Waking Up In Eden Part 10

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 compet.i.tive 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 j.a.pan, cuc.u.mbers 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 inst.i.tution to successfully pet.i.tion 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 b.u.t.toned up to the neck. A few of the more experienced Florida doyens trailed fur coats. I s.h.i.+vered 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 pa.s.sionately 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 bypa.s.s 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, b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.pes 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."

"s.h.i.+t," 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 rea.s.suring 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."

"s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t," I stammered.

Dr. Rosale walked out of the gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ny, 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 h.e.l.lo 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 sh.o.r.e, to succeed him, pus.h.i.+ng him to hone his management skills and connections with other botanical inst.i.tutions. Chipper didn't possess a Ph.D. but brought perhaps more weighty credentials - pa.s.sion, 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 inst.i.tution that he donated the property to the NTBG.

But Chipper's name wasn't even mentioned as a successor to Bill. Instead Doug a.s.signed Chipper to go to Maui to take charge of the Kahanu Garden. Doug recruited the former finance director, my nemesis, to come back from the mainland to serve as acting president. No nightmare could have been worse. Our new president immediately took down Dr. Klein's poster boards displaying architectural drawings that lay out the future growth of the Garden and replaced them with charts listing budget cuts. One by one, Klein-appointed staff were called into closed-door meetings and fired.

"It's just business, Lucinda," explained Doug. After they packed up their desks and departed, it was as if they had been disappeared, never to be mentioned again. I watched each go with a growing sense of foreboding. By chance, I witnessed the shoddy treatment of Geoffrey Rausch, our distinguished landscape architect. Rausch perched awkwardly on a small desk chair in the open office area at headquarters, within a few feet of my secretary and the two finance department a.s.sistants. The accountant-president pulled up a chair. He leaned toward Rausch. "We're taking a close look at all of the consultants," he told the designer. "Now what is it that you do?"

Rausch sat straight up, flinched, his already pale face turning white. I closed my office door behind me before I heard the rest of the dismissal. If they didn't know what the landscape architect did, we were in more trouble than I thought.

The atmosphere in the office, always somewhat sour whenever Dr. Klein was away, grew charged with the toxic deadness that pervades an inst.i.tution that has just axed a number of its workforce and the survivors ponder who's next. My experience with regime change at The Philadelphia Inquirer had prepared me for some of this. But the dreadful drama at the Garden was Shakespearian in its display of unmasked brutality. With astonis.h.i.+ng speed Dr. Klein, once honored as a visionary, was now portrayed as a reckless screw-up. Supposed errors were discovered, magnified, and triumphantly exposed - aha! What bothered me most was the enjoyment.

In one of our daily phone calls, Doug told me that several weeks ago he and the accountant-president had discovered a budget deficit. "We didn't balance the budget last year as Bill Klein claimed," Doug said, with an air of mournful victory. I reeled with the news that for weeks I had been excluded from those discussions.

"How could that be?" I asked. "We raised so much money last year that we delayed a big foundation grant so we wouldn't get it until this year." I faxed him figures. After that I no longer had access to budget numbers. But the figures didn't really matter. It was all done in whispers. Bill Klein was a big spender. He hired those outside consultants. h.e.l.l, many of the accusations were true, anyway. He had boasted about shaking up the garden, expanding it, hiring new staff, and increasing the budget. I had no doubt that Bill Klein would have realized many of his ambitions given time. His three years had been long enough to build a new foundation but too short to complete the job. The Garden was like a rubber band snapping back into its former inertia. I sensed that it would descend into another dark era.

Yet nothing could erase a lifetime of goodwill. Bill Klein continued to walk the Garden like the ghost of good King Duncan who haunted his successor Macbeth. We remaining Klein loyalists learned to confer only when we were alone, outdoors. As I drove through the Garden grounds one day, I met foreman Scott Sloan on an empty road. We pulled our vehicles abreast and leaned out open windows, quietly appraising each other as fellow comrades. "I can't stand it," I said. "The way they're talking stink about Dr. Klein makes me sick."

"I know. He was my friend," Scott said proudly. "I feel like I've gone from having a mentor as a boss to having a tor -mentor." We laughed as conspirators. "It's true," Scott continued, "not all of his plans were doable and sometimes he got ahead of himself. But he had to do something, just to get this place moving."

Most of the time I wasn't laughing. I picked up cigarettes again, smoking when I rose in the middle of the night, panicked. I had depended too much on my relations.h.i.+p with Dr. Klein, failing to build alliances to protect myself. I remembered Bill's words. Make friends, because come a hurricane, you're gonna need them. I could feel the people on the board whom I felt were my allies dropping away, in phone calls not returned or, if they were, by their distant tones. I was outnumbered by Doug, the new president, and those who united around them. When I protested one of their new initiatives, Mike Shea, the Garden corporate counsel advised simply: Swim with them.

I didn't know where to go. There were no other jobs on the island for me. Like many of the most beautiful places on earth, Kauai was primarily a resort and retirement community. Home to the newlywed or nearly dead. I was in the middle of the Pacific. My living arrangements were akin to those of an indentured plantation worker. I lived in a Garden cottage, drove a Garden car. If they fired me, would I be thrown out of the cottage that day or would they give me a week to pack?

And so I kept my mouth shut. Every morning as I readied for work, I felt fear rising in me like a smothered scream. I looked into the bathroom mirror in my enchanting cottage and gave myself a little pep talk: Smile on your face, back straight, act as if nothing is happening, show the flag, hide your opinions, get through the day. Model prisoner. Today, you're going to keep your job!

Acting exhausted me. There's a violence inflicted on those who need to suppress their voice and silence their opinions. A death of self. A veil of gray depression descended, making me doubt and blame myself. At home, at dawn, I made frantic calls to old friends on the mainland. "Get out, get out!" most counseled. There were other nonprofit organizations, ones that prized fund-raising skills. Conceivably I could climb to ever-larger inst.i.tutions, with ever-larger salaries. Perhaps become a director myself. The best of these jobs required pa.s.sionate leaders.h.i.+p, not just the urge to be in charge. At times, Bill Klein drove me mad with his ego and occasional pomposity, yet he had a.s.sumed the ident.i.ty of the Garden. The Garden's growth was his growth; its transformation became his transformation.

I realized I could never embrace the task of presiding over an inst.i.tution, though, immersing myself in administrative improvement while inspiring a collective effort. Individual work interested me more. The hunt of reporting, of crafting the results into a narrative, then getting the story out and contributing to the public debate - those were my interests. And I missed the rest of the world. I missed men. Smart men and ambitious women. Careerists who wanted to move mountains. I missed journalists, the fomenters of ideas, experimentation, and the kind of compet.i.tion that spurred greater achievement. I missed talking about issues and the news of the day. I missed writing under my own name instead of the reams of letters and reports I produced anonymously. I was a journalist and needed to go back to that. Though I had grown weary of daily deadlines and the short half-life of news stories, journalism offered more choices. Magazine pieces, books, perhaps teaching. In early mornings at the cottage, a return to writing started with diary entries, sometimes no more than notes that served as warm-up exercises.

As I knew that my time in Hawaii was running out, I wanted to fill in the missing pieces in the Hawaiian plant story. I wasn't sure whether saving them was truly a lost cause. What could be done to protect the biodiversity of Hawaii, if not the rest of the planet? And why hadn't the National Tropical Botanical Garden led the charge? Keith Robinson remained a puzzle. I desperately wanted to see how he had reintroduced rare and endangered plants into the wild, succeeding when no one else could. John Rapozo had been a childhood friend of the mysterious Robinson, had even helped him carry water up at the Outlaw Plant Reserve. John volunteered to intercede and arrange a meeting with Robinson.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Never Too Late

CARLOADS OF EAGER customers were lined up for the volunteers' annual plant sale. A temporary nursery of canvas tents shaded potted palms, ferns, bougainvillea, and, most in demand, one-of-a-kind anthuriums bred by Allerton Garden's master gardener, Hideo Tes.h.i.+ma. I held up a pot of the delicate, lipstick-pink, arrow-shaped blossoms. Before I knew it, I had s.n.a.t.c.hed several pots of anthuriums and seven containers of ti, those fountains of red or green leaves. Then, in a mad rush, I grabbed three palms and half a dozen ferns. John Rapozo, unofficial foreman for the sale, piled my pots onto a large wheelbarrow. We could barely pack all of the plants into my car, so the palms extended out the trunk.

Suddenly, I recognized my inner urges. Spring fever. March had arrived. In Philadelphia I would have been sowing seeds in flats on the kitchen counter. Hawaii's seasonal changes creep in so subtly that I failed to recognize the signs, but my body clock registered the lengthening days. Settling in, work, and grief had consumed so much attention that I hadn't time or energy to start a garden at the cottage. Unsure of how much longer I'd remain after Dr. Klein died, creating a garden seemed pointless. But now I remembered his words: It's the nature of gardeners to take these disasters and improve on them.