For Katharine especially, the one member of the family there at Orville’s side seeing the condition he was in, it was truly a miracle he had escaped with his life.
Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas—“the two Charlies” as they had become known at Fort Myer—came to the hospital to show Orville the piece of the propeller blade that had broken away. The wreckage of the machine, they assured him, was secure in the shed, where the windows and doors had been nailed shut, and a guard stationed. They were packing the plane’s engine and transmission parts that were undamaged to be shipped home. That accomplished, they, too, would be on their way.
On September 23, Alexander Graham Bell and two members of his Aerial Experiment Association came to the hospital to see Orville, but learned he was not yet ready for visitors. The group then crossed the parade field toward Arlington Cemetery to view Lieutenant Selfridge’s casket still awaiting burial. On the way they stopped at the shed. Charlie Taylor, who had not as yet shipped the wreckage of the Flyer back to Dayton, had taken a break for lunch. The only one on duty was the guard, who agreed to let the visitors into the building where the crate containing the Flyer stood open, the wreckage on display. Bell took a tape measure from his pocket and made at least one measurement of the width of a wing.
Word of this was not to reach Katharine or Orville for another week, but when it did they were extremely annoyed. Katharine asked Octave Chanute for his view on the matter and after talking to the soldier who had witnessed the incident, Chanute felt it was not something to be overly concerned about.
When Charlie Taylor, on his return to Dayton, told Bishop Wright what had happened, the Bishop, in a letter to Katharine, allowed it was “very cheeky” of Bell, but “a very little piece of business anyway.” No more was said of the matter and exactly what Bell’s intentions were was never made clear.
Everyone at the hospital continued to be extremely kind and helpful to Katharine, and while she did not find the military hospital quite up to standards, no other hospital would have permitted her to stay there and without a single restriction. The doctors and the day nurse were “splendid.” But having learned that the night duty nurse looked in on Orville only once every half hour and that he was stationed on the floor below, she felt she had to be on hand for Orville. She stayed day and night, which Orville greatly preferred. Often he was delirious at night and could not be left alone.
The strain on Katharine was taking a toll. “Brother has been suffering so much . . . and I am so dead tired when morning comes that I can’t hold a pen,” she wrote to Wilbur in explanation of why he had heard so little from her.
She fended off reporters and received visitors who were denied access to Orville. She continued to answer mail and telegrams, and it was she who represented Orville at the funeral ceremony on September 25 when Lieutenant Selfridge was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors.
The role she had taken upon herself did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. Some of the press concluded she had to be a nurse and so described her. “Your sister has been devotion itself,” wrote Octave Chanute to Wilbur. Most important by far, Orville told her he never could have gotten through the ordeal were it not for her.
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.