The Judge Is Reversed (3 page)

He smashed with a kind of fury, angling the ball. It landed inches beyond the side line, bounced hard and true—bounced spitefully toward the base linesman. The linesman moved, moved quickly. He caught the ball and for a moment held it in his hand, looking at it as if it were a strange object, an inimical object. Then he tossed it toward a ballboy and stood up, and looked the length of the court at Doug Mears. He looked for some seconds, and sat down again.

“Game and first set, Mr. Wilson,” the loudspeaker said, in a silence which was curiously sodden. Then, and only then, the audience applauded, but not as if its heart was in applause.

“If I can say something now without shush,” Pam said. “Judge not that ye be not judged. In other words, that's Mr. Blanchard. First cats and then feet. First a woman in fringe, and then poor Mr. Mears.”

“Thirty—love,” the loudspeaker said.

“Poor Mr. Mears,” Pam said again, watching Ted Wilson's third service go for an ace—for an ace at which Mears lunged with no apparent enthusiasm.

“I've heard about the cats,” the man on Pam's right said. He had, apparently, joined them. At tennis matches, spectators are comrades under the skin. “Always think of old Johnny as a tennis man, myself. Used to be—”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “
That
Blanchard.”

Pam looked from one to the other.

“Thirty years ago,” Jerry said, “he was one of the good ones.”

“Almost,” the other man said.

“All right, almost. Quarter finals at Wimbledon, wasn't it?”

“Semis,” the other man said. “But he was senior champion three years straight not so long ago. Now he's an umpire, mostly. Filling in on lines today, but he's usually in the chair. Calls them as he sees them, Johnny does. The kid let it get him. Too bad, because he figured to take—”

“Game, Mr. Wilson. He leads, one game to love, second set.”

“—which would have put him in line for a pro bid,” the informant on Pam's right said. “Now—but it could be he'll snap out of it.”

Mears did not. He was broken through in the second game, and Wilson coasted to six-three. Each time he served from the base line Blanchard watched, as linesman and foot-fault judge; Doug Mears glared at the older man. And from that side, he served badly, seemed uncertain—looked after each service again at Blanchard, and seemed to wait.

“He's let it get him,” the authority on Pam's right said. “He's sure enough let it get him.”

Mears played better in the third set, but not enough better. It went to Wilson at seven-five. The match went with it.

“Mr. Wilson is good,” Pam said, as they went down the concrete steps.

“Not that good,” Jerry told her. “As our friend said, Mears let it get him.”

“What, exactly, is a foot fault?”

“God only knows,” Jerry said.

“And Mr. Blanchard,” Pam said. “He knows.” They went into the garden bar and found a table. And waited. And continued to wait. When she came, the waitress was sorry, and would bring gins and tonics.

They waited, without impatience. At Forest Hills in tournament time only the players hurry. They hurry enough for everybody. It was pleasant in the garden bar, at an umbrella-shaded table among other tables scattered on grass—tables now filling during the intermission between stadium matches. Half a dozen men sat at a long table, and gestured tennis as they drank; along a path between the tables and the field courts, brisk young people in white walked back and forth and one could guess whether they were participants in the nationals or merely passive members of the West Side Tennis Club. It was Pam's theory, advanced while they waited, that people carrying only two tennis rackets were probably not in the tournament. At least not at this stage.

“It takes,” she said, “three rackets and a serious expression. Here he is again.”

Jerry looked where she looked.

“I begin to feel I'm being followed,” Pam said.

John Blanchard, authority on cats and, it now appeared, tennis, was not alone. With him was a slender and sprightly girl in white shorts and blouse and sweater—a very pretty girl, who seemed to sparkle as she walked beside the much taller, much older man; a girl with deep red hair. They turned from the path and passed quite close to the Norths on their way to a table. “—ought to apologize,” the girl said, smiling up to the man. Blanchard shook his head at her and shrugged slightly, square shoulders moving under dark jacket. As they passed the long table of men who talked tennis with their hands, one of them—who had, as far as one could guess, been demonstrating the proper forehand—broke it off to salute Blanchard and to say “Hiya, Johnny?” At that there was a low chorus of “hiyas” and one “You can lose your head thataway, Johnny,” at which there was general laughter.

Blanchard waved and did not answer, but his regular features moved into a regular smile. He touched the girl's brown arm, guiding her to a table under an umbrella.

The waitress came to the Norths' table, and said she was sorry to have been so long, and deposited gins and tonics and said “Thank you” for a tip and went. From his table, Blanchard beckoned to her, and she went there. The Norths sipped, sitting in the sun. From beyond the fence—from the grandstand, probably—there was hand clapping. Somebody had done something which could be approved. The Norths sipped on.

And then a rangy young man in tennis shorts and sweater, carrying rackets, came down the path. He came without looking to either side, his expression set—his expression angry. When he was at a place where he could see all the tables in the garden bar he stopped, and looked at all of them. And then, his face more set than ever, he walked over grass, walked to the table at which Blanchard and the girl were sitting. When he got to it he stopped and glared down at Blanchard. After some seconds, he looked at the girl, and then back at Blanchard.

Everybody in the small enclosure stopped talking. Somebody put a glass down, and the sound of the glass on the metal table top was like a tiny explosion in the silence.

“Well,” Doug Mears said, and spoke loudly, with a grating in his voice. “It worked out fine, didn't it, Blanchard?
Mr
. Blanchard.”

There was a peculiar emphasis when he said “Mr.” It was as if he derided the appellation as applied to the man he spoke to.

Blanchard merely looked up at him, as if he looked through him. He lifted his glass and drank from it, and put it down on the table.

“Doug!” the girl said.
“Doug!”

The rangy man looked at her again, and looked away again.

Everybody watched. One of the men at the long table stood up, and started to move around the table toward Doug Mears and Blanchard and the girl.

“Got just what you went after, didn't you?” Mears said, and his voice was still loud, harsh. “Think you did, anyway. Got it sitting right here and—”

Blanchard stood up, then. He moved very quickly when he moved.

“I'd stop there, Mears,” Blanchard said. His voice was not as loud as the younger man's—the much younger man's. But his voice bit in the silence. “I'd stop right there.”

“You'd like me to,” Mears said. “You're a prize son of a bitch,
Mr
. Blanchard. A lousy, creepy old—”

Blanchard came around the table then. And then the man who had started seconds before from the long table came up behind Doug Mears and put a hand hard on the blond man's shoulder and said, “I'd knock it off, son.”

The pretty girl put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands, and the dark red hair streamed down around her face.

Doug Mears wheeled, his face working.

“I'll—” he began.

“You'll knock it off,” the man who held him said. “You're off the beam, son. Way off. So far off that—”

He did not finish, but looked steadily at Doug Mears. And, after some moments, Mears shrugged and the man removed his hand from Mears's shoulder. He said, “Thata-boy.”

“What you mean is,” Mears said, but his voice was lower. “What you mean is—be a good boy, take it lying down or—or get suspended. Ruled off the—”

“Now son,” the man said, and spoke like a father. “Why don't you just run along? Probably nobody'll remember hearing anything.” He looked across at Blanchard, still standing, flush showing under the tan of his face. He looked and seemed to wait, and after some moments Blanchard nodded his head briefly, and sat down. The girl did not move, still hid her face in hands and soft, dark-red hair.

Doug Mears looked for a moment at the man who had intervened. Then he looked once more, his face dark, at Blanchard, who met his gaze; whose face showed no expression of any kind. Mears wrenched free of the restraining hand then, and walked across the grass to the path, looking at nobody, and then walked away along the path. Everybody watched him—everybody except John Blanchard and the girl with him. Blanchard was talking, his voice inaudible, to the girl, who, after a time, began shaking her head slowly, without moving the hands which hid her face.

The loudspeaker in the stadium was even louder here, it seemed, than within the enclosure itself. It spoke now. “Linesmen ready?” it inquired, asking the rhetorical question—and, evidently, being greeted by the traditional silence. “Play,” the loudspeaker roared.

Pam finished her drink and said, “Come on,” and stood, and Jerry finished his and went with her across the grass to the path. “Although,” Pam said, “almost anything will be an anticlimax, won't it? What's all this about its being only a game? And I want a hot dog.”

They stopped under the stadium for hot dogs and carried them up the steep stairway. “Game, Mr. Farthing,” the loudspeaker said. “He leads, one game to love, first set.”

Again lithe young men raced on green, performing prodigious feats with rackets and with balls. The Norths munched and watched, and then, after wiping mustard from faces, merely watched. It was a better match than the other, and nobody seemed especially enraged, although there was the usual amount of hopeless headshaking over shots gone wrong and, from Dennis Farthing an occasional admiring and audible “Wow!” in appreciation of an opponent's ace. Mr. Farthing, being an Australian, won, but it took him five sets and only the last was easy.

John Blanchard did not officiate and, although Pam thought she saw him sitting under the marquee, she could not be sure. If the man was Blanchard, he was alone.

They stayed for several games of the mixed doubles match which followed, on Pam's theory that they might learn something. But when the members of one team found themselves simultaneously in a distant corner of the court, imperiling each other with swinging rackets, Pam said she thought they had learned enough. “After all,” she said, “we could do that. And have.”

“When we could run faster,” Jerry agreed, but agreed also that it was time to go.

Driving home, Pam North kept remembering young Doug Mears.

“Grant he was disappointed,” she said. “Grant he was mad. Still—to get as mad as all that? Of course, I suppose the girl is mixed up in it, somehow. They tend to get. Particularly when—did you think she was pretty, Jerry?”

“I didn't,” Gerald North said, gravely, “notice especially.”

“What a lie,” Pam said. “And how nice of you to bother to tell it. Makes me feel so—nurtured. Unless you're slipping?”

Jerry said, “Mmm?”

“I didn't say you were,” Pam said. “Is Mears an especially temperamental player, do you know?”

“Never saw him play before,” Jerry said, clipping words because of trucks. “Hadn't heard that. Did blow up.”

“Did he really mean to hit Mr. Blanchard with that smash?”

“How'd I know?”

“It looked like it,” Pam said. “And afterward, with his fists. Is it that important for them to win?”

“Some of them,” Jerry said, “damn it all, stay in line.” This was to a truck, which had not. “This Mears—supposed to beat Wilson easy. Good chance against Farthing, who'll gobble Wilson. Mears had won, probably got pro offer. Now nope. For God's sake make up your mind.”

Pam sorted correctly, since she had had practice. She said, “Even a pro offer?”

“Depends,” Jerry said. “Guarantee's gone as high as fifty thousand for the first year. Could be, Mears lost that in less than a couple of hours. Irritating, sort of.”

“It would me,” Pam said. “And blamed Mr. Blanchard. Who seems to get a good deal of blame. Speaking of cats—”

They spoke of cats, when Jerry was not speaking to other drivers, for some time. They decided to be resolute against pointed ones.

3

Al Laney, writing in the
Herald Tribune
, hit the nail most precisely on the head, Jerry North said, and read applicable sections aloud to Pam, who was reading the
Times
and displayed forbearance and a modicum of attention.

“Doug Mears, one of the most promising of our younger players, lost a good deal yesterday,” Jerry read from the works of Mr. Laney. “He lost a match he should have won easily, his temper and, probably, whatever chance he may have had of a bid to join the professional ranks this year. He revealed that he lacked the one essential of a really good player—the ability to concentrate on the point in play and to remain unruffled by adverse decisions.”

That there had been cause for young Mr. Mears to become upset, Mr. Laney admitted. More foot faults had been called against him in a single set than against any player in Mr. Laney's memory, with the possible exception of one famous incident, which Mr. Laney did remember. On the other hand, the calls had been made by John Blanchard, an official of long experience—although more often seen in the umpire's chair than on a line—and unquestionable impartiality. Relaxed as the foot rule had become, it remained a rule, and not one which could be ignored. “It is the opinion of most observers,” Mr. Laney wrote, “that Mears has for a long time ignored it flagrantly, and that he is not alone in this.”