Dreamer of Dune (29 page)

After this, Howie was more relaxed.

Another time, Dad showed Howie a manuscript he was about to mail to New York. Dad noticed an error and said, laughing, “Look at that. I haven't even got this word spelled right.” He left it misspelled, and quipped, “I'm not proving myself as a typist, Howie. I'm proving myself as a writer.”

Actually, Dad was just having a little fun with Howie—enjoying his success. My father was an excellent speller, and always prided himself on clean manuscripts sent to publishers. He was such a perfectionist, in fact, that he sometimes reopened envelopes in the post office before mailing them out, just to change a few words.

For sixteen months my parents led a busy but idyllic life at Xanadu, their Port Townsend property. In the middle of April 1974, they were scheduled to fly to New York City for an important meeting with one of Dad's publishers. Then the world fell out from under them.

For several weeks, Beverly Herbert had been experiencing congestion in her lungs, and after taking antibiotics prescribed by her family doctor, the condition wasn't getting better. In the middle of the night, her condition worsened, and she couldn't stop coughing.

At 2:30
A.M
., Dad telephoned a friend who owned a small plane and asked if he could fly them to Seattle right away, to get Mom to Group Health Hospital. The answer was yes, so Dad bundled Mom up and helped her downstairs to their 1966 Volvo sedan, then drove to the small county airport just outside Port Townsend. On the way he reached speeds in excess of one hundred miles an hour.

In the air, the pilot radioed ahead to Seattle and arranged for an ambulance to meet them at Boeing Field. In the ambulance half an hour later, with red lights flashing, Dad was at my mother's side holding her hand and telling her she was going to be all right. A paramedic assured him he wasn't in the way and worked around him, taking Mom's vital signs and radioing them to emergency room personnel waiting at the hospital.

On the way she kept saying, “I can't go to the hospital. We have to be in New York.”

“Don't worry about it,” Dad said.

From the hospital, Dad telephoned me. It was dawn, and I was just getting up for work. He said Mom had a collapsed lung, and there were ominous indications of even more serious problems. Jan and I bundled up the children (Julie was six, and Kim, two) and rushed to the hospital.

Mom was in intensive care, and the children weren't allowed in her room. I went to see her first, leaving Jan in the waiting room with the kids.

My mother appeared pale, but smiled weakly when she saw me. Her eyes looked pained and murky. She had an intravenous line connected to one arm, with a plastic bottle hanging from a portable metal frame nearby. Clear liquid in the bottle bubbled as it fed through the line into her body. A book of Emily Dickinson poems and a
Vogue
magazine sat on a rolling cart to her left. Dad was slumped in a straight-backed chair on her other side, looking very tired.

“Did you shave this morning?” she asked, looking at me closely.

Sheepishly, I admitted I hadn't. I felt like a little boy under scrutiny for dirt behind the ears.

She smiled gently.

I waited while doctors tended to her. She said she had a collapsed lung from pneumonia, but assured me everything was fine. It was being taken care of well, she said. And I recalled but did not mention the fact that pneumonia had killed her mother, Marguerite, at the age of fifty-one. As I stood looking down on my mother I thought of her age: forty-seven.

The doctors wanted each visit kept short, so I had to leave after a few minutes. Dad walked out in the hall with me, saying he needed to stop at the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. He said he would check into a hotel near the hospital that evening to be near Mom.

“You can stay with us,” I offered.

But he declined, saying our house was small, and besides, he wanted to remain closer to Mom.

Jan went in to see Mom afterward, and I didn't learn until the following year what transpired during their conversation. Mom told her she didn't have pneumonia at all, that what she had told me had not been true. From X-rays the doctors strongly suspected lung cancer, and further tests were being conducted. She said if it was cancer she didn't think I was strong enough to hear the news.

“You're stronger than Brian,” my mother said. “I don't want him to know yet. He's like me. He'll be up worrying all night.”

Mom said she'd known for several weeks something was seriously wrong, but she'd been afraid to see a doctor about it. On a number of occasions she had repeated to herself the Litany Against Fear, written so beautifully in
Dune
by her loving husband:

She had been lying awake at night, depressed and worrying over her condition and how she would pay bills. Dad had been writing checks and transferring funds between accounts, without leaving a clear paper trail that she could follow.

Inside, Jan didn't feel strong at all, but she tried not to show this. She was falling apart herself, fighting back tears. Unable to speak, she hugged the woman who had become a mother figure to her.

After a long while, Jan pulled away and said, “I love you, Bev. I'll pray for you.”

“I love you, too.” Mom's eyes were moist, filled with pain at the thought of separation. “I'm getting the best care. The doctors are doing everything possible.”

In a short time, without my knowledge, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable, terminal lung cancer, apparently caused by having been a heavy smoker during most of her life. Two daily packs of Lucky Strikes, a brand having extremely high quantities of tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide, had taken their toll. They called it “squamous cell carcinoma,” and it was in the region of the left upper lobe.

Mom was especially despondent upon hearing a doctor tell a nurse, “Let her have whatever she wants.” It meant that they were giving up on her, that as far as they were concerned it didn't matter what pain-killer drugs she took, or what she ate.

She obtained opinions from two physicians, and the most optimistic prognosis gave her only a five percent chance of surviving beyond six months. Thereafter she began a rigorous program of chemotherapy and cobalt radiation treatments.

Dad canceled his New York City appointments. He also slowed his work on
Arrakis
, writing only a few hours a day or not at all, so that he could concentrate upon his new priority—helping Mom find the best medical attention possible. While she was undergoing treatment, he was burning up the telephone wires, asking everyone he could think of for advice. He wanted the best technology available for Mom, even if he had to take her out of the country to get it. Radiation and chemotherapy were attacking the disease from two directions, and he was zeroing in on a third, the possibility of a trip to Mexico for laetrile, also known as the “vitamin B17” treatment, derived from apricot pits. Her odds were low, and he wanted to give her every extra fraction of a percentage point that he could.

As a result of his investigation, Dad decided that Mom's best opportunity lay with chemotherapy and radiation in the United States followed by laetrile treatments in Mexico, since they were not legal in the U.S.
^*

Dad's mother, Babe, sent a Catholic nun—Sister M. Jeanne of Saint Leo Convent—all the way from Tacoma to see her. The nun gave her a set of rosary beads, along with a scapular. When Sister M. Jeanne returned to the convent, she supervised twenty nuns in prayer sessions for my mother. Despite a lifelong aversion to organized religion,
^**
Mom graciously accepted the attention. Over the years she had come to regret the lack of a relationship with God in her life, and at the brink she was trying to make up for lost time.

Five weeks after the awful diagnosis, during a time when my mother was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments in Seattle, Jan telephoned her. Mom said the treatments were hard on her, and she was sick to her stomach. She asked if Jan had told me.

“No,” Jan replied.

“Don't. It's for the best. I'm fighting this thing, Jan, and I'll be damned if it's going to get me, not when Frank and I have reached the point where we can begin enjoying our accomplishments.”

A month later she received good news. Her body was responding to treatment, and the cancer was in remission. The doctors said it was a miracle, that she had developed a “warrior spirit” in order to survive. My parents still planned to go to Mexico for laetrile later in the year just to play it safe, to employ every possible cure.

While receiving radiation treatment, however, Mom's heart had sustained irreparable and serious damage, destroying one-fourth of the muscle. The medical process, which left quite a bit to be desired but was the state of the art at the time, involved the administration of more than five thousand rads of irradiation to her left mainstem bronchus (lung) through a single anterior port, with no shielding of the heart. Now, while she was much improved overall, her heart condition caused her to tire easily. Doctors prescribed an exercise program that involved swimming.

Dad refinanced the house to obtain funds, and arranged for the rush construction of a swimming pool on the property and a cedar pool building. He had a custom weather vane installed on the roof of the new structure—with a writer's quill for a wind direction arrow. The pool water was kept pleasantly warm for Mom, and Dad made sure that she completed the swimming exercises she needed. If she ever had trouble finishing a lap, he was right there to help her to the edge.

With Arthur P. Jacobs deceased, his company, Apjac International, was still uncertain if they would exercise their option to film
Dune.
The option was about to come due, and with a higher mortgage payment and the extra (uninsured) medical treatments that Dad wanted Mom to receive in Mexico, they were in need of the money this would bring in.

Marvel Comics made an offer to print a
Dune
comic book, but Dad was not enthusiastic about the idea. He delayed responding.

For the first time in two and a half months, he had
Arrakis
rolling again. A gut feeling told him this book would be tremendously successful, but his hardcover publisher, Putnam, was cautious. They paid a small advance and were talking about a limited print run.

While awaiting word from Apjac, Dad taught a writing workshop at the Symposium in Creative Print, conducted in Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend.
^*
His uncle, Ken Rowntree, Sr., had commanded this U.S. Army fort in the 1940s, before it was decommissioned and turned into a state park. A young Port Townsend poet, Bill Ransom, was director of the workshop. In a short time they would become fast friends, and then collaborators on a number of book projects.

When Mom finally returned to her desk, she found it overflowing with unpaid bills, unread contracts and unanswered letters. By the fall, she was feeling much better, and could swim three laps of the pool. I was told only that she was recovering from the lung condition that had been described to me earlier, pneumonia—and I had no idea of the suffering she had experienced. I did hear her complaining about cold, damp weather, so typical of the Pacific Northwest—and I later learned that the radiation treatment had contributed to this condition. Her radiation-damaged heart wasn't pumping as much oxygen as before, so that her circulatory system wasn't working well. Her weight loss undoubtedly made her feel colder, too.

She told me she had stopped smoking, and I had to get used to seeing her in the new way, without the customary cigarette in her hand or in an ashtray nearby. In a few months she could do forty laps of the pool nonstop—around five hundred meters in all. She had been a strong swimmer before her illness, had even placed first in an all-city swim meet in her youth.

Apjac did not renew their option to film
Dune,
which came as a financial blow to my parents. In October, however, they received substantial royalties from still burgeoning
Dune
sales, more than enough to pay their bills, including a Mexico “vacation” by car. Or so I was told. The Marvel Comics offer for a
Dune
comic book was not accepted.

Reflecting good sales of
The Dragon in the Sea
and a poorly named paperback version,
21st Century Sub
, Ballantine came out with a new “Classics” edition using yet another title for the same story. This was the original “Under Pressure” title from a magazine serialization (
Astounding Science Fiction,
November 1955–January 1956). The sales of all Frank Herbert novels increased with the amazing success of
Dune
, and his publishers, domestic and foreign, scrambled to reissue the old material.