The black Chuck Taylors were another matter. On Friday morning Mr. Grant handed her a paper sack at the Ebenezer gate, and in it was a pair of white canvas Converse in her size, and he would not say where they came from.
* * *
On Friday, the day before the match, Mr. Langford came down to Court One himself.
Dee saw him from the maintenance road. He walked out onto the clay in his loafers—you weren't supposed to walk on the clay in hard-soled shoes, it left marks, her father had to brush them out—with Coach Pemberton behind him, and he stood on the baseline and bounced on the balls of his feet like he was testing a mattress. Then he called her father over.
She couldn't hear what they said. But when her father came back to the shed he got the big roller out, the half-ton one, and started up the tractor, and drove it to the hose bib at the back of Court One and stood there with his hand on the valve for a long time without turning it.
"What did he say?" Dee asked.
"He wants it rolled hard and dry tomorrow," her father said. "No water after six in the morning. Make it play fast, he says. For the spectators."
Dee understood. Fast clay meant fast balls, low bounces, short points. Fast clay meant a serve-and-volley player could get in to the net before anybody could do anything about it. Fast clay meant every one of those lobs she'd hit at Ebenezer would come down and skid away instead of sitting up.
"Are you going to do it?"
Her father took his hand off the valve. He looked out at Court One, at the white lines he'd nailed down and brushed every morning for eleven years, the windscreen and the little bleachers, the clubhouse up the hill with its veranda and its ceiling fans.
"Har-Tru's got a way it's supposed to be," he said. "You water it at dawn and you water it at noon and you roll it in between, and it plays like Har-Tru. That's how I've kept it every day I've been here. Rich man doesn't like how it plays, he can find somebody else to keep it." He started the roller. "Tomorrow morning I'm going to keep it the same as always. Not one drop more. Not one drop less."
* * *
Saturday, September first, was ninety-four degrees at noon and the humidity was so thick the marsh steamed.
By one-thirty the little bleachers on Court One were full, and the overflow had spread out along the fence on lawn chairs and coolers, men in seersucker and Madras and Bermuda shorts, women in wide hats with their drinks sweating in their hands. Somebody had set up a striped tent by the clubhouse with a barbecue going, and the smoke drifted down across the courts and mixed with the smell of the clay and the marsh and suntan lotion. Inside the clubhouse, through the open French doors, a television was showing the early rounds of the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows, and every so often a cheer went up from the bar when somebody hit something good.