Ruin by Leigh Seippel

Author:Leigh Seippel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Point Press
Published: 2022-06-13T17:07:38+00:00

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Before setting out on the long road north to the Farm I do have one appointment at a club. When I told Arthur I still could not go fishing with him for a while because of my beer sales trip to Manhattan, he insisted I try the New York Fly Fishing Association. Where he has long been a member, since the years when he was a surgeon at New York Presbyterian. I, a do-it-yourself fisherman for three months, have never heard of the place.

It’s hard even on Google to find the address. But it’s there in a double wide brownstone a little off Central Park West, convenient to the lake where in 1905 the club built its private competition casting pier. So it is I ring a street bell set within a brass plaque so discreet the letters FFA can hardly be discerned. And inside climb a steep grade granite staircase that probably maimed some whiskeyed up members back in the Roaring Twenties and Crying Thirties. For at some point they put in an elevator chair on a rail. As I climb up along a gallery of good fishing paintings and cartoons and fish mummies, it’s not hard to imagine this hallway shaking with late night laughter as the chair levitates somebody down toward his safe bed. My wheeled suitcase full of beer could use the chair, but I just carry it up strong young buck–style.

The manager greets me, a comely middle-aged woman. But has to go back to the phone awhile. I look around waiting. This feels like a club boys would dream of, an old boys club festooned for over a century with relict fishing stuff. Here and there glass casements contain historic patterns of hundreds of flies, styled from discreet to garish. I see a lit glass case display of reels ancient to eccentric. Open racks bristle old rods that must have stories to sense if you touch them. Stuffed fish are at a minimum, but in this cavernous room there is a long floor-to-ceiling library I walk to inspect. I can guess every book of thousands is somehow about fly fishing.

From behind me the steward in white uniform says, “Biggest and best in the world.”

I turn to look. And in a blink sense she’s the type you can talk to as if, beforehand, a lot has been almost said of unseen things. Henry James’s kind of gal. “Do these books get opened?”

“Our members fish around the world. But they tend to be well read too.”

As she says this I look down the room where a small group in dark suits talks at the far end of a 50-foot-long table. I hear only rumble. About zebra trout of Swaziland I may as well guess. I clear my throat, being in another diction world now, “Well, as I said on the phone, I hope you have some beer drinkers here.” The diners sit among sherry glasses. I see one iced tea or immense sherry.

“Oh my yes, we have beer and sandwiches every tying evening gathering.

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