We ate dinner at Lido’s Restaurant in Port Townsend, which served good Mexican food. Dad talked a little about Mom, and said before falling silent about her, “Bev was fey.” It was a reference to her supernatural and spiritual powers, including her ability to see into the future.
He had a Carta Blanca beer with the meal, and as he finished the beer he said there were many things Mom wanted taken care of after she was gone. His gaze was remote, as if he still imagined himself at Kawaloa with her, and he said, “I have all these things I’ve made promises to her about, promises I have to keep.” She had mapped out his entire year of 1984 and beyond, with lists of things to keep him busy, to pull him through.
Her first wish: She didn’t want any of us to cry for her, though she must have known we would. This was an impossible request, it seemed to me. We weren’t tough enough to comply. As Frank Herbert wrote in the Chapterhouse: Dune tribute to her: “She recognized tears as part of our animal origins. The dog howls at the loss of its master.”
Her second request was just as difficult for me to hear. She wanted Dad to remarry, didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life alone.
Third, he was supposed to talk with the children, Penny, Bruce and me, about our futures, helping us wherever possible. In this category, Dad promised Mom he would write a book with me. And, since my mother had grown so close to Jan, Dad said he would help her with her interior design career.
Fourth, Dad was supposed to talk privately with all the grandchildren about their futures, providing them with advice and financial assistance as needed.
Next, she wanted him to ask family members for assistance with all the support work involved in his writing—keeping accounts in order, answering fan letters, maintaining his schedule, and the like. It was her hope, my father told me, that I might be able to perform many of the tasks she had done, and that Bruce and Penny might assist. I assured him that we would do whatever we could.
As her sixth request, she wanted Dad to purchase a house near Jan and me on Mercer Island. Sensing her plan when she was still alive, he had resisted this previously, but now he was committed to do it.
Her seventh request: Finish Chapterhouse: Dune. This was proving difficult for him, since she had been so involved in the creation of the book, but he would do his best.
Number eight, she did not want a funeral with her body on display. Instead she desired cremation and a modest ceremony held at Kawaloa, with family members present. Her ashes were to be spread by the shore beneath a large, sweeping kamani tree. It was a species considered sacred by Hawaiians, one that produced small, round fruit, from which oil could be obtained. At the ceremony the Simon and Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” would be sung by a Hana friend and professional musician with a beautiful voice, Danny Estacada. This song represented what my father and mother had become for one another—bridges over troubled waters.
Ninth, because she felt Group Health Hospital had extended her life by nearly a decade, she wanted Dad to coordinate a special benefit showing of the Dune movie when it came out, with the proceeds going to Group Health. Mom also wanted him to telephone some of the doctors who had been most instrumental in her survival, including the radiologist who had cured her cancer while inadvertently damaging her heart with radiation. She wanted this doctor in particular to know she felt he had done his best with the medical technology available at the time.
Lastly, it was her hope that the Kawaloa property might be kept in the family and used by her children and grandchildren for many years. Toward this end, she and Dad had taken certain steps in setting up their estates.
After Dad went to bed at around 7:30 that night, Penny stayed up to talk with me. We sat on the recliner chairs in the reading area by the kitchen, and she told me how difficult it had been at Kawaloa, and how worried she was about Dad. He had been getting up in the middle of the night for months, unable to sleep. In her final days, Mom stopped eating. Dad tried with only limited success to force-feed her. I learned later that dying people often stopped eating, the almost unconscious act of a body that knew it was going to pass on.
Penny also said Mom was extremely worried about how Bruce would fare in the future. She felt Penny and I were set up better financially than our little brother, and that we were stronger than he was. Mom and Dad had discussed hiring a business manager for him, to give him financial planning advice. It troubled Mom as well that Bruce had not found a lifelong companion, and that he was exposing himself to grave dangers in the gay community. The rest of us, especially Penny, had also been concerned about this.
That evening I slept in the living room, on an inflatable mattress. This was the room at Xanadu where I had spent so many enjoyable hours with my parents, discussing all manner of fascinating subjects. I was beneath the high gable with stained glass windows that my father had designed, the rooster and writer’s quill, and had my mattress pulled up next to the couch that he and I had sat upon while working on my manuscripts.
It was quiet. I wept for my mother and prayed for my father. And it seemed to me that there could be no greater love story than the way my parents felt for one another—no greater story of sacrifices each made for the other. I was proud to be their son.
At 4:30 Sunday morning, I was awakened by clattering noises in the next room, the master bedroom. The door was partially open, with a light visible. I went inside, where I found Dad going through Mom’s things. He said he had to clear everything out, that he was too upset when he encountered items that had been precious to her, and he wanted to get the pain over with. He had a dresser drawer open, and was putting her clothing and jewelry in boxes and large white plastic bags.
Dad showed me a long letter from his accountant, Marilyn Niwao of Hawaii, with all sorts of information she needed to prepare the 1983 tax return. A short while later, I started on the paperwork in Mom’s office. I found nearly three years of backlog in there, with tax records in disarray, unanswered fan, business and personal letters, and a dizzying assortment of bank statements, undocumented deposits and withdrawals, and receipts. Only a few had Dad’s notations on them concerning what they had been for. I set to organizing everything into existing file folders, and created new folders where necessary.
Mom had been very organized before becoming too ill to keep up, and I’d had no idea that she had been forced to let so much go. When I saw the state of the records, I told my father I would return to Port Townsend on weekends to help, until he could find a secretary.
At mid-morning the three of us decided to go for a walk. Dad wore a heavy sweater and a blue Gore-Tex coat, and when he stepped outside, even though it wasn’t that cold (in the high forties), he zipped and tied the coat, with the collar tight around his bearded mouth.
“My blood is still thin from Hawaii,” he said.
On farm roads and forest trails near the house, Dad talked more about Mom, saying he averaged only three hours of sleep a night during the last months of her life. With a chuckle he spoke of her skill with comeback lines, and suggested that I might have inherited her talent. He referred to my book Classic Comebacks, and to an incident he had been told about at the Norwescon science fiction convention the prior year, when I dispatched a rude panelist in front of hundreds of people. The audience had cheered me.
The following day, Penny and I did more paperwork in Mom’s office, and ran several errands for Dad. Since Penny offered to undertake the task of answering all fan mail from then on, I separated out all such unanswered correspondence for her.
That afternoon, Dad and I sat in his study loft, where I described my Man of Two Worlds plot ideas for him. He liked them. It had taken me two months to work them up, and I was heartened by his reception. He said I was now a professional writer, and that I had made excellent progress in a relatively short period of time.
Later that evening I heard my father crying in his loft. When I went up there and put my arm on his shoulder he showed me something Mom had left in his desk, a tiny white slip from
a Chinese fortune cookie. It said, “With patience, you will find happiness.”
“It hurts so bad,” he said, “and I can’t do anything about it.”
I remembered helping my mother up a long stairway the previous September, to the Seattle shops where she left her watch and bought two Canadian gold coins, so I knew she hadn’t climbed easily to Dad’s writing loft. It must have taken her an excruciatingly long time, probably in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She must have paused to catch her breath after each step.
When my brave mother sensed that she would never return to Port Townsend, she left things for Dad.
Here and there in his study over the next few days, on the tops of books, on the windowsill, or in a box of computer paper, he found other fortune cookie messages. And he found other things she left, including a shiny lucky penny in a tiny red envelope with Chinese characters on it.
The next day, Valentine’s Day, Penny helped me with some of the paperwork. The filing and searching seemed endless. At low tide that evening, Dad, Bill Ransom and I took buckets, shovels and flashlights and went clam and oyster digging at Marrowstone Island. We brought back a nice haul, which we planned to share later in the week when Jan arrived with Bruce and the kids.
The next morning, I jogged at sunrise. Then more filing and searching for tax records. Dad and I typed a two-page outline on Man of Two Worlds and sent it off to our agents in New York. When he was typing the outline, he typed “By Frank Herbert and Brian Herbert.” Then he looked at me and asked, “Is that all right?” He was referring to the placement of his name first. I nodded.
Dad wrote Mom’s birth and death dates in her Bible, which had been passed on to her by her father. The cover was coming apart, so I repaired it.
Penny, Dad and I took walks each day. We made plans to meet at Kawaloa in February 1985, to conduct a service for Mom. I would take a ship, while the others would fly. Dad wanted to be certain that I could be there, since it was one of my mother’s specific wishes.
Dad’s face, particularly his forehead, was scaly and blotchy, which he said was caused in large part by medication a doctor had given him for his Hawaiian sunburn. Tests indicated that he did not have melanoma, but that was an ever-present concern since he was fair-skinned, and he would need close monitoring. “It’s better than skin cancer,” he said.
Frank Herbert was beginning work again on Chapterhouse: Dune, and hoped to have it completed by the middle of March. He said it was difficult going, like fighting a head wind, but he was doing his best. At the end of each day’s work, he printed the hard copy. The printer made squawking and clicking noises.
Friday morning I found one of Mom’s messages in the top drawer of her desk, where I was doing bookkeeping. It was on a Chinese restaurant’s matchbook and read, “A long life to you.”
I showed it to Dad. He smiled gently and said, without hesitation, “That was left for you, Brian.”
I knew he was right, and recalled so many little things she had said to me in our final months together, her tones of voice, her gestures with her hands and arms. The way she turned her head and looked at me, and smiled. All were clues to deciphering the puzzle my mother had left. My mother’s plan, as it became clear, had been laid out with the meticulous care and attention to detail of a mystery writer setting up a plot. Her plan was selfless.
It was difficult working where she had worked, constantly seeing her handwriting, her thoughts, her wishes. It was especially hard seeing old records so carefully organized with meticulous, loving care, contrasting with recent records in such disarray. She hadn’t complained about her workload, hadn’t wanted to give up her work.
Dad was extremely thoughtful in his time of greatest grief. When Jan arrived with Bruce, Dad gave her a book about Monet that my mother had ordered before her death. For Bruce, Penny and me, he had an Omni magazine photograph of him and Mom enlarged, reproduced in three copies and framed. In the color photograph, my parents looked very happy, with Dad in his full beard and she nuzzling against his neck.
He also gave each of us a signed 1,100-word piece he had written about their life together, written at Kawaloa the day after Mom’s death.* It roughly paralleled the poem he had written, “Bev.” True to the way he wrote much of his prose, the tribute to my mother seemed in some respects to be an expanded version of the original poem.
Two of the passages in the dedication, in particular, reveal what my father did for my mother, and what they meant to one another:
…In her final days, she did not want anyone but me to touch her. But our married life had created such a bond of love and trust she often said the things I did for her were as though she did them. Though I had to provide the most intimate care, the care you would give an infant, she did not feel offended nor that her dignity had been assaulted. When I picked her up in my arms to make her more comfortable or bathe her, Bev’s arms always went around my shoulders and her face nestled as it often had in the hollow of my neck.
…Is it any wonder that I look back on our years together with a happiness transcending anything words can describe? Is it any wonder I do not want or need to forget one moment of it? Most others merely touched her life at the periphery. I shared it in the most intimate ways and everything she did strengthened me. It would not have been possible for me to do what necessity demanded of me during the final ten years of her life, strengthening her in return, had she not given of herself in the preceding years, holding back nothing. I consider that to be my great good fortune and most miraculous privilege.
I spent all day Sunday working on the accounts in Mom’s office. Late in the evening, after Dad had gone to bed, I emerged and told Bruce, Penny and Jan that the list from the accountant, when added to the dismal paperwork involving my mother’s death, was overwhelming. I could envision an impossible workload in the future, in addition to my responsibilities as an insurance agent, writer, husband and father. I could do the filing for Dad and write checks, but it was clear that he needed a bookkeeper in Port Townsend to help out. We all agreed to talk with him about it in the morning.
I didn’t sleep well that night. At one point, around 5:30 A.M., totally exhausted and nearly forgetting how much my father needed my help, I almost got in my car to drive home alone. Jan stopped me. Later we discussed the situation with Dad, and he agreed to bring in a bookkeeper to help me.
One day while working in his loft-study, Dad heard me downstairs and came down. “Did I hear footprints down here?” he said with a smile.
So that we might spend more time together, Dad and I went to a bicycle shop in Seattle one day, and each of us purchased new mountain bikes with fat tires. His was silver, a fifteen-speed with every gizmo the store could cram on the bike. Mine was bright red, a more practical twelve-speed. We broke the bikes in on a sunny day in Port Townsend at the end of February.
We cycled around North Beach—a six-and-a-half-mile trip from the house, over hilly roads. Dad walked up some of the hills, while I pedaled up and then waited for him each time at the top. On the first downhill stretch, he took off like a Kamikaze, going at a speed that left me far behind and apprehensive for his safety. He didn’t touch the brakes at all, and said he thought he reached forty miles an hour. It looked like a lot more to me. Perhaps he was being competitive, showing me the old man still had it. But even more it revealed the risk-taker in him, and his youthful enthusiasm for life.
Before Penny returned to California, she asked several of his friends to be sure and spend a lot of time with him after we left. She was concerned about how he would feel being alone in the house for the first time.
I stayed with Dad until February 27, and as I loaded my luggage into my car, he thanked me for the help. He placed his right hand on top of my open car door, and I touched his hand. Then, when he pulled his hand free and extended it to shake mine, we couldn’t get coordinated, and a clumsy, slapstick maneuver took place until finally we grasped hands in the manner of modern school kids…sort of a “hip�
�� handshake achieved accidentally.
Dad gave me a slender briefcase during my stay, which I opened on the ferry while crossing from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. Inside I found a note in Dad’s handwriting, probably forgotten by him there. It was the last stanza of “The Waking,” a poem by Theodore Roethke, one of the poets he most admired. The final lines read:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
On the other side of the paper, my father had written the last line of another Roethke poem (“Four for Sir John Davies”), a work he had quoted more completely in Heretics of Dune. This last line was, I knew, one of his favorites in all of poetry:
The word outleaps the world and light is all.
Chapter 40
Live Your Life!
The greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love.
—Bill Moyers
PROCEEDING WITH loving care, my father complied with each of the wishes on my mother’s list. While doing so, he often said, as if she were still alive, “Bev is a white witch. I’m in big trouble if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do.”
He gave advice to all of us, and told us to trust our instincts, our gut feelings. “If you feel sick to your stomach about something,” he said, “your body is talking to you. Listen to it.” This advice was similar to his writings, to the inner awareness of the Bene Gesserit of Dune and to the statements of Leto II in Children of Dune, when he said, “You have felt thoughts in your head; your descendants will feel thoughts in their bellies,” and, “It is time humans learned once more to live in their instincts.”
Dad developed a special relationship with Julie, who turned sixteen in April 1984. He took her to the American Booksellers Association Convention in Washington, D.C., where she was thrilled to meet entertainers Raquel Welch and Mr. T. She also watched my father deliver a speech at a big breakfast banquet. When Julie returned from the East Coast, she said her grandfather was referred to as “The Big Ragu” by New York publishing people.
Dreamer of Dune Page 47