Waking Up in Eden (27 page)

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

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“Coral Gables Hospital.”

“Shit,” he exploded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shit, shit, shit,” I stammered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Doug, I didn't die,” I told him.

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

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

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

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

The reservists fired three rounds of rifle shots.

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

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

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

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

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

But Chipper's name wasn't even mentioned as a successor to Bill. Instead Doug assigned 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 assistants. 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 institution 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 astonishing 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.
Hell, 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 relationship 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?