“I’m one of the natives now,” he said, proudly. “A kama’aina. We’ve been very well accepted by the community.”
Five miles down a road that seemed like much farther, by the second fruit stand out of town, Dad slowed and wheeled sharply left, rolling over a metal cattle guard that kept hoofed intruders off his property. The cattle guard, which rattled when they crossed it, had been installed after a Hana Ranch bull chased my mother around the yard.
From the parking area as Jan got out of the car she saw the hip roof of the main house just downhill and palm trees along the shoreline, swaying gently in trade winds. The sea, a darker shade of blue in receding daylight, stretched far into the distance. On the far right she could barely make out the outline of the island of Hawaii and its nearest volcano, Mauna Kea. A flower-lined walkway curved downhill to the entrance of the main house.
When Jan walked in the door, with Dad just ahead of her toting luggage, he called out, “Bev, I brought your sunshine!”
Mom rose from the gray sectional couch in the living room and walked slowly toward her eagerly awaited visitor, smiling broadly. My mother was thin, only 110 pounds on a 5'7" frame, and her skin was ivory, in striking contrast with her dark brown hair. A delicate whisper of a woman, she wore an exquisite red Polynesian muumuu, red with pink and white flowers.
“Oh finally!” she exclaimed, “Our breath of fresh air! Frank, everything will be all right now. Jan’s here.”
To one of my parents, Jan was sunshine, and to the other fresh air.
Mom took Jan outside, and on the hill facing the kitchen showed her where she had planted poinsettias. “I planted them for you,” she said. And she expressed worry that the caretakers might not water them enough. Jan didn’t ask about this, but wondered why anything in Hawaii needed extra watering. Maybe it had to do with how young the plants were, she thought, or the time of year.
An apartment wing had been completed, on the other side of the pool that was still under construction. But the apartments (two of them) were a good distance from the main house and only reachable by going outside and traversing a long, covered walkway. My mother thought Jan might be lonely out there, so they set her up on a Japanese futon folding mattress on the mezzanine of the main house.
“You’ll be cozier here,” Mom said. Her voice was weak, filled with sickness.
The following morning, Jan saw beauty she had never imagined possible. Kawaloa, a five-acre piece of paradise, brimmed with flowers, breadfruit trees, palms, papaya trees and banana fronds—at the edge of an aquamarine sea with dancing whitecaps.
A few days later the poinsettias were not doing well and my mother became displeased with the caretakers, Bart and Sheila Hrast, saying they weren’t watering the plants enough. Mom’s displeasure reached the ears of her enforcer, my father, and he became very angry. He wanted everything to be perfect for her, didn’t want her upset in the least, because of her precarious medical condition. Dad got on the phone to the caretakers, who were in a separate house on the upper level of the property (by the Hana Road), and said, “Get down here and water the poinsettias! We don’t want them to die!”
Jan and Sheila became friends, and Jan learned that Sheila loved my mother dearly, and tried to do everything she could to please her. The poinsettias had been watered, she insisted. They just weren’t adapting well. She showed Jan around the land, which was nearly five acres, with three hundred and thirty feet of oceanfront. The grounds were exquisitely kept.
After visiting Sheila one day, Jan returned by herself to the main house, where Mom made a surprising remark. “Don’t ever get too close to the help,” she said. “It’s best to keep your distance.”
Jan found this pretentious but didn’t argue. It was one of my mother’s few flaws that she had a tendency toward snobbishness, even when we had been poor. Subsequently Jan was more discreet when she visited Sheila, waiting until Mom was taking a nap.
My wife spent two weeks there, and in that time noticed that Dad hardly ever went anywhere, so worried was he about my mother. Any time he went to town without her, he couldn’t stand to be away, and drove even faster than usual. The locals were learning to watch out for him on the road. On one occasion, he became impatient trying to get around another car and went up a shortcut by the Pu’uiki cliff, blew a stop sign and roared back onto the Hana Road just ahead of the other vehicle.
Each day, Dad spent time in his study, but when Jan passed his open door and looked inside, she could see he wasn’t writing much. He would sit at his computer and stare at it, or move his fingers listlessly over the keyboard, where once they had danced across the keys with furious energy.
Dad was forever listening for Mom to be sure she was all right. If she so much as whimpered his name, he bolted out of the study to help her. He was overly attentive at times, to the point where Mom grew irritated with him and would say, “Jan’s here. You can go back to work.”
Because of the heat in his upper-level study, a tropics-related design problem he hadn’t contemplated, he regularly wrote with his shirt off. He looked so sad to Jan, rarely smiling or breaking into laughter, making her suspect he cried in private and that he was pretending to write or trying to write through tears. Whenever he came downstairs, he invariably looked sweaty and upset.
My mother tried not to disturb him, except when she had to. She liked him upstairs working. She wanted everything to be normal, the way it used to be. But she must have sensed that he was not writing wholeheartedly, and that he was way behind schedule on Chapterhouse: Dune.
With all the diuretics she had to take and her lack of energy, little accidents were inevitable, and embarrassing for Mom. She would try to make it to the bathroom, but after only four steps would be out of breath, leaning on the wall. One day Dad was away briefly and Jan tried to help her, but she wouldn’t allow it, saying she only allowed Frank to help her. My mother could be stubbornly independent.
But Jan said to her, “After all the years you’ve helped me, won’t you let me do this for you?”
The woman she knew as Bev, the woman who had become a mother to her, smiled gently at this and said, “All right.”
Mom relied on her more after that. At bedtime Dad normally came down from his study to help her. But this evening, while Dad worked in his study, Mom allowed Jan to assist her to bed, and told her how the oxygen was to be hooked up. This was a shock. Jan had seen two tanks in the bedroom, but hadn’t known they were in constant use, thinking they were only there “just in case.”
Jan eased her into bed and connected the oxygen. Just before shutting out the light, Jan kissed her on the cheek, as I had done so many times. Her face felt cold.
On her night stand, my mother kept a Catholic rosary, given to her by the nuns from Tacoma when she had been close to death almost a decade before. Simple black beads and a brass cross bearing Jesus. She also had a scapular—two tiny pieces of rectangular woolen cloth connected by a string. The scapular bore pictures of Catholic saints, with the words “Have pity on us” and “Be our aid.” Each night before she went to sleep she held the religious artifacts and prayed.
My mother attributed her extra years of life in large part to a newfound faith in God. Not particularly in the Catholic version of God, or in anyone else’s version of a deity. Instead, Beverly Herbert was a free thinker who did not easily accept the constructs of others.
Each morning Jan prepared breakfast, usually serving Mom in bed on a tray according to strict dietary requirements: a bowl of Cream of Wheat and banana slices, with fresh guava or papaya juice. Alongside, Jan placed a fresh hibiscus flower in a little crystal vase—a vase I had given my mother some years before.
During the day, Mom liked to sit in the “vee” of the sectional couch, which gave her commanding views of the home’s interior and the ocean. Jan helped set her up each day, providing pillows, bringing books and knitting materials, and placing the cordless telephone nearby.
Jan prepared all the meals and performed other
tasks my father normally did, making her realize the full extent of the time-consuming chores he performed out of love. Prior to Jan’s visit Mom hadn’t allowed anyone but him to help her, so he was her medical attendant, masseur and personal chef. He cleaned the house, did her laundry, made and changed her bed, performed her bookkeeping chores, wrote letters for her, and bathed her. In caring for a person this ill, he was forced to reach deep for the strength he needed.
The fatigue showed on his drawn face, with dark circles under his eyes. He had gained a lot of weight, more than fifty pounds at one point from nervous eating, from the stresses of building the house at Kawaloa and not knowing from day to day if the woman he was building it for would survive to see it completed. He had more wrinkles, more gray hairs. His beard and hair, usually neatly trimmed, were long and unkempt.
In recent weeks he had begun losing weight, having lost his appetite and enthusiasm for food. Ten of the fifty pounds had fallen off. Jan tried to make certain he ate a balanced diet each day, but often he wouldn’t finish what she put in front of him and she would have to remove it. At times he seemed listless.
Each morning, Mom had to take her medicine, but once while Jan was there, she resisted, saying it didn’t taste good. She was seated in her usual place on the couch, with the medicine on the black slate table in front of her.
Dad came up behind Mom and started rubbing her neck and shoulders. He pushed his hand inside the back of her sweater to massage her upper back, and as he did so, said, “I’m not getting fresh.”
“I wish you were,” she said, with a winsome smile.
Jan wanted to paint the glorious Hawaiian countryside around her. One very special afternoon, with warm, gentle trade winds blowing in from the sea, Mom followed Jan out on the deck. Barely able to walk, Mom went six feet, held on to something, and then struggled another six feet. They sat by the pool, where Jan sketched and painted. Adding to what she had taught Jan before, Mom described more of the techniques her mother had used, this time in the mixing and matching of watercolors and in brush strokes. And, while she did not have the energy to paint, she enjoyed watching Jan spread colors and shapes on paper.
“Yes, that’s it,” Mom would say. “You’re very talented.”
Inside the house, my mother showed Jan a number of sketches and paintings she had done when they first moved to Kawaloa, when all the excitement of the tropical scenery was new and fresh in her mind. One painting was of the house and garden, a happy production full of bright flowers. Another was a potted flower drawn in black ink.
Mom gave Jan a set of Japanese watercolor paints, with colors in little porcelain dishes. While Mom was napping one day, Jan went out on the deck by the stairway that led up to the caretaker’s house and painted a picture of a lacy Coral Hibiscus and a bright red Ostrich Plume Ginger. Looking around the side of the main house, she had a glimpse of the water, but most of that view was blocked by the house.
Mom awoke and saw her out there. Slowly, painstakingly, she worked her way outside, and came up behind Jan to admire her work.
Jan set up a chair for her, and ran back inside to get my mother’s favorite wool shawl for her shoulders. In one of their conversations, Mom told Jan she was sorry she hadn’t spent more time with her grandchildren but that if she kept her distance it wouldn’t hurt them so deeply when she passed away. Jan had suspected as much. Sadly, she thought of how much Kim resembled her grandmother as a teenager, with baby fat that would soon melt away, revealing hidden beauty. They shared an interest in astrology, in sewing and knitting, and had many other similarities of personality, especially in the subtle ways of obtaining what they wanted.
Still, Jan held out hope for future closeness between Bev and the girls, and found it hard to accept that my mother was dying.
Dad also spent time with Jan. He alternated between depression and optimism, refusing to believe his wife of nearly four decades might not be able to continue. Proudly, he showed Jan his computer system. From his nonstop nursing duties and trying to meet a writing deadline, he had let his personal appearance slip. So he asked Jan to neaten him up, with a haircut and beard trim.
While cutting his hair, Jan noticed a large mole on his back and said, “Frank, this looks like it needs taking care of.”
“I’ll have it looked at,” he assured her, “when I get back to the mainland.”
During Jan’s visit the swimming pool was finally completed and filled with water. The solar heating unit was not functioning yet, so the water was too cold for Mom. Dad and Jan swam, however. The pool was large and beautiful, just off the master bedroom. Partially completed redwood decks surrounded it, and on one section, in a chair beneath the shade of an Italian umbrella, Jan often gazed out over the magical, shimmering sea.
To pay for the remaining construction he wanted for Mom, Dad took out a large bank loan. “I’m expecting movie money soon,” he told Jan. He then sought interior design advice from her as to how they might decorate the main house and the apartment wing.
At 3:30 one morning Jan awoke to noises. From her futon bed on the mezzanine floor, she heard someone walking around, and a sliding door opening and closing. She went in Dad’s study, and through an open skylight heard a splash and someone swimming in the pool. It was my father taking a wake-up dip before going to work in his study. This was his daily routine, rising earlier than ever so that he could have precious writing time alone while Mom slept. After swimming his “lengths,” he squeezed fresh orange juice and prepared a light breakfast for himself.
Jan discovered that Dad was taking No-Doz tablets to stay awake…to work through intense fatigue as he sought to keep the writing deadlines that were so important to him.
At times Jan needed to get away alone. Sensing this, Mom told her to take the Blazer and drive to nearby Hamoa Beach, owned by the Hotel Hana Maui. From dues they paid, my parents had the right to use the recreational area, described by Dad as the most beautiful stretch of white sand beach he had ever seen.
Jan sat on one of the lounge chairs provided by the hotel and cried for Bev, hardly noticing a famous actress who was seated nearby, Julie Newmar. A man in his forties approached Jan and introduced himself as “Smitty.” Friendly and compassionate, he said he was a preacher and that he lived in a cave nearby. He wore boxer shorts and a faded Hawaiian shirt.
Jan told him about my mother.
“Let’s say a prayer for her,” Smitty suggested.
And for long minutes they prayed together, silently.
Later Jan learned he was quite a well-known personality in those parts, known as “Born Again Smitty,” a man who had saved many swimmers from the dangerous surf and undertow just offshore. Tragically, Smitty died a short while later when the cave in which he lived collapsed on him. He was one of many people living off the land around there, in shacks or caves, fishing and picking fruit from the jungle. No one starved, not even people who didn’t fish, because of the abundance of bananas, papaya, guava, breadfruit and other fruit that grew readily in that climate.
When Jan arrived home from Hamoa Beach, she came in late, having lost track of time.
“Where the hell were you?” Dad demanded. “I was just about to call the police! I had people driving around looking for you!”
She apologized for causing concern, and hurried in to prepare dinner. Later, during one of her visits to Hamoa Beach, Jan made these notes:
When I think of Bev and how she must feel inside, I hurt for her. She has always been so strong, but now I think she would welcome death from all the hurt and sorrow she has suffered. I will miss her so very much that I hope she will hold on for us all. Today I feel so sad inside for all of us who love her. I wish to leave this beautiful place only because I cannot watch her hurt, and I miss my babies and Brian….
A short while afterward, Jan asked my father if she could leave a few days earlier than expected, so that she could get back to Margaux, who was only two, and take care of other obligations. She said nothing about her real
reason. If my father sensed anything else he didn’t comment, though his eyes were filled with pain. Jan knew as well that my sister, Penny, would arrive soon to help out. Bruce had wanted to come afterward, but Dad was delaying in giving him a time that would be convenient. My brother wondered, but did not say so to Dad, if this had anything to do with his homosexuality, which our father had never accepted.
A couple of days later when it was time to leave, Jan said good-bye to Mom, who was too weak and fatigued to rise from the gray sectional couch. Mom wore her colorful Missoni shawl and her favorite red cotton muumuu with pink and white flowers. Jan had ironed the dress for her that morning.
“Thank you, dear.” Beverly’s face was a mask of sadness and pain. “You’ve been a big help.”
Jan leaned over, kissed the frail woman on her cheek and hugged her. Then she turned quickly to leave, because she didn’t want my mother to see her crying. From the front entry, she looked back at the woman who had become a mother figure to her. A mounting fear filled Jan, a terror that it was the last time she would ever see her, and she saw in Mom’s face that she sensed this as well.
The leaving process was like slow motion to Jan, a terrible pulling and wrenching. She didn’t want to go, wanted to look upon Bev just a little longer, wanted to be with her for just a few moments more.
On the way to the Hana airport, Dad said, “You know she’s dying.”
Jan couldn’t respond. It was why she needed to leave. She didn’t feel she had the strength my mother saw in her, and was torn between wanting to help and fearing the imminence of death.
My father was torn as well, in different ways.
One moment he believed Mom might die, and the next moment he didn’t believe it. Whenever the terrible reality of her fragility hit him, he tried to overcome it with his powerful sense of optimism—his knowledge of what the human spirit, particularly my mother’s, could accomplish. She had survived so many close calls that it seemed to many of us that she would continue to beat the dread disease that afflicted her body. Like my father, we always held out hope.
Dreamer of Dune Page 45