Mario's birth and body (pp. 313–314)
Bradypedestrianism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like block feet: not only flat but perfectly square, good for kicking knob-fumbled doors open with but too short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis in his lower spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge of pitching face-first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether given a bit of a shove from behind by his older brother Orin or no.
Context
The gait: block feet, lordosis, the permanent forward list "as if into a wind." Carlisle's reading of the whole section hangs on this posture — inclined ever forward, the book's counterexample to cultivated passivity — and the scene's cruelty ledger again files Orin's shoves inside a casual dependent clause.