Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  He had to run the risk of losing her over the summer, since the only alternative was to lose her now, once and for all.

  Jeanne’s letters still came. All was well with his family, she was happy to assure him. “Yes, Monsieur Bruno, you will be glad to know, all is as it should be at Valmont.”

  “Mr. Hampton, it doesn’t make sense for you to stay here any longer,” Doctor David Weitz said to Jock, who hadn’t left the corridor outside of Freddy’s room at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, since she had been wheeled into it on a gurney eighteen hours earlier, a grotesque mummy encased in a sarcophagus of white, with only the valiant strands of her hair to identify her “I promise to phone you the minute there’s the slightest change in Mrs. Longbridge’s condition.”

  “I’ll just hang around,” Jock said stubbornly, for the tenth time.

  “There’s no way to tell when she’ll come out of the coma. It may be days. It may be weeks. It could be months, Mr. Hampton. You’re not being reasonable.”

  “I know.” Jock turned away, feeling another wave of intense, illogical hostility toward David Weitz. The man was too young, Jock insisted to himself, to be in charge of anything. He’d telephoned Swede and had him run a check on the guy.

  Weitz was forty-two, enormously respected, and the youngest Chief of Neurology the great hospital had ever appointed. There was no higher authority at Cedars to whom he could appeal for an older, wiser, more experienced doctor. Every doctor Swede talked to said they were fortunate to have Weitz supervising Freddy’s case.

  The information reassured Jock for only a minute. Here was this fellow, only forty-two years old, ordering around a flock of residents, calling in the specialists he needed, making dozens of decisions that he relayed to Freddy’s round-the-clock nurses, none of which he had time to explain to Jock except in a doctor’s typical shorthand-for-civilians.

  Meanwhile, Freddy lay where Jock couldn’t see her or help her, smashed up, injured in ways he didn’t understand, in ways even they didn’t seem to understand, or surely they could be more accurate about her condition. Here was this stranger who had suddenly become the most important person in the world, because it was up to him to pull Freddy through, make her all right, and he didn’t even know her, had never met her or heard her talk or laugh or watched her walk, he couldn’t have any idea of how … how essential … how necessary Freddy was.

  Freddy’s life lay in the hands of this man, which meant Jock was totally dependent on Weitz, and hated him for it. He wanted to take the tall young doctor by the shoulders and shake him, until that confident, controlled, intense expression left his face, until his glasses fell off and broke, he wanted to scream at him that he had to make Freddy well, perfectly well … he wanted to put the fear of God into the bastard, let him know how much was at stake, that if Weitz didn’t do his job he’d kill him with his bare hands … and at the same time he didn’t dare to offend him.

  Jock walked up and down the corridor, thinking in a rage of the nurse who’d tried to tell him that it was a miracle that Freddy’d lived through the crash. What did that woman know about it? Naturally she’d lived. She hadn’t crashed, for Christ’s sake, didn’t they know better than to use that word? She’d had a bad landing, a rough landing, she’d come in with too much speed. People don’t die from bad landings, they get shook up, they break a leg or a collarbone, or even a bunch of bones, but bones mend eventually, nobody dies from broken bones. What had Weitz meant by a “closed head injury”? If her skull wasn’t broken, what was the problem?

  There were chairs in the corridor, and Jock tried to make himself sit down for a minute. He’d walked so many miles that his legs were almost too heavy to lift, but sitting down was worse, because as long as he kept moving, he felt as if he were accomplishing something, not just waiting helplessly. He perched on the couch, in the same falsely relaxed position he used to settle into, near his plane, when his squadron was on two-minute standby, waiting to be ordered to scramble for a combat sortie.

  Damn the incompetent, criminal idiots at the Burbank Tower, he thought, for not having closed the airport yesterday. Nobody should have been permitted to take off in that weather. Damn even the well-meaning, clumsy idiots at the Catalina airport coffee shop who’d climbed down to rescue her. God knows how much more damage they’d caused, carrying her back up to the top of the mountain like a sack of potatoes, or bumping her around in the winding drive down to the harbor or on the boat trip across to the mainland. Christ, what a place for a bad landing in a fog! Damn to eternal hell the Catalina airport for existing at all. Fifteen hundred feet high, without a tower, without radio communication—it should be bombed into rubble, so no one would ever be tempted to land there again, not that he thought for a minute that Freddy was trying to land there in zero visibility. Obviously she’d been off course, lost in the sudden fog, that was the only possible explanation for her being near that treacherous, murderous rock. Freddy was a careful pilot. She’d never bent a blade of grass in six years in the ATA, much less a kite.

  But what had possessed her to go out flying at dawn yesterday? What kind of crazy idea had that been, Jock asked himself in desperation, thinking of all the things he had promised himself he was going to explain to Freddy, all the words he had rehearsed during the long, sleepless night after the Eagle Squadron reunion. He had been planning to go over to her house at breakfast time and force her to listen to him, force her to understand, to forgive him. And she would have, he was certain of it, because you couldn’t tell him that Freddy wasn’t ready to love him, at last, as he had always loved her. You couldn’t … lose … true love, just when you’d almost found it. Could you?

  The ceiling light fixture had a dead fly caught inside it, Freddy thought, dimly aware that she had had the same thought before, recurring over whirling cycles of time, pounding by, age after age, lifetimes that had no beginning and no end. Perhaps this was hell; to lie forever, immobilized, utterly alone, unable to call out, in the bottom of a white bowl filled to the brim with dark, dangerous waters, watching a dark spot of a dead fly inside a glass fixture that seemed always to be lit. Was she looking into a mirror? Was she the black, dead spot trapped inside the fixture? Panic such as she had never known began to beat in her temples and she knew she would never be able to call for help. Her eyes opened, but her mouth was covered over, her hands unable to move. She had been buried alive.

  “You’re awake,” said a man’s voice, “good girl.” A hand took her wrist, a thumb settled firmly on her pulse. It was salvation. She was not in hell. She was not doomed.

  “Don’t try to ask questions,” the man’s voice said the next time she woke up. “Your jaw is broken and wired together so it can heal. That’s why you can’t talk. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Don’t waste your strength, you need it all. You’re going to be as good as new, I promise you, but now you’re very weak and I know that you’re in pain. We’re giving you as much medication for the pain as we can, but we can’t stop all of it. I’m Doctor David Weitz. You’re Freddy Longbridge. You’re at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Your mother is here from France and she’s taking care of your little girl. They’re both fine. All you have to do is get better. You can’t have any visitors for a while. You must try not to worry about anything. The world will take care of itself, I guarantee it. Just let yourself go and sleep. While you sleep, you’ll be getting better. When you wake up, the nurse will call me wherever I am, and I’ll come as soon as I can. You have private nurses and you’ll never, ever be left alone, not for a minute. Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine. Sleep now, Mrs. Longbridge, just close your eyes and drift away. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m here for you.”

  Freddy tried to thank him with her eyes. He looked down at her and smiled and she saw that he understood. She closed her eyes and slept.

  “Maybe you can try to speak today,” David Weitz suggested to Freddy. She had been fed intravenously for the three weeks in which she had been in a coma, and then
fed through a straw until her jaw healed. Yesterday the wires had been removed, but she had been too afraid to try to talk.

  “Annie?” she asked, without moving her lips, in a tiny voice that came from the back of her throat.

  “She’s terrific. She’s at school right now. Your mother will be here later. How do you feel?”

  “Better.”

  “You are. Much, much better.”

  “How … long?”

  “How long have you been here? Over a month, but that’s not the important thing. It won’t seem as long now that you can talk.”

  “How much … more?”

  “I just can’t tell you for sure. You hit your head when you were thrown out of the plane. That caused what we call a closed head injury—an injury where there was no fracture of your skull but there was a sudden injury to your brain—like a severe bruise—which caused fluid to accumulate. That’s why you were in a coma from the time you hit the ground. However, the coma lasted a relatively short time. When the fluid finally disappears, you can expect complete recovery, with, perhaps, some mild memory loss. However, we just don’t know how long that will take. It’s a slow business, and there’s nothing we can do to rush it along. Meanwhile, you have a lot of other healing to finish. Two broken legs, one arm, one wrist, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone—fortunately there was no injury to your spine, and no pelvic fractures. You’re doing very well.”

  David Weitz bent over her, peering intently through his glasses, his dark eyes magnified as she blinked at him, trying to understand all that he had just told her. “Don’t think about the injuries,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I’m proud of you—you’re going to be truly fine. I want you to know that there are a lot of things we have to take care of, but nothing that’s out of our control. Are you up to seeing your mother? Yes? All right, but I’ll tell her not to stay for more than a few minutes. I’ll be back later.”

  She had been glad to see her mother, Freddy thought, her eyelids closing again, but she felt exhausted after the short visit. She hadn’t the strength to talk, except to the doctor. Until today living through each minute had been the boundary of her life, both question and answer. “The world will take care of itself,” David Weitz had said, and through pain, through the confusion in her head, through the terrible nights and fearful days, bandaged, her jaw wired shut, her limbs in casts, only one arm unbroken, she clung to the lifeline of his words. She repeated them to herself over and over; there was magic in them, some of his strength had been transferred to her. She abdicated her will, cast it aside, did as he bid her, because she trusted David Weitz absolutely. His devotion was abstract, to the cause of healing, and yet it was personal, because she was his patient.

  Now, with Eve’s coming, the real world had reentered her hospital room, a world she did not welcome. She was too frail, too broken, too sick to deal with it. She didn’t want to think, to talk to people. Even to have to try to turn up the corners of her mouth in a smile was too much to be asked of her. She would tell her nurses that it was too soon for her to have visitors, Freddy decided. When, she wondered, would David Weitz be back, to check on her again?

  “Your nurses tell me that you haven’t asked for a mirror,” David Weitz said to Freddy.

  “No.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think. With the help of reconstructive surgery you can expect to look the way you did before. Luckily, California is the world’s capital of plastic surgeons. A few scars may remain, after the surgery, from the lacerations you sustained—it depends on how your skin heals—but you can cover most of them with your hair. However, about playing the cello—”

  “Who said I played the cello? I’ve never touched one.”

  “That’s a relief. It’s the one function we can’t promise to restore.”

  Freddy laughed for the first time since the crash. “Is that a doctor joke?”

  “A classic.”

  “What if you told it to a cellist?”

  “I wouldn’t. I checked with Annie to be sure.”

  “Thank you for telling her how I was going to look. I was afraid that she’d be terrified when she saw me. She said you drew her sketches to show her what all the bandages and casts were about.”

  “She’s a great kid.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “No, I don’t. I got divorced a long time ago, before I could afford them.”

  “I’m divorced too.”

  “So Annie told me.”

  “That must have been quite a conversation. What else did you talk about?”

  “Her father, her schoolwork, her plans to learn to fly.”

  “Will I be out of here by the time Annie’s summer vacation starts?”

  “I don’t think so. You’re still not ready to get out of bed. When you are, your muscles will be very weak from lying here so long. You’ll need a great deal of physical therapy.”

  “I’ll send her to England, then. She can spend the summer at Longbridge Grange with her grandparents. Her father is probably there too.”

  “He is. I’ve talked to him a number of times on the phone. But not as often as I’ve talked to Mr. Hampton.”

  “Is he bothering you?”

  “Not more than twice a day. Sometimes three times. He refuses to believe that you don’t want any visitors. Are you sure you don’t want to see him?”

  “Absolutely. But I’ll see Swede Castelli and make sure that Jock stops calling you,” Freddy said with determination.

  “Do you have any idea how much better you are, Mrs. Longbridge?”

  “Thanks to you, Doctor Weitz.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a fighter. Those first weeks … I was worried.”

  “I didn’t worry. You said not to, so I didn’t. You said you were here for me.”

  “So you remember that, Mrs. Longbridge?”

  “Freddy. Won’t you call me Freddy?”

  “Of course. I’m David.”

  “I know.”

  “I have to go. I’ll be back to see you later, before I leave for my office.”

  “Thank you, David.”

  “Jesus, Freddy, did you think you were still a stunt-double? What the hell is this?”

  “I know, Swede. I’m told it looks worse than it is. I haven’t bothered to inspect the damage. But I’m going to be fine … just a matter of time and patience. Don’t worry. How’s everything at Eagles?”

  “Business is great. All the planes are flying, full loads in both directions, and we’re making our stockholders very happy. However, morale is low at the head office.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We miss you, the sight of your funny little face and the sound of your little footsteps and your snappy little ways of keeping us on our toes.”

  “Better get used to it, Swede. I’m not coming back.”

  “You’re in no condition to make decisions. I don’t believe you.”

  “Have it your own way. I don’t care. Look, Swede, you’ve got to stop Jock from calling Doctor Weitz. He’s a very busy man and he doesn’t have time to take nuisance calls.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say. Jock’s in bad shape. Worse than you are, except for those plaster casts and bandages.”

  “I don’t give a damn what kind of shape he’s in. I simply don’t want to see him. But he is not to bother Doctor Weitz. Will you get that through his skull?”

  “I can try. But you know Jock.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Much too well.”

  “Hell, Freddy, I didn’t know you could sound so bitter.”

  “It’s about time I learned to take care of myself, Swede.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Swede, old friend, I don’t have much strength yet. Thanks for coming. I’m counting on you about Jock.”

  “Sure, Freddy. Take care of yourself. Jock’s not the only one whose morale is low.”

  “Give me a kiss, Swede.”

  “Your big toes look pretty good to me.”
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  “I knew you’d find a place.”

  Eve persuaded Freddy to take Annie out of school early, so that she could fly back to Europe with her granddaughter, and leave her with Tony in London, before she continued to Paris. Eve was badly needed back in Champagne, where the full cycle of hospitality couldn’t properly begin without her. She had already spent far too much time away from Valmont.

  Jock drove them to the airport to catch the plane for New York. While Annie explored the airport as they waited for their plane to board, Jock sat morosely with Eve, reluctant to see her go.

  “Damn it, Eve, I’m going to really miss the hell out of you,” he said, grabbing her hand and squeezing it.

  “Darling Jock. All those dinners, all those movies, those weekend drives—what would Annie and I have done without you? You never let us feel alone for a minute. You’re the most wonderful friend. You have a permanent invitation to come and stay with us in Champagne for as long as you like, whenever you like.”

  “Maybe someday. Eve, listen, about Freddy—”

  “I tried, Jock, you know I did, several times, but she just doesn’t want to see you. I thought … possibly she’s waiting until she looks better. Maybe it’s just vanity.”

  “How vain is Freddy? Come on, Eve, you know that couldn’t have anything to do with it.” Jock’s insubordinate features were set in a mask of hopeless misery.

  “You’re probably right,” Eve sighed. “But she wouldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t pry a single reason from her. Freddy doesn’t tell me about a lot of things, we never had that sort of relationship … both of my daughters always kept a lot of secrets. And I … well, I had my secrets too. We’re that kind of family. Now, with Delphine, it’s different—we talk to each other a lot—but Freddy—” Eve shrugged her shoulders. Freddy, even in her wounded, weakened state, wasn’t one to confide in her mother.