The doctor my mother had seen that morning said her heart had been strong or she wouldn’t have survived so long, nearly eight years after the diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. But, he went on to say, it was only a matter of time before her heart gave out on her altogether. He could not predict how long she might live.
“I worry most about Frank,” Mom said, with a brave smile. “We’ve always been like one person. When I go, what will happen to him?”
Chapter 32
I’ll Take Your Worries If You Take Mine
ON THE evening of April 17, 1982, we met my parents at Trader Vic’s Restaurant in the Westin Hotel. My father was in the midst of a big book tour, with another week to go. He had signed thousands of books in Toronto alone, so many that he’d been forced to wear a wrist brace. This was a custom appliance that wrapped tightly around his wrist and the heel of his hand, looping around the thumb. It kept the wrist straight and stable so that it didn’t constantly flex with each signature he made, tiring it out. Even so, he said he could hardly move his right hand after the signings.
A limousine met them in every city. “I’m not playing B.T.O. (Big Time Operator),” he said. “The limo is a matter of survival.”
In Philadelphia, the vehicle was a fabulous 1926 Rolls Royce Landau, with an open area for the driver. It had a cigar lighter in the back, and little snippers on chains to cut off cigar tips. The driver was always using “No Parking” zones, and never got a ticket. They parked illegally and went to see the Liberty Bell. When they came out, a policeman was standing by the car. Dad thought, Uh oh! But the policeman was just admiring the car.
For the Los Angeles segment, Dino De Laurentiis sent an immense private limousine to pick them up at the airport. The chauffeur gave Mrs. Herbert an exquisite red rose and served champagne in the car.
Dad caught a cold in Texas and was still hacking from it. He had to take lozenges during many interviews. He also had a skin split on his right eyelid, and Mom had a sore on her upper lip—conditions from the dry, windy cold on the East Coast.
They didn’t talk about Mom’s medical condition, and she looked much the same as the last time I had seen her—rather thin and drawn, but courageously cheerful. She wore a lovely Hawaiian shell necklace outside her blouse. Dad’s beard was freshly trimmed, and he and Mom looked manicured. Dad was giggly and in a good mood, and he spoke cheerily of Mom walking off the plane this time, instead of being pushed in a wheelchair—as if she were doing better. This didn’t track with what Jan had told me, and as I gazed into his eyes and into my mother’s I detected new sadness there. He was in denial, desperately looking for the slightest encouraging things, while overlooking the negative.
Dad told us that the Dune movie director, David Lynch, wanted to leave theater-goers with the same feeling after seeing the movie as they would have after reading the novel. Lynch was going to extra efforts to remain true to the novel.
We learned that their first caretakers in Hana, the young couple, were quitting to return to the mainland. “They got island fever,” Dad said, “couldn’t take the confinement of the island.” New caretakers were on the job, Bart and Sheila Hrast.
We all had quite a bit of wine, and were getting pretty silly. Dad was telling some hilarious jokes, when Mom touched his arm gently and asked, “Did you tell the one about the two Mexicans?”
He then proceeded to tell the story, and got it so fouled up that Mom interrupted him and said, “You’ve got it all wrong, you know. I hope you can get out of this.”
“Oh I will,” Dad said with his eyes twinkling. “That’s my business!”
A week later Jan, Kim and I met my parents at Seattle Tacoma International Airport. They were just in from San Diego, last city on the book tour. Mom was standing straight as she walked, and holding onto my father’s arm. Weary, they took their car and drove straight to the ferry terminal in Seattle.
On the first Friday in May, Mom cooked an entire dinner for us in Port Townsend, a delicious roast rack of lamb served with mint jelly, corn on the cob and roasted potatoes. She said she was feeling a lot better, with her energy returning. She had been swimming laps of the pool in recent days, an essential part of her rehabilitation program. The water temperature was set at ninety-one degrees for her, which resulted in substantial electric bills.
Margaux sat on the living room floor atop a blanket while we ate. Looking down at her, Mom recalled how cute Julie and Kim had been as babies, and how Margaux resembled them. Dad played a lot with the baby during the evening, pushing his beard in her face and making her giggle.
That weekend, Dad, Jan and I went sailing on the Caladan. It was a beautiful day, but a little too cool for my mother. So she stayed home with the kids. Jan and I did really well, as the boat was easier to sail than the ones on which we took lessons. Standing at the helm, Dad said he determined wind direction by feeling it on his face, and that he had learned to do this as a boy. This seemed an extraordinary ability for anyone to have, and I was doubly impressed because he didn’t have a heck of a lot of his face exposed around his beard.
I thought of Paul Muad’Dib in a burnoose on the desert planet Dune, with most of his face obscured by the tucks of the robe. Sniffing at the air, Paul could sense the approach of a storm, and could tell wind direction just as my father did.
In ensuing weeks my book Incredible Insurance Claims received quite a bit of publicity, and I was interviewed by radio stations in the United States and Canada. Dad said a number of people had seen notices of the upcoming publication of my first novel, Sidney’s Comet, and they were asking if we were related.
Early in June, my mother called me at work and said excitedly that she had received a letter from an astrologer friend in New York, a letter mentioning her “firstborn”—me. I was supposed to have great success in the future, involving a door opening for me that had previously been closed. Apparently the woman had been very accurate with her predictions in the past.
I never paid much heed to such matters, and was more concerned with finishing my second novel, The Garbage Chronicles, which was near completion. I wanted to show it to my father that weekend, and had worked long hours, including a marathon Thursday night until 3:30 A.M., allowing only three hours before going to the office. There had been more work remaining in the book than I had anticipated, but I pushed all the way through to the end…402 pages. In the process I created some pretty unusual characters, including one I really liked, a young magical comet named Wizzy. One of the chapters was based upon an unpublished short story I had written the year before, “Earth Games.”
I was a zombie at work the next day.
When I next saw my father in Port Townsend, he said everything was progressing on the Dune movie, although he had no idea who would star in it. Apparently the desert scenes would not be filmed in either of the most frequently rumored locations, Tunisia or China’s Gobi Desert. The latest plan called for using a giant World War II blimp hangar in England, the interior of which would be converted into a desert. My parents were flying to Universal Studios in Los Angeles in a few days to talk with director David Lynch and Raffaella De Laurentiis, Dino De Laurentiis’s daughter. She had been put in charge of the film by her father.
Dad was looking forward to a ten-day fishing trip in Alaska with his first cousin Ken Rowntree, Jr., and a friend, Jim McCarren. They planned to leave at the end of June—my father’s first real vacation in ten years. He went to bed at 8:30 P.M., taking my just-completed manuscript with him.
In the morning he cooked blueberry pancakes and prepared fresh juice, a tasty mixture of orange and grapefruit. We were talking about vitamins and nutrients, and Dad said that British seamen (“limeys”) discovered they could avoid scurvy by drinking lime juice. “They used to drink it with rum,” he said.
“Sounds like a daiquiri,” Mom quipped.
After breakfast Dad said, “Let’s talk story.”
The two of us took my manuscript in the living room and spread it out on the coffee tab
le. “I didn’t get very far last night,” Dad said, while my heart hammered in trepidation, “but far enough to see that you’ve really improved.” He had read the first chapter.
We worked all day, both of us sitting on the black vinyl couch. He made corrections here and there and passed the pages on to me. At times as he read he would take deep breaths and pick at his ear, and I tried to determine whether these were signs of boredom or fatigue. Five or six times, he laughed boisterously, once at a passage that was not intended to be funny. At other times, he would slouch back on the couch and drop his right arm to his side, in apparent disbelief. Sometimes he would stack pages neatly after reading them on the cushion between us. Other times, he would slam them down or hand them to me one at a time. He didn’t say anything, just kept reading, and most of the signs seemed bad.
It was hot in the house, and as the session proceeded, I became sticky with perspiration. Partly from nervousness, no doubt. We could hear the excited squeals of the children as they swam with Jan and Mom.
By 6:00 P.M., Dad had read 328 of the 402 pages, with a couple of breaks. Once he sat back and closed his eyes. Within seconds, he was asleep—an enviable ability of his to nap anywhere.
We drove to the Harbormaster Restaurant in Port Ludlow. Fortunately, we got a nice corner window table with a view of the yacht harbor. Dad was not familiar with a particular selection on the wine list, a 1978 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon. He was afraid it might be too young, but decided it was probably okay since it was from California. It turned out to be very good.
Dad said a British publisher had made an unprecedented offer for United Kingdom book rights on The White Plague, higher even than he had received for any Dune book. Knowing he was hard at work on a book with Bill Ransom and had “Dune 5” to do after that, I asked him if he couldn’t take life a little easier. He said Mom’s illness had cut five and a half months out of his writing time, and they had some huge bills to pay for the construction in Hawaii.
“He’s always worked hard,” Mom said.
Jan toasted my new novel, The Garbage Chronicles, and to my relief Dad commented, “It’s very good.”
Mom mentioned that Bill Ransom and my father were writing alternate chapters in a “leapfrog” method, and that she never had been able to tell who wrote which chapter. “Bill has a smooth writing style,” she said.
They were going better than anticipated, and now expected to complete The Lazarus Effect in August.
Keeping his voice from carrying to other tables, Dad told me how much he expected to earn the coming year, a seven-figure income that was equal to his entire net worth. In one year he would earn the equivalent of what it had taken him an entire lifetime to accumulate.
Three days later they flew to Los Angeles to visit Universal Studios and see how the Dune movie was going. In the process, my father lost another week from his writing schedule.
While they were gone, I finished The Garbage Chronicles and mailed it to Clyde Taylor in New York City.
After my parents returned, Dad was anxious to get back to his study, but Mom needed still another checkup with a heart specialist at Group Health Hospital. With all the ferry rides this would cost him yet another day. But my mother arranged with a pilot friend, Graham Newell, to fly her in a small plane from Port Townsend to the Bellevue Airfield, near our house. Jan picked Mom up in Bellevue and took her to the hospital, and then back to our house afterward.
I arrived home at shortly past 5:00 P.M., just in time to take Mom to the airport for her return flight to Port Townsend. Kim went with us and gave her Nanna a heart pendant necklace that she bought with her allowance. Kim, now ten, had lost a molar tooth that day, and for the first time said she no longer believed in the Tooth Fairy.
Tremendously excited about the movie, Mom described meetings at Universal Studios with David Lynch and Raffaella De Laurentiis, discussing cuts that might be needed in the film to keep it under budget. Lynch was having trouble with cuts to his “baby,” so my father (after praising the work he had done) offered to help. One evening Dad worked at the studio editing the script, after which he and my mother went to a late dinner with Raffaella and David.
Frank Herbert’s changes were incorporated into the screenplay, which would ultimately go into a sixth draft. In all he cut fourteen pages of material, resulting in a savings of fourteen million dollars in the budget. A million dollars a page. They had discussions about giving my father a share of the screenplay credit, but he wouldn’t hear of it, saying he felt David and his associates deserved it for doing such a masterful job. He would accept a consulting fee only.
Raffaella De Laurentiis showed my parents a series of storyboards that had been prepared by the art department—pictorial instructions for the positioning of actors in key scenes. It was an intriguing process to Beverly Herbert. All of the castle scenes, for example, would be filmed at once, no matter where they appeared in the story. Then they would tear the castle set down and build another one. It would be extremely costly if they forgot to shoot a scene and had to rebuild a set. After all the filming, the scenes were pieced together where needed, in the film editing process.
An air of secrecy surrounded the production. Lynch, who referred to his scriptwriting team of Eric Bergren and Christopher DeVore as “The Great Team,” wrote regular memos to them. During the first three days of June 1982, his transmittals included this: “Any leaks concerning what we are doing on this project will decrease the curiosity factor and cause us to lose power. I beg you to keep this in mind.”
My mother found it all fascinating, but beneath her excitement I heard layered sadness and concern. She was wondering if she would live long enough to see the film. I prayed that she would.
Much later I ran across an entry in her travel journal from that Los Angeles trip, on binder paper. It comprised less than one page and revealed all the excitement of a schoolgirl confiding in her diary: “I can’t believe it’s really going to happen!”
She didn’t have the energy to write more.
A few days later I spoke with Dad about his upcoming fishing trip to Alaska. “I don’t know if I’m going,” he said, and refused to discuss it further.
I knew he felt run down by what he’d been through—all the writing deadlines, the movie, the nonstop work, and the care he’d given to my mother. He needed that vacation desperately, had been looking forward to it for months. But Mom’s latest medical tests had been so bad, showing a continuing downhill slide, that he thought he shouldn’t go after all.
To save the fishing trip, Mom wondered if Jan could come to Port Townsend and stay with her. But Jan was having her difficulties at Cornish Institute, where she was hanging on by a thread. These troubles had been caused in part by her concern over Mom, and in part by the demands of taking care of the baby. Her grades had been falling, and she couldn’t afford to miss any more classes.
In a telephone conversation my father revealed to Jan that Mom wanted only her there in his absence—no one else who lived nearby would do.
Without approval from the school, Jan promised she would be in Port Townsend the next day. After catching the first ferry, from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, she called the school. The director said he understood, that he realized she had to take her chances and go. But he made no promises.
Dad waited until Jan arrived before leaving on his trip. He told her he felt bad for her having to leave school, but said he needed to get away. Jan told him not to worry, that it was all worked out at school. This was not true, of course.
Their first evening together, Mom did needlepoint while she and Jan talked in the living room about what was going on in their lives. Dad had found a new high-carbohydrate diet that was supposed to stop his chronic jet lag, and he was going to test it during the Alaska trip. Mom spoke as well about her best friend in high school and college, Frankie Goodwin, how they would exchange worries to relieve the burden of them. “I’ll take your worries if you take mine,” one girl would say to the other. And
then they would trade. They called it the “Worry Game.”
“Why don’t we do that now?” Jan suggested.
Mom smiled, and said softly: “All right.”
Jan did not mention her concerns about school, and spoke instead of worries about how our daughters would grow up, and who they might marry. And her hope that I might do well enough in my writing to leave the insurance business, since it seemed to her that I was wearing myself out writing and working full-time to support a family.
Mom spoke of her illness, and again of her concern over what might happen to Dad if she passed away. She said she’d been staying awake worrying about bills again, how they would be paid, and how she would get the energy to make sure the checks were sent out, and all the filing and letter writing she had to do. She said while she was in the hospital or at doctor’s appointments, Dad moved funds between their various accounts, leaving a bewildering trail she couldn’t follow. He told her that he had issued important checks, paying mortgages, construction bills and other things. But she couldn’t figure out which accounts had been used for what, and if they were the correct accounts. Now there were piles of unpaid bills, bills that Dad hadn’t gotten around to paying because he was preparing for his trip and meeting writing deadlines.
He kept assuring her the money she needed for bills was available, and there was nothing to worry about. But to her their cash flow and cash on hand positions were not clear, and she didn’t have the energy to figure it all out. Bills flowed in constantly. Big ones.
“Why don’t you hire an accountant?” Jan suggested.
“Then what would I do? This is my job.”
The next day Jan pulled two chairs up to Mom’s desk and said, “We’ll just sit here and figure it out together.” Jan looked over the ledgers and made a telephone call (with Mom) to a banker, obtaining current bank balances. Jan couldn’t quite figure it all out, and needed to ask Dad questions. But plenty of money seemed to be in the accounts and she said to Mom, “You tell me who to write the checks to, and out of what account.” And every day with my mother, Jan helped her organize and pay the bills.
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