Dreamer of Dune (43 page)

I went outside and brought the boxes of books into the basement, through the garage. Dad sat at a table and signed half the books, while I unpacked and repacked them. He signed each title page with a flourish, after first crossing out his printed name.

During our meal, my mother said it was unusual that I was selling novels without first having sold short stories. I told her I had incorporated one of my short stories, “Earth Games,” into
The Garbage Chronicles
as a chapter.

After dinner, I was pouring Grand Marnier for the adults, while Jan was helping Mom and Dad in the kitchen with the dinner dishes. Suddenly all hell broke loose. Margaux, a year and a half old, was in the living room, and had gotten into some
Dune
movie slides that Dad had brought back from Mexico City. She made finger marks on many of them, and Dad said these marks had acid in them and would never come out. He was furious, though he probably should not have left the slides on a coffee table with a toddler running around. He tried to blame Kim for not watching Margaux, when suddenly Jan erupted in tears and told my father it was as much his fault as anyone's. She said it would be impossible to keep the baby out of their other things and that perhaps it would be better if we left right then and went home.

Mom calmed Jan down, and Dad said he was sorry for blowing up.

Several times afterward, though, he muttered, “She was
walking
on them! I can't believe she was
walking
on them!” But gradually things settled down and we stayed.

Children, my father's
bête noire
.

Dad put the Mexico slides in a projector, set up a screen and showed them to us. The pictures showed the
Dune
movie sets along with many of the production people. De Laurentiis and Lynch were assembling a crew of nine hundred, along with thirty-nine principal actors and a cast of twenty thousand extras. There would be seventy-five sets and eight sound stages—and four exotic planets would be depicted. Some of the scenes would be filmed in one-hundred-and-twenty-degree desert heat. Dad said they would not be doing the famous banquet scene from his book due to time and budgetary constraints. He disagreed with this decision, but did not seem visibly upset by it.

In a determined tone, Mom said she would go with him on the next movie trip, “come hell or high water,” as she felt she was missing out on all the fun. She swam almost an entire pool length before we arrived—the best she had done since returning to the mainland earlier in the year. I got the feeling she was highly motivated, the way she'd been when she first discovered she had lung cancer back in 1974. She had a warrior's spirit.

All of us had seen
Sidney's Comet
next to Dad's books in bookstores. Both Mom and Jan were always rearranging our books, making sure they were neat and moving them up to eye level…displaying them more prominently. Jan mentioned receiving a telephone call in January, from a science fiction writer wanting to reach Dad. She said the fellow was rude, couldn't wait to get past her. “He was abrupt with me,” Jan said, “treated me like a bump. So the next time I saw his books in a store, I moved them to the back and put Herbert books in front of them.”

“Revenge of the Bump,” I said.

“What a title!” Dad exclaimed.

While I was running an errand with my mother the next day, she quipped that she was married to Imhotep the Pyramid Builder, with all of the construction projects he had going on all the time. I thought back on my father's life. His Vashon Island, Washington, house hadn't been completed. Neither had a home remodel in Cloverdale, California. A houseboat project turned into a near disaster, financially and otherwise, as it strained relations with two of his closest friends. Then Dad purchased the Port Townsend place, and building activity reached new heights for him. He was forever giving me tours of the property and pointing out the changes he had in mind. Frank Herbert enjoyed showing visitors around, be they friends, family members or interviewers. He was always looking toward the future, toward what he hoped to build soon. No matter how much he completed, there was always more to come. And this was appropriate, I imagine, since he was a man of the future.

Now Kawaloa on far-off Maui was in a category of its own, way beyond anything he had attempted previously. And once it was built, what then? He wasn't only like Imhotep, I told Mom. He was like William Randolph Hearst, another powerful man who always had construction projects going on around him. My father liked the ongoing activity as a creative outlet when he had finished writing for the day.

“I hadn't thought of it quite that way,” she said, “but I think you're absolutely right.” As I turned onto the gravel road, I saw her nodding her head. She glanced at me, said, “You've become very observant, Brian.”

“I figured him out with my journal.”

“Good,” she said. “And I suppose you've figured me out that way, too?”

“I'm still working on you,” I replied, with a laugh.

My parents planned to spend their thirty-seventh wedding anniversary together in Mexico City, and were flying there on June 17. We got together with them the night before in Seattle.

Mom had been working hard on her conditioning program, improving her cardiovascular system to the maximum it could be. Doctors were concerned about the altitude of Mexico City and the terrible air pollution there, but she pressed to go. Finally they relented. They were absolutely amazed at how well she was doing, considering the damage they knew had been done to her heart from radiation treatment to cure lung cancer. She could swim two laps of the pool now, and almost half a lap underwater.

Universal Pictures was paying for the trip and for visits to the movie set by leading film distributors. The studio was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, Dad said, for all the people they were bringing to Mexico City.

My parents' trip to Mexico this time differed markedly from an earlier excursion in 1955–56, when we were poor and had to return to the U.S. nearly penniless in a hearse with bald tires, our family car.

After the return of my parents from Mexico in early July 1983, we picked them up at the Red Lion Inn in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue and took them to dinner at a French restaurant. Mom looked good but admitted feeling a little tired. Dad said she was continuing to improve. He put his arm around her at the table and said, “She swam laps at our hotel, at eight thousand feet!”

Mexico City was at 7,350 feet, but I said nothing. I knew what he was saying, that she had done well with her exercises at altitude, where the air was thinner and exertion more difficult. Not to mention the pollution.

“And she's up to four laps at home now!” he said.

“Four and a half,” Mom said, proudly.

Two big parties had been given while they were in Mexico City, and they met many cast members. My parents sensed charisma in the handsome young actor playing Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), and thought he'd have to be on the alert for groupies. They saw three and a half hours of the first prints of film, called “rushes.” Filming was 60 percent done, and should be completed around September. The editing, scoring, special effects and other finishing touches would take quite a bit of time after that, and the production staff thought it might be released to the public no earlier than June 1984.

Dad tossed around some staggering eight-figure numbers in terms of income he expected to receive from the film, and said he wanted to use a small portion of it, “a few million” to set up a foundation for the “study of social systems,” with the goal of setting the American bureaucracy on a new course.

He said he had been plotting the sixth book in the
Dune
series for several days, while I was around 60 percent through my new novel,
Sudanna, Sudanna
. I had been working on it since February.

At least once a week, Mom and Dad came south from Port Townsend to look for a house in the Seattle area, hoping to find that waterfront piece on Mercer Island. They found a house that my mother loved, only a few blocks from our place on Mercer Island. A sprawling single-level home with Japanese architecture and landscaping, it featured a fine view of Lake Washington, but was not waterfront. They submitted an offer, and on the day it went in, Mom told Jan how much she hoped they could get that house. But my father had his own price in mind, substantially lower than the asking price. He “lowballed” the place, making such a bargain basement offer that it angered the sellers and the deal fell apart.

When Jan told me about this, about how much my mother wanted that house, I blew up. Jan had been going around with them looking for real estate for weeks, helping in every way possible. Now, after all the trouble, Dad had blown the deal. I called him and expressed my displeasure in no uncertain terms.

He didn't have much to say, but somehow after I hung up it resulted in Mom crying about the whole thing. I don't know how much I contributed to the upset, and how much of her unhappiness was from losing the house. In any event Dad called me back and we had a less emotional conversation.

“I'm not totally lost in a maze,” he said to me.

I found this comment somewhat perplexing, and thought about it afterward without coming up with an answer. Only later, much later, would I realize what was truly going on. Mom was convinced she was dying, and wanted to be certain Dad had a home near Jan and me, so that we could care for him. The year before she had expressed concern to Jan so poignantly: “I worry most about Frank. We've always been like one person. When I go, what will happen to him?”

After her poor medical diagnosis she began formulating a plan, assuring herself that the members of her family would be taken care of if she was not around. The Mercer Island house was part of it. In a related part of the plan, she was encouraging him to write a book with me, perhaps more than one, so he would be kept busy and wouldn't have time to get depressed.

A place to live near loved ones and work to keep him busy. Other pieces of her plan would emerge soon.

Dad's comment about not being “totally lost in a maze” came because he knew exactly what she was doing. If he purchased property near us, it seemed tantamount to an admission on his part that Mom was not going to make it. So he lowballed the place and lost it. I think Dad would have found something wrong with any house on Mercer Island.

He was also extremely hesitant to sell the Port Townsend farm. He had put too much work into Xanadu, too much love. It fulfilled some of his most closely held lifelong dreams. Frank Herbert could not have a farm on a Mercer Island lot—it was a highly suburbanized area, with comparatively small pieces of property and neighbors that would not understand ducks running around and roosters crowing at the break of dawn.

I
N LATE
July 1983, Frank Herbert told me that he typed one hundred rough-draft pages on “
Dune
6” (as yet unnamed) in just four days. (I didn't dare ask, but I had seen some of his rough drafts done
single space
.) In contrast, it had taken me six months to write 152 rough-draft pages of
Sudanna, Sudanna
, double-spaced. He said he normally spent six hundred to eight hundred hours on a completed novel.

His contract on “
Dune
6” was in the stratosphere, providing him with even more money than the astounding figure he had received for “
Dune
5,”
Heretics of Dune
.

Around this time Jan and I went to a dinner dance with my parents, where the entertainment was a small combo that played music ranging from the 1940s to modern, popular selections. Mom and I had one slow dance together. While a little short of breath, she was laughing like a schoolgirl when I led her back to the table.

The following month, Mom decided she wanted to start a newsletter, reviewing Seattle restaurants as well as restaurants from their travels. She planned to call it “BAH,” using her own initials, and wanted Jan and me to eat at restaurants and provide her with reports. I suggested the use of a form for the criticisms, an idea she liked. Dad and I offered to help edit the newsletter, while Jan said she would be the “Chief Eater.” Mom said we were the only people, along with Dad, that she was telling about the idea.

Late that evening after Dad had gone to bed, Mom told me that if the newsletter got off the ground it would be the first time she ever got her name on a publication. I asked her about a romance story she had sold in the 1940s, a “plan ahead” book she worked on for the Retail Reporting Bureau, and a number of Christmas stories she had written for department store promotions, all of which were published.

“My romance story was published anonymously,” she said. “And the other writings, well, they weren't very significant. They were part of my job, part of structures I didn't create. This newsletter would be a big step for me. I plan to have fun with it.”

Our first foray for BAH was the elegant Mirabeau Restaurant, a few days later. This gourmet dining establishment, on the forty-sixth floor of the SeaFirst Building in downtown Seattle, provided a spectacular, panoramic view of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains. There were flat mirror surfaces on pillars by the windows, reflecting the views from a variety of directions.

When the conversation grew too serious, Mom touched Dad's arm and asked him to tell a favorite joke of hers, one I hadn't heard in years. Dad told it like this: There were these old friends, and one of them finally turned to the other and said, “Alfie, we've been friends for a long time, and I can barely tolerate you putting down my stories, and the way you're always late to my parties. Most of all, I've just now decided I absolutely cannot tolerate the fact that you've become so pretentious.”

To this, Alfie responded, “Pretentious?
Moi
?”

Dad provided a brief history lesson about the use of the French word “
moi
,” meaning “I,” or “me.” He traced it back to Louis XIV, king of France longer than any other monarch, who said, “
L'etat c'est moi
”—“I am the state.”

All of us gave our opinions of the meal, while Mom scribbled “BAH” notes on a notepad from her purse. The waiter seemed a little nervous, and I saw him watching her.

On August 31, 1983, we drove my parents to Rosellini's Other Place Restaurant in Seattle, for a 6:30 dinner reservation. Walking in from the car, Mom had to stop and catch her breath twice. “It's nothing,” she said. “I've just been a little tired lately.”

We ordered a bottle of Richebourg before eating. With only two bottles remaining on the premises, a 1979 and a 1966, Dad said, “We'll have the '79 now and the '66 with dinner.” He wanted to build up to the better, richer wine.

The waiter removed the cork from the '79 and set it on our table. With a very serious, intense expression, Dad smelled the cork. Then a smile broke across his mouth, and his blue eyes sparkled. “Grind this up, will you,” he said, “and put it in our salad.”

Our waiter, a cheery, portly fellow, laughed so hard that he nearly popped his cummerbund.

It was a favored Frank Herbert line in elegant restaurant settings, delivered with a sense of comic timing at an ostensibly serious moment. It deflated any semblance of pretentiousness, which he abhorred, and never failed to elicit hearty laughter.
^*

Soon we were immersed in our dinner and in conversation about my parents' upcoming trip to Hawaii. Mom said she always enjoyed the flight across the ocean, and that a wonderful feeling came over her when the Hawaiian Islands came into view through the windows of the plane. She described the islands as green and brown jewels on a shimmering aquamarine sea.

Mom said she was glad she'd gone to Mexico City to see the
Dune
filming, that for her it had been the trip of a lifetime. “A Channel 5 (Seattle) news team was with us,” she said, “but they won't run a story until the movie is ready for release.”

To build up public interest, Universal and De Laurentiis were keeping the cast list secret. I saw a television story on the movie, run by Channel 7 in Seattle, in which they interviewed the mysterious and unnamed leading man, with his back to the camera. It was Kyle MacLachlin, I knew. But not too many other people did.

Two days afterward, on September 2, Clyde Taylor called, and told me that W. H. Allen, a large publishing house in London, wanted to publish
Sidney's Comet
and
The Garbage Chronicles
in the United Kingdom, in hardcover and paperback. I told him to accept their proposed terms.

Later in the week I called Mom in Port Townsend and discussed the “BAH” newsletter with her. We went over the format and specific language that might be included in every issue. She wanted it to look elegant.

She and Jan spoke on the telephone for a long while, after which Jan told me my parents wanted us to visit them in Hawaii that winter. If I wouldn't fly, Jan wondered, would I mind if she went alone? Mom said she was afraid Dad would steamroll her on the interior decorating at Kawaloa, and she wanted Jan there to prevent that.

I assented. Details were worked out, but because of school Jan couldn't go until after Christmas. Mom expressed disappointment, and said, “Come as soon as you can.”

After discussing this with my mother by telephone, Jan sat silently for a long while and then asked me if she should interrupt her classes and go earlier. Knowing the difficulties she had been through at school, I suppose I didn't answer very well. I left the decision to her.

The following week, I mailed my mother four restaurant reviews I had written, using a form I had developed for the purpose. I also edited a sample “BAH” letter she wanted to mail to a selected list of people and offered my suggestions for improvement. We were establishing a tone with the letter, appealing to a discriminating class of diners. Mom had decided not to show her name anywhere in the publication, to guarantee the integrity of calls she made upon restaurants. She was afraid that restaurateurs, upon learning a food critic was on the premises, would roll out a red carpet.

So, despite her earlier excitement about receiving credit in the publication for her operation of it, she was now slipping, once again, into anonymity. Her point seemed well taken, however.

On the sixteenth of September, 1983, Dad called. He said Warner Brothers and Paul Newman were making a bid for the movie rights to
Soul Catcher
, my father's 1972 novel about a clash between American Indian and white cultures. Previously there had been interest from a Seattle production company, Gardner-Marlow-Maes, as well as from Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, and Henry Fonda. I found myself unable to keep up with the history of these film rights. It was turning out to be almost as complex and ill-starred as the early history of the
Dune
movie project.

My father said he had a possible ulcer from tension over all the things he and Mom had been trying to do. The construction at Kawaloa was on the very top of their stress list, and below that their struggle over selling the Port Townsend house and purchasing something closer to me. Temporarily they had stopped looking for property in the Seattle area but would resume the search in the spring, upon returning from Hawaii. His stomach didn't feel good, and to compound matters, he was battling the flu. He was grumpy from flu shots, said his muscles were so sore that he could hardly walk up the stairs to his writing loft.

Despite this, Dad rode his ten-speed Schwinn bicycle to a market in Port Townsend the following day—a distance of six miles round trip—and purchased fetuccini for the evening meal.

On September 23 I called Mom, and she said Dad was feeling a little better, but she wasn't. Only two months before she had been up to four and a half laps of the swimming pool, and now she could barely do one. As she spoke to me, I realized this was an unusual conversation. Previously, Mom didn't like to talk about her condition, and we had to receive information on it from Dad. I was worried.

She said both of them had doctor's appointments in Seattle on the twenty-ninth. She also wanted to take her gold wristwatch to C. Rhyne & Associates to have the band shortened so that she could wear the watch again. “I want to buy a gold maple leaf coin at Rhyne Precious Metals, too,” she said. “In the same building. I've just begun collecting coins.”

She asked if I would take her, and I said I would be glad to.

I told her I was just finishing my novel,
Sudanna, Sudanna
, which was coming in at around 310 pages, double-spaced, or seventy-five thousand words.

She said Dad had three hundred single-spaced pages done on the first draft of “
Dune
6,” and that she had gone over the plot with him, offering comments. “I also suggested a title to him,” she said. “
Chapterhouse: Dune
. He likes it. That's the title now.”

Mom cleared her throat and said the newsletter idea was dead, because of a rival publication already in existence.

We discussed business matters I'd been helping them with, and then I had to listen to one of the things I hated to hear, that she and Dad were executing “living wills,” giving one another the authority to “pull the plug” if either of them slipped into a vegetable state.

My mother paused, as if awaiting comment. I didn't say anything. What could I say to
that
? She added that if both of them were being kept alive by machines, they wanted to give me the authority to pull the plug, and she asked if I would do that for them. I said I would do as they wished.

It was a quality-of-life issue, she said, of particular concern to her. Dad once told me she used the term frequently, that she wanted the right to die in dignity, without the interference of unnatural and uncomfortable medical equipment. It was why she wanted to live at Kawaloa when she was so ill, despite its great distance from hospitals and modern medical equipment. She didn't want to die in a cold, sterile hospital, connected to machines, and Kawaloa was as far from that environment as she could possibly get.

Late that month, Dad had an autograph session in Seattle. While he was there, I had lunch with my mother in the Garden Room of the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. They conducted a fashion show as we ate, with models strolling between tables in expensive Paris gowns. Afterward I drove Mom over to a jewelry store in an old building in downtown Seattle, where they would measure her wrist and remove gold links from her watch, since she had lost so much weight. The building didn't have an elevator, so I helped her up a long flight of stairs to the second floor. She was weak and frail, and had to rest on almost every step. My heart went out to her. I was confused and concerned by her physical downturn, because only a short while before she had been doing well with her exercise program, improving steadily. I hoped it was only a temporary setback and that Hawaii would make her stronger. She seemed so much older than her fifty-six years.

Two days later I drove Jan and the kids to Port Townsend, and we arrived at midmorning. There were five deer in the yard. Dad came out to greet us in his customary fashion, and gave us warm hugs. “Did you bring your manuscript?” he asked.

I had completed
Sudanna, Sudanna
only a couple of days before. Opening a back door of the car, I reached in and pulled a manuscript box off the ledge above the backseat.

He took the story that I had sweated over these many months to the living room, and set himself up on the couch. He seemed anxious to read it.

Mom wanted to go over a number of business matters with me, and we went in her office. At her desk I pulled up a chair to sit beside her. She gazed through a tall window that overlooked her garden and a little wooden bird feeder attached to a cedar tree. A brown-and-white wren was eating seeds, and she watched it for a moment. Her desk was more cluttered than usual, and she had a large green ledger book open on it, with a Cross pencil lying on the exposed page.

She was breathing hard, taking deep, erratic gulps of air, and I thought she was going to sneeze. Then I realized her breathing was labored from the exertion of walking into her office, only thirty feet from the kitchen. I wanted to help her, but didn't know how. Touching her hand, I asked, “Mom, are you okay?”

She smiled, looked at me and said, “I'll be all right in just a moment.” I saw pain in her dark blue eyes.

To the left of her desk, on the side where I sat, stood a light teak filing cabinet, with a miniature black and white Sony television on it. Above that, on the wall, a bookshelf held reference books, including a zip code directory, a Roget's thesaurus, and a big black hardcover volume, the new Cassell's German dictionary.