Others tried to show their empathy and respect in other ways. Alexander Graham Bell invited her to take a drive one evening along with Octave Chanute, after which they dined at the Bell home on 33rd Street in Washington. It was the only time she had been anywhere, she told her father.
She was growing dreadfully homesick and worried over earning no income. “Have lost eighty-two and a half dollars already,” she reported to Wilbur on October 2, knowing she still had a long time to go before a return to Dayton would be possible. Orville seemed to be improving but was still in no shape to leave for home. The night of October 3, his temperature jumped to 101 degrees and for no apparent reason.
Orville was thirty-seven, but in his present condition, lying there, he looked older by far. The chances that he might ever fly again—or ever want to fly again—seemed remote, if not out of the question.
Letters from home and letters from Le Mans helped greatly. The postscript of one letter from Wilbur gave her and Orville both a particularly welcome lift. “I took Bollée (240 pounds) for a couple of rounds of the field,” he wrote. “It created more astonishment than anything I have done.”
“We are both fairly wild to get home,” Katharine wrote to him. She had been thinking of going back for a week or so, if only to get some sleep. But then Orville would turn miserably uncomfortable, unable to get his breath. “I think I will have to stay until I bring him home,” she wrote to her father on October 17, a month to the day since the crash.
Orville continued having his “ups and downs,” which the doctors attributed to indigestion. So she began cooking for him—broiled steak, beef broth, soft-boiled eggs. When Walter Berry, the American attorney who three years before had come to Dayton with the French delegation, invited her to dinner, she had to turn him down. She was refusing nearly all invitations, she explained to her father, being “too tired to talk!”
By the last week of October, it was decided Orville should be moved to Dayton, not because he was sufficiently recovered, but in the hope that being back in familiar surroundings might help alleviate his nervousness. Three days before he was to leave, two nurses helped him out of bed to try standing with crutches and the blood rushed down within his left leg as if the leg were about to burst and he nearly fainted.
But on October 31, after five weeks and five days in the hospital and with Katharine still at his side, Orville was taken aboard a train at Washington’s Union Station.
A good-sized crowd stood waiting at the Dayton station as the train pulled in the next morning. Katharine stepped out first onto the platform. Then Orville appeared on crutches, supported by two train officials. “Many had come there to cheer the return of the man who had been instrumental in placing the fair name of Dayton before the eyes of the civilized world,” wrote the Dayton Journal. But instead of cheers there was silence and murmurs of pity and sympathy, so drawn and wasted did the hero look. No one was allowed to speak to him except members of his family. Her brother was still a very sick man, Katharine explained.
Brother Lorin had come to the station to meet them and a carriage stood waiting. But the vibrations on the train ride had been an agony for Orville and any more of that in the carriage, it was decided, should be avoided. So he was moved slowly along the twelve and a half blocks to Hawthorn Street in a wheelchair.
Bishop Wright was at the house to greet them, and Carrie Kayler (who had been married and was now Carrie Grumbach) was on hand to prepare dinner. Orville’s mind was “good as ever,” the Bishop would record that night, “and his body promises to be in due time.” A bed had been set up for him in the front parlor. As for herself, Katharine allowed she was “tired to death.”
In the days that followed Orville still required “a good deal of attention,” as Katharine recorded, but was “tolerably active,” able to stay up longer through the day, sometimes for several hours. A local surgeon who looked him over found his left leg had been shortened about an inch—not the one eighth of an inch he had been told at the Fort Myer hospital—but with proper padding in the heel of his shoe he should have no serious trouble.
Neighbors, old school friends, came to call on Orville. By the second week in November, Charlie Taylor was pushing him in the wheelchair to the shop on Third Street, where the engine from the Fort Myer Flyer had been uncrated for inspection.
“I have an awful accumulation of work on hand,” Orville told Wilbur on November 14, in the first letter he had written since the accident. Home and a little work seemed to do exactly what had been hoped. So improved was he in health and outlook, and such was his progress walking on crutches, that by late December he and Katharine were letting it be known they would soon be sailing together for France to join Wilbur, Wilbur having told them they were needed.
CHAPTER TEN
A Time Like No Other
Every time we make a move, the people on the street stop and stare at us.
KATHARINE WRIGHT
I.