Waking Up In Eden Part 2

"We had fifty cottages to work on," Faye said. "One late night a bunch of us were sitting around a bonfire, drinking beer and singing ancient songs from the 1920s and 1930s. I thought, 'This is the real Hawaii. How do we capture this feeling?' The cult of old houses has never been strong in Hawaii. Everything is modern. But I always had a feeling for these old cottages." He hunted down vintage plantation camp houses all over the island, pulled them apart, trucked them here, and rea.s.sembled them with modern amenities.

As I confided my quandary over whether to renovate the cottage, Faye suddenly turned, recognition on his face, "When I was growing up, my family had a ranch in the Lawai Valley, where I would go on weekends to fool around with horses. Now, where is this house?"

"On Lauoho Road. You know, around the corner from the banana plantation and up the hill through a bamboo tunnel?"

"Yeah, I know it. On Halloween, my friends and I went trick or treating on horseback around there, so we knew all the houses. But we never went up to that one. There was something about it, so removed from everything else, that was kind of spooky." Great, I thought, I've got the neighborhood haunted house.

I wanted nothing to do with renovations. I knew all about the dust, the upset, the workmen traipsing through the house early in the morning or not showing up for weeks until I wanted to strangle them. The projects that didn't turn out quite right and made my blood boil every time I looked at them. Never again. And yet I remembered that wondrous privacy of five acres. I asked him, "So? Do you think I should do it?"

He just pressed his lips into a straight line. Slowly he nodded his head.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Secret Garden

UUUU-GHHA, UUUUU-GGHAAA, the horn blared like a submarine's dive signal as a cartoonish vehicle bore down on us with threatening speed. Dr. Klein drove the fanciest of the Garden's three antique touring cars, a restored, silver-gray 1947 Dodge land sampan once used as a public taxi on the Big Island. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption had a long snout festooned with acres of s.h.i.+ny chrome. A surrey-style roof provided shade for open-air seating. None of us at the Garden entirely trusted Dr. Klein behind the wheel, as he usually got so involved delivering the botanical lecture of the day that he paid scant attention to the road. He screeched to a stop where I waited with half a dozen prospective donors invited to a late Sunday afternoon barbecue. Few could resist a private, after-hours invitation to Allerton Garden. I ushered the guests up onto rear leather benches. We jostled against one another as the sampan careened out of the parking lot, seemingly on two wheels.

At the end of the public road, two ma.s.sive brick King Kong gates barred our way. Dr. Klein cheerfully refused all offers of help, hopped down to unlock the gate, drove through, then hopped back down again to lock it behind us. We followed a red dirt road through two more locked gates, along the edge of a field of tall sugarcane. Then we entered a lane enclosed by hedges of th.o.r.n.y night-blooming cereus vine that blocked any view.

With a dramatic flourish, Dr. Klein drew to a stop before an opening in the dense foliage. A steep cliff fell away before us, revealing a hidden cove of blue waters veiled by bending palms and the chartreuse lawn of the Allerton estate. Bathed in late afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, there stretched before us a strange other world, isolated and enclosed by jagged lava cliffs surrounding the valley. Two of the guests gasped, as people always did at their first sight of Lawai-Kai. It was an iconic vision of a rich man's paradisiacal hideaway - calm, inviolate, alluring in its secretiveness.

Subdued by the breathtaking beauty, we were quiet for the rest of the descent, veering away from the ocean into the forest. We pa.s.sed through a narrow rock canyon where air roots from a giant banyan tree above brushed our roof, then through a plumeria grove that wrapped us in its musky scent. On the valley floor, Dr. Klein parked the sampan at Pump Six, a red barnlike building that once housed irrigation pumps for the old sugar plantation that had filled the valley before the botanical garden was established. We'd ferry the picnic supplies to the beach in electric golf carts.

Dr. Klein opted to walk, leading what I privately called "the Big Donor Tour." Tonight's guests included a wealthy couple targeted for the Garden's $1,000-per-year Fellows Society; a couple of local businessmen; a visiting scientist. Not really A-list, but Dr. Klein gave them the mil lion-dollar treatment: his lecture on the history of gardens; his views of landscape design; his plans for turning NTBG into not only a tourist attraction but a preeminent center for botanical research. To fuel his ever-expanding enterprises, Dr. Klein adopted the P. T. Barnum approach to fund-raising. The moneyed were no different than others, he theorized, and what they really missed was pa.s.sion and the chance to do something important. He was selling dreams.

For the staff, long neglected and ignored, Bill became their uber-mentor, encouraging them to reach for new aspirations. He invited them to dinner, sponsored study trips to mainland gardens to broaden their outlooks, and advised further education for some. "Gardens are for growing people" was a Klein motto. While much of the Garden staff wors.h.i.+pped him as the long-sought savior who could shake up the place and turn it into a showplace, others resisted his plans for change. "You're turning it into a Disneyland," accused one of the intransigents in a meeting. "Visitors will tramp over the plants and ruin our scientific collections," they complained. In a rare fit of temper, Dr. Klein had turned an apoplectic red to address them, "This is our future, folks. We need to bring in people or the Garden will die."

He seemed to befriend any and all, promiscuously. A visiting scientist, author, or other personage with even the shakiest of credentials could w.a.n.gle a free tour and lengthy discussion with him. I protested after one late Friday night when he pressed me and several other staff members into entertaining a couple of bozos from L.A. - filmmakers, they claimed. But he was unrepentant. "Make friends, because come a hurricane, you're going to need them," he insisted.

Our group trailed behind him as we walked into the tropical fruit orchard planted by the garden's creators, Robert and John Allerton, soon after they arrived from Illinois in 1938. Gnarled orange and lem on trees grew in profusion, but also cherry trees. Cannonball-sized pomelos resembling thick-skinned grape fruit littered the ground. Dr. Klein reached up and plucked a waxy yellow star fruit, took out his penknife, and cut samples for the group. Munching the crisp applelike slices, the guests were literally eating out of his hand.

We meandered down a cinder-covered pathway, past a castiron sh.e.l.l urn that marked the entrance to Allerton Garden. The light changed, the temperature dropped, and a green gloom enmeshed us in a sense of lost antiquity. High Java plum trees soared above, dwarfing our mere human forms. No mat ter how many times I came here, I was never quite prepared for its arching vastness. As we strolled, we pa.s.sed the Thanksgiving Room, the first of what the Allertons called their "garden rooms." An opening in the far leaf wall revealed the white latticework of a whimsical gazebo and another, more secret, garden beyond. The story was that Robert and John Allerton had invited guests to a casual picnic on Thanksgiving Day, then ushered them here for a surprise formal banquet.

The two Allertons, almost Victorian in formality, were the best of hosts. They famously induced guests to choose from their extensive costume collection of silk Chinese robes and skullcaps, gold-threaded saris from India, j.a.panese kimonos, or the Bali dancer's spired headdress that made the Allertons giggle when the women unknowingly chose it, a prost.i.tute's gilded finery. Looking into the shadowy, green-walled room, I imagined long tables garbed in white linens, silver candelabra, and dark-skinned butlers serving from lavish trays. I could almost see specters of costumed guests, gla.s.ses in hand, gliding among the tables, laughing.

I discerned a hint of camp at Allerton, a humor that stops just at the edge of bad taste. The Victorians built garden follies - fake Gothic castle ruins, grottoes, and forest huts - to create an atmosphere of a lost world. Allerton Garden is a Victorian folly, but with a wink. Coy cupids and naked stone G.o.ds spy on visitors along the garden walks.

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, G.o.ddess 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 cla.s.sical inclinations, to run riot."

Then down the steps and onto some of the other tour highlights: the Three Pools; the Sh.e.l.l Fountain that spilled water from giant sh.e.l.l to giant sh.e.l.l 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 Jura.s.sic 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 n.o.body 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 inst.i.tutions 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, G.o.d 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 ma.s.s 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 peac.o.c.k 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs 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 cla.s.sical 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 gra.s.s, 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 Ha.n.a.lei 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 trespa.s.sing, 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 Hamps.h.i.+re, 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 conversation. "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 cla.s.sic 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.

Robert and John remained so shut off from the rest of the island that when the j.a.panese attacked Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, the Allertons didn't know about it for a full day. Most of Kauai had prepared for some sort of outbreak, and residents jumped to a.s.signed posts shortly after the December 7, 1941, bombing began at 8:30 a.m. By 11:45 a.m., all of Kauai had sprung to action. Within hours, sewing machines across the island hummed with the sound of women st.i.tching bandages and uniforms. Provisional police declared martial law and appropriated radio station KTOH as the emergency communications center until the Army in Honolulu ordered all stations off the air at 1:30 p.m.

The military immediately ordered a strict blackout throughout the islands. Civilian wardens patrolled, ready to arrest violators. But no one told Robert and John, still newcomers. Finally somebody telephoned them after dark and said, "I hope you're not showing any lights."

"What for?" John asked.

"Don't you know war was declared?" the caller demanded.

Had the Germans invaded? John worried. "Who are we at war with?" he asked.

All civilian air flights off Kauai were cancelled for two years. s.h.i.+pments from Honolulu were suspended. The Allertons could have w.a.n.gled special privileges if they had wanted or, at the least, could have taken a military s.h.i.+p to Honolulu, and from there, sailed or flown back to Illinois.

Robert insisted on staying.

In the two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Kauai chapter of the Red Cross received a large contribution of two hundred dollars donated, according to a front-page article in The Garden Island newspaper, by a "Mr. Ellerton." Despite the misspelling, the local gentry quickly identified him and asked Robert to head the Red Cross fund-raising campaign. He agreed. With quiet efficiency, he raised a record seventeen thousand dollars - an amount that earned him election to the post of chairman of the entire Kauai chapter of the Red Cross. Robert pressed Flora Rice, the wife of his lawyer, to act as his spokesperson, so he could remain behind the scenes. John, younger and more fit, joined the Kauai Volunteers Regiment as a captain.

Military commanders considered rural and unpopulated Kauai, the most northern of the main Hawaiian islands, a likely site for a j.a.panese invasion. Hundreds of Army soldiers and Navy seamen landed within weeks. The Army identified Lawai-Kai, facing south and offering a flat-bottomed bay and beach, as a prime landing spot. Soldiers dug a watch camp into the beach and another on top of the cliff. They strung dozens of rolls of barbed wire across the bay.

All of Kauai went into high alert in the weeks preceding the June 4, 1942, Battle of Midway. Extra hospital beds and supplies were prepared and nurses were called to emergency duty. Only years later would the people of Kauai learn that the American military had cracked the j.a.panese code, allowing a strategic attack on the Imperial j.a.panese Navy. The rout was so complete, with so few American casualties, that no wounded ever arrived on Kauai. The Battle of Midway not only effectively eliminated the core of the j.a.panese Navy; it removed the Hawaiian Island chain from any real danger of invasion. For the rest of the war Kauai offered an exotic idyll for those stationed there, peacefully coexisting with the doting populace.

Throughout the military occupation, Kauai families eagerly invited soldiers home for dinners, picnics, and dances. The "Tired Pilots" program had begun on Oahu as a way for the locals to host aviators at their homes to give them some R & R. Robert and John quickly volunteered to host their share. They held concerts on the lawn for servicemen, a hundred at a time, who sat in their dress khakis with arms folded over knees, shaded by coconut palms. The barbed wire off Lawai-Kai trapped seaweed and debris, becoming so tangled and thick with vegetation that it blocked the ocean view. But the wire barriers floated on rafts, and those who knew how could part them to swim. Lawai-Kai became a beach spot for off-duty officers. The Allertons invited them for lunch, for luaus, for quiet strolls in the garden. A steady parade of crisp Navy whites and Army tans came and went.

For the Allertons, not only was it patriotic, it was exciting. James Michener would later write about the pent-up s.e.xuality of young military men cast adrift on a tropical island, in his Tales of the South Pacific, later made into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The 1958 movie version was filmed entirely on Kauai, including a scene shot in Allerton Garden in which Lieutenant Cable and his Polynesian lover, Liat, raced laughingly through the jungle.

The steamy, s.e.xy vibrations that electrified the Allerton estate in the war years were likely of an entirely different nature. The war changed everything for gay men and women alike. Before, they had mostly lived their lives in isolation, only a few urbanites finding companions in shrouded nightclubs. The draft brought gay servicemen and women together in droves to share their stories and experiences. The war turned into a watershed event for gay ident.i.ty. Emboldened, they started to come out of the closet.

During those war years, Kauai plantation society courted the Allertons, inviting them to their black-tie yacht club parties, family weddings, and c.o.c.ktail parties. In turn, the Allertons welcomed them to Lawai-Kai, becoming entwined with the island wealthy. Before Pearl Harbor, they had been outsiders. After the war, the islanders agreed: They were one of us. Charmed by the summers as well as the winters in Hawaii, the Allertons decided after peace was declared to move full-time to their Kauai estate. They never mentioned to anyone that Illinois was becoming inhospitable to "their kind" and remained somewhat mysterious. "You could only get so close," one acquaintance told me, "and then a wall went up."

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Mission

MIKE FAYE HAD promised that the cottage would be ready in six weeks, but after two months, renovations continued to drag on. The Kleins invited me to use their ohana (Hawaiian for family, also used to describe a mother-in-law suite) with its own entrance through their garage. Their house itself was built like a s.h.i.+p, with a two-story prow pointing to a distant ocean view. In the back courtyard, a red lightbulb lit a steaming hot tub so it bubbled like a volcano. I imagined Dr. Klein boiling there in royal splendor. Behind his back I called him "the Grand Poobah," for all his treasured executive perks: the reserved parking s.p.a.ce in the headquarters' parking lot, his secretary and a.s.sistant to keep his calendar and arrange his travel like a Fortune 500 chieftain, and his frequent reference to himself in the third person as "the executive director."

For dinner I often fetched takeout from Kalaheo Steak House. After my usual order of prime rib and salad, I sometimes fed bits to a friendly stray cat that had taken up residence on my door stoop. I had a weakness for tiger-striped cats and starting calling him Sam. No matter what time I arrived home, he waited for me. One early evening, I lifted him as I closed the apartment door behind me. He laid his head against mine and purred. "Okay, Sam, that's enough," I murmured. "See you later."

I drove back to Garden headquarters for some after-hours work. The full moon lit my way as I went through the usual rigamarole - unlocking the padlocked gate to the entrance, swinging open the gate, driving through, stopping, relocking the gate behind me, parking in the dark. I groped my way along the unlit lanai, used my key to open the front door, and rushed to punch in the security code - P-L-A-N-T - before the alarm sounded and summoned the police. The lights in my office formed a small island in the black night. It gave me the creeps sometimes to work here alone, but the lack of interruption meant I could focus on the papers, files, and reports spread out in stacks on my desk and across the carpet.

I searched for something to write about the Garden. Dr. Klein had already rushed us into a $10 million fund-raising campaign. He had gone through the prescribed step of commissioning a feasibility study to a.s.sess a target goal. He drafted a master plan detailing conceptual blueprints for each of the five sites. Not only did he envision improved roadways and trails, but a new entrance to Allerton Garden, a $1 million science building, new greenhouses, and several new endowed chairs to bring in top scientists. He freely adopted Chicago architect Daniel Burham's motto as his own: "Make no small plans; they have no power to seize men's minds." From the beginning of my tenure at the Garden, various trustees would pull me aside to urge: Rein Klein in! There's a guy who could spend $100 million and it wouldn't be enough, commented one.