Dreamer of Dune (40 page)

She didn't have the energy to write more.

A few days later I spoke with Dad about his upcoming fishing trip to Alaska. “I don't know if I'm going,” he said, and refused to discuss it further.

I knew he felt run down by what he'd been through—all the writing deadlines, the movie, the nonstop work, and the care he'd given to my mother. He needed that vacation desperately, had been looking forward to it for months. But Mom's latest medical tests had been so bad, showing a continuing downhill slide, that he thought he shouldn't go after all.

To save the fishing trip, Mom wondered if Jan could come to Port Townsend and stay with her. But Jan was having her difficulties at Cornish Institute, where she was hanging on by a thread. These troubles had been caused in part by her concern over Mom, and in part by the demands of taking care of the baby. Her grades had been falling, and she couldn't afford to miss any more classes.

In a telephone conversation my father revealed to Jan that Mom wanted only her there in his absence—no one else who lived nearby would do.

Without approval from the school, Jan promised she would be in Port Townsend the next day. After catching the first ferry, from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, she called the school. The director said he understood, that he realized she had to take her chances and go. But he made no promises.

Dad waited until Jan arrived before leaving on his trip. He told her he felt bad for her having to leave school, but said he needed to get away. Jan told him not to worry, that it was all worked out at school. This was not true, of course.

Their first evening together, Mom did needlepoint while she and Jan talked in the living room about what was going on in their lives. Dad had found a new high-carbohydrate diet that was supposed to stop his chronic jet lag, and he was going to test it during the Alaska trip. Mom spoke as well about her best friend in high school and college, Frankie Goodwin, how they would exchange worries to relieve the burden of them. “I'll take your worries if you take mine,” one girl would say to the other. And then they would trade. They called it the “Worry Game.”

“Why don't we do that now?” Jan suggested.

Mom smiled, and said softly: “All right.”

Jan did not mention her concerns about school, and spoke instead of worries about how our daughters would grow up, and who they might marry. And her hope that I might do well enough in my writing to leave the insurance business, since it seemed to her that I was wearing myself out writing and working full-time to support a family.

Mom spoke of her illness, and again of her concern over what might happen to Dad if she passed away. She said she'd been staying awake worrying about bills again, how they would be paid, and how she would get the energy to make sure the checks were sent out, and all the filing and letter writing she had to do. She said while she was in the hospital or at doctor's appointments, Dad moved funds between their various accounts, leaving a bewildering trail she couldn't follow. He told her that he had issued important checks, paying mortgages, construction bills and other things. But she couldn't figure out which accounts had been used for what, and if they were the correct accounts. Now there were piles of unpaid bills, bills that Dad hadn't gotten around to paying because he was preparing for his trip and meeting writing deadlines.

He kept assuring her the money she needed for bills was available, and there was nothing to worry about. But to her their cash flow and cash on hand positions were not clear, and she didn't have the energy to figure it all out. Bills flowed in constantly. Big ones.

“Why don't you hire an accountant?” Jan suggested.

“Then what would I do? This is my job.”

The next day Jan pulled two chairs up to Mom's desk and said, “We'll just sit here and figure it out together.” Jan looked over the ledgers and made a telephone call (with Mom) to a banker, obtaining current bank balances. Jan couldn't quite figure it all out, and needed to ask Dad questions. But plenty of money seemed to be in the accounts and she said to Mom, “You tell me who to write the checks to, and out of what account.” And every day with my mother, Jan helped her organize and pay the bills.

In this process, Jan felt frustrated that she could not do nearly enough, that she was like the little Dutch boy holding a finger in a massive dike—and anything she did was just stopgap, didn't really solve anything. So much more needed to be done for Mom, and Jan realized her own frustration must be minor compared with Dad's feelings.

Mom was too weak to cook, so Jan did it all, as Dad had done in recent months. Jan put her mother-in-law to bed, laid an electric blanket over her and set it up, brought her glasses of water and books—all the things Dad had been doing.

Some days they painted together—landscapes of the gardens, the duck pond, the tall, graceful trees around the property, the flowers. Or they went to the beach and took their paints and a picnic lunch along. On large sheets of newsprint, my mother showed Jan how her mother, a professional artist, had taught her to draw large scale without looking at the page, keeping her eyes glued on whatever she was painting.

While Dad was in Alaska, Mom received a dramatic cover art poster from New York for
The White Plague
, which was soon to be released. It depicted a lush green Irish countryside, a dark, stormy sky and a giant double helix in the foreground. Dad had hoped to see the cover art before he left, but it hadn't arrived in time. Mom said she was putting it up in a prominent position on the kitchen bulletin board, so Dad would be sure to see it the minute he came in the door.

Mom gave me a phone number so that I could reach my father in Alaska at his fish camp near Lake Creek, which actually was a river. She said it was a radio telephone connection, in which only one person could talk at a time. When one spoke, it cut the line off for the other. Dad told her he was catching a lot of king salmon and rainbow trout and throwing them back, for the sport of it. He quipped that mosquitoes there were so big that four of them marked one fisherman with pheromones (external hormones) and carried him off. They dropped him when they saw a bigger, juicier fisherman. To thwart this danger, Dad claimed he wore a scuba diver's weight belt while fishing.

On the morning of the July day that Dad was due back from Alaska, Mom said she hadn't slept well, worrying if everything would be just right for him when he returned. She and Jan were sitting in dark yellow recliner chairs in a reading and television area just off the kitchen, with a table full of books and mail order catalogs between them.

“Could you make Frank a special meal?” Mom asked. “He really likes the barbecued sparerib recipe you gave me.”

Jan went through two big boxes of recipe cards and found one in her own handwriting, from which she made the ribs. As soon as Dad phoned from the airport to say he would be home in a couple of hours, Jan left, so that my parents could share the meal in private.

When Dad arrived, he was so engrossed with having missed Mom that he didn't notice the giant, bright green poster for
The White Plague
—it was clearly visible, just inside the entry. Not until hours later, after he had savored the spareribs and was cleaning up in the kitchen, did he see it.

When I think of how my parents felt for one another, about the depth of their love, this incident comes quickly to mind. No matter the glory my father achieved from writing, no matter how many millions of people read his books, it all meant nothing to him without her.

E
ARLY IN
July 1982, my parents announced that they were leaving for a month in Hawaii the following day, a decision they had made on the spur of the moment.

At a hastily arranged dinner in Seattle just before their departure, Dad told us in a sharp, angry voice about the difficulties they were having finding low-salt foods for my mother in restaurants and grocery stores, and how frustrating it was. Salt was everywhere in the American diet, he said, and much of the blame had to do with the ignorance of the medical profession. Doctors knew too little about diet, and not enough meaningful research was being conducted about the benefits and dangers of particular foods and diets.

While Dad was taking care of Mom, Penny was trying to keep Bruce—now thirty-one years old—out of trouble. An incurable disease had recently been discovered that was killing homosexual men—AIDS. From her home in Stockton, California, Penny telephoned Bruce in San Rafael near San Francisco. The most thoughtful and generous person in our family, Penny was always sending us notes and little gifts. Now, with her stepmother seriously ill and weakened, Penny tried to be a mother figure to Bruce, providing him with important advice. She warned him about the dangers in the homosexual community from the new disease and cautioned him against having unprotected sex and relationships with multiple partners. Like the rest of us in the family, she wished he wasn't homosexual at all. We were all worried about him.

Bruce promised to be careful.

Later that summer after my parents returned, Jan, Julie and I borrowed the
Caladan
and took it on a week-long sailing trip to the San Juan Islands, along with one of Jan's brothers, Ron Blanquie, and his wife. It was a great trip, with beautiful weather and excellent winds. When we returned to the Port Townsend Yacht Club, however, I didn't back the boat in the way Dad wanted it done. Backing confused me, so I took it in bow-first. Dad was on the dock watching, shaking his head in disapproval. After we disembarked he boarded the sailboat and restarted the engine. “Release the lines!” he shouted.

This was done, and he pulled the
Caladan
out, then turned it around quickly and backed it toward the slip. But he came in at the wrong angle, and too fast. The dock and boat were about to merge when Julie saved the day with quick thinking. At the last possible opportunity the 14-year-old threw a line from the boat around a cleat on the dock and heaved on it as hard as she could.

Subsequently all of us, especially my father, acted as if nothing had happened.

At Xanadu, Mom said her fingernails had been flaking lately, and she was not sure why. I said nothing about it, but worried that it might be an indication of her condition. When she tried to swim the length of the pool, she only made it three-fourths of the way on her own. Dad walked alongside the pool by her as she swam, and dove in quickly to help her finish.

The following Thursday I telephoned to see how she was doing, and she said, “I'm bearing up. Frank took me swimming this morning.”

My mother went on to talk about her jewelry insurance, which I was handling for her. She had a valuable Cortina quartz watch with a gold band, a gift from Dad during one of their European trips, and she told me what amount to use in insuring it. Recently she took the watch to a jeweler and had one of the links in the band taken out so that it would fit better. Her wrist was much smaller from all the weight she had lost.

My mother had bookkeeping ledgers spread before her as she talked, and gave me a couple of tips about looking for errors in the books: how to tell if a figure had been transposed, and if an amount had been moved from debit to credit by mistake.

Sometime that summer my father and mother stopped by our house for a short visit. I recall standing in bright sunlight with him in the backyard. He spoke about the beauty of Kawaloa, and the perfect Hawaiian weather. “There's a certain kind of warmth you get from the sun that you don't get anywhere else,” he said.

These words conveyed another message, that the paradise he had provided for Mom in Hawaii had become his as well. It more or less sealed what I already knew and feared, that one day they would finally decide to sell the Port Townsend property and live year-round in Hawaii.

In September, Dad went on a big book tour to promote the hardcover edition of
The White Plague
. Chauffeured limousines picked up my parents in every city on the tour, and huge crowds greeted Dad at every public appearance.

By the twenty-seventh of the month, the tour was wrapping up and he was scheduled to appear in Seattle. Jan and I met my parents at the
Seattle Times
at 11:30
A.M
., where Dad had just been interviewed by the newspaper's book editor. A limousine provided by Putnam took us to a posh restaurant in downtown Seattle. I brought along their insurance files, to review at the table.

“
The White Plague
is taking off!” Dad said, as he broke open a French roll.

I said I hoped he meant the book, and not the plague germ that would wipe out all womankind on the planet. This elicited a hearty guffaw from him. Dad's beard was neatly trimmed, shorter than usual, and he was ebullient. He was having the absolute best time of his life, at the height of his success. To crown it, Mom had been strong all through the tour, and said she was feeling good.

The novel had gotten rave reviews from a number of prestigious publications, Dad said, including
The New York Times
.

It was his sixth national bestseller.
Children of Dune, The Dosadi Experiment, God Emperor of Dune
and
The White Plague
had all appeared on weekly bestseller lists.
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
were bestsellers as well, from a ground swell that built up over years. Each title in the
Dune
series sold millions of copies, and the canvas of his imagination kept getting bigger. All Frank Herbert books were selling exceptionally well, with so many reprints of old titles all over the world that it was difficult to keep up with sales figures.

At one of the stores on the tour, a frail old woman in her nineties brought Dad a hardcover first-edition copy of
Dune
, a collector's edition. She placed it before him, and leaning close by his ear, whispered in a crackling voice, “Write something dirty in the book for me, please.” Dad's eyes twinkled as he caught her gaze, and he thought for a moment. Then he wrote, “Something Dirty,” and signed his name.

Another time, Dad actually did write a profanity alongside his signature, in a book he gave to a friend. It had been an impulsive prank, but subsequently he felt guilty for it and sent the friend a substitute copy, more properly autographed.

Occasionally, very rarely, readers would come to Dad with criticisms—some involving major plot points. Dad always smiled pleasantly and said, “Why don't you go write your own book?”

Despite brisk book sales, my parents were still having trouble keeping up with ongoing construction expenses at Kawaloa. They were drawing up plans for an apartment wing to be built next, and a swimming pool was planned soon after that. A number of the estimates they had received for construction were proving to be woefully low, and they didn't have a written contract to keep costs down. Even if they'd had a contract, Dad said, it wouldn't mean much, because of the number of changes he kept making in the design during construction.

In early October, Mom prepared a special birthday meal for Dad—oysters from nearby Quilcene Bay and wild blackberry pie. She said the oysters, as she prepared them, were a favorite of his, and I made notes on how to do it.

After work the following Monday I worked at the public library on a new nonfiction book I was writing about how to deal with dishonest businessmen, which I entitled
The Client's Survival Manual
. When I arrived home, Julie said there was an article on her grandfather pinned to a library wall at her high school. It was next to a large paper fish.

Proudly, Julie told a friend, “That's my Grandpa on the wall there.”

“That fish?” the friend exclaimed.

Margaux, now ten months old, could stand without holding on, but was pretty shaky.

On the eighteenth of October, Mom received good news at her Group Health checkup. Her heart function had improved slightly, undoubtedly from the strict diet and careful exercise regimen she followed. Her potassium level was on the low side, however, so her doctor prescribed Slow-K to keep the level up. To further improve the condition, she was told to eat bananas and drink orange juice daily.

In Seattle that day, however, Mom and Jan rode with an insane taxi cab driver who drove too fast and cornered over the edges of sidewalks, causing pedestrians to jump clear. Another matter unsettled my mother as well, since she was taking her wedding ring to a jeweler that day to have it reduced. Her fingers had become extremely thin from weight loss. It was the first time in thirty-six years she'd had to leave it anywhere.

When we saw Dad that evening, he said that the casting call had gone out on the
Dune
movie, and that all parts were set with the exception of the three leading roles of Paul Atreides, Lady Jessica and the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. The base of operations was uncertain, but the desert scenes would be filmed in the Samalayucca Desert in Mexico, since Mexican peso devaluations made it economically attractive.

Dad said that
The Lazarus Effect
was finished, and that it was a substantial improvement over
The Jesus Incident
, where he and Bill Ransom had experienced plot and characterization difficulties.

The next morning my parents left for Hawaii, planning to remain until spring. On their second day there, Dad called to say that he had forgotten their passports in Port Townsend, which they needed for a romantic Christmas trip to Samoa and Bora Bora. I promised to retrieve them, along with other items that Mom wanted sent to her. He said he was in tennis shorts looking out at two mountain peaks on the “Big Island” of Hawaii, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. It was eighty-four degrees, and they were about to leave for dinner at the elegant Hotel Hana Maui.

A month later, by the seventeenth of November, I had typed 170 pages of
The Client's Survival Manual
. That evening, Margaux took her first steps—five of them. Her steps were extremely hesitant and uncertain, with no bending of the knees at all. In the manner of a tightrope walker, she had her arms extended at her sides for balance.

Dad called when we were getting ready for bed. It was three hours earlier in Hawaii. He was eighty pages into a new manuscript,
Heretics of Dune
, fifth in the
Dune
series. They had decided not to go to Samoa or Bora Bora after all, as he was in the middle of a book and did not want to leave it.

I heard Segovia classical guitar music in the background, from his extensive reel-to-reel collection. Mom came on the line and said she hoped he would change his mind about the South Seas trip. They never did go, and later I learned it was really because of the constant cash flow problems. The trip was on the frivolous side.

Early in December I spoke with Mom by telephone, about Christmas gifts for the children. She said Honolulu was a “two-bit town” for shopping. “It's not like the places I've seen,” she said. “Oh! The places I've seen!” The way she said this brought to mind exotic, colorful marketplaces all over the world. It also made me think of an entry in Leto II's journal in
God Emperor of Dune
: “Oh, the landscapes I have seen! And the people!”

She was depressed about spending the holidays away from family and said, “Give the girls a big hug for me.”

“I can see your arms stretching across the Pacific to us,” I said.

“Well they are,” she responded.

Four days before Christmas, my father called. He said their Christmas tree was a five-or six-inch-high Hawaiian bush with ornaments on it.

The De Laurentiis people were building sets now, with a $56,000,000 projected film budget, substantially more than earlier estimates. After changing their minds a number of times, the producers had decided to film the entire motion picture in Mexico, because of Mexican peso devaluations. They hoped to release it in the spring or summer of 1984.

I asked Dad how many pesos there were in fifty-six million dollars. His answer: “Muchisimo.” (“Very many.”)