Late that evening after Dad had gone to bed, Mom told me that if the newsletter got off the ground it would be the first time she ever got her name on a publication. I asked her about a romance story she had sold in the 1940s, a “plan ahead” book she worked on for the Retail Reporting Bureau, and a number of Christmas stories she had written for department store promotions, all of which were published.
“My romance story was published anonymously,” she said. “And the other writings, well, they weren’t very significant. They were part of my job, part of structures I didn’t create. This newsletter would be a big step for me. I plan to have fun with it.”
Our first foray for BAH was the elegant Mirabeau Restaurant, a few days later. This gourmet dining establishment, on the forty-sixth floor of the SeaFirst Building in downtown Seattle, provided a spectacular, panoramic view of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains. There were flat mirror surfaces on pillars by the windows, reflecting the views from a variety of directions.
When the conversation grew too serious, Mom touched Dad’s arm and asked him to tell a favorite joke of hers, one I hadn’t heard in years. Dad told it like this: There were these old friends, and one of them finally turned to the other and said, “Alfie, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I can barely tolerate you putting down my stories, and the way you’re always late to my parties. Most of all, I’ve just now decided I absolutely cannot tolerate the fact that you’ve become so pretentious.”
To this, Alfie responded, “Pretentious? Moi?”
Dad provided a brief history lesson about the use of the French word “moi,” meaning “I,” or “me.” He traced it back to Louis XIV, king of France longer than any other monarch, who said, “L’etat c’est moi”—“I am the state.”
All of us gave our opinions of the meal, while Mom scribbled “BAH” notes on a notepad from her purse. The waiter seemed a little nervous, and I saw him watching her.
On August 31, 1983, we drove my parents to Rosellini’s Other Place Restaurant in Seattle, for a 6:30 dinner reservation. Walking in from the car, Mom had to stop and catch her breath twice. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ve just been a little tired lately.”
We ordered a bottle of Richebourg before eating. With only two bottles remaining on the premises, a 1979 and a 1966, Dad said, “We’ll have the ’79 now and the ’66 with dinner.” He wanted to build up to the better, richer wine.
The waiter removed the cork from the ’79 and set it on our table. With a very serious, intense expression, Dad smelled the cork. Then a smile broke across his mouth, and his blue eyes sparkled. “Grind this up, will you,” he said, “and put it in our salad.”
Our waiter, a cheery, portly fellow, laughed so hard that he nearly popped his cummerbund.
It was a favored Frank Herbert line in elegant restaurant settings, delivered with a sense of comic timing at an ostensibly serious moment. It deflated any semblance of pretentiousness, which he abhorred, and never failed to elicit hearty laughter.*
Soon we were immersed in our dinner and in conversation about my parents’ upcoming trip to Hawaii. Mom said she always enjoyed the flight across the ocean, and that a wonderful feeling came over her when the Hawaiian Islands came into view through the windows of the plane. She described the islands as green and brown jewels on a shimmering aquamarine sea.
Mom said she was glad she’d gone to Mexico City to see the Dune filming, that for her it had been the trip of a lifetime. “A Channel 5 (Seattle) news team was with us,” she said, “but they won’t run a story until the movie is ready for release.”
To build up public interest, Universal and De Laurentiis were keeping the cast list secret. I saw a television story on the movie, run by Channel 7 in Seattle, in which they interviewed the mysterious and unnamed leading man, with his back to the camera. It was Kyle MacLachlin, I knew. But not too many other people did.
Two days afterward, on September 2, Clyde Taylor called, and told me that W. H. Allen, a large publishing house in London, wanted to publish Sidney’s Comet and The Garbage Chronicles in the United Kingdom, in hardcover and paperback. I told him to accept their proposed terms.
Later in the week I called Mom in Port Townsend and discussed the “BAH” newsletter with her. We went over the format and specific language that might be included in every issue. She wanted it to look elegant.
She and Jan spoke on the telephone for a long while, after which Jan told me my parents wanted us to visit them in Hawaii that winter. If I wouldn’t fly, Jan wondered, would I mind if she went alone? Mom said she was afraid Dad would steamroll her on the interior decorating at Kawaloa, and she wanted Jan there to prevent that.
I assented. Details were worked out, but because of school Jan couldn’t go until after Christmas. Mom expressed disappointment, and said, “Come as soon as you can.”
After discussing this with my mother by telephone, Jan sat silently for a long while and then asked me if she should interrupt her classes and go earlier. Knowing the difficulties she had been through at school, I suppose I didn’t answer very well. I left the decision to her.
The following week, I mailed my mother four restaurant reviews I had written, using a form I had developed for the purpose. I also edited a sample “BAH” letter she wanted to mail to a selected list of people and offered my suggestions for improvement. We were establishing a tone with the letter, appealing to a discriminating class of diners. Mom had decided not to show her name anywhere in the publication, to guarantee the integrity of calls she made upon restaurants. She was afraid that restaurateurs, upon learning a food critic was on the premises, would roll out a red carpet.
So, despite her earlier excitement about receiving credit in the publication for her operation of it, she was now slipping, once again, into anonymity. Her point seemed well taken, however.
On the sixteenth of September, 1983, Dad called. He said Warner Brothers and Paul Newman were making a bid for the movie rights to Soul Catcher, my father’s 1972 novel about a clash between American Indian and white cultures. Previously there had been interest from a Seattle production company, Gardner-Marlow-Maes, as well as from Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, and Henry Fonda. I found myself unable to keep up with the history of these film rights. It was turning out to be almost as complex and ill-starred as the early history of the Dune movie project.
My father said he had a possible ulcer from tension over all the things he and Mom had been trying to do. The construction at Kawaloa was on the very top of their stress list, and below that their struggle over selling the Port Townsend house and purchasing something closer to me. Temporarily they had stopped looking for property in the Seattle area but would resume the search in the spring, upon returning from Hawaii. His stomach didn’t feel good, and to compound matters, he was battling the flu. He was grumpy from flu shots, said his muscles were so sore that he could hardly walk up the stairs to his writing loft.
Despite this, Dad rode his ten-speed Schwinn bicycle to a market in Port Townsend the following day—a distance of six miles round trip—and purchased fetuccini for the evening meal.
On September 23 I called Mom, and she said Dad was feeling a little better, but she wasn’t. Only two months before she had been up to four and a half laps of the swimming pool, and now she could barely do one. As she spoke to me, I realized this was an unusual conversation. Previously, Mom didn’t like to talk about her condition, and we had to receive information on it from Dad. I was worried.
She said both of them had doctor’s appointments in Seattle on the twenty-ninth. She also wanted to take her gold wristwatch to C. Rhyne & Associates to have the band shortened so that she could wear the watch again. “I want to buy a gold maple leaf coin at Rhyne Precious Metals, too,” she said. “In the same building. I’ve just begun collecting coins.”
She asked if I would take her, and I said I would be glad to.
I told her I was just finishing my novel, Sudanna, Sudanna, which was coming in at around 310 pages, do
uble-spaced, or seventy-five thousand words.
She said Dad had three hundred single-spaced pages done on the first draft of “Dune 6,” and that she had gone over the plot with him, offering comments. “I also suggested a title to him,” she said. “Chapterhouse: Dune. He likes it. That’s the title now.”
Mom cleared her throat and said the newsletter idea was dead, because of a rival publication already in existence.
We discussed business matters I’d been helping them with, and then I had to listen to one of the things I hated to hear, that she and Dad were executing “living wills,” giving one another the authority to “pull the plug” if either of them slipped into a vegetable state.
My mother paused, as if awaiting comment. I didn’t say anything. What could I say to that? She added that if both of them were being kept alive by machines, they wanted to give me the authority to pull the plug, and she asked if I would do that for them. I said I would do as they wished.
It was a quality-of-life issue, she said, of particular concern to her. Dad once told me she used the term frequently, that she wanted the right to die in dignity, without the interference of unnatural and uncomfortable medical equipment. It was why she wanted to live at Kawaloa when she was so ill, despite its great distance from hospitals and modern medical equipment. She didn’t want to die in a cold, sterile hospital, connected to machines, and Kawaloa was as far from that environment as she could possibly get.
Late that month, Dad had an autograph session in Seattle. While he was there, I had lunch with my mother in the Garden Room of the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. They conducted a fashion show as we ate, with models strolling between tables in expensive Paris gowns. Afterward I drove Mom over to a jewelry store in an old building in downtown Seattle, where they would measure her wrist and remove gold links from her watch, since she had lost so much weight. The building didn’t have an elevator, so I helped her up a long flight of stairs to the second floor. She was weak and frail, and had to rest on almost every step. My heart went out to her. I was confused and concerned by her physical downturn, because only a short while before she had been doing well with her exercise program, improving steadily. I hoped it was only a temporary setback and that Hawaii would make her stronger. She seemed so much older than her fifty-six years.
Two days later I drove Jan and the kids to Port Townsend, and we arrived at midmorning. There were five deer in the yard. Dad came out to greet us in his customary fashion, and gave us warm hugs. “Did you bring your manuscript?” he asked.
I had completed Sudanna, Sudanna only a couple of days before. Opening a back door of the car, I reached in and pulled a manuscript box off the ledge above the backseat.
He took the story that I had sweated over these many months to the living room, and set himself up on the couch. He seemed anxious to read it.
Mom wanted to go over a number of business matters with me, and we went in her office. At her desk I pulled up a chair to sit beside her. She gazed through a tall window that overlooked her garden and a little wooden bird feeder attached to a cedar tree. A brown-and-white wren was eating seeds, and she watched it for a moment. Her desk was more cluttered than usual, and she had a large green ledger book open on it, with a Cross pencil lying on the exposed page.
She was breathing hard, taking deep, erratic gulps of air, and I thought she was going to sneeze. Then I realized her breathing was labored from the exertion of walking into her office, only thirty feet from the kitchen. I wanted to help her, but didn’t know how. Touching her hand, I asked, “Mom, are you okay?”
She smiled, looked at me and said, “I’ll be all right in just a moment.” I saw pain in her dark blue eyes.
To the left of her desk, on the side where I sat, stood a light teak filing cabinet, with a miniature black and white Sony television on it. Above that, on the wall, a bookshelf held reference books, including a zip code directory, a Roget’s thesaurus, and a big black hardcover volume, the new Cassell’s German dictionary.
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 r
eading, 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.
Dreamer of Dune Page 43