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.
Chapter 36
There Are Flowers Everywhere
ON 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 w
asn’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:
Dear Brian, Jan and kids:
This letter is being composed on the word processor that I am readying for Bev to use in writing all of our correspondence. It works much faster than ordinary typewriting and saves the letter on a disk that is much easier to store. One disk 5 1/2 inches in diameter can store hundreds of letters and find them when required (provided you label the disks correctly).
As I write this letter, I can hear the workmen outside finishing the swimming pool. Bev really needs it desperately. Her muscle tone has gone down dangerously since our arrival, although she still is stronger than she was when we arrived. Dr. and Mrs. Howell were here for dinner last night and brought good news about Bev’s latest blood test. She is managing to keep up her potassium level without taking the slow-K that made her so ill just before we left Port Townsend.
For Jan’s information, the guest house* is coming along rapidly, as well. [The contractor] put in the steel supports for the corner tables yesterday and we decided to surface them with the same blue tile we are using in the bathrooms. We are overflowing with that tile because, on learning that they no longer are making it, we bought out the store’s supply. We had visions of needed repairs sometime in the future and no source for the tiles.
We’re really looking forward to Jan’s visit and only wish Brian would be with her…Too much activity around here to do much else except watch the work. I always say I love work. I could watch it forever.
Love,
Frank
Chapter 37
The Race to Finish Kawaloa
AT THIS point in writing Dreamer of Dune, I found myself unable to continue. For many weeks, the manuscript languished, untouched, while I busied myself with other things, with “make work projects” that were without substance. Ultimately a great depression set in over me, for I was not writing, and beyond that, far beyond that, I was not telling the story that had burned in my heart for so long.
One evening I sat down at my computer to resume work on the book. But my fingers were numb on the keyboard, moving sluggishly, stumbling over keys and producing misspellings. My brain and fingers refused to cooperate in the telling of something so terrible. Fatigue overwhelmed me, and I wanted nothing more than to sit in the soft side chair by my desk and nap. It was the large orange Naugahyde chair that had been my mother’s favorite, one she said “leaped out and grabbed” her as she tried to walk by it in a department store. Maybe tomorrow I would be able to proceed. But not this evening. Not now. I settled into the chair and fell asleep.
Tomorrow arrived, but again I put the work aside. Three more days passed, and eventually I looked through the old notes again….
In December 1983, I set to work on an outline and some of the scenes for a new science fiction book that I hoped Dad and I might write together—a novelization that would include some of the America concepts we had been discussing. This was a book my mother very much wanted us to do, as she felt we might become like Irving Wallace and his son, David Wallechinsky. But as I got into the outline, many of the America concepts didn’t seem to fit.
Instead, I envisioned a universe that was entirely dependent for its existence upon the imaginations of an alien race, called Dreens. They lived on the planet Dreenor and created entire worlds with the power of their imagination. Out of their imaginings, worlds came into existence. Earth was one of those worlds, and a situation would come to pass where the people of Earth would perceive a threat from aliens living on a distant planet, Dreenor, and a military mission would be sent to destroy that far off planet. Of course, such an act could destroy Earth as well if all the Dreens were killed, since our planet only existed by virtue of the imaginations of these beings. But the military people on Earth would have no knowledge of such an impending catastrophe.
The key character in our story would be a newspaperman, a young publisher who operated a paper owned by his business-mogul father, a number-cruncher who cared little about the newspaper industry and was more interested in his widespread, diversified enterprises, which were far more profitable than publishing. In many respects, our young protagonist would be modeled after William Randolph Hearst, who, like the character in our story, was left a newspaper by his wealthy father. The real-life newspaper owned by Hearst, the San Francisco Examiner, had been employer to both Frank Herbert and me in the 1960s—he as picture editor and me as a copyboy. And of course, I had in recent years been intrigued with the life story of Hearst, for the similarity he bore with my father when it came to ongoing construction projects.
Dad liked the concept when I described it to him over the telephone. He liked my title, too, A Man of Two Worlds—a reference to the character becoming split in his obligations between the worlds of Dreenor and Earth. Dad told me to go ahead and set the story up as much as I could.
Shortly after Christmas 1983, Jan flew to the international airport at Honolulu on the island of Oahu. From there she caught a Royal Hawaiian Air Service Cessna to the island of Maui. As she flew over the water, it was the most incredible aqua blue color she had ever seen, breathtaking in its beauty and brilliance. The plane skirted Maui and headed for its eastern shore, where she beheld spectacular vistas of waterfalls, cliffs, and jungle. Tiny settlements and ranches were carved out of the jungle that ran up the slopes of the massive inactive volcano Haleakala, the dominant topographical feature of the island.
It had been a cold winter in Seattle, with rain and snow and temperatures dropping into the teens. But when Jan stepped out of the plane at the Hana Airport, it was eighty degrees with trade winds blowing gently. Darkness was just beginning to blanket the island. The airfield was a strip of pavement between the jungle and th
e sea.
Dad greeted her at a little gate between the tarmac and a small terminal building, and helped her load luggage and Christmas gifts into his white Chevrolet Blazer. Jan hadn’t known about this vehicle, and when she commented on it he said it was perfectly suited to their lifestyle in Hawaii. It was large, permitting them to fill it with groceries and other items during all-day shopping trips to the other side of the island, necessary because Hana had only two small general stores. The Blazer had four-wheel drive, enabling it to traverse rough roadways and off-road terrain.
In the gathering dusk, Jan saw tropical beauty she had never imagined, with lush jungle vegetation and bright flowers pressing in all around the highway, threatening to overwhelm civilization. Dad drove as if he didn’t own the vehicle, too rapidly and with little respect for rough spots in the road. The Blazer wasn’t that old, but already the shock absorbers were shot and it rocked crazily on every bump. He spoke of construction work at the house, and said, with great concern, “If we could only get the pool done, Bev could do her strokes. She’d be stronger then. Her heart would get better.”
Jan knew the unspoken, that he meant improvement of her whole cardiovascular system, including her lungs.
They passed the luxurious Hotel Hana Maui and the quaint, busy Hasegawa’s General Store, about which a popular Hawaiian song had been recorded. Outside town were large green pastures, most of them the property of the Hana Ranch (owners of the hotel), with black lava rock, tumble-down fences and cattle grazing. There were outstanding vistas of the sea.
The road became worse on this side of town and seemed to have been paved in a prior century, so filled with potholes and washboards was it. The natives liked it that way, Dad said with a chuckle as they went over the eyeball-rattling, bumpy stretch known as the Molokai Washboard. It kept visitors to a minimum.
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