Thomas McGuane - The Sporting Club

“The true Quinn!” yelled Stanton in an opening bid, as Quinn entered briskly. “I feel certain that he can tell you.” Five faces turned to the door quizzically. Quinn knew them all right. “Tell how you touched down in that crop-dusting plane and tore up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” Quinn pulled the door shut behind him, perplexed at having to whip something together so soon. Janey leaned in repose on the piano beside Stanton. Quinn wondered what fatality obliged him to continue. The five had moved around him and he addressed himself to them.

“Picture me,” he said, “in my Steerman biplane dusting away, as it were. Suddenly, I touch down and tear up a hundred yards of turnip seedlings.” This seemed a suitably inane place to stop. Stanton was delighted. One of the five coughed.

“Tell them what happened when you returned to the airport many months later,” said Stanton slithering onto the piano. This would be difficult to play.

“Many months later,” Quinn began, ransacking his brain.

“When you returned to the airport—” One of the five, Fortescue by name, assisted.

“That’s right, and the Steerman biplane had been left neglected out in the field. I couldn’t find it. ‘Where’s my Steerman biplane?’ I asked a farmer. ‘Out there,’ he said. ‘Out where?’ ‘Out there in the turnip patch.’” Quinn considered this merely an escape maneuver; but Stanton was much affected. He fell off the piano, for one thing, and could be heard more or less barking from the floor. Quinn went over to the table and made himself a drink. Purely on the basis of Stanton’s response, he awarded himself a certain number of points. He looked around. The five were still standing, not having yet broken the crescent they had formed. Then, two at the right end, Sturtevant and Olds, looked at each other and began to move. This precipitated a general movement among the others who, yes, they were beginning to move now, mostly just turning in their tracks, but there was sign of life here, the play of expression on the faces like shadows on glass; and before long they had become part of the crowd of thirty who talked and leaned into each other’s smoke. Quinn joined them and ingratiated himself by starting up a conversation with Fortescue about his collection of military miniatures, the largest in the country. “… my point being,” Fortescue concluded, “that such quantities of horse are scarcely imaginable at Ypres—” he was talking about a competitors’ collection “—and therefore this fool had made the whole battle implausible to me. I don’t expect perfection. After all, I have displayed hussars with paint bubbles on their chests and artillerymen divided by the seams of sloppy casting. But I find a historical lapse like this abhorrent.” Quinn said that he was putting it mildly.

Meanwhile, another member named Scott, an obsequious professor to whom the academic life had given an avid taste for the outside world, greeted everyone who came through the screen door — many were entering for the third and fourth time — with the phrase, “Nice to see you.” Quinn’s main fear all along was Stanton and that is why he buried himself in this group. Spengler, the chronicler of the club, was explaining his race against time to finish his account of the club’s first hundred years by the centennial on the Fourth. “Nice to see you,” said Scott, looking past them with his diluted eyes. There were under twenty-five hairs in his moustache. “My account,” said Spengler, “is very thorough and does not quail before realities.”

“Nice to see you.”

“Where have you gotten your information?” Quinn asked.

“Letters and diaries mostly. There was an early account, done around the turn of the century, which I take issue with. This was written by a local boy who resented the club and who was not a member. The name of his account was Hellfire in the Woods and tried to prove that the club was founded for disreputable reasons. I take issue, Quinn.”

“Nice to see you, Bob.”

“As well you should,” said Quinn. He could see Stanton craning his neck. He was after Quinn.

“And I put it right on the line. Everybody asks me if I am afraid to write my chronicle before I see what is in the time capsule and I answer that thorough research has no fears. The thing is this, the first ten years are terra incognita and my job is to reconstruct them. I do not quail, Quinn.” Stanton had the scent now. He was moving. Quinn’s stomach got colder.

“Nice to see you.”

Olson came in. Thin, intelligent Jack Olson, native of this Northern country, was wearing an apron and carrying a tray, holding the tray aloft on his left hand and with the other unloading snacks, bonbons and party favors. As Stanton went in one end of the group, Quinn squeezed out the other and went over to Olson. “Why aren’t you fishing?” Olson asked. Quinn liked the quiet sanity of his voice.

“I don’t know why,” he confessed.

“The big duns will be on the water. I got a handful of nymphs out of the feeder creek and the shuck was all dark, almost black on the top where the wings show. Why don’t you pass this up?” Olson said contemptuously of the party. He knew Quinn wouldn’t misunderstand him.

“What about you?”

“Tell you what, I’ll have a look at the river. If I got it right about the hatch, I’ll come get you.”

“That’d be good. I’d love to go. What about Vernor?” Olson looked over at Stanton who made his way from conversation to conversation toward them. He didn’t conceal the hesitation before saying, “Why not.” Quinn nodded, then turned hopelessly back toward the group to find Stanton opposite him, having sandwiched some of the older members between himself and the unwitting Quinn. He was encouraging them in sentimental reminiscence. “Autumn boulevards,” he was saying. “A leaf falls slowly to the sidewalk, right?”

“That’s what happens,” said an old gentleman sadly.

“How about when you first found that old portrait of Mummy in her wedding gown?” Assenting murmurs. “And the portrait is in an oval frame?” More of them. “Now, what about this: the summer house is boarded up. The luggage is out on the porch. The refreshment stand is closed for the winter. Already, the ocean just isn’t as blue—”

“Oh, gawd!” said one of the women morosely. Stanton seized the moment to begin singing softly and in the most cloying voice possible, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot —Come on, won’t you join me, fellows!” The others, staring and unwilling, began. Stanton stopped them priggishly. Quinn saw Janey a short distance away, watching and talking to no one. By this time, Stanton had gathered most of them in front of the piano. He was running back and forth with a purely imaginary choirmaster’s scuttle, adjusting shoulders and making people stand up straight. The others began to look on. “Come, ladies!” Stanton cried joyously. “You join us, too, won’t you?” Some of the women who had stood aside piled in behind. “James!” he called, letting his eye fall horribly on Quinn. “Do us the honors on the piano!”

“No, I—”

“James!” The contemptuous disappointment that Quinn had seen when he offered the box lunches at Mackinac began to spread on Stanton’s face.

“I may as well,” Quinn said, overpowered. Stanton bent to the storage box beside the bandstand. He stood up with a tuberous, corroded saxophone in his hands, the reed of which he inspected earnestly. He pulled up a folding chair next to the piano where Quinn was now seated and sat down. Quinn watched his useless fingering of the rigid keys. “Now! On three, you all begin to sing and Quinn and I begin to play!”

“Sing what!” any number of people asked at once, and angrily too. They were not happy with this.