Chapter 36

There Are Flowers Everywhere

ON A Sunday in mid-October, 1983, I was working on the final draft of Sudanna, Sudanna. A phone call came in from my brother Bruce. He was in California, said he had seen Sidney’s Comet in bookstores, that it was selling and being restocked. Other friends called to tell me the same thing.

A few days later, on my mother’s fifty-seventh birthday, I telephoned Hawaii to give her our love. She said she was tired but better. “It’s warm here,” she said, “and there are flowers everywhere.”

They were planning to have dinner at home, and Dad was preparing a special low-salt recipe of Oyster Sauce Beef for her, one of her favorite meals.

In ensuing weeks, I spoke with my parents often but made few journal entries. I needed a respite from the demands of the word-eating monster that sometimes threatened to consume me if I didn’t feed it. And through the middle of November I got my fill of writing, anyway, finishing Sudanna, Sudanna and mailing it to Clyde Taylor. I then set to work on a light project, a science fiction humor book in collaboration with an artist friend, Dick Swift.

It wasn’t easy working as an insurance agent and writing on the side, and I longed to write full-time. I understood now what my father must have been thinking during his own monumental struggle to make a living as a writer. There were many dimensions of him that I understood now only because I became, like him, a writer. “The best way to learn a thing is by doing it,” he often said. And so it was in learning about this enigmatic genius, Frank Herbert. The process of becoming a writer myself helped me to forgive him.

In phone conversations across the Pacific, I usually spoke with Mom, for Dad was almost always working, trying to get out of a financial straitjacket. Mom carried a cordless telephone around with her, and usually sat with it in her favorite spot on a large gray sectional couch, where she could do her knitting and gaze out upon the sea. She didn’t sound noticeably different to me, and never complained to me of discomfort. I was to learn later that Dad was dressing and bathing her, and that her condition had so deteriorated that she needed oxygen to sleep. I was to learn as well that Mom was being attended constantly by Dr. Howell, who lived a short distance down the road toward Kaupo Gap. I wasn’t told how bad it was getting—or maybe there were things I should have heard, but didn’t.

I knew the swimming pool was under construction at Kawaloa, for example, but I didn’t fully understand the desperation my father felt to get it completed, so that Mom could resume the exercise program that had worked so well for her in the past. Work seemed to drag along on the pool, going at the special slow pace reserved for the tropics. The process took forever, he told me later.

In every telephone conversation, I was told that Mom was doing better, that she was happy and warm.

That November they felt a strong earthquake at Kawaloa, centered at Hilo on the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Dad said it lasted forty-five seconds to a minute, and “felt like someone running across the deck.”

Months later, Dad told me he woke up once during the night and my mother was blue, a condition known as cyanosis, from inadequately oxygenated blood. He noticed that the oxygen tube had fallen from her mouth, so with trembling hands he reconnected it, and her color returned. After that he slept only lightly, listening for changes in her breathing pattern. He said he had been averaging just three hours of sleep a night.

In the middle of December we received a letter from my father:

Dear Brian, Jan and kids:

This letter is being composed on the word processor that I am readying for Bev to use in writing all of our correspondence. It works much faster than ordinary typewriting and saves the letter on a disk that is much easier to store. One disk 5 ¹/² inches in diameter can store hundreds of letters and find them when required (provided you label the disks correctly).

As I write this letter, I can hear the workmen outside finishing the swimming pool. Bev really needs it desperately. Her muscle tone has gone down dangerously since our arrival, although she still is stronger than she was when we arrived. Dr. and Mrs. Howell were here for dinner last night and brought good news about Bev’s latest blood test. She is managing to keep up her potassium level without taking the slow-K that made her so ill just before we left Port Townsend.

For Jan’s information, the guest house^* is coming along rapidly, as well. [The contractor] put in the steel supports for the corner tables yesterday and we decided to surface them with the same blue tile we are using in the bathrooms. We are overflowing with that tile because, on learning that they no longer are making it, we bought out the store’s supply. We had visions of needed repairs sometime in the future and no source for the tiles.

We’re really looking forward to Jan’s visit and only wish Brian would be with her…Too much activity around here to do much else except watch the work. I always say I love work. I could watch it forever.

Love,
Frank