Wheelchairs

WHEELCHAIRS / Leonard Kriegel THE WHEELCHAIR WAS the way home." The line is from my first book, published in 1964, when I believed I was forever done with wheelchairs. I was thirty when The Long Walk Home appeared, a husband and father, about to embark on a Fulbright year abroad. But the words younger men choose have a way of catching up to the realities older men must face—and if the selfconsciously dramatic tone I used to describe the origins of my love affair with the wheelchair is a trifle embarrassing today, the judgment itself remains surprisingly accurate. The first time I ever used a wheelchair was the moment I was given back the mobility I had surrendered earlier, when I lost the use of my legs to polio. I was eleven years old, confined to bed, and about to discover why the wheelchair was the way home. In life, as in memory, that wheelchair proved as much salvation as I could claim during the twenty-four months I spent being remade as a cripple in the New York State Reconstruction Home. I am once again an eleven-year-old boy sitting up in his bed in the ward for boys between ten and thirteen. This ward has been my home for five and a half months and I will live here for another eighteen months. An explosion of joy sweeps through my body as I look up and see my mother and father and uncle. My father is pushing a wheelchair in front of him. It is a few minutes after one o'clock on the last Sunday in January 1945. Sunday is visitors' day. A sense of expectancy lingers in the air like the smell of breakfast coffee. Every boy in the ward feels himself breathing a bit quicker for the possibilities awaiting him. On the edge of meeting a destiny that six months earlier would have made me shudder, I feel prepared, grateful, anxious. I am alive and the wheelchair is mine. I had hungered for that particular possibility for two months, ever since the hot pools to which I had been subjected from midAugust until Thanksgiving succeeded in baking the stiffness out 272 · The Missouri Review of my body and left me with lifeless legs alone to worry about. And my hunger was about to be satisfied. That wheelchair my smiling father was pushing toward my bed would open up the hospital and its grounds for me. Better still, it would open up my Ufe for me. It was a big, old-fashioned, straw-backed wooden chair, oak arms gleaming in the frozen January sun flagging the ward and playing the varnish shine like a crazed shadow dancer. My father, that gentle immigrant, guided the chair alongside the bed in the cubicle I had shared since September with a boy named Morty whose long, narrow nose had earned him the nickname, "Moleman." Aided by my uncle, he braced the chair against my bed. "It's yours, Lennie," my father said triumphantly. "We bought it for you." No gift I would ever receive—not the baseball bat my uncle had given me for my birthday three years before the polio, not the piece of yellow clay baked into the shape of an ash-tray or candle-holder I would receive twenty-three years later from my oldest son (he wasn't certain what he intended to make, and I gratefully accepted not the form but the love that existed beyond the form), crafted with a minimum of talent but with all the pride a four-year-old takes in being able to make a gift he gives—glows so brightly in memory as that ponderous remnant of eighteenthcentury design, my huge, ungainly, magnificently ugly throne on wheels. We don't usually think of liberation as mechanical. The word strikes us as disreputable, tawdry, the very antithesis of liberation. Mechanical. One pushes the sound out of one's mouth and breaks it off in midair, a brief click befitting a forced, hurried exit. Mechanical leaves the mouth harshly. Link it to virtually anything— mechanical freedom, mechanical style, mechanical abstraction—and the implication is of something unearned, unimaginative, for...