Читать книгу Cass Timberlane - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 15

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

THE ZEBRA SISTERS

Table of Contents

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-in-Law, 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-in-law 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-in-Law, 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-in-Law 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.