"Well," she said at last, as they took their chairs. "We can see the whole room from here."
"We can see the whole room," Isaiah agreed, "and the kitchen door. Which, historically, is where the truth comes in and out."
She smiled at that, the private smile, and the evening — which had spent two hours being an endurance event — quietly changed its nature.
A table at the edge of a great party has one advantage over a table at its center: nobody at it is performing. The retired schoolteacher who had won her invitation in a charity raffle introduced herself with the air of a woman who had decided, somewhere around 1978, never to be intimidated again. Her name was Ruth Abernathy. She had taught fifth grade in Bridgeport for forty-one years, she announced, and had buried two husbands, one beloved and one educational, and she had worn her good shoes because a raffle ticket was a promise.
"I bid forty dollars at the library auction," she said, "expecting a fruit basket. Instead I got a ball. Life has a sense of humor, but you have to dress for it."
"You won the best seat in the house," Naomi told her, and meant it, and Ruth — who had spent four decades detecting insincerity at thirty paces — registered that it was meant, and relaxed into her chair like a woman coming home.
The other guests at Table Nineteen were a study in the evening's long tail: a cousin of somebody, twice removed and once widowed, who ate with great concentration and spoke to no one; a junior Pemberton in-law whose name dissolved on contact; and a young man in a suit that had been bought for this night and would be returned to the closet afterward like a borrowed book — Dale Okafor, thirty-one, a shift manager at the Pemberton appliance plant in Stratford, one of the very few employees in the building who did not work for a catering company. He had the careful manners of a man who has been warned. Somebody in human resources, selecting the token names from the plant, had chosen him because he photographed well and did not drink, and he sat with his hands folded and his program squared to the edge of the table, and he looked at Isaiah Coleman the way a man looks at a photograph he has only ever seen in a newspaper.
He knew. That much was plain within the first ten minutes, though he said nothing, and Isaiah — who had been recognized in stranger places by stranger people — made no sign. There are men who announce another man's importance to a room because it raises their own price in it. Dale Okafor was not one of them. He simply became, almost imperceptibly, more careful: careful not to presume, careful not to stare, careful to be exactly the tablemate the evening required and not one degree more. It was, Isaiah thought, a finer piece of social craftsmanship than anything happening at the head table, where care was not a discipline but a decoration.
The first course came out of the swinging door in a small procession, and Table Nineteen settled into the rhythm of people who have decided to enjoy one another because the alternative has been thoroughly advertised elsewhere. Ruth held court the way she must once have held a classroom — which is to say, completely, and with the children's interests at heart. She cross-examined the cousin about his late wife's garden. She asked the in-law about his children and remembered, forty minutes later, both their names. She regarded the ballroom, the chandeliers, the orchestra tuning behind its screen of palms, with the delighted skepticism of a woman pricing a house she has no intention of buying.
"They do this every year?" she asked.
"Every year since before I was management," Dale said, and then, hearing the word escape him, colored slightly. "It's — the company. Pemberton. The family gives the ball for the foundation."
"And the foundation gives?" Ruth asked.
There was a small silence, of the kind that at the head table would have been filled instantly with a figure. Dale turned his water glass a quarter turn on the linen.
"It gives," he said at last, "in ways that photograph well."
Ruth Abernathy looked at him with the sudden, total attention of a teacher who has just heard the one honest sentence of the school day.
"Young man," she said, "you may sit by me."
It was Naomi who drew him out, in the end. Naomi Coleman had a gift that Isaiah, who could read a balance sheet the way other men read weather, had never acquired and never stopped admiring: she could ask a question so plainly that it became a door. Over the soup — a pale, perfect consommé that Ruth praised with the generosity of a woman who had eaten forty-one years of school lunches — Naomi asked Dale how long he had been at the plant, and Dale, deciding something, answered her as if she were a person and not an occasion.