Waking Up in Eden (17 page)

As they said good-bye, Sam slinked through Bill's ankles in a last bid for more attention. “That is one friendly cat,” he said.

“Yes, he is,” I said. “At least I'm pretty sure he's a he. Sometimes I'm not sure.”

Bill picked up a willing Sam and laid him on his back and pointed out the genitalia. “And there's something about his head that looks male,” said the professor.

“Good night,” called Janet. “I'll pick you up around one o'clock to drive you to the airport.”

H
IGH PILES OF SNOW
lined the streets. White buried all of Connecticut. My brother Breck unlocked the house and with apprehension we went into the foyer, icy cold because the heat had been turned way down. In the blue and white kitchen, we began to follow a trail of objects. Her eyeglasses lay upside down in the usual place on the counter next to the phone. When Dad was alive, he grabbed them away from her and washed them in a daily devotion. But now fingerprints smeared the lenses and dust settled in the corners. We walked with heavy steps down the hall into the bedroom. The flowered bed covers in the kingsize bed lay at the foot in a tangle, as if turned back in a rush. Mom was constitutionally incapable of leaving a bed unmade during the day, so she hadn't been up very long. A small bowl on the bedside table cradled a half-eaten cracker.

We went back to the hall and looked into the small bathroom where she had died on the floor. The room reeked. Breck turned up the heat and went to get my bag from the car. After the overnight flight from Hawaii, I needed sleep. Most of the relatives would arrive tonight or tomorrow. But first I got down on my knees and scrubbed the bathroom floor.

The morning after the funeral service, a dozen relatives gathered to scatter the ashes in the quiet memorial garden next to the Universalist Church. No sun penetrated the flat, gray sky — just the kind of winter day that Mom hated. Eighteen inches of snow shrouded small trees and shrubbery in ghostly forms. Breck and our brother-in-law, Max, wielded shovels to break through a crust of ice to find a suitable place for the ashes.
They shoveled away snow from under a scrawny, leafless Japanese maple, the same spot where only two months before we had sprinkled Dad's remains. Dad loved Japanese maples so much that he used to drive around town in autumn to jot down locations of the trees with the brightest reds, then return in spring to pick up seeds to grow in coffee cans. When Breck and Max reached bare earth with their shovels, they revealed the pure white grains of Dad's ashes, stark against black dirt. Then Breck turned the shovel around to use it as a sculptor's tool. With a couple of decisive strokes, he carved the hole in the snow into the shape of a heart.

“Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” intoned the minister. Each in turn, we dipped a hand into a cardboard box of nearly weightless ash. I scooped up a tablespoon or two of gritty powder and cast it back and forth, to form a layer of fine gray over the particles of white.

B
ACK ON
K
AUAI
, the early winter darkness caught me by surprise. I hadn't anticipated that the sun would set early, even if the weather didn't change much. For once home before dark, I took Sam for a walk down the long yard. The setting sun washed the plateau a varnished orange. Palms cast long black shadows, tinged with coolness, like a New England fall.

I strode up the small hill next to the cottage. Sam nibbled grass while I stopped in the green shadows to listen to the shama, a Hawaiian mockingbird, its cascading song lilting from branch to branch. Of course, the inevitable had happened. I had taken Sam for a checkup, and the moment the vet saw the brown, gray, and black fur, he said, “Oh, it's a girl.” Turns out that mutiple coloring is a sex-linked female trait.

“Good thing you went into botany and not zoology,” I ribbed Dr. Klein.

Now, as I reached the line of macadamia trees at the center of the yard, I turned back to call: “Sam, Sam, the jungle cat.” Her head bobbed up, ears alert, one paw cocked like a bird dog. Then she came trotting low to the ground.

Hawaii, with its year-round breeding temperatures, fostered bounties of fleas, so for curative measures I bathed Sam. First I'd fill a bucket with tepid water, dip her, lather her up, then rinse her in the bucket again before holding her under the shower faucet for a final rinse. I can't say she ever liked it, but she loved her fresh-smelling coat. Steve Perlman said he shampooed his cat every weekend and the cat loved it so much that he'd jump into the outdoor sink.

I continued to walk farther down the long lawn until I stood under the giant mango tree where the tip of the plateau opened to a view over two valleys to the sea. As I headed back to the cottage, my faraway brass student lamps cast comforting orbs of golden light through the windows like beacons.

Night descended so thickly, so completely, that once inside, I rarely left again until morning. I would have given anything to be able to call a friend and talk. But because of the six-hour time difference between Hawaii and the East Coast, all my friends and family had long gone to bed by the time I left the office. I climbed the steps to the front porch and opened the cottage door. I smiled at the transformation that had been wrought. The cottage had changed from a place where no one would want to live to a comforting retreat, a lady's colonial plantation camp, full of light and air. The outdoors seemed to spill inside.

Bits and pieces of my previous life melded with the new surroundings.
The blue and white Chinese rug created a frame for the white canvas-covered sofa and chaise. I had upholstered two chairs in a faint white and blue plaid and covered pillows in blue and white toile print. Here on Kauai I picked up more blue and white pillows, quilted silk with Hawaiian themes of coconut palms and pineapples, swimming sea turtles and leaping dolphins. Deep red and blue antique Oriental carpets glowed like stained glass against the painted slate-colored floors. A dark wood Chinese armoire and two coffee tables with a Far Eastern motif salvaged from the cottage's original furnishings helped create a South Seas theme.

The massive purging of possessions I had undergone in Philadelphia had simplified life. No fancy dishes or fussy furniture. I had brought only a few remnants of elegance to contrast with my primitive surroundings. Crystal and silver perfume bottles and embroidered sheets added some glamour. I propped on top of the armoire a gold-framed oil painting of a Connecticut autumn scene that I had bought cheap at auction and didn't care if the tropical climate ruined it. Some doubts crept in about the degree to which this scheme bespoke of New England. Those misgivings vanished when I visited the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As I walked through the wood-frame house that had been shipped in pieces from Boston around Cape Horn in 1820, I recognized New England dark furniture. Straight backs and hard seats emanated moral rectitude against tropical indolence. I had laughed when I saw the toile curtains.

I could have left all my possessions behind. But like the first Connecticut missionaries who settled in Hawaii, I drew comfort from the power of a few familiar belongings. That's why we call them belongings, because they give us a sense of belonging
to something when we've left behind one life and have no compass to guide us through the next. I liked dining at my Queen Anne dining room table from my great aunt Elizabeth who had lived in the Connecticut countryside. I often touched the wood jewelry box my father had carved for me.

As darkness fell, the banks of windows turned into black mirrors, entombing the cottage. I hustled into flannel pajamas, socks, and a robe. Although winter brings sunny mornings and usually a perfect eighty degrees by 11 a.m., nights grow chilly up here in the hills, with temperatures falling occasionally into the fifties. Like most houses in the islands, the cottage had neither heat nor air-conditioning, so I closed all the windows to keep warm. I slept with both blanket and comforter.

Evenings I crawled home exhausted. Too many foreign realms overwhelmed me: the strange flora of this hothouse climate; the mellifluous Hawaiian names in the almost consonant-less language; a new house; new routine. With so many conversations required in the office and so much work to be done, my days were very long. The sudden deaths of both parents left me in a state of gray funk. Every night I meant to write at least five thank-you notes to people who had made gifts to a scholarship for medical students in honor of Mom and Dad. Yet grief wearied me so heavily that I couldn't write a one. I hadn't enough energy to make dinner. That night I popped an envelope of popcorn in the microwave, poured a glass of milk, then carried the paper envelope to the couch and ate popcorn lying down while watching the old movie
South Pacific
— filmed entirely on Kauai.

With familiarity, I watched as World War II Navy nurse Nellie Forbush wavered over the decision to marry the handsome
island plantation owner Emile, so different from anyone she knew in Little Rock, Arkansas. She learns that Emile had killed a man in France before he fled to the South Pacific.

“What are you running away from, Emile?” she asks.

“Who is not running away from something?” he answers.

Nellie returns to the Navy base, where the handsome young lieutenant Joe Cable from Philadelphia agrees with her that life here is too strange, too different. He sings the nostalgic song: “Far, far away, Philadelphia, PA.” I remembered my own forsaken Philadelphia. Armageddon had arrived at the
Inquirer.
Another downsizing buyout was offered, and more than twentyfive writers and editors, including several of the top brass, took it. Corporate headquarters demanded another increase in profits. I couldn't go back even if I wanted to. Nor had I any reason to return to Connecticut anymore. Now I really was marooned.

Sam snuggled close to me on the couch, waking briefly and stretching out her front legs in a request for petting. I complied. With regular meals, Sam's dusty gray coat had deepened into a deep gloss. I stroked her black-bottomed feet, one palominocolored paw, and tiger-striped face. Dr. Klein had hooted: “That cat moved in on you so fast you didn't know what hit you.” Turning serious, Dr. Klein added bluntly, “I'm worried that your social life revolves around your cat.” Privately I felt that I could do worse. He and Janet constantly invited me along on their island activities. We drove up to Waimea Canyon — the gorge that ran from the high peak to ocean, its sides banded in shades of red mineral — or into Kokee State Park, Dr. Klein lecturing on tropical botany. They roped me into a benefit dinner at Wilcox Memorial Hospital and concerts and plays at the
Kauai Community College auditorium. On new-moon nights we drove out to the Navy base for the astronomy club stargazing events. Sometimes I hiked with Rick Hanna and his friends up into the misty rain forest on the Pihea Trail or through the fog drifts over the spongy Alakai Swamp, an incongruous marsh over the island's high-elevation aquifer.

Mostly, though, I hadn't the zest to start building a new life. As
South Pacific
concluded with its happy-ending sunset, I turned on a Beethoven CD and lay back on my chaise. Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” How true, although Dr. Schweitzer obviously never had a garden. Sam climbed up and over me to her pillow roost, and settled against the back of my head. We closed our eyes.

T
HE ALARM RANG
in the dead of night to wake me in time to watch the Leonid meteor showers. I climbed to the top of the ridge on my cottage property, then sat on a low beach chair, wrapped in a terry cloth robe and sipping coffee. The cocks crow all night, not just at dawn. I can hear the deep lowing of cattle grazing on nearby farms. I live alone on five acres of darkness, on a small island in the middle of the Pacific. People ask me if I am afraid, but I'm not. The police blotter column in
The Garden Island
newspaper provided more entertainment than cause for alarm, with its accounts of loose horses, cockfights, and often comical altercations. Crime seemed far away. I struck a match, surprised at the enormous sound in the deep silence. I pulled a smoky drag on a cigarette. I hadn't smoked for a couple of years, but in times of upset it provided a quick fix. It made me feel close to Dad. We used to joke that his blood
consisted of a brew of cigarette smoke, scotch, and black coffee. He liked the stars, too.

Sam ran up the lawn to join me and climbed on my lap, assuming her favorite petting posture, forepaws hooked over my knees, back presented for stroking. The night skies offered some of the best stargazing on the planet. Far from lights of any major city, or even neighbors, galaxies swirled in brilliant profusion. The Southern Cross sank low in the sky. A moving point of light, like a plane, evaporated. Comet? Perhaps, but too slow. Then a streak of light fell vertically from the Big Dipper, like a drip. Definitely comet.

I missed Mom and Dad, longed to see their faces, hear their voices, know them beyond the identities I had assigned them as parents. Bill Klein said he had experienced the same phenomenon after the death of his father. “It's as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are,” he said. Memories tumbled together. Mom met Dad during World War II at the University of Minnesota Hospital, my father a psychiatric intern, my mother a student nurse.

My mother was a first-generation American, her mother and father German immigrants who arrived separately, met in Chicago, and married, probably unwisely in my grandfather's case. His three daughters suffered his rages and would remark that he never should have had children.

My parents rarely spoke about their childhoods. Once my mother told me about the shame she felt about having to live at home while attending the University of Minnesota Nursing School. The poor students ate their homemade lunches on a bench where they hoped no one would notice them or their brown bags, a searing brand of poverty. My aunt showed us
the location of one of the many cheap apartments she and my mother had lived in as children in south Minneapolis. Certainly Mom would not disclose that secret. But she had class. An expert seamstress, she used
Vogue
patterns to conjure up a wardrobe. While Mom was getting dressed in her mustard tweed suit to chauffeur us to doctor or dentist appointments, she permitted us to forage through her blue earring box. All the wiles of womanhood were contained in that box along with tiny turquoise knob earrings and a heavy set of faux pearls and rhinestones. Later, when I inherited the box after her death, I realized it was only a plastic case lined with rayon velvet. I kept it, all the same.