Since Dad wanted to forget his pulp Western that was published in 1937, Opus Number 1 for Frank Herbert went to “Survival of the Cunning,” published in 1945. The Dragon in the Sea (1956) was number eleven, and Dune (1965) was number twenty-five. There were some errors in the numbering, because the system was set up late and Dad had many unpublished stories that pre-dated the system.
As part of the system she maintained a loose-leaf binder, with separate sheets on each work arranged by opus number. On those sheets she wrote the title or titles, copyright dates, advances, royalties, foreign translations and other important information. She said that this binder served as a “tickler file,” reminding her of money that was due from each publisher, when to renew copyrights and the publishing history of the work. With the help of an alphabetical master list that she constantly updated, she could locate important files quickly and keep documents in order.
Based upon another Heinlein system she also set up an annual correspondence section, in which all non-opus letters for a particular year were filed in sections from A to Z, according to the last name or company name of the other party. A 1972 letter from Jack Vance, for example, went into the “V” section for 1972. There were many other files maintained.
Dad depended upon Mom entirely to keep his business affairs organized. In addition to editing his stories and handling all of his paperwork (including the answering of fan letters), she coordinated his speaking and other travel arrangements, wrote publicity for him, and kept careful accounting ledgers. When interviewed my father frequently could not remember when a particular story was published, or some other detail requested by the interviewer. “I’ll check with Bev,” he would say. “She’s always right about details like that.”
Business and monetary affairs hardly entered Dad’s mind at all, and soon slipped away entirely, to be fielded by Mom. This despite the fact that his study was a model of efficiency and organization, as were the stories he wrote in there. He was also highly organized when it came to affairs of the kitchen, since he so loved to cook. He kept kitchen pans and utensils clean, and, of utmost importance to him, kept them in exacting locations in cupboards and drawers, near where they would be used. Baking dishes were by the oven, pans by the range, and so on. He called it “point-of-use” storage.
Because of his inattention to financial details he had a tendency to overspend, and to buy impulsively. Mom was constantly reining him in, reminding him of stark economic realities.
Frank and Beverly Herbert were more content in Port Townsend than anyplace they’d ever lived before, and in large measure their happiness came from the beauty of the land itself, and from their attention to improving it. With my grandmother’s help they planted roses, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, bougainvillea, poinsettia, and geraniums along the driveway and around the front of the house. Mom poured coffee grounds around roses and other plants, saying that something in the chemistry was good for the plants. The results bore this out.
By mail order they obtained seeds for trees and seedlings, and they planted giant sequoias, redwoods, firs, sugar maples and dogwoods. Based upon research my father did, they kept the giant sequoia seedlings in a refrigerator for two months before planting them, simulating winter temperatures at a young age in order to improve the odds of their surviving through the first real winter.
Above the duck pond stood an old apple, pear and plum orchard, where they added young apricot, crabapple and filbert trees. They researched wine grapes carefully, hoping to find varieties that would do well in the cool northern latitudes. It was a risky proposition, but near the orchard they planted a small experimental vineyard of Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Sauvignon. At the top of a hill overlooking the orchard, vineyard and duck pond they constructed three large stone-walled vegetable (and low-growing fruit) garden areas, with drainage holes in the walls to keep excess moisture from damaging the plants.
In Frank Herbert’s studies of Native American planting methods, he discovered that they often planted corn in circles. Supposedly this was for religious reasons, since the circle had spiritual significance to them, but after several seasons Dad discovered a practical reason as well: higher yields were produced. Subsequently he employed a variation on circles—spirals—and obtained even higher yields.
Dad had a poultry house built, connected to a wire-screened enclosure, and filled it with nearly a hundred Rhode Island Reds (prolific brown egg–layers) and other breeds of chickens, and thirty ducks. Turkeys became occasional, if short-term visitors before they were relocated onto a dinner table or into one of the freezers in the main house. And there were a pair of geese living in the yard, a working couple who earned their keep by weeding the garden.
Some of the ducks were Rouens from France, examples of genetic engineering that looked like dark-feathered mallards but grew much faster and didn’t fly well. A meat breed, they laid green, blue or tinted white eggs. They were allowed to forage around the pond, an unfenced area, and in this way were able to come up with most of their own food—supplemented by small amounts of grain left around the shores of the pond by Dad. He also stocked the pond with tubers and salamanders (for the ducks), fresh water clams, pond snails, and bass. Always thinking of the interrelationships of an ecosystem, my father said that duck droppings sealed the bottom of the pond better than concrete.
In his travels to Third World countries, Frank Herbert learned about high-yield hybrid rice, which he wanted to plant on the shores of the pond. He set up bird feeders on trees all around the main house, including on a fir outside Mom’s office, so that she could watch activity at the feeder from her desk. Dad referred to birds as “feathered insect killers,” and said they kept insect levels down on his patio and decks during summer months when insect populations were highest.
My parents were amateur bird watchers and frequently went for long walks in the woods together, taking binoculars and Audubon bird callers.
Doing most of the construction work by himself, Dad put together a fancy Lord and Burnham greenhouse adjacent to the house. When the structure was complete they used it in the winter to “get an edge on the growing season,” keeping plants inside during the cold months and then planting them at the first opportunity in the springtime. They kept warm-weather fruit trees in the greenhouse year ’round, providing their table with fresh lemons, limes, oranges and figs. They also grew strawberries in there.
Dad arose early each day to write, before Mom or Babe were up. After a small breakfast of unbuttered whole wheat toast with jam or honey and freshly squeezed orange juice, he was at work on Arrakis by 5:30 or 6:00. He continued without interruption until noon or early afternoon, depending upon where he was in the story. Friends and family were instructed never to call him before noon.
After lunch, Dad did farm work, often involving heavy manual labor. To compensate for the sedentary life of a writer, he liked getting his hands dirty and exercising in fresh air. He and Mom often said the earth calmed them as they gardened, when they immersed their hands in the soil. One day when my daughter Julie was upset they suggested that she go outside and do this. It worked for her, and the farm benefitted as well from the weeds that they suggested she pull.
My father designed and built a number of farm gadgets, including an enclosure for the garbage cans (with a lid that propped itself open), a brush (nailed bristles-up to the deck by the front door) for cleaning mud from shoes, and a funnel arrangement (nailed to a tree by the chicken house), for draining fowl he had slaughtered. It was an efficient farm, producing the fresh makings of fabulous gourmet meals, which we shared with them often. Each morning, awakening with our stomachs pleasantly full from the evening before, we heard the crowing of roosters.
Frank Herbert was the most famous person in town and liked by every level of the social strata, from contractors to professors. They helped him guard his privacy. Whenever an outsider came to town looking for Frank Herbert, no one seemed to know where he lived.
When Howie Hansen’s best f
riend became famous, for a time Howie didn’t know how to relate. It wasn’t the same to him, no matter how he tried to achieve the closeness they had known in the past. Finally Howie initiated a heart-to-heart conversation. Dad told him he was very skittish of people who wanted to know him only after they found out he wrote a book. “You’re different, Howie,” he said. “You know me as a guy who runs a typewriter, and I know you as a guy who runs a fishing boat. There isn’t a lot of difference from one person to another when you look at it that way.”
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:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
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 n
un 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.
Dreamer of Dune Page 28