Part 6 (1/2)

My own experience with trying to weed Kauai of the ivy gourd left me feeling that no matter how ma.s.sive our efforts, they would probably only succeed in small pockets. Yet the silversword projects demonstrate how dedicated individuals and inst.i.tutions can s.n.a.t.c.h a few species from extinction. Sherwin Carlquist, the author of Hawaii's evolutionary history, offered a fair-minded and plausible challenge: If there are reasonable, simple, practical measures to conserve the earth's most fragile inhabitants, why not take them?

PART THREE.

Light After Darkness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Hearts in the Snow.

THAT JANUARY AFTERNOON the pueo swooped in circles, staking her territory around Garden headquarters. Small and gray, this Hawaiian owl flies in daylight. I watched through the window in Dr. Klein's office as a group of us met to review the year's final budget numbers. As always, Dr. Klein commanded the head of the conference table, surrounded by easels holding architectural drawings of his expansionist plans for all of the Garden properties. Many donors liked to wait until December to review their tax bills before deciding how much to give away in charitable deductions. We sweated in the final days of the year as we opened envelopes that contained checks from board members of $5,000, $20,000, $50,000, and more.

Two or three times a day, Doug Kinney, the Garden's chairman of the board, telephoned from his Florida golf retreat, always growling, asking for the latest figures. A businessman, he wanted to report that the Garden had ended the year in the black. ”How much do we need?” Doug demanded. If we hadn't received an expected gift, he called the reluctant trustee to remind him or her to step up to the plate.

”And so we balanced the budget,” Dr. Klein announced to the gathered staff. ”But I submit,” he said, his pasty complexion turning the telltale pink that signaled high pique, ”that balancing the budget is not the mission of the Garden. Education and research and conservation are the mission of the Garden.” Right on, Dr. Klein!

My attention faded from the staff meeting. As always during times of sorrow, my work sustained me, giving me a focus. The last two months blurred together in a river of grief as I recovered from my father's death. At age eighty he was still working two days a week, though he had grown frail from a series of small strokes. We had expected it when the ma.s.sive, killing attack came. Still, I had not antic.i.p.ated the penetrating sadness, the sudden engulfment in memories that brought sharp pain and the realization that he was gone forever.

Dr. Klein's secretary interrupted the staff meeting to ask, ”Lucinda, are you taking a call from June in Minneapolis?”

”Oooh. That call I'll take,” I told the group and got up from my chair to go to my office, happy to escape for a few minutes. I knew that my mother expected a visit from my nephew, Will. But my sister-in-law was on the phone to report that Will had been waiting at the Connecticut airport for three hours and Mom hadn't arrived to pick him up.

It was already 9 p.m. in Connecticut. I called Chuck, the young lawyer who lived across the street from my parents' house. ”The house is dark,” he reported. ”I'll go over. Weird. I didn't see her get the Sunday paper yesterday. There was an ice storm here, and I don't think she's been out of the house for three days.”

I put down the phone and went back into Dr. Klein's office. Forty-five minutes later came the second telephone call. ”I better take that,” I told Bill and the others at the meeting, laughing. ”My mother seems to have gone off somewhere, so there's a family alert.”

”Lucy, your mother is dead,” Chuck said.

RITUAL TELLS US what to do. Call relatives. Plan another funeral. Go home to Connecticut again. I closed the door of my office and started telephoning. When I heard a knock on the door, I opened it to see Janet Klein. Bill had become so worried about me that he had called her in.

Later that night, Bill and Janet arrived at my cottage door, expressions of concern on their faces. I had turned down their dinner invitation, as I needed to pack for another emergency red-eye flight to Connecticut.

They carried twin Styrofoam takeout containers from their favorite Italian restaurant. ”We couldn't decide whether you'd like spumoni or chocolate mousse, so we brought you both,” Bill explained. Food, particularly chocolate, at a time of grief and crisis is never a mistake. I made tea and we sat in the living room as Sam the cat entertained us by walking from lap to lap in an oddly companionable evening. Instead of talking about the looming funeral, they decided to distract me with Garden and island gossip.

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.”

HIGH 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 eyegla.s.ses 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 const.i.tutionally 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 j.a.panese maple, the same spot where only two months before we had sprinkled Dad's remains. Dad loved j.a.panese 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.

BACK ON KAUAI, the early winter darkness caught me by surprise. I hadn't antic.i.p.ated 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 gra.s.s 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 s.e.x-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 c.o.c.ked 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 bra.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs helped create a South Seas theme.

The ma.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+pped in pieces from Boston around Cape Horn in 1820, I recognized New England dark furniture. Straight backs and hard seats emanated moral rect.i.tude 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 compa.s.s 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s 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 bra.s.s, 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 Wilc.o.x 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.

THE 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 c.o.c.ks 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, c.o.c.kfights, 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, a.s.suming 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.