Dreamer of Dune (52 page)

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.

Water…I thought of
Dune
, of the most precious commodity on the planet—water—and the saying of the people when a person passed away. The water of my mother's life was gone.

With the music still playing, I watched Dad walk back up a tire-tracked area of the grass. As he reached the edge of his landscaped yard, a huge wave hit the rocks behind him, just beyond the kamani tree, sending white spray high in the air. It was spectacularly beautiful, this place my mother had chosen. I understood why she wanted to die here, refusing to go to a hospital.

After scattering the ashes, Dad remained alone under the deck somewhere—undoubtedly crying and trying to compose himself. I never saw him cry that day, although he looked near it a number of times. That evening he was in a pretty good mood considering the circumstances, undoubtedly relieved at getting the service behind him.

At a luau the next evening, I spent a lot of time talking with one of Dad's contractors. He was a likable fellow, with dark skin and a quick smile. Beneath the charming exterior I detected glimpses of a tough businessman, and I let him know that I could be just as tough in negotiating the final tasks to be done on Dad's property, a responsibility that had been given to me.

The following day I had a lunch appointment with Bill Ransom. He telephoned late in the morning and moved the time back, to 1:30. When I subsequently met him at the Hana Ranch Coffee Shop, he said Dad showed up that morning at his door at the Aloha Cottage in Hana, saying he wanted to “talk story,” and that this was the only time he could do it. After they talked for a while, Dad dragged Bill off to lunch, and Bill ate lightly, saving room for a second lunch with me.

Bill spoke of a number of contractual matters on the books he and Dad had written together, and about the newest project. At my father's instruction, the contract for the latest collaboration had been drawn up under the title,
The Swimmers
. Upon seeing this, Peter Israel, president of G.P. Putnam's Sons, called Bill to say he didn't like the title at all. Bill agreed, and offered a better one that ultimately was accepted by all concerned,
The Ascension Factor
.

Our table overlooked the Hana Road and a sweeping stretch of pasture that extended to the sea. Bill expressed gratitude toward Frank Herbert for the opportunities given to him. He also told me of fond feelings he held for my mother, and of his compassion for her. When he stayed at Kawaloa for four months in 1982, he would jog along the road and then come back to the house, perspiring. On one such occasion, Mom said to him, “I hate you when you run.” Thereafter, Bill did his running elsewhere. Her remark hit him hard, and he felt it reflected her terrible frustration at her own weakened body.

That afternoon I worked in the office at Kawaloa. An hour before we were scheduled to go to Mary Moore's for dinner, Dad came upstairs and stood in the doorway between my office and his study. On the wall beside him was a massive built-in bookcase filled with his titles, many of them rare first editions. But now this phenomenal man did not speak about matters of great note, about philosophy or religion or history or science or any of the other wondrous things he knew. He simply said, in an irritated tone, “Would you help me keep the pantry door closed? They just left it open again.”