The Proprietor's Daughter Page 11

  Katherine recalled telling her father the real reason for the request, Franz’s trouble in Germany. She remembered Roland’s face as he considered the information, stern at first, then softening when he said, “All right, I’ll offer Franz a job in store operations, the same as he’s doing for his father. But, Kathy, if he gets involved in anti-American demonstrations here, and drags you along, I won’t wait for the Home Office to deport him. I’ll kick him out of the country myself.”

  Roland’s concern had been unfounded. Within minutes of being collected at Heathrow Airport, sitting in the back of the chauffeured Bentley with Katherine, Franz made it abundantly clear that his demonstration days were over. “When I protested in Germany,” he told Roland, “it was not so much against the Americans as against my father’s generation. They led us into a terrible war, and they still govern our country. I was protesting what my father’s generation left us as a legacy — a divided country, and the reputation of being the birthplace of some of the most heinous acts known to man.”

  Katherine’s memory formed the picture of her father turning away, unable to match Franz’s blazing intensity. Later, Roland had said to his daughter, “No wonder you always rushed down to greet the postman each morning. Franz’s letters must have read straight from the heart.”

  Franz had found a furnished apartment in town. He saw Katherine almost every evening. Dinner, a movie, dancing, or sometimes just a drive or a walk. No matter what time Franz brought her home, though, Roland would always be waiting up. Like an anxious mother hen, Katherine thought with a half smile.

  When Franz had been in London for three weeks, Katherine had taken him to the wedding of a family friend. After the party, they had gone to Franz’s apartment. Katherine had returned home that night just before dawn. As she crossed the hall toward the stairs, her father’s voice — coming from the doorway of the drawing room — had stopped her.

  “Kathy.”

  She turned around.

  “Where did you go with Franz?”

  “To a jazz club. Then for a walk on the Embankment.”

  “You must have frozen.”

  “Franz had his arm around me.”

  “I should hope so.”

  She started up the stairs again, halted, and swung around. “I can’t lie to you. We went back to Franz’s.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s not good enough, Kathy. I knew I loved your mother when I was with her the first time.”

  A week later, Katherine had told Roland that she and Franz wanted to live together. The memory of that particular moment turned the half smile on Katherine’s face into a broad grin. It had been one of the infrequent times she had seen her father stuck for words. At last, he had spoken to both her and Franz. Formally, over dinner at the house. After ascertaining that Franz and Katherine did, indeed, love each other, he had said, “If you’re both so certain that living together is right, then go the whole damned hog and get married! If I am to be blessed with grandchildren, I would like it to be while I’m still fit enough to push a carriage. And I would like to have a son-in-law as well. . . .”

  The grin faded abruptly as Katherine’s memory flashed across the intervening years, jarring to a halt twenty-four hours earlier. New Year’s Eve at the Bentley farm. What was it she had told Franz? What would make her happier? “I’d like you to be home the next time I have something special to celebrate.” That was it. Nothing harmful or malicious about that, just a little wish that her husband would be home when she had a big event to shout about.

  Satan must have eavesdropped on that conversation, because Katherine’s wish had been granted. But not in the way that she would ever have wanted it to be fulfilled.

  Most probably, Franz would be home the next time she had something to celebrate.

  In a . . .

  Her mind struggled to form the words, to include an obscenity she would never normally dream of using. But on this first obscene day of the new year, it somehow seemed so horribly fitting.

  Franz would be home, all right. Sitting there in a fucking wheelchair!

  Chapter Six

  THE TIME immediately following the new year comprised the most agonizing period of Katherine’s life. Four days after the accident, when it seemed that nothing worse could possibly happen, Franz contracted pneumonia. A tracheotomy was performed, a tube inserted into his throat to bring up the mucus congesting his lungs before he drowned in his own fluids; another tube was inserted in his nostrils to drain water from his stomach. Each evening, when Katherine left the hospital after visiting Franz, she wondered if she would ever see him again.

  Even after the lung infection cleared, the throat tube remained in place because Franz’s cough reflex was not powerful enough to assure keeping the bronchial passage clear. Every time Katherine saw the tube, she was reminded that a broken neck was just the start; the illnesses that attended such an injury, and the enforced immobility that went with it, could be just as terrifying.

  The first signs of improvement came after six weeks, when Franz was able to straighten his arms and move his wrists. Physiotherapy began, limited exercises where his hands were strapped to a bar above the bed so he could strengthen his arms by lifting himself. A panoramic mirror was fitted to the bar, allowing Franz to see what was happening around him. Finally, a television set was brought in, angled so he could watch it from his supine position.

  In Katherine’s eyes, the television was the best therapy of all. When she arrived at the hospital each afternoon, Franz seemed a little more cheerful. The television kept him in contact with the outside world. He discussed news events with Katherine, and for the first time since the accident, he seemed truly optimistic. Instead of saying, “If I walk again,” he used the word when. It was a good time, Katherine believed, to broach a subject she had so far kept to herself.

  “Henry and Joanne keep asking when they can visit you. Do you feel up to seeing them?”

  “Of course.” Franz looked in the mirror at the photograph on the bedside table. It was one he had taken on Christmas Day, of Henry and Joanne on their new bicycles. “When will you bring them?”

  “This coming Saturday.”

  For the rest of the week, Katherine and the children eagerly anticipated the special visit. But when she took Henry and Joanne to see their father on Saturday afternoon, Franz’s room was in darkness. Leaving the children in the corridor, Katherine entered the room. The blinds were drawn, the television was nowhere in sight. Franz lay on the bed, eyes screwed shut, his face a painful grimace.

  “Franz . . .? The children are outside.”

  “Take them away.”

  Stunned, Katherine could only say, “But you said you wanted to see them.”

  “Take them away. I do not want them to see what I have become. A cripple, that is all I am. A useless cripple.” Then, in a pitifully pleading voice, as though speaking directly to God, he asked, “Why could the horse have not fallen on me?”

  From a doctor, Katherine learned what had happened. Franz had been watching a Saturday-afternoon sports program. He had seen a race, athletes pounding around a track, running as he had once loved to run. Then he had looked in the mirror at his own legs — those limbs which had no movement, no feeling — and he had summoned the nurse to remove the television and draw the blinds.

  Katherine returned to the room. “You’ll run again,” she told Franz. “Once you’re better, you’ll go running over the heath, just like you did before.”

  “Do you still not understand? I have broken my neck. I will be crippled until the day I die.”

  Katherine rushed from the room, collected Henry and Joanne, and drove them home without them seeing their father. She spent the entire journey fighting back tears. As long as Franz had believed he would recover, she had held the same conviction. Now that his faith had been shattered, her own optimism lay in ruins.

  From that moment, Franz underwent a personality change. He seemed
to care little for what happened to him. He was neither encouraged when the strength in his arms showed marginal improvement, nor disappointed when it became obvious that he would never regain any body use below his arms. He accepted the rehabilitative process with a stoic fatalism. It was as though, doctors told Katherine, he was doing the therapists a favor by submitting himself to it.

  His moods fluctuated. Sometimes when Katherine visited, he was receptive, asking about Henry and Joanne, about the house, even about the newspaper. Abruptly, his mood would shift. Just as Katherine felt it might be a good time to ask if he wanted the children to visit, Franz’s tolerance level would flash to the other end of the scale, and he would demand to be left alone.

  “Go! Leave me!” he would snap. “I do not need your pity!”

  “I’m not here because I pity you. I’m here because I love you, and for no other reason.”

  “Love me?” He gave a dry croak of a laugh. “How can anyone in their right mind” — he gestured helplessly at his legs — “love something like this?”

  “Stop feeling so full of self-pity. A lot of other people who broke their necks didn’t live to complain about it.”

  Grim humor glinted in Franz’s blue eyes. “Who? Murderers who were hanged?”

  Eight months after the accident, Franz began to spend weekends at home, Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon. The visits, accompanied by an attendant named Jimmy Phillips, were to reacquaint Franz with living in a house. To accustom him to being with his family again; with whole, healthy people, and not with other patients whose physical disabilities he shared.

  The house had been altered from the day that Franz had last seen it, when he, Katherine, the children, and Edna Griffiths had left to spend New Year’s Eve at the Bentley farm. Ground-floor doorways had been widened to allow access to a wheelchair; ramps had been fitted over steps. It seemed to Franz that everywhere he looked, he saw a reminder that he was crippled. Even the library at the front of the house, where he had brought home work from the office, had been altered. It was now a bedroom. The bathroom that adjoined it was fitted with the bars and supports that a handicapped person would need.

  The weekend visits gave the children their first opportunity to see their father. No matter how sweetly Katherine had coated the pill of rejection — inventing stories about infections in the hospital that she did not want Henry and Joanne catching; even an excuse, the one time they had accompanied their mother to the hospital, about Franz being too tired to see them — they had been badly hurt. On that first visit home, before Franz was lifted from the car by Jimmy Phillips, Katherine told him exactly how she wanted him to behave.

  “Franz, today’s a big day for everyone. Inside, there’s a welcome-home party all set out. Henry and Joanne have presents for you. They’ve been looking forward to today for weeks. Please don’t let them see the face I’ve seen at the hospital.”

  Before Franz could answer, Jimmy Phillips spoke up. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Mrs. Kassler. All the way here, your husband’s been talking about nothing else but seeing his kids. And you, of course.”

  Katherine smiled. She liked the attendant, a cheerful, middle-aged cockney who had once dreamed of a boxing career in the heavyweight division. Despite his ponderous size and fearsome looks — shaggy dark hair, and a nose that appeared to have been broken at least a dozen times — Jimmy Phillips was one of the most gentle men Katherine had ever known. He had been recommended by a nursing agency to care for Franz once he returned home. With just enough strength in his hands and arms to lift a fork or spoon, Franz would need constant attention.

  Katherine stood aside as the attendant lifted Franz from the front passenger seat as easily as if he were a baby and placed him in the wheelchair. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Kassler, what I just told Mrs. Kassler?”

  Katherine saw Franz move his head in answer to the question. Phillips pushed the wheelchair up the steep ramp leading to the front door. As the ramp leveled out into the entrance hall of the house, Franz saw “Welcome” banners suspended from the ceiling. Shining gold stars and silver tinsel drifted in the breeze. His eyes filled with tears when he saw the waiting people. His father-in-law and Sally Roberts. The Bentleys. Edna Griffiths. And standing in front of them all, his son and daughter, Henry and Joanne. How could he possibly have denied them the right to visit him?

  Smiling, he slowly held out his hands to them. They rushed forward, flung their arms around his neck — gently, as their mother had instructed them — and kissed him. But at the very moment of contact, Franz felt a backing-off. He told himself that he understood. The children had not seen him for eight months. They were wary, a little afraid. And who could blame them? Adults realized the changes that sickness could make upon a man, but children did not possess the wisdom of older heads. They could only compare what was with what had been. Their father had been a fit and happy man, who took great pride in his physical ability. The man they had been told to greet was a mere shadow of such a person, a white-faced, crippled specter.

  The smile remained etched on Franz’s face, but agonizing pain swept through him.

  Six more weekend visits followed. Then, at the beginning of November, exactly ten months after the accident, Franz came home for good.

  *

  While Franz had been away, Katherine had divided her life into two compartments: the harsh world of reality, and the less stressful world of make-believe.

  Reality was visiting Franz every afternoon, searching desperately for any sign of physical improvement and a corresponding improvement in his mental state. Make-believe was carrying on life as normally as possible, fulfilling her functions as both a mother of two young children and a woman with a blossoming career. The only way she could successfully accomplish that was by acting as if nothing was wrong.

  Initially, she had felt callous, and perhaps a trifle guilty. After all, what right did she have to continue with her own life, to find enjoyment in her work — even to laugh — while Franz lay in a hospital bed? Slowly, those feelings had yielded to a pragmatic appraisal of the situation, which she summed up by asking out loud, each time she felt herself falling apart, “How on earth will Franz be helped if I allow my own life to collapse because I’m sick with worry over him?” The answer she gave herself each time was obvious. “He won’t be helped at all, you idiot, so get a grip on yourself and carry on!”

  The dual role became a part of Katherine’s life. She altered her day, rising at six each morning to spend time with the children as Franz had always done. At work, she gave greater responsibility to Heather and Derek, her two assistants on “Satisfaction Guaranteed!” When Katherine left the Eagle building early each afternoon to visit Franz, she was certain that the column was in the most capable of hands.

  Franz’s return to the house in Hampstead erased the line between reality and make-believe, and brought Katherine’s carefully constructed world crashing down. It was no longer possible to pretend that nothing was wrong when Franz was present in the house, when he was sleeping downstairs, and when he was being bathed and dressed each morning by Jimmy Phillips, who was now as much a part of the household as Edna Griffiths was.

  Along with his damaged body and his wheelchair, Franz brought tension home with him.

  Katherine saw it in the children. They were quieter, less rambunctious, especially at mealtimes, when Franz was helped to the table by Phillips. Henry and Joanne would stare at their plates, unwilling to look at the man opposite them. They acted like normal children, Katherine noticed, only on those days when Phillips drove Franz to the hospital for routine therapy. Then they would play in the jungle of a back garden, or in the house, as carefree as two young children were supposed to be, until they heard the crunch of the Jaguar’s wide tires on the gravel of the driveway, saw Phillips remove the collapsible wheelchair from the trunk of the car, and lift Franz into it. The abnormal quietness would then return, and with it the refusal to look into the face of the man who was their father. Franz, aware
of his children’s confusion, and not wishing to disturb them even more by forcing them to acknowledge him, withdrew.

  After six weeks, Katherine’s nerves were on edge. It was close to Christmas. Instead of seasonal joy, the house was full of fear and distrust. The next time Franz was taken to the hospital for therapy, Katherine called the children into the breakfast room and asked why they were rebuffing their father.

  “He isn’t like our daddy used to be,” Henry answered. “He frightens us now.”

  Despite the high-pitched voice, Katherine could not help marveling how adult her son sounded. “Why should you be frightened of him? Because he’s in a wheelchair? Now that’s silly, isn’t it?”

  “Our daddy would never frighten us,” Henry said defiantly.

  Katherine turned to Joanne. Less self-assured than her brother, the four-year-old girl just nodded in agreement. And Katherine wondered what was more to blame for the alienation between children and father — Franz’s injury itself, or his refusal to let the children see him in the hospital? During the eight months from the accident to his first visit home, had Franz and his children become strangers?

  That evening, after Henry and Joanne had gone to bed, and while Edna Griffiths was busy in the kitchen, Katherine decided to discuss the situation with Franz. She found him in the television room, watching a movie with Jimmy Phillips.

  “Franz, can we talk?”

  “Of course.”

  “Privately, Franz.”

  “Excuse me,” Phillips said, and walked to the door before Franz could ask him to leave. Katherine took the seat Phillips had vacated, next to the straight-backed, heavily padded armchair in which Franz sat. A plaid blanket was stretched over his legs, as though to ward off a bothersome draft. But there were no gaps in the walls or windows of the television room for any draft to find its way through, and Katherine knew that the blanket was there only to hide Franz’s legs from his eyes.