"Nine years," he said. "Started on the floor at twenty-two, on the refrigerator line. My father was on that line thirty years before me. Retired in — well. He retired."
"Did he?" Naomi asked.
"He got the papers," Dale said. "Whether that's the same thing is a question the whole plant is asking."
And there it was. Isaiah felt it arrive the way he felt figures arrive — not as a number but as a shape. He leaned back in his chair and let his wife conduct the conversation he had driven to Greenwich to have, though neither of them had known, when the invitation came, that it would be held at Table Nineteen.
"The letters came in March," Dale said. He was not complaining; that was the thing Isaiah would remember later. He was reporting, the way a good floor man reports. "Pension statements. Most years nobody opens them — you know what it says, roughly, it says what it said last year plus a little. This year there was a change in the — the language. Assumptions, they call it. A new table. My mother made my father sit at the kitchen table and open his, because she's the kind of woman who opens everything the day it comes. He read it three times. Then he put it in the drawer where we keep the batteries and the good scissors, and he hasn't taken it out since. He's seventy-one years old and he's afraid of an envelope, Mrs. Coleman. There are four hundred men on that floor with the same envelope in the same drawer."
"And overtime?" Naomi asked quietly.
"Overtime was how you got ahead of it," Dale said. "Time and a half was the college fund, the roof, the car that starts. Two years ago the plant went to — they call it flexible scheduling." He smiled, and the smile had nothing in it. "Very flexible. The work flexes up, the pay flexes down. The hours are still there, sir — forgive me — the hours are still there to be worked. They just get counted differently. Split across weeks. Averaged. A man can work fifty hours and be paid for forty with a kind of arithmetic that has a name I can't pronounce and a result I can. The result is that the envelope stays in the drawer."
Ruth Abernathy had stopped eating. The cousin, the in-law, the whole far end of the ballroom seemed to lean, minutely, toward this young man who was not raising his voice.
"Does anyone say anything?" Ruth asked. "At — wherever one says such things."
"People say it to each other," Dale said. "In the parking lot. At the union hall, the meetings are — the local's officers are mostly men near retirement themselves, and they're tired, and the company lawyers are not tired. That's the whole story, ma'am. One side is tired and the other side is not."
Isaiah said nothing. He turned his glass once on the linen, the way Dale had, and listened to the shape of what he was hearing assemble itself into the thing he already knew from other documents, in other rooms, rendered in other inks: a ninety-year-old company with a proud name and a tired floor; a pension fund whose assumptions had been adjusted the way a hem is adjusted, a quarter inch at a time, so that no single alteration could be called a theft; a workforce that had stopped opening its mail. He had come to the Pemberton ball to be insulted, and had been, on schedule, all evening, by a young man at the head table with a camera for a conscience. But this — this was the evening's real text. The human balance sheet. Assets: four hundred men and women who still showed up. Liabilities: everything that was being done to make them stop believing they should.
At the far end of the room, elevated on its shallow dais, the head table glittered like a separate municipality. Eleanor Pemberton presided from its center with the flawless, terrifying command of a woman who had been seating difficult people beside one another for fifty years and had never once seated them wrong. She did not appear to eat. She appeared, rather, to conduct eating, the way other women conduct orchestras — a glance here, a lifted finger there, a conversation redirected with the economy of a chess master moving a pawn to end an argument three moves early. Nothing at that table happened that she had not permitted. It was generally understood in Greenwich society that Eleanor Pemberton could end a feud, a marriage, or a political career before the fish course, and the fish course had not yet been served.