Kaethe Gregorovius
Franz's wife, living on the clinic grounds and keeping the accounts nobody else looks at — the first person to say out loud that Dick Diver has stopped being serious.
Security for her family and credit for the work she and Franz actually do — with the Divers' private disorder kept on the far side of the clinic gate.
The book
At a glance
- Franz Gregorovius's wife
- A villa on the clinic grounds, with their children
- Frugality, and her dislike of Nicole
- That Dick has stopped taking the work seriously
- The Zurich chapters and the clinic years; Book Three opens with her
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFrau Kaethe Gregorovius lives with Franz and their children on the clinic grounds, and Book Three opens with her overtaking her husband on the path of their villa, out of breath because she has been holding a question in her mind during the run. She is practical and economical and entirely conscious of the distance between her household and the Divers'. Dick, on an early visit, makes her feel charming and then hates himself for it.
She does not like Nicole. She suspects that Nicole uses illness, money and position to command other people's attention, and she believes the Warren fortune had a good deal to do with the marriage. Her judgements are harsh and coloured by resentment, and the book does not pretend otherwise. It also does not let her be wrong: she notices Dick's deterioration well before Franz is willing to hear about it, and says so in the plainest available terms.
How the book draws them
- Out of breathHer first appearance is a woman running to catch her husband up in order to ask, mildly, how Nicole was — and giving away by her breathing that she has been rehearsing the question.
- The accountingShe sees the dresses not bought, the work got through, the children managed, and whose money the clinic runs on. She is the one character keeping track of the material arithmetic under everyone else's romance.
- The unwelcome opinionShe is not a psychiatrist and does not need to be. Her observation is that Dick is no longer conducting himself like a serious professional, and Franz's first response is to resist it.
- Accurate, not fairThe book keeps both halves. What she notices is real; the motives she assigns to Dick and Nicole while noticing it are not always just.
- The chosen classThe narration puts her at the centre of Franz's decision to live smaller than his inheritance allowed — the choice it says is typified by his selection of a wife.
- Not made sympatheticShe is never converted into a confidante or a wise outsider. She stays slightly grudging and slightly right, and the novel leaves her that way.
She and Franz keep the clinic. , the institution continues on the terms she has always understood best: work, family, reputation, and money coming in.
The novel does not reward her with a scene of vindication, which is more damaging than if it had. Her central claim — that charm is not a substitute for seriousness, and that the Divers were spending the clinic's credibility along with their own — simply turns out to be what happened.