MY FRIEND BRIAN

FAMILY TRAIT

Now at last Brian was on crutches for real all day every day for eight weeks. He disciplined himself to move his body forward from the hip as Sam did, locking his knee and pulling on his foot rather than pushing with it, and found that he could indeed let his arms and shoulders do most of the work of walking. This was very taxing at first but by the time they took the cast off Brian had developed exceptional upper body strength and stamina. The doctor showed Brian how he should walk by taking as much of his weight as he could on the right leg now withered and weak with disuse, moving it together with the crutches. Once out of the doctor's office, however, Brian adopted a swing-through gait, landing both feet together, pushing from the left hip while letting the right leg mostly go along for the ride. He simply ignored the occasional admonition from family or friends that the leg would not recover if he didn't start putting weight on it.

After three months the doctor made it clear to Brian's parents that his leg was not improving because of his willful refusal to use it properly. The Meadows large extended family was possessed of old and very, very substantial wealth. They kept a clinical psychologist on retainer to attend the needs of several peculiar members, and the family doctor recommended that they consult him. After an hour alone with Brian the psychologist told them that Brian's compulsion grew out of a lifelong desire to present himself as mobility impaired, which was an unusual but by no means unheard of phenomenon. No cause had ever been found for it, nor any cure. He advised them to let Brian walk with crutches as much as he wished, and to bring him back each month for an hour's consultation. If indeed he suffered the compulsion described in the literature nothing would stop him, and if not he would eventually tire of it. They should hope that it would stop with using crutches. Some had been known to arrange accidents resulting in the amputation of one or more limbs, sometimes with more serious, even fatal unintended results. He reminded them, though it was surely already in their minds, of the history of Brian's grandfather Emile Meadows, whose enterprise had multiplied the family fortune at least tenfold through both World Wars and the intervening Great Depression.

Emile Meadows's authorized biography states, "The exact nature of the malady which deprived him of the use of his legs from early childhood has never been determined." That his disability had no physical cause, however, was one of the many Meadows family secrets that everyone in the generation of Brian's parents seemed to know, though Brian was quite unaware of it growing up, as were his cousins. When they would ask, "What's the matter with Grandpere's legs?" the grownups would reply vaguely, "Nobody knows," and change the subject.

From an early age, by most accounts three or four years after his birth in 1881, Emile Meadows had simply refused to stand or walk, for no reason that any physician could find. He never complained of pain or, at the beginning, weakness. He simply refused to use his legs and no amount of pleas or threats could get him to do so. The servants tired of carrying the growing boy around after a couple of years and they persuaded his parents to get him a wheelchair. For the rest of his long life a succession of wheelchairs were his exclusive means of personal mobility. A life-size oil painting in the foyer of the Meadows Building, the world headquarters of the family's vast network of enterprises, portrays him enthroned in one of those old-fashioned wood and wicker affairs. The portrait is full length and shows what anyone who met the adult Emile Meadows instantly perceived, how his powerfully built torso sported hips and legs more proportioned to a child of eleven or twelve. It was said that the artist objected to such a literal portrayal of his subject but that the magnate insisted on it, for he was inordinately proud of what he had accomplished in life without the use of his legs.

Shortly after Brian turned eleven, the psychologist informed his parents that Brian was demanding braces to support the legs now weakened by nearly two years of crutchwalking. Unless they objected, he told them, he was going to have them prescribed along with good quality forearm crutches, for fear that Brian might do greater damage to himself if he tried to improvise something. After that Brian, self-exiled from the world of the able-bodied, began to be accepted as yet another harmlessly eccentric member of a clan with far more than its share of them. In the Meadows family you can really do almost anything as long as you make something of your life in the family business or in public service and stay out of the courts and the media.

Brian's family lived on the vast family compound, not far from the ancestral mansion now occupied by his grandfather. However, visits with the old man who had attained demigod status were not frequent. The first time Grandpere Emile saw Brian on crutches he was still in his cast. The next time a cousin two years older was also on crutches with a sprained ankle, which may have led the old man to think that Brian's problem was of a like transitory nature. Brian had just turned twelve and had been in his legbraces nearly a year before his grandfather saw him in them, at his eighty-fifth birthday party. When the photographer called the fifteen grandchildren to have their picture taken with their grandfather, the old man had Brian, the youngest of them, stand next to his wheelchair, not the wood and wicker of the formal portrait but the most up-to-date modern lightweight. After the picture was taken Brian's grandfather startled him as reached out and drew him to himself. The old man ran his hands over the custom tailored blazer covering the muscular bulk of Brian's arms and shoulders as his eyes measured the disproportion already appearing between his grandson's upper and lower body. Looking up at him he chuckled softly as he said, "That's my good, strong boy. You be yourself!" In that moment Brian realized they were bonded by the same deep need, so little understood by those who did not have it.

For the remaining four years of his grandfather's life the old man often summoned Brian to accompany him in a private lunch, usually preceded by a swim together in the mansion's heated indoor pool. Grandpere Emile's mind and body, other than the stunted birdlike legs now in their ninth decade of atrophy, retained the vigor of a man twenty years his junior until he died unexpectedly in his sleep at eighty-nine. The two would sometimes speak of how their earliest memories were full of the need to become as they now were, and of the price they paid for inner calm. The old man tried to impress on Brian how the family's position of privilege made it easy for them to take care of their need to live as disabled persons, and that he in turn was that much more obliged to accept people as he found them and do what he could to promote their happiness. In what turned out to be their last visit Grandpere Emile told Brian the tale his own grandfather Jacques had told him, of Jacques' youngest uncle Jean-Pierre du Chateaneuf du Pré (from which the family name had been anglicized to Meadows), the only member of the family who did not flee the atrocities of the French Revolution.