Garden by the hurricane and elected to remain. Rick named him after the garden founder and fed him cat food.

  “Anybody home?” I hollered.

  “Yeah,” a deep voice answered. Rick lounged in a tippedback chair on the porch, reading a faded, cloth-covered book, an old adventure story from the 1930s. “I’m working my
way through the Allertons’ library. Going for a swim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. I’ll go with you.”

  I climbed up to the porch and followed him through a rusty screen door, then turned right to the guest room. The furnishings hadn’t been changed in decades. Four-poster twin beds were covered with frayed patchwork quilts. A navy Oriental rug was worn to its white thread backing. Once in my swimsuit, I strode out to the beach, then took a running start to break through the surf. The bottom quickly dropped off. I was out of my depth at once.

  Rick cut laps back and forth across the cove. I bobbed languidly in the smooth rolls and surveyed the remains of the Allerton estate house, the white Colonial mansion. The hurricane had struck it head-on. Winds greater than 120 mph had picked up a quartet of life-sized classical statues representing the four seasons, hurling them like battering rams and slamming them into beams until the house was brought to its knees. The decapitated statue heads rolled back and forth like wrecking balls, shredding paintings and furniture. Three feet of sand surged into the house, destroying the rest.

  Next door to the collapsed great house lay the remains of Queen Emma’s Cottage. In 1870, the young widowed queen had come from her Honolulu palace to Kauai and stayed in this two-room frame house, part of a large, royal encampment. The storm flattened it, too, so it looked like Dorothy’s Kansas house dropped into Oz. For years the NTBG’s lawyers and the insurance company squabbled over a settlement to rebuild both structures. Dr. Klein had broken that logjam, too, and architects now drafted reconstruction plans.

  By the time I toweled off and dressed, our party was spread out over the Allerton house lawn. Everybody held a drink and scooped chips into a fresh tropical salsa made from chopped papaya, mango, red pepper, onion, and cilantro. A couple of guests play ed a desultory game of croquet with Rick.

  Dr. Klein’s wife, Janet, had marinated ahi steaks in ginger teriyaki and had baked hot curried fruit and iced chocolate brownies. Janet appeared content in Hawaii. Silver streaked her short dark hair, and when she laughed, her long silver earrings jingled — a gift from her husband, she said proudly. She wryly called herself a camp follower, traveling in her husband’s wake, raising their four children, acting as hostess, serving as a quiet moon to his resplendent sun. Now the kids were on their own. A gifted botanical artist, she spent days bent over a magnifying lamp, painting portraits of Hawaii’s endangered plants. As usual, Dr. Klein commandeered her into doing all the picnic shopping. She complained of having to make the long drive to Cost-U-Less, a discount store in Kapaa, north of Lihue. “What’s the big deal?” I asked. It’s only fifteen miles away. “It’s the island effect,” she said. “After you’ve been here for awhile, your world seems to shrink and driving even to Lihue seems too far.”

  As the sun descended to the ocean horizon, Dr. Klein and Janet began a practiced tuna duet, placing the thick steaks in a wire basket, then over banked coals. Janet set a timer to measure the minutes before flipping the fish, as ahi is divine if left almost, but not quite, raw in the middle. Surrounded by a semicircle of guests, Dr. Klein hurtled full-throttle into a discourse about aliens, the invasive plant spe cies blamed for pushing out the native flora. Botanists hotly debate the topic, arguing over the definition of native, a distinction particularly difficult in Hawaii, where all plants originally arrived as colonists. Are native species those that existed before Cap tain Cook arrived or before the first Polynesians came in their voyaging canoes? Some botanists take a long view, that it’s part of the natural order for new invaders to take over until a balance prevails. Others hold that the aliens represent all the troubles man has unleashed with his infernal tinkering.

  Dr. Klein was philosophical: “Do you realize that all of the Hawaii plants evolved from just two hundred and ninety different species? They came to Hawaii where they were set free in a superb environment, to adapt and flower out to hundreds of different forms, each acclimating to its own microclimate. I say that is why we can’t get too upset about recent invaders. All of the plants in Hawaii were invaders of some sort. Can you imagine, being cut loose from all your past ghosts and demons and given perfect conditions to thrive and just take off?”

  I laughed. “Sounds like us, Bill.”

  One of Hawaii’s frequent rainbows poured down to Lawai-Kai. The luminous bands of colors were unusually bright. As the arc moved toward us, we stood still, entranced.

  Dr. Klein announced merrily, “This is the pot of gold!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  They Were One of Us

  IN THE GARDEN library, I found a typewritten transcript of a tape-recorded conversation with John Allerton in which he described in detail how he and his adoptive father stumbled onto what would become their home for the rest of their lives. The transcript was useful in creating a picture of their early life, which I began to amplify by talking with James, my own gardener at the cottage, and anyone else I could find who knew the Allertons.

  The two men were in the habit of making long winter cruises to exotic parts of the world, particularly the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Returning home from Australia in 1938, they had time to kill, stuck in Honolulu for three days before their ship sailed back to America, then home to Illinois. Why don’t you go see the old McBryde place on Kauai, a friend suggested. The property had been on the market for the three years since sugar planter Alexander McBryde had died.

  Robert and John boarded a small plane to cross the rough one-hundred-mile channel that kept Kauai separate from the other islands. Robert, sixty-five, was intrigued. With his hair swept back, he was quiet and reserved and wore a pressed shirt and tie. John, thirty-seven, drove. Often laughing, John was more fun, more outgoing. He pulled the old Packard to a stop on the valley floor, and they got out. They walked onto the expanse of almost fluorescent green grass, under bending palms. The dark Victorian house wasn’t much. Knock it down, John the architect suggested. A few Hawaiian tenants up the stream grew taro, watercress, pumpkins, and lotus roots. They could be removed, said Robert. You could build gates at the cliffs and no one could come in. They gazed back toward the head of the stream, up the valley that was enclosed by jungle and another wall of rock. It was its own world here.

  Back in the rented car, they headed to Hanalei to see the old town and famous bay. After a half hour of silence, Robert ventured that it might be nice to have a winter place where they could stay instead of traveling all season. Yes, agreed John. He turned the automobile around and went back.

  “This is going to be my paradise,” Robert Allerton said. He wrote a check for fifty thousand dollars, and bought eighty-six acres and one of the most private coves in all Hawaii.

  When they returned to Kauai later that year, Robert placed an ad in The Garden Island newspaper to announce that the beach was now private. No trespassing, it warned. For further protection, Robert leased two beautiful bays, extending his property almost to Spouting Horn, the ocean blowhole in Poipu. At the eastern entrance to the estate, the Chicagoans erected what we now call “the King Kong gate,” with brick piers and swinging doors of Chinese red.

  They sawed up McBryde’s house and made a big bonfire. John sketched plans for a more open dwelling. “I want to see ocean and sky from every window,” Robert directed. John designed a flat concrete-slab floor level with the ground, so that there seemed to be no barrier between the outside and in. He had been intrigued by a photo of the headmaster’s house at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Robert’s alma mater. That house incorporated a large veranda under the roofline, so that the structure resembled a giant porch. John copied the idea for the Kauai house, laying it out in an L-shape around an open courtyard, encasing the rooms behind long, screened lanais.

  “We thought the best idea was to fit in with the style that was on the island, and of course the first architecture that was here in Hawaii was what the missionaries brought with them from Cape Cod, so it necessarily meant a clapboard type of house,” John explained in that taped conversat
ion. “So when anybody asks me what this style of architecture is, I always say, ‘It’s early missionary.’”

  Simple and open to the sea breezes, the main house grew grand because of John’s flair with elaborate carved moldings. Working with a lumber mill in Waimea, he designed classic Georgian scrolls, lavish curved cornices, and wide baseboards. He paneled the library with intricate moldings and mantel, all painted in deep red. When finished, the room looked as if it could have been imported intact from Connecticut. Along the lanai surrounding the house he designed multiple sitting alcoves, small conversation groupings, so that Robert, nearly deaf without his hearing aids, could more easily socialize.

  They renamed the beachfront property Lawai-Kai. There is no literal translation for their invented name, except that it conveyed a meaning of plenty. Plenty fish, plenty in the valley.

  FOR THEIR FIRST two years on the island, building the house and starting a garden consumed them. They didn’t even bother to visit the two main sights on Kauai — the gorgeous red-banded Waimea Canyon or the castellated cliffs of the Na Pali Coast. They didn’t want anything to do with local life, and the locals left them alone. The two men stayed only a few months each year, arriving on Kauai shortly after Thanksgiving and returning to Illinois in April to see the daffodils bloom.

  Everyone on the island knew the Allertons were very, very rich. But odd. Almost a joke. It wasn’t just that two men lived together or that they were mahu — the Hawaiian word for gay — or that they were rumored to be nudists. What made the Allertons laughably different in their early years on the island was their Deco furniture and modern art, their mainland taste, and the fact that they were rarely seen.