But Schmidt had suddenly lost interest. Turned to a total stranger at the bar and asked, ‘Jack, what’s your frank opinion of a woman who’ll go to bed with a man she don’t even know his name?’
He’d torture himself like that, as lovers always have.
For what would begin when he’d wheel into Mama’s was one of those mysteries born only in brothels – a relationship with a deep river’s surpassing strength: that had swept two unready people into its current and now carried them past dumb faces on the shore. Faces awe-struck or compassionate at sight of so strong a woman and so strong a man suddenly made more weak than those still safe on shore.
Finnerty was holding the big door wide when Schmidt rolled in.
Like a statue of serenity calmly smiling.
‘Hallie! At last your husband’s come!’ Mama called at once.
He had a greeting and a smile for every girl in the place but Hallie. Floralee kissed his big hand, Frenchy stroked his hair dark yet silvered, the one half-out-of-her-mind child and the other with no mind to be out of, letting the pair of them compete to see which could get his straps unbuckled first. When each stepped back with a captured strap it was as though his stumps had springs – he leaped right into the center of the divan, tottered, regained his balance and glanced all around with triumphant pride.
Yet had not so much as noticed Hallie. Instead he shoved his hands down his pockets and came up with his palms filled with nickels, dimes, even half dollars – ‘Count it, girls! Count it!’ – and slung every cent into the mildly astonished air – ‘Count it! Count it all!’
Frenchy and Floralee went down on all fours, diving under divans, hopping like rabbits, scurrying like mice. In a moment Kitty Twist followed, crawling, creeping, elbowing the others.
But the sallow woman in the portiere standing so silently never moved, though a coin rolled right to her feet.
‘The most generous man I’ve ever known,’ Mama decided right there.
‘Just buying like everyone else as far as I can see,’ Kitty Twist perceived.
‘I notice when he’s “buying” you’re right in there with your elbow in everybody’s eye getting your full share,’ Hallie reminded the new child.
‘You get yours,’ Kitty told Hallie quickly – ‘You stoop like everyone else.’
‘Why, I make my living here, honey, if that’s what you mean,’ Hallie replied without heat, ‘what line of work are you in?’
Kitty grew more careful after that, for as much as the women heckled one another about their dates, they spared Hallie’s relationship to Schmidt.
‘You in the brown dress,’ he called to her as though he had not noticed her till now, ‘step out here where we can see what you got.’
Hallie was obliged to stand alone in the parlor’s center between Schmidt and the juke’s unblinking eye. Like a sultan, he gripped the point of his little brown beard as he studied her manner of walking. And like a sultan swung his hand, to indicate he was now ready to view her from behind.
‘Is this one healthy?’ he asked Mama after a moment. ‘I hold you responsible.’
But Mama was counting her beads, the others were looking out window or door – it was plain they felt their big daddy was overdoing things tonight.
Big Dad didn’t feel he was overdoing a thing. He slid down off the divan and kneewalked around his selection.
And turning her head on her olive throat to follow the torso as it stumped, she thought, ‘What a man he must have been!’ For even on stumps Schmidt moved with grace.
‘I’ll have a go at this one,’ he decided aloud, and swung himself after her through the portiere, his head just barely higher than her waist, with the satisfied pride of a man who has driven a cunning bargain.
But the moment the door shut behind them both pride and satisfaction fled – he seized her hand, kissed each separate finger, pressed his head hard right under her heart and clasped her as though she were the life he had lost. It was the stumps made him act like he had, he told her. It was all the fault of the stumps.
Hallie stood quite still, pitying the power that could not be contained. And after a while smiled down, stroked his hair and agreed as with a child: yes, it was all the fault of his stumps.
To such tenderness he reacted like an enormous cat. And rolled within his massive arms, pressed to the great cave of his chest, his lion’s breath against her breast, she felt his passion relentlessly driving. And then it was as though no man till Legless Schmidt had possessed her.
Many had rented her, none had possessed her. Not for one moment, not even to the man she had married, had Hallie been subjugated as this shattered athlete subjugated her. To be reduced to a thing for the use of lust was her trade, and to that trade she was long resigned. But to feel, below his lust, love running like a river in flood terrified her; for she abandoned herself to it, she lost herself in it, she could not help herself against it. And then was ashamed – not that she had given herself to a cripple, but that she had violated the first rule of her craft.
There were moments with him when she cried weakly and begged his flesh, as if it were something apart from him, to let her be. And at the same moment drawing his flesh so tight and deep toward her heart, so fierce not to let him escape her, that the man himself was brought close to tears as he lay back limp and done.
Schmidt had never felt a woman like that before. With him it was as if he had never had a woman completely till Hallie. Only with her, not until her, never at any moment except those with her was he a man, able, loved, possessing and possessed – his own true man again.
In her he spent a lifetime’s wrath. In him she too lived once more. Nine Christmases she had been buried, and twice that many for him. And with each time together, each lived a little while again.
Once, waking from sleep she became aware again of how the Santa Fe wheels had rolled back his thighs, one at the hip and one at the knee, into raw volcanic folds. She threw the sheet across him to conceal, at once, his deformity and her own disgust.
‘I’m afraid you’ll catch cold,’ she pretended.
‘Don’t worry’ – she hadn’t fooled him for a moment – ‘you don’t look no better to me than I do to you.’
It always ended like that. And she never tried directly to answer his insults, as bitter now that he’d had her as before.
‘I don’t want to go through this anymore,’ she told him what she had told him often. ‘I’m clearing out.’
‘Sister, if you think I’m going to say “Please don’t go,” you’re barking up the wrong tree. When I get a bit of the booze in me it don’t make no difference what girl I pick. All you tramps look alike to me.’
‘In that case you won’t miss me. So goodbye.’
But after he had dressed and she still lay on the bed he stumped to the dresser with a handful of bills. She lay with eyes closed pretending she didn’t know what he was up to.
‘There’s a hundred or so under your comb and brush,’ he told her – ‘that’s one way to anywhere. See you in jail.’ And so, having salvaged his pride at the cost of his heart, he left.
‘I might just take you up on that one of these days,’ Hallie promised herself after he’d left.
Then in the damps and glooms of her little room, Hallie slept.
Schmidt’s greatest joy was Armless Charlie, a panhandler whose face was a mask of fright and whose arms ended in delicate nibs, more like fingered fins than hands, where another man’s elbows would be. What stray wind off what derelict’s row had blown him down Perdido Street nobody knew. But there he was with a dime between his teeth, placing it carefully on the bar – ‘Listen to this,’ – Schmidt would command silence. And in the silence the beggar would ask, in a boyish lisp out of some eastern preparatory schooclass="underline"