Chapter 12

The select golf-and-tennis association of Grand Republic was the Heather Club, three miles from the business center, on a peninsula reaching out from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake. Surrounding it was the smart new real-estate development called the Country Club District, habitat of such gilded young married couples as the Harley Bozards, the Don Pennlosses, the Beecher Filligans, and the playground of Jay Laverick, the town’s principal professional Gay Bachelor, who happened to be a widower. The houses were Spanish, like Hollywood, or French, like Great Neck, and the Heather club-house was a memory of Venice, with balconies, iron railings, and a canal thirty-six feet long.

To the Heather Club in late June Cass came for one of the famous Saturday Evening Keno Games. Keno (a sport beloved by the more aged and pious Irishwomen also) consists in placing a bean upon a number called out by some swindler unknown, through an unseen loud-speaker, and after you have breathlessly placed enough beans upon enough numbers, you fail to get the prize. It is not so intellectual as chess or skipping the rope, but it is a favorite among Grand Republic’s leading citizens, who gather at the Heather Club on every Saturday evening in summer, to drink cocktails and play keno and then drink a lot more.

With only one cocktail in him, Cass was deaf to the joys of keno this evening, and he wished that he were deaf to the crackling voices about him at the dozen long tables, as he somberly put down his beans. Roy Drover’s shouts of “Send us a thirty-two, baby, send us a thirty-two, come on, baby, come on, hand us a thirty-two” merely rivaled Queenie Havock’s parrot shrieks and Norton Trock’s high giggling, while Eve Champeris had a flushed mild imbecility about her lily face. Delia Lent, a purposeful lady though rich, sat beside Cass, babbling about trout-fishing, but presently he could hear nothing that she said. All the hundred voices were woven into a blanket of sound that covered Cass and choked him.

Abruptly, while Mrs. Lent stared at his lack of manners, Cass bolted from the table, charged toward the bar. He would have to have a quantity of drinks, if he was going to survive these pleasures. He passed an alcove in which two grim women, too purposeful about gambling to waste time on keno, were hour after hour yanking the handles of twenty-five-cent slot machines. He passed a deep chair in which sat two married people—not married to each other. He looked into the card room where Boone Havock, Mayor Stopple, Judge Flaaten, Counselor Oliver Beehouse, and Alfred Limbaugh, the hardware king, were playing tough poker in a refined way.

Jinny’s spirit walked with him derisively.

He had almost reached the forgetfulness to be found at the bar when beyond it, in the Ladies’ Lounge, he saw Chris Grau, having a liqueur with Lillian Drover. He stopped, in cold guiltiness, and the imaginary Jinny fled.

He had not seen Chris for ten days, and as she looked at him, all her kindness in her good brown eyes, he shivered. But he obediently chain-ganged into the lounge. Lillian Drover rose, tittering, in washed-out imitation of her husband’s humor, “I guess I better leave you two young lovers alone, if I know what’s good for me.”

Chris’s smile indicated that that would be fine.

The Ladies’ Lounge, which had been named that by Diantha Marl, after having been christened the Rubens Room by the Milwaukee architect-decorator who had done the club in the finest Moorish style known in his city, was a harem, with grilled windows, a turquoise-blue tiled floor, and a resigned fountain. It was suitable to the harem feeling that Chris should be wearing a loose-throated lilac dress.

Cass sat facing her, with an entirely mechanical “Can I get you another drink?”

“Not for me. There’s too much drinking here. I’m glad you’re so sober. But then, you always are. It’s these younger people that are breaking down the bulwarks of society with their guzzling and shrieking and indecent dancing.”

“Now, now, Chris, the drunkest person here tonight is Queenie Havock, and she’s well over fifty, and I saw Bernice Claywheel, and she must be over forty, out dancing on the terrace with Jay Laverick as though she expected to eat him.”

“Ye-es I know, but—You simply love the sweet young things, don’t you, Cassy—Cass.”

“M?”

“I’m sure you had a wonderful time with your beautiful unknown at the Unstable, two weeks ago!”

“Why, I—Yes I did!”

“And did you enjoy holding hands in the moonlight?”

He tried to be jaunty. “Enjoyed it very much. Especially as I don’t suppose I’ll have another chance, alas!”

—Why don’t you tell Chris to go to the devil? She’s not your guardian.

“So you don’t think you’ll see her again, eh, Cass darling. Honestly, now—honestLEE—you know I’m not the nagging sort of girl that would even ask who she was, and certainly I’m not the kind that would go around hinting and whispering that a man who isn’t so young any more—”

“What do you—”

“—is making a fool of himself over some young tramp. I was just teasing you about this girl. Of course I KNOW you’d never fall for her, whoever she is. So let’s not say anything more about it, dear.”

“I hadn’t said anything at all!”

“That’s what I say. Honestly, I was just joking. Now tell me: will you get the Fleeber–Biskness case in the fall, or will they settle it?”

Now the affaire Fleeber–Biskness was a fascinating controversy, to Judge Timberlane, but it had not seemed so to the crass public. It was a conversion case, dealing with the possession of a warehouse 28’ 7” X 62’ 8”. Cass was glad once more to see what a sympathetic brain Chris had and, as he looked at them again, what sleek legs. As the palace of pleasure rang with the bacchanalia of keno, he explained to this willing hearer the low tricks Mr. Biskness was accused of having played with a carload of clay. He stumbled as she crossed her legs and he realized that, with innocent spinster boldness, she had come without stockings.

This was in the prim pre-war era of 1941, when it is true that bathing-suits had been reduced to an emphasized nudity, but when perfect ladies still did not display naked legs in public rooms. The Judge was a person of decorum and modesty, but he was interested.

—Chris would give a lover such solid affection—probably much more than a filly like Jinny Marshland.

Not unmindful of the careless lilac-colored skirt but determined to be high-minded, he went on with the case, winding up, “You understand, that’s only Fleeber’s version, and it’s a matter of record. I’m not giving away any secrets.”

“Sure. I know you never tell tales out of court,” said Chris, fondly.

“If I ever did, you’d be the one person I could rely on. What’s say we have a drink?”

“I’d love to,” gurgled the strange woman in lilac.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

THE ZEBRA SISTERS

The Quimber Girls, better known to the ribald of Grand Republic as the Zebra Sisters, belonged to a real family, lively and devoted, full of anecdotes that began with laughter and, “Oh, do you remember the time when.” Their father, Millard Quimber, who was still alive, aged eighty-one, was the city superintendent of schools from 1895 to 1928. He was referred to in the press as “one of our greatest builders,” because during his reign there had been erected three red-brick school-buildings which looked like red-brick school-buildings. He was also known as a “profound scholar,” because he continually quoted Bobby Burns and Henry Van Dyke and the first two lines of the Iliad, almost in the original Greek.

His three daughters were named Zoe, Zora, and Zeta; they were born between 1890 and 1900; they were fine, big, bouncing hussars of women, hearty at winter sports, discursive about their husbands, all philoprogenitive, all ardent Presbyterians, though with secret desires to be Episcopalians and chic. Their favorite words were family, chickabiddies, earnest, expensive, womanly, jolly, and ice cream.

Their several husbands were derisively referred to at the Heather Club bar as the Brothers-inLaw, Incorporated.

Zoe, the youngest daughter, was married to Harold W. Whittick, the owner of radio station KICH and of Whittick & Bruntz, a two-room advertising agency which existed chiefly to tell a house-hungry world about Wargate Wood Products. When the chairman of a Rotary Club luncheon at which Harold W. was to speak (about Progress) asked him what to say in introduction, Harold W. wrote a description of himself which may stand as modest and accurate:

“Not only the most streamlined but the most up-to-the-second moderne citizen of Grand Republic.”

But Harold W. was, as the chairman laughingly said—you know, kidding him—not himself in Rotary, because he was National Assistant Treasurer of the rival Streamlineup Club, a service organization distinctive in that it had all the speeches BEFORE lunch, when everybody was “still on his toes, full of ginger and not of hash.”

Zora, the middle Zebra, was fondly wed to Duncan Browler, first vice president of the Wargate Corporation, in charge of manufacture. Unlike Harold W. Whittick, he did not make speeches.

The oldest, Zeta, was married to Alfred T. Umbaugh, a gentle and predatory soul who admired his brother-inlaw Harold and who, more nearly than the other two husbands, endured the demands of his wife that he be jolly and amorous. He was the chief owner of the Button Bright Chain of Hardware Stores, twenty-seven of them, all shiny and yellow, scattered through Minnesota and the Dakotas, with one far-flung outpost or consulate in Montana. This imperial standing made him, like Browler, eligible to the Federal and Heather Clubs. Naturally, Whittick had also been admitted to those twin heavens, but with a warning from the committee that he would do well not to get oratorical and forward-looking after his fourth highball, and while he was at the table of the blest, he was about ten feet below the salt.

Harold, Duncan and Alfred were unlike in tempo, but they were all true husbands to the Zebra. All three of them were irritated by their wives but never thought of quitting them, all of them had sons and daughters, all were devoted to golf, fishing, musical-comedy movies, motor boats, and Florida, and all of them had new houses, in the Country Club District, of which they were fiercely proud and for which they would have done murder. None of them was eccentric, except that Harold W. Whittick—just for a josh, everybody said; to show off and try to be different—asserted that he had once voted for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And all of them, though grumblingly, consented to be ruled and extensively discussed by The Family.

They all dined with Grampa Quimber every Sunday noon; and each Thursday, one of the three sisters was hostess to the others and their broods, with the one great-grandchild in The Family, that of the Umbaughs, asleep upstairs. At these feasts, Harold W. Whittick usually told the story about the Irishman and the cigar-counter girl; and there was a good deal of innocent laughter about the time, in 1936, when Mr. Browler got drunk at an Elks’ Convention and bought a small red fire engine.

An unusual feature of the Zebra gatherings was the fifteenth-century frankness with which the sisters reported on the progressive feebleness of their husbands as lovers. They were rugged and healthy girls, and expected a lot, and did not get it. However, they sighed, it was something that neither Harold W. nor Alfred T. nor Duncan “ever so much as looked at any woman outside the home.”

That’s what they thought.

The Brothers-inLaw, Inc. jointly made business trips to Minneapolis, where they stayed at the magnificent Hotel Swanson–Grand, with three connecting bedrooms and a parlor. Of the uses to which these rooms were put, the Sisters knew nothing. The Brothers-inLaw were stalwarts, pledged and reliable, and so were their Grand Republic friends who managed to be in Minneapolis at the same time.

Half an hour after the Brothers’ arrival, the parlor was turned into a complete bar. Within half an hour more, the girls had arrived—not traditional young blondes who glittered, nothing so frigid and boring, but dependable young women of thirty, who worked in offices and banks and stores, who understood hard liquor and liked men.

By two next morning there was a tremendous amount of laughter and communal undressing, to the nervous delight of such Grand Republic visitors as Mayor Stopple, Harley Bozard, Jay Laverick, and Boone Havock.

New York and Chicago and London visitors to Grand Republic, particularly if they were journalists renowned for shrewdness, concluded that Harold W., Alfred T., and Duncan were the most conventional, most standardized, most wife-smothered and children-nagged citizens of our evangelical land, but in truth they belonged among the later Roman Emperors, and he that has never seen Duncan Browler, elder of the Presbyterian Church, standing in his cotton shorts, a lady telephone-supervisor clasped in his right arm, a half-tumbler of straight Dainty Darling Bourbon Whisky waving in his left hand, the while he sings “It’s Time to Go Upstairs,” has only the shallowest notion of the variety of culture in our Grand Republic, a city which, in different dialects, has also been called Grand Rapids and Bangor and Phoenix and Wichita and Hartford and Baton Rouge and Spokane and Rochester and Trenton and Scranton and San Jose and Rutland and Duluth and Dayton and Pittsfield and Durham and Cedar Rapids and Fort Wayne and Ogden and Madison and Nashville and Utica and South Bend and Peoria and Canton and Tacoma and Sacramento and Elizabeth and San Antonio and St. Augustine and Lincoln and Springfieldill and Springfieldmass and Springfieldmo and Ultima Thule and the United States of America.