Dreamer of Dune (44 page)

Between her desk and the doorway to the kitchen, a photocopy machine sat on a small oak library table that had belonged to her father, with manuscript pages stacked neatly beside the machine. A bulletin board by the doorway had little snips of paper and cartoons on it, including a number of cartoons Jan and I had sent. There were two large and significant items on the board: A smiling, black and white photograph of Dad, much favored by my mother, in which he looked happy and regal in his full beard. And a complete list of the cast in the
Dune
movie, printed in large type.

We talked about a number of accounting matters that she had been handling, and she showed me the incredible volume of bills she had to handle. Some of the entries in the ledger were in Dad's handwriting.

I asked why she didn't hire an accountant or a bookkeeper to help her, not knowing at the time that Jan had asked her the same question during an earlier visit.

“This is my work,” she told me. “Frank has his work, and I have mine.”

I learned that foreign royalties went directly from foreign publishers to a bank in Zurich, Switzerland, with documentation then forwarded to Mom from the bank and from their literary agents. Mom made careful accounting entries for each deposit. They had a precious metals account in that bank as well, for gold and other metals in which they had invested. She said she had to be extremely careful not to release the account numbers to anyone, not even to their accountants, since anyone with those numbers could withdraw the funds. My mother took great pains to delete the account numbers on any document copies she distributed.

She maintained four separate ledgers—Port Townsend (personal), Hana (personal and construction), Herbert Limited Partnership (for domestic royalties and expenses) and Swiss (foreign royalties and investments). In addition, Dad kept separate check registers of his own, issuing drafts for everything imaginable. As part of her job with the partnership, for which she received a six-figure income of her own, Mom re-entered every check that Dad had issued onto the main ledgers, lining out the entries in his personal registers as she did so.

She needed to go to the bank that morning in downtown Port Townsend, and asked if I would take her. So, without realizing what she was doing—her secret plan—I helped her to the car and drove her downtown. At Seattle First National Bank, she placed some Canadian gold coins in a safety deposit box and then introduced me to the bank employees she knew, including the vice president.

We went into the office of an account executive, a middle-aged woman, and sat in front of her. There Mom described a number of accounting problems she had been experiencing. Mom left her business and personal bank records with the woman, for help in figuring them out.

I didn't realize until months later how these events fit neatly into a plan Beverly Herbert had in mind, one she never revealed to her husband, though I know now that he had guessed some of it. She had worked it out meticulously, and, unawares, I was part of it. Showing me the records in detail for the first time…introducing me to bank employees…It was all for transition. She wanted me to handle the financial affairs of my father if she didn't return from Hawaii.

It was gray and drizzly as we drove back to the house, and Mom said, “I really hate this weather.”

Dad served lunch for all of us. It was a delicious chicken broth, thickened by puréed potatoes and pumpkin from their garden. No solids. He poured crème fraîche in the bottom of each soup bowl, sprinkled nutmeg on top of that, and poured the soup over it all.

He made an entertaining production out of it, and told us not to dump croutons in the soup. Instead, he had us place two of them in our bowls at a time (just enough for a spoonful) to keep them crisp.

I sat in the living room with Dad the rest of the afternoon while he read my novel. High on the gable wall beside us were the stained-glass windows my father had designed—a rooster and a writer's quill—and through windows below I could see another writer's quill, this one a weather vane on top of the pool building.

When he finished reading, he pronounced my story fit but thought I might add more descriptive language in a couple of places. “You've come a long way,” he told me. He said the novel had many “marvelous passages” and a good plot. I loved the way “marvelous” rolled across his tongue, as if you could taste the excellence of what the word was describing.

That evening, all of us were standing in the living room looking out on the pond. We saw a small family of deer cut into the woods, one trailing after the other.

The following Wednesday, October, 5, 1983, Dad drove Mom into Group Health Hospital in Redmond to run her through a battery of tests before they left for Hawaii. They hoped to leave by the tenth of the month.

When I spoke with Dad at my house later that day, he said Mom had been afraid to see the doctor. Aside from increasing fatigue and shortness of breath she had been experiencing backaches, and was worried that her cancer had spread. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and suffered silently, without disturbing him. She didn't want to make him tired, detracting from his ability to write. Dad found out about this, and told her to wake him up at any time for a back rub. “What good am I if I can't do that?” he told her.

So each night after that he brought her warm milk in the middle of the night and massaged her back. “I tell her I love her when I do these things,” he said, his voice full of emotion. “My hands tell her I love her too, as I massage her back.”

During Dad's stay with us, he ordered four live Maine lobsters from the Village Fish Market in New Canaan, Connecticut, sent by express and packed in seaweed and blue ice. Each lobster weighed at least two and a half pounds, and they were sent directly from Connecticut to the Mirabeau Restaurant in Seattle, where they would be prepared for a gala dinner the four of us were scheduled to have that evening.

But after all the medical tests, Mom wasn't feeling well enough to join us. The doctors said she had been experiencing a problem with her potassium medication that had been making her ill, leading to the fatigue she had been feeling. It had to do with “Slow-K,” Dad said, a medicine to keep her potassium level up. So Dad, Jan and I went to the restaurant. It wasn't the same without Mom, but we enjoyed my father's company nonetheless.

With the lobster, we had a 1979 bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, Mom's favorite white wine. “And mine, too,” Dad said.

We discussed special effects in the
Dune
movie, which he said were impressive, particularly with respect to the “weirding” machine, the sandworms, the Guild fish-creature Edric in a transparent tank,
^*
and the hunter-seeker units. He said that he had been writing “
Dune
6” under the working title
Hunters of Dune
until Mom suggested the title he liked better,
Chapterhouse: Dune
.

Warner Brothers and Paul Newman were still after the film rights to
Soul Catcher
, and Dad was insisting upon doing the screenplay himself. He thought he might receive a six-figure fee for the task, in addition to funds from the sale of movie rights.

“There are two juicy parts for Newman,” he said. “The boy's father or the sheriff.”

In our usual wide-ranging conversation, we entered into the subject of pheromones, external hormones. Dad said people had them and so did lower life forms, such as mosquitoes. He suspected that pheromones were responsible for mob hysteria and crowd activity in general, and for two women living together going onto the same menstrual schedule. He planned to investigate this.

That week I took my lunch to the hospital several times, to be with my mother. On the way to her room on Friday I saw Dad in a downstairs nurse's office, and stopped to talk with him. He had his own test results in, and didn't have an ulcer or the flu. No medical problems showed up in any of his tests. The doctors were correcting the problem with Mom's potassium medication, and she was feeling better. He said that no reason had been found for her backaches.

In the hallway, he told me he was making arrangements for a special showing of
Dune
in Seattle, with the proceeds going to Group Health Cooperative, which he felt had been largely responsible for prolonging Beverly Herbert's life. It had been more than nine years since she had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. With the hospital's assistance she had proved the statisticians wrong.

On Dad's birthday, Saturday, October 8, he checked Mom out of the hospital and took her to her hairdresser in the Westin Hotel. She looked trim and elegant when she and Dad stopped by the house for a short while. She said she was feeling better, and smiled readily.

They had hoped to leave for Hawaii by Monday, but that was delayed by my mother's
bête noire
—constant tests the doctors wanted to perform. She could hardly wait to return to Kawaloa.

Saturday, the fifteenth of October, 1983, was the last time I ever saw my mother. I was thirty-six years old. It was a rainy day, around sixty degrees. I worked on
Sudanna, Sudanna
in the afternoon, primarily moving key items forward in the story.

We had dinner with Mom and Dad at Hugo's Rotisserie, in the Hyatt Hotel near SeaTac Airport. Mom was in a wheelchair that squeaked because it had a bent wheel. As Dad pushed her through the long corridors of the hotel, from their room to the restaurant, I thought of the countless times I had been with them in similar places. For years it had been an endless maze of hotel corridors, it seemed.

We crossed the lobby, and I helped Dad carry Mom in her chair down a short flight of stairs, three steps. She wasn't very heavy. He pushed her to our table, a booth at the back of the restaurant, and she slid off the chair onto the seat.

Mom didn't look well at all. She was tiny and terribly fragile, and I wondered why she had to be taken so far from modern hospitals and technology. Of course she wasn't being “taken,” I realized. She was the prime mover in the drama, and wanted to be at Kawaloa.

Frank Herbert would do anything for her, in return for the love she had given him, and for supporting the other love in his life, writing. Many women wouldn't have done the things for my father that she did. They would have told him to get a real job and support his family properly. Writing was, after all, a tremendous gamble.

But she was a white witch, my father said. A good witch. Mom could predict events with frightening accuracy. In her heart she had always known her husband would be successful one day.

And now, as she prepared to leave for her beloved Kawaloa, she sensed her own future.

She didn't eat a meal with us, had only a dish of vanilla ice cream. She was in obvious discomfort of some sort. I couldn't tell exactly what, didn't feel I should ask. She was quiet, suffering inwardly. Still she put on a gallant face, and was intermittently cheerful.

Mom was on my immediate left, and I placed my hand on hers. Her skin was cold and without fat, and I felt the bones and sinews of her hand. Such an inadequate covering for my mother, for this important person. I could only hope that she knew what was best for her, that her Kawaloa would regenerate her.

She gripped my hand in hers, squeezed. We exchanged smiles, and I had to look away so that I wouldn't cry.

Dad was telling a true story about a professor he knew at the University of Washington. The professor pulled his car into a gas station that was within view of Western Washington State Hospital near Tacoma, a large institution for the mentally infirm. His car needed water, but in error he grabbed an air hose and stuck it inside the radiator. The gas station attendant took one look at this and nodded toward the hospital. “Wait right here, sir,” he said. “They'll be right over to help you.”

My father told other stories, one about a resident of the mental health facility in Napa, California. Something about wheel nuts and a tire being repaired. From my concern over my mother, I wasn't paying attention, and in a fog I heard the punch line: “I may be nuts, but I'm not stupid.”

I remembered other punch lines from other days, going back to when I was six years old at a tiny beach house we lived in near Tacoma, listening from the mezzanine while Dad told long, convoluted “shaggy dog” stories. I was supposed to be in bed then, not eavesdropping. Now I was supposed to be listening, but wasn't.

Kawaloa became my mother's dream, her paradise on this planet. We all have dreams, but to some of us they are only vague mental images or plans drawn on paper and never implemented. Some people only see the dreams of others, and never realize their own.

Beverly Ann Herbert obtained her dream house, and a magnificent palace it was, fit for any queen! She called it Kawaloa, meaning “a nice long time,” but only spent a small portion of her life there.

When she was away from her paradise, she longed to be back. She would be there the following day, where it was warm and comfortable. Kawaloa beckoned. And I kissed her on her cheek for the last time.

O
N A
Sunday in mid-October, 1983, I was working on the final draft of
Sudanna, Sudanna
. A phone call came in from my brother Bruce. He was in California, said he had seen
Sidney's Comet
in bookstores, that it was selling and being restocked. Other friends called to tell me the same thing.

A few days later, on my mother's fifty-seventh birthday, I telephoned Hawaii to give her our love. She said she was tired but better. “It's warm here,” she said, “and there are flowers everywhere.”

They were planning to have dinner at home, and Dad was preparing a special low-salt recipe of Oyster Sauce Beef for her, one of her favorite meals.

In ensuing weeks, I spoke with my parents often but made few journal entries. I needed a respite from the demands of the word-eating monster that sometimes threatened to consume me if I didn't feed it. And through the middle of November I got my fill of writing, anyway, finishing
Sudanna, Sudanna
and mailing it to Clyde Taylor. I then set to work on a light project, a science fiction humor book in collaboration with an artist friend, Dick Swift.

It wasn't easy working as an insurance agent and writing on the side, and I longed to write full-time. I understood now what my father must have been thinking during his own monumental struggle to make a living as a writer. There were many dimensions of him that I understood now only because I became, like him, a writer. “The best way to learn a thing is by doing it,” he often said. And so it was in learning about this enigmatic genius, Frank Herbert. The process of becoming a writer myself helped me to forgive him.

In phone conversations across the Pacific, I usually spoke with Mom, for Dad was almost always working, trying to get out of a financial straitjacket. Mom carried a cordless telephone around with her, and usually sat with it in her favorite spot on a large gray sectional couch, where she could do her knitting and gaze out upon the sea. She didn't sound noticeably different to me, and never complained to me of discomfort. I was to learn later that Dad was dressing and bathing her, and that her condition had so deteriorated that she needed oxygen to sleep. I was to learn as well that Mom was being attended constantly by Dr. Howell, who lived a short distance down the road toward Kaupo Gap. I wasn't told how bad it was getting—or maybe there were things I should have heard, but didn't.

I knew the swimming pool was under construction at Kawaloa, for example, but I didn't fully understand the desperation my father felt to get it completed, so that Mom could resume the exercise program that had worked so well for her in the past. Work seemed to drag along on the pool, going at the special slow pace reserved for the tropics. The process took forever, he told me later.

In every telephone conversation, I was told that Mom was doing better, that she was happy and warm.

That November they felt a strong earthquake at Kawaloa, centered at Hilo on the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Dad said it lasted forty-five seconds to a minute, and “felt like someone running across the deck.”

Months later, Dad told me he woke up once during the night and my mother was blue, a condition known as cyanosis, from inadequately oxygenated blood. He noticed that the oxygen tube had fallen from her mouth, so with trembling hands he reconnected it, and her color returned. After that he slept only lightly, listening for changes in her breathing pattern. He said he had been averaging just three hours of sleep a night.

In the middle of December we received a letter from my father: