“I was lucky it was just one foot, the doctor told me, at least I was half normal.” Frank stepped away from the airplane, cleaned his hand on a rag. “The doctor, eager to impress, told me that both Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott had had a club foot, as if he knew that one day I would read poetry.”
They were in the hangar, Frank having invited Miriam to help with the maintenance of Peter’s airplane, part of her flying education. She was wiping down the oil that had spotted the exterior of the plane and noticed that Frank’s limp had worsened in the hour that they were working. What happened to your leg? she’d asked, remembering how he’d faltered the day of the crash.
“A deformity. That’s what the doctor called it, as if the word itself, the fact of it being named, denoted an accomplishment.”
She’d pressed him, asking, How long? Was there pain? Was there nothing to be done? He dropped his rag on the bench and sat at the stool, rubbing his leg that had tightened under the strain of too much standing. “I thought I was normal, my own kind of normal, until the doctor came.”
“You were still a child then?”
“Five years old. I was in bed, foot bent inward, toes curled around as if napping. That’s what I saw out of my squinting eye, my foot napping. I’d been sleeping, myself. Curled up like a whorl, the covers a protective shell, head tucked between my arms, all the while knowing that I was not safe, knowing that they’d be coming for me.
“It’s for your own good. Even at five I knew it was nonsense. They were doing this for some reason that had nothing to do with me. For what? To fix me? The doctor wielding the Thomas Wrench, convinced that making the tiny adjustments would solve everything.
“I didn’t care about my foot. Didn’t bloody care. I wouldn’t have said this out loud though. I knew how easy it was to bring on anger. My father especially. Who would see my bloody foot anyway? At school. That’s what they kept whispering. They wanted it to be right when I went to school. Next year was not long away, and the manipulating with the wrench and the healing had better hurry up if I was to be right by then. I remember the doctor taking my foot, rubbing the rashed skin where the brace held it in place, forcing it to remain in that position, an infinitesimal adjustment that was supposed to take me ever closer to normal.
“The Thomas Wrench would do it, the doctor promised my mother, who was standing back, wringing her hands, my father away on business.”
“How awful.” Miriam leaned against the airplane.
“I remember my mother’s hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s time, Frank,’ she said. I can still hear the snap of the clasp on the doctor’s bag. I can still see myself in that bed. My eyes shut tight, the soft tugging of my feet, my mother’s hand trying to unfurl me.”
Later. Barely fourteen when the Great War ended, soldiers stumbled home with their afflictions, and he could see his own as a kind of bravery. A day in the village with his mother, the war over but the tinge of it still in the air. Bunting sagged from the village hall, the smell of foreign cigarettes in the air, and soldiers out of any formation, limping and listless. One not yet twenty with a crutch under his arm marking him as a beacon and repository for so many sorrows. Everyone was tired, it seemed, tired of suffering, tired of just holding on, and though the war was well and truly over, they all wanted it to be gone for good, all traces concealed, gone from their sight, their daily lives. They wanted gone the need to ration, to wear dull clothes, to be mindful of petrol use. So, the young man shambled along, as a reminder of what had been, and in some ways still was, and Frank had felt a kind of equivalence with him; his own status as a cripple bolstered to match the beaten-down soldier’s.
He’d offered Frank a cigarette, and this pleased him, knowing the soldier thought him more a man than he was. By this time the treatments were long past, the brace replaced by customized shoes that he’d worn to walk the corridors, balancing himself, straightening muscles, altering his body stance to minimize the limp.
An airplane had flown past as they stood in the street that day, the soldier pinching the cigarette to his lips and Frank gawking skyward, forgetting for the moment that he was not alone. He was a pilot, the soldier told Frank, his lame leg a result of a crash. This, an opening for Frank, who declared that he was to be a pilot one day, would have his own airplane, inventing his own life story as he went along, as if he were a character in one of the books he’d read.
“Good man,” the soldier said to him, and these words sealed Frank’s fate, his declaration now a vow he could not break. Frank stretched his spine, raising his height by a good inch, a constant readjustment of his body normal for him, and cast a glance at the soldier’s uniform, looking for the wings that marked him as an RAF man. He saw none. He looked at the soldier, who had reached the end of the cigarette and was now looking across the village as if suddenly remembering where he needed to be. He tossed the butt, cocked his head up to Frank, wished him luck, and wandered down the road.
“Frank?” Miriam at his side, a bottle of solvent in her hand that she was capping. “It’s late. Time to go home.”
“Yes, it’s late, isn’t it. Time to go.”