Free Waking Up in Eden by Lucinda Fleeson

about the pent-up sexuality of young military men cast adrift on a tropical island, inhis
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, sexy 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 identity. 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 cocktail 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
    M IKE 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 ship, 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 space in the headquarters’ parking lot, his secretary and assistant 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 closedthe 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 assess a target