Jan was supposed to pick me up in Lahaina with Dad’s Chevrolet Blazer, but it was out of commission in a repair shop with a rusted-out fuel pump. We borrowed an old pickup truck from the mechanic.
The Hana Road, that legendary and foreboding passage between a tourist civilization on one side of Maui and an old Hawaiian way of life carved out of the jungle on the other, passed more than fifty waterfalls. The road was bumpy, and we had to drive it in a light rain, with night fast approaching. There were crumbling turn-of-the-century bridges and cliffs dropping off to the sea. We passed ferny jungles of bamboo, breadfruit, papaya and mango trees, and a most interesting tree called the hala or lauhala (Pandanus odoratissimus). Known as “the walking tree,” the hala had large, finger-like aerial roots above the ground that seemed to prop the tree up and were said to “walk” across the land, shifting the tree’s position slightly as the roots extended.
It was a treacherous stretch of road—requiring more than three hours to drive fifty-three miles—but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had heard. The tropical smells and verdant greens were reminiscent of Mexico, as were the simple huts and fruit stands we passed, and the old, rattling pickup in which we rode. Dented, rusted, rattly old vehicles were a way of life in such places. Front end alignment? Forget it!
At a gravel parking area adjacent to the apartment wing on Dad’s property, caretakers Bart and Sheila Hrast helped us unload the truck—groceries, office supplies and luggage. A blond man in his thirties, Bart stood around six feet tall, with a pleasant, weathered face. Sheila was dark-haired and pretty. Both were well-tanned. They shared an interest in flowers and cats.
In centuries past this eastern shore of Maui had been a favored area for Hawaiian royalty. They had summer homes, court baths (down the road at Seven Pools), and royal coconut groves, which according to legend were groves of palm trees planted by powerful chiefs.
On the afternoon of our first full day in this magical place, Jan and I walked down to the craggy black lava rocks that rimmed the property, where we saw waves crashing against the shore some twenty or thirty feet below us, foaming white around the rocks and throwing spray high in the air. The water all around the white foam was turquoise and aquamarine, in subtle variations of color. It was as Jan had described, unlike any water I had seen before.
Behind us, not far from the shore, stood the wide-boughed, graceful kamani tree where my mother’s ashes would be spread.
We saw a humpback whale a hundred yards offshore, indicating deep water a short distance out. In one of the tidal pools (framed in black rock beneath our perch), Jan spotted a fish, and if I’d had a net handy I would have gone down there and tried to catch it. We found a cave secreted in the rocks as well, with a small amount of debris to indicate that fishermen had camped there recently.
On the grassy expanse between the house and shore were rustic rock walls only a couple of feet high, property lines from centuries past when the Hawaiian royal family issued land grants that extended from the top of the volcano Haleakala all the way down to the sea. Some of the walls were the remnants of a Filipino village that had once been on the site.
Kawaloa…A nice long time. I wished my mother had been able to live here longer.
We went to a big luau that evening, a Hawaiian feast where much beer and good food was consumed. It was in honor of a baby’s first birthday—and in ensuing weeks we would learn that luaus were given to celebrate a wide variety of events.
At shortly past 2:00 P.M. on February 3, 1985, I picked up Dad at Hana Airport in the old pickup, since his Blazer still had not been repaired. A strong wind blew as he got off the two-engine prop plane, causing the gate between the tiny terminal building and the landing strip to swing and creak. In the truck, Dad told me that both Dune and Dune Messiah were now on The New York Times paperback bestseller list.
I showed him the new cover for Arbor House’s upcoming hardcover edition of my third novel, Sudanna, Sudanna, along with two excellent national reviews on the book. “I told you it was a good story,” Dad said.
My father and I walked around the property, and in familiar fashion he told me about all the future construction ideas he had for Kawaloa. Dad said he planned another apartment beneath the house for a maid or gardener, plus a concrete parking area under the house and a screened-in dining room on what was now an outside deck, by the present dining room. He had run short on funds the year before, but eventually he intended to have blue Italian tile installed in a gazebo already built by the swimming pool. Adjacent to the gazebo, cut out of the steep, flower-covered hillside that ran up to the caretaker’s house, would be a waterfall and a carp pond.
At dinner that evening, we heard the smacking click-click-click of a gecko (tiny lizard) coming from somewhere on the exposed beams over our head. Dad said he welcomed them in the house, as they ate insects and were considered good luck by the natives.
Dad said he planned to do a screenplay for a pilot film after our collaboration was completed. The pilot film (for what he hoped would be a television series) was to be entitled Nashville, about power, politics, and love in the deep South. When that was completed, he would write “Dune 7,” followed by his trip to Nepal in the spring of 1986, then a documentary film and a book on that. A third book with Bill Ransom would follow, set in the same universe as their prior collaborations, The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect. Sometime in 1987, he hoped to be able to start the new book with me about Northwest Salish Indians, based upon his Circle Times manuscript.
Frank Herbert would not sleep on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, since his beloved wife had passed away on it. He wanted to sleep in his study. So beneath the skylight, by a bookcase-lined wall where he had many poetry books, we set up a lounge chair that was folded open into a cot, and placed a Japanese futon mattress on top. It couldn’t have been very comfortable, but he didn’t complain.
His roll-top desk stood against the wall opposite the cot, with a makeshift table between. The table was a flat door stained black, set on top of a pair of two-drawer black file cabinets. Three manuscript boxes were stacked on top, by a small pile of my father’s business cards. His card was white and simple, with “Frank Herbert” in the upper left corner and a line beneath that extended the width of the card. In the lower left corner, it said, simply, “Hana, Hawaii—USA 96713.”
We had all of Dad’s mail forwarded to us in Hawaii, and I worked on his paperwork the following day. That afternoon, Margaux was riding a tricycle on the deck at Kawaloa, yelling and screaming with exuberance. At around 4:30, Dad, who was preparing dinner, emerged from the kitchen to announce that he couldn’t work while Margaux was screaming. “It just does something to my head.” He stood in the living room, staring at Margaux through the screen door, refusing to work on dinner anymore until we did something about her. It made me think of times as a child when our house had to be absolutely quiet, to the point where I wasn’t able to bring my friends over.
Julie, now sixteen, was watching television when Dad went into his routine, and she thought his behavior was so out of line that she left the room without comment. Later she told Jan that Grandpa had not been treating her very well, either. “He used to be nice,” Julie said. Actually, my eldest daughter was just beginning to see a more complete picture of a complex man. We explained to her that this was a terrible time for him, coming back to Kawaloa for the ceremony—and stress seemed to bring out the most difficult side of his personality. Besides that he seemed tired, undoubtedly from not sleeping well.
I was frustrated by the situation, because I probably knew better than anyone how important strong family ties were to my father. Over the years, he had often expressed an interest in setting up a family business, since he believed in strong family ties. Now a number of us—Penny, Ron, Jan, and me—had pulled together and were working for him. Penny and Ron were living in Port Townsend now, as caretakers, and Penny was handling fan letters. Jan was helping me with the astounding piles of paperwork generated around
the phenomenon known as Frank Herbert, and besides that she was working on the interior design of a new caretaker’s house that Dad wanted to build in Port Townsend for Penny and Ron.
Around 8:00 that evening, Dad said he wasn’t feeling well and went to bed, saying he thought he was coming down with something. In the middle of the night, he was awakened by Julie’s stereo. First he went out to the guest apartment and asked her to turn it down. When she didn’t turn it down far enough, he went out a second time, got into an argument with her, and took the stereo away from her.
The following day, a Tuesday, Dad awoke, perhaps not surprisingly, in a foul mood. I found aspirin for him. A few minutes later he was scolding me for allegedly leaving two kitchen utensils in the left sink, where they could fall into the garbage disposal. I had not done it, and told him so. But he kept raving about it, on and on.
He was also on an uncompromising mission to make certain that all the closet doors in the house were kept closed in order to ward off moist sea air that might get in, and about keeping drawers shut for the same reason and about keeping plastic over certain things. Moisture was a big problem here, especially on metal objects, so he had set up “dry rooms” in all of the closets and in a large pantry off the kitchen, using electric heat rods that I had purchased for him in Seattle. The pantry was the largest dry room. When the house was shut down, and each night, he stuffed these special rooms with everything he thought might be subject to damage. Now, with us in the house, he was nervous about maintaining his carefully designed system.
I said I understood his concerns, and promised to monitor the dry rooms for him.
Julie and Kim, now enrolled in the local public school, were on holiday due to teacher’s conferences, and Jan took them to Hamoa Beach to escape their grandfather’s constant haranguing. For the same reason, I jogged three miles on the Hana Road in the direction of Kaupo Gap, away from Hana town, running up long, steep Drummond Hill. When Jan returned later in the afternoon, I gave Margaux a swimming lesson.
By then, Dad was feeling better, and on the mezzanine he went through a box of his mother’s family pictures with me, marking the backs of photos to show who people were. He had photos of himself as a two-year-old with his head bandaged from a severe dog bite, and for the first time I saw pictures of colorful small-town characters he had described, and of his favorite grandmother, Mary Stanley Herbert. It was exhilarating for me, matching faces with stories that I had been hearing him tell for years. He gave me a number of pictures and asked me to ship the rest to him on the mainland.
At 5:00 P.M., Jan and I went with Dad to visit Dr. Milton Howell, my mother’s doctor, sharing hors d’oeuvres with him and his wife, Roselle, at their house. Dr. Howell was tanned, curly-haired and relaxed. He wore shoes and socks, and I wondered how he kept from getting sweaty feet in the Hawaiian climate. His wife was stocky and peppery, an affable, generous woman. She loaned me two autographed books that had been given to her by her close friend, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles Lindbergh. They were Gift from the Sea, written by AML herself, and Autobiography of Values, by her late husband. I felt honored, and took extra care with the treasures.
Dad told the Howells we were doing a book together, “one that would knock down a lot of the conventions in science fiction.” This had never been mentioned to me before, and I remained silent. I was shocked. What did he mean? And I’d already written my part!*
That evening we went to Frayn Utley’s place for dinner. A large woman in her eighties, she was the mother of NBC television news correspondent Garrick Utley and a radio personality in her own right back in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago (with her late husband, Clifton). Frayn wore a red muumuu with white flowers on it. She was jovial, alert and talkative. While cooking dinner, she scolded her two black cats repeatedly and chased them out of the house. They kept sneaking back in, so perhaps this was a little game played by master and pet. The dinner conversation was largely political.
As we were leaving, Frayn invited Jan and me to monthly “concerts” held at her house. This would involve listening to music from her extensive recording collection. She said she started the concerts a dozen years before with her husband, and it became a popular event in the Hana area, attended regularly by forty or more guests. We promised to attend.
My mother’s ceremony would be in two days. Whenever Dad spoke of it to friends he explained that it wasn’t going to be a formal service and that there would be no holy man. “Bev made me promise to keep it simple,” he said, “and I don’t want her coming back to haunt me.”
The next day I read Gift from the Sea from cover to cover. It was the perfect book to read on this paradise island, and spoke a great deal about the need people have to be alone. I had that need, and Jan spoke of requiring it for herself as well. It wasn’t that we wanted to be apart, but we needed our individual quiet times, times that improved our relationship. Personal space.
My father had always demanded his own personal space, but paradoxically he often didn’t allow people close to him the same privilege. He had a tendency to smother people with his dominance. Not intentionally, of course. Not even selfishly. He simply didn’t realize he was doing it.
A contractor stopped by, and Dad told him to build gates for the swimming pool to keep Margaux from getting in without supervision. Dad was very concerned about her safety.
Two more excellent reviews came in on Sudanna, Sudanna, and I recall standing on the mezzanine by the stairway telling Dad about them. He was below me in the living room reading, on the big gray sectional couch. He looked up at me, and after congratulating me he said, “Even bad reviews sell books, Brian. Best of all is a bad review from The New York Times. That sells at least ten thousand copies for me.” He went on to say emphatically that he cared more about sales than about critics, because if his works were selling the fans were telling him they liked his work. Fans were the only reviewers who mattered to him.
When Jan brought Margaux home from preschool at around 4:00 that afternoon, our daughter had a new plastic lunch pail from Hasegawa’s General Store. She ran into the kitchen with it to show her grandfather. But Dad was already talking with Jan, and he told Margaux to be quiet. She went away dejected, and he never did ask her what she wanted.
Dad loved Margaux dearly, but didn’t always have the patience for her. She had boundless energy, much as he’d had as a child. The adult Frank Herbert, I am certain, would have booted the child Frank Herbert out of the house!
Ron, Penny and their youngest son, Robert, fifteen, arrived shortly after that, having rented a car in Kahului and driven the tortuous Hana Road. My sister had gotten sick along the way from all the curves. Bill Ransom and Dr. William and Zee Scheyer arrived, too, from Port Townsend. We shared dinner.
It was one of Dad’s specialties, sukiyaki, with the added ingredients shrimp and nenue (pilot fish) caught the day before by Julie. She said she caught three of them, having been shown how to fish with a bamboo pole by her new Hawaiian girlfriends. They used shrimp for bait.
At dinner, Bill Ransom said there had been some confusion about the completion date on their new collaboration, which they were going to call The Swimmers. It had been my father’s understanding that it had to be completed by November 1987, but the actual date required by the contract was a year earlier: November 1986. Bill had recently begun work on the project, and said he had to complete his portion prior to September 1986, when he would begin classes in nursing.
Bill also mentioned a British publisher of one of the earlier collaborations, who printed the name “FRANK HERBERT” in huge letters on the cover, with “Bill Ransom” in small print on the back cover, as if he were a reviewer. The publisher received a heated letter from the “reviewer,” and deservedly so, considering all the work that Bill had contributed.
On the day we looked forward to and dreaded, I arose early and ran three miles, toward Kaupo Gap. It was overcast, and in the breezes I smelled thick sea air and dew-moistened earth, redolent with
pungent, decaying vegetation that had soaked into it.
Later, after breakfast, I went to my upstairs office to write in my journal. Ron and Jan joined me, and we talked about Dad’s reputation around Hana as an aggressive driver, and about a number of incidents that had occurred over the years with him at the wheel. When he wanted to get from Point A to Point B, he was so goal-oriented (as he was in the rest of his life), that he sometimes made dangerous passing maneuvers—even on the right shoulder of the road. Now, on top of Dad’s luggage in his study was a book entitled Expert Driving, and he had plans to pick up a new Porsche turbo (top speed 180 m.p.h.) on his next trip to Europe.
At shortly before 2:00 in the afternoon, many friends of Mom and Dad, mostly locals, started arriving. Dad took me aside and said, “We’re going to use the past to make the future more pleasant. Bev wanted it that way, and I do, too.”
He told all of us to wait on the deck on the water side of the main house, and at a little before 2:30 he went off alone to the kamani tree several hundred feet below us, just above the craggy shoreline. He wore dark blue pants and a blue Hawaiian shirt with white flowers on it, and in his right hand he carried a bag that bore the urn containing my mother’s remains. He stood below the large, spreading tree and motioned to one of the guests, Danny Estacada, a local musician. Danny was too choked up to play and sing the song that Mom wanted, so he had a cassette player, which he turned on.
We heard “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” by Simon & Garfunkel, representing what my parents had become for one another in their times of need. As the music played, Dad opened the bag and removed the urn. I saw him spread a thick dusting of ashes beneath the tree. Tears blurred my vision. I watched Dad moving around the tree, and then I looked down to the expanse of grass and old lava rock Hawaiian walls between the house and the tree. Jan cried softly at my side, and we held each other tightly. Jan pulled Kim close to her on the other side.
Dreamer of Dune Page 51