"Whitfield, that's enough," Mr. Langford said.
"In July," Whit said, as if he hadn't heard, "I came around the side of the shed and there was my mother's racket in some girl's hand. Some groundskeeper's daughter, hitting it against a board. With tape all over it and the strings knotted. And I was so—" He stopped. "I wanted to hurt somebody. And she was the one standing there. That's all it was. That's the whole thing. It wasn't about her at all. And it should have been about my father, and I didn't have the nerve." He turned and looked at Dee, straight at her. "She plays exactly the way my mother used to. Every ball one more ball. I knew it the first time she hit a lob today. I could've cried."
Nobody said anything. Somewhere down on the lawn one of the kitchen girls let out a breath.
Mr. Langford set his bourbon down very carefully on the napkin. He stood up. He was a big man and he took up a great deal of room.
"We're going home," he said quietly.
"In a minute." Whit picked up the sheet of club stationery off the table. "You signed this. In front of all of them. I know there's an Article Six, Mr. Dabney, I've read the bylaws too. It says non-members can't hold privileges. It doesn't say a thing about a member's personal guest, as long as the member's in good standing." He held the paper out to his father. "Are you in good standing, Daddy?"
It was then that old Mrs. Eugenia Rhett spoke up from the wicker chaise at the end of the veranda, where she'd been sitting since the bridge game broke up at noon. She was eighty-one. She had won the club ladies' singles in 1931 and 1932, and nobody had heard her say a word all day.
"Gordon," she said. "Sit down and listen to your boy. And then do what you put your name to."
Mr. Langford turned.
"Miss Eugenia, with respect—"
"With respect nothing." She set her sherry on the side table. "I was watching that match from up here with my opera glasses, and I'll tell you what I saw. I saw Pemberton call a good ball out because you were up on those bleachers glaring at him. I saw that child hand your son her own tea when she could have had the game for nothing. And I saw a man who works in our locker room know the rules of our own exhibition better than our own professional." She looked down the steps toward Mr. Grant, and for a moment her pale old face changed. "Isaiah. How long have you worked here?"
"Twenty-two years, Miss Eugenia."
"Twenty-two years," said Mrs. Rhett, "and I believe that's the first full sentence I've heard out of you. And it was correct." She turned back to Mr. Langford. "This club used to mean that a person's word meant something, Gordon. I don't know when that went. Maybe when we started letting men buy their way in with a heron in a hat. But if you don't pay that girl's way to Columbia, I'll pay it myself, out of my own pocketbook, this evening, and I'll tell every soul at the Carolina Yacht Club next weekend why I had to."
Nobody laughed. Nobody coughed it into anything.