Hal horizontal in V.R.5 — "he returned with a new bride…"
he returned with a new bride the Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf—the huge square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon’s right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle.
Context
Hal flat on the Viewing Room carpet, free-associating through family history: C.T.'s mother, the Moms's stepmother, read off a wedding photo in full clinical deformity-catalogue — achondroplasia, the phocomelic arms — in Hal's flattened anhedonic register. Deformity is in this family's stock, which is exactly where the passage is headed next.