The Lovely Shoes

by Susan Shreve

  Franny crossed her fingers, closed her eyes tight, and took off the top of the box.

  “Gorgeous!” her mother said even before the shoes were out of the box. “Oh, Franny, I’m so excited.”

  The shoes were soft black leather, a little bow at the base, flat with a round toe. The left foot shoe with its high lift that would even out the length of her legs was remarkably made. Although the lift was obvious to Franny, it would be difficult for a person looking at Franny with her shoes on to tell that one shoe was quite so different from the other.

  “Try them on,” Margaret Hall said.

  Franny leaned over and slipped her right foot easily into the shoe. Her left foot, however, kept getting stuck as she pushed it until her mother brought her a shoe horn and edged the foot into the shoe.

  “Beautiful, darling,” her mother said. “Walk. Walk across the room.”

  And Franny did.

  She stood very straight, moving easily side to side, balancing on the flat of her foot.

  “Perfect, Franny,” her mother said softly. “Look at them in the mirror on the door.”

  Franny opened the downstairs closet door with its full-length mirror and looked at her feet, surprised at how small and normal they appeared.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” she asked her mother about the shoes.

  “They’re beautiful, Franny.”

  Her mother made tea, her father made himself an old-fashioned with bourbon and water and a maraschino cherry and turned the news on the television. Franny sat with her mother and talked about Filippo and the workshop at Ferragamo’s, about the cheerleading squad and the spring dance.

  When Zeke came home after playing at Benji’s, tears running down his cheeks because Benji had called him a bear cub, Franny grabbed him around the waist and pulled him into her lap.

  “My very own fuzzy bear cub,” she said as he finished the rest of her cookies.

  Upstairs, while her mother cooked dinner, Franny took the thin, crispy letter from Filippo out of the envelope. Behind it folded double was the drawing he had done of Franny, looking very much as she remembered it, only prettier.

  Dear Francine,

  I am sending the drawing I made of your face. I have now made the painting, which is hanging on the wall of my studio. I have given you blue eyes, striped with yellow which I believe to be the color of your sparkling eyes, and a red sweater just as I said I would. You are beautiful. I will keep this painting forever but I hope you will visit soon, maybe this summer and I can show it to you. Love, Filippo del Santo

  She lay very still on her back listening to the banging of pots and pans in the kitchen, her father on the phone with the hospital as usual, the sound of the television which Zeke was watching before dinner.

  When her mother knocked to tell her that dinner was ready, Franny slipped Filippo’s letter without the drawing in the drawer with her own collection of letters to him which she had never sent.

  “Coming,” she said, taking the drawing downstairs with her.

  Her mother had lit the candles so the dining room was almost dark and it felt very like the trattorias where they had eaten in the evenings in Florence. She had made chicken with olives and artichokes and little potatoes, food she had learned about in Florence.

  Beside Franny’s place there was a wine glass.

  “We’re having a celebration of shoes,” Zeke said from his place at the table. “You get to drink wine, Franny.”

  Franny slipped into her chair next to her father, who still had on his suit from the hospital, his medical bag beside him.

  “May I have wine for the shoe celebration?” Zeke asked.

  Franny’s father poured a thimbleful of wine in Zeke’s glass.

  “To your lovely shoes,” Dr. Hall said.

  “So are you going to the spring dance, Franny?” Zeke asked. “My friend Jono’s sister is in your class and she got a new dress for the dance.”

  “What do you plan to wear, Franny?” her father asked.

  “I don’t even know whether I’ll go or not,” Franny said, reaching in her pocket to take out the drawing that Filippo had made. “But if I do I’ll wear a periwinkle blue dress.”

  “Eleanor called to see if you’d come to the Knights of Columbus Hall and decorate with her tonight,” Margaret said. “She’s feeling unhappy about Mikey Houston.”

  “Of course I’ll help decorate,” Franny said.

  “Mama said you got a boyfriend in Italy,” Zeke said.

  “I did get a boyfriend,” Franny said. “He made a drawing of me.”

  She unfolded the drawing and handed it to Zeke. “How come it’s just your face?” Zeke asked, taking the drawing and examining it. “Because he likes my face.” “Your face?”

  “Yes, Zekey, he likes my face.” She passed it to her father.

  Dr. Hall lifted the candle over the drawing so he could see it better.

  “This is beautiful, Franny.”

  “It’s just me, not exactly beautiful,” Franny said.

  “But it is, darling,” her mother said, taking the drawing from Dr. Hall, holding it up so it was backlit by the hanging light in the dining room. “He has captured something wonderful in your face.”

  “Like what?” Zeke asked.

  “Light,” Margaret said. “Franny’s face is full of light.”

  Zeke leaned over the picture, his chin in his hand.

  “I don’t see where the light is,” he said.

  “Everywhere,” Franny said and they all laughed.

  Margaret cleared the dishes, blew out the candles.

  “I like the blue formal for tomorrow night,” she said.

  Franny didn’t reply. Before she’d left for Italy, the school dance had been the map of her failure as a girl with boys.

  Now the dance had lost the air in its balloon and become something that Franny could do or not. More or less like every other occasion in high school, birthday parties and movies, trips to Cleveland.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, she read Filippo’s letter again. She wished he had given her a photograph to put in a frame to keep on her bedside table. She would ask him for one. After all, he had a picture of her in a red sweater in his studio.

  “Do you want to try on the dress and shoes together?” her mother called from her bedroom.

  “Sure,” Franny said, putting the letter back in her drawer.

  She slipped on the black ballet slippers, put the periwinkle blue strapless dress over her head.

  “Look at yourself in my full-length mirror,” her mother said. “You’ll be surprised.”

  It was almost seven, dusk smoking the horizon. The members of St. James Episcopal Church choir were walking past the front window of the Halls’ house on their way to choir practice, the church bells ringing the hour. Zeke, his cowboy gun in its holster strapped around his waist, had mounted his imaginary horse and galloped into the bedroom, watching Franny reflected in the mirror.

  Margaret Hall was stretched out on the bed in her black trousers and high-heeled strappy shoes, her hair swept up in a loose bun like a movie star.

  “What do you think?” her mother asked as Franny stood in front of the mirror.

  “I think I look like the girl Filippo del Santo imagined when he saw me.”

  “Not the girl he imagined, darling,” she said. “The girl he saw.”

  Outside the window, the wind had picked up, whipping the branches against the bedroom window. Zeke galloped his horse over to the window and looked out.

  “Do you think it’s a tornado?” he asked.

  “We don’t get tornadoes in Ohio,” Franny said, sitting on her parents’ bed, settling on the pillow next to her mother, her legs stretched out in front of her, the toes of her ballet slippers barely visible under the periwinkle skirt.

  “You know Filippo didn’t even notice my legs.”

  “He noticed you, didn’t he?”

  “I guess he did.” Franny smiled, slipping her hand into her mother�
�s, and for a while, until she heard her father coming upstairs to bed, they leaned against the headboard side by side, listening to the sound of the leaves rustling like dancers, watching the lights flicker out in the houses across the street until it was dark.

  WHAT IS TRUE

  The Lovely Shoes is an invented story, but some of the things that happen in the book happened to me, although in a different way. When I was eighteen months old, I caught the disease polio, against which children today (and since 1953) are inoculated, and so polio no longer exists in the United States. It is a neurological disease and the form that I contracted paralyzed me for several weeks. Then some of the muscles in my legs returned and some did not. I spent two years living off and on at the Warm Springs Polio Foundation between the ages of eleven and thirteen, having surgeries that made it possible for me to walk and run and, in fact, become a cheerleader, which I certainly wanted to be. Franny is born crippled and crippled was the word used to describe anyone whose legs didn’t work properly or were twisted or deformed in any way. We no longer use that word, considered insulting in our current vocabulary, but growing up I was called a cripple. Nor do we use gimp, but I remember absolutely the day in fifth grade when a boy who I still know and then loved called me gimp, and I think about that every time I see him now.

  There are two incidents in the book true to my own life. My mother bought me regular shoes at G. C. Murphy’s, a five-and-ten store, to wear to my first formal dance. Because they didn’t fit properly, she stuffed them with toilet paper. While I was dancing with Kirk White, the toilet paper got loose and to my humiliation, it trailed behind my long dress. I headed quickly to the girls’ room where I hid out in one of those cubicles with my feet up under my chin so no one would know I was there until the dance was over. And that was my last dance for a very long time.

  When I was about fourteen, my mother read a story about Salvatore Ferragamo who in fact did — and his company still does — make beautiful shoes. She wrote Ferragamo a letter and told him about me and my problem at the dance and asked could he make me a pair of shoes. By the time we got to Italy, Ferragamo had died, so I never met him, although in the story, Franny Hall does. But his children made me a last, and for several years, I ordered shoes from pictures in magazines, even the shoes I wore in my wedding, and they came by mail. I would have continued ordering these lovely shoes had not the factory with the lasts had a fire and my last was destroyed.

  And so this book about Franny Hall, who is not me, and Margaret Hall, who is not unlike my mother, owes a great debt to my real mother, who would not stop wishing for lovely shoes for her daughter, and to Salvatore Ferragamo and his lovely family, who made it possible for me to wear shoes that were not stuffed with toilet paper.

  Susan Shreve

  Washington, D.C.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I am so lucky in Arthur Levine for his fierce editorial standards and his child’s heart. To the great group at Arthur A. Levine Books and Scholastic — what an honor to be published by you — and to Emily Clement, vigilant, funny, and smart. It goes without saying that my determined, beautiful mother made possible my story, with the generous collaboration of the Ferragamos and their lovely shoes.

  About the Author

  Susan Shreve drew from her own experiences with her mother, custom-made Ferragamo shoes, and the challenges of a childhood battle with polio as inspiration for The Lovely Shoes. Of Warm Springs, her memoir of this time, USA Today said, “Shreve has a dramatic story to tell, and she does so with subtlety and grace.” Susan Shreve has written many books for young people, including Kiss Me Tomorrow and Blister. She lives in Washington, DC.

  Copyright

  Text copyright © 2011 by Susan Shreve

  Cover design by Marijka Kostiw

  Cover Photo-Illustration © 2011 Marc Tauss

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, the LANTERN LOGO, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shreve, Susan Richards.

  The lovely shoes / Susan Shreve. — 1st ed.

  p.cm.

  Summary: In 1950s Ohio, ninth-grader Franny feels isolated and self-conscious at high school because of her deformed leg and feet, but her irrepressibly high-spirited mother is determined to find shoes for Franny to wear at the school dances.

  ISBN 978-0-439-68049-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  [1. People with disabilities — Fiction. 2. Self-acceptance — Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters — Fiction. 4. High schools — Fiction. 5. Schools — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S55915Lp 2011

  [Fic] — dc22

  2010027937

  First edition, June 2011

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  eISBN: 978-0-545-38869-6