"First. The family exits management. Today. Not at quarter's end, not after a transition study — today. Chairmanship, the chief executive's office, every titled role held by a Pemberton, a Pemberton spouse, or an appointee whose qualification is the name. Resignations on the secretary's desk by five o'clock. Pensions and earned benefits stand — what's earned is earned; I don't take bread off any man's table, including yours. But the authority ends today. You will be shareholders. Under-twenty-percent shareholders, with the rights that carries and not one right more."
Eleanor nodded, once, slowly, as if ticking an item off a list she had written herself years ago and misplaced.
"Second. The pension fund." A sound went through the room that was not quite a sound. Isaiah let it settle. "There is a hole in it. You know its size to the dollar; so do I; the employees who'll retire on it do not, and that arrangement ends this week. An independent audit begins today — auditors from the court's list, chosen by neither of us. Whatever the hole is, it gets filled before one cent of dividend is paid to any shareholder — and it gets filled first out of the family's remaining distribution. If the family's twenty percent won't cover it, we will discuss the lake house. I am told it photographs beautifully. The photographs have been very popular this week."
Bianca made a small noise and then, to her own visible astonishment, did not follow it with anything.
"Third. No Pemberton employee loses a job because of this change of ownership. Not one. Not the janitor, not the second shift, not the man who draws the circle around my face if he draws it on his own time. Any executive — any — who brings me a list of synergies with names on it will be explaining his own name's presence at the top of it by Friday. I did not buy a company to strip it."
"And what do you intend," Reginald said, "about the name? I assume the gate comes down by summer. Coleman Dynamics, in letters of — what does Atlanta favor. Neon."
"The company keeps its name." That surprised them more than anything else had; Isaiah watched it move through the room like light through slats. "Its name, its factories, and its ninety years. Your grandfather built something real, Mr. Pemberton, whatever his grandson did with the dividend. Four thousand people in this valley have the word Pemberton on their work shirts, and their fathers had it on theirs; I am not in the business of making them strangers at their own lockers. What ends today is not the company. What ends is the family's ownership of it. The name stays. The entitlement goes."
He stood and buttoned his jacket, and the meeting was over in the way a surgery is over — not when the talking stops, but when the work does.
"The audit letter goes to the trustees at noon. The letter to employees goes out at one; my son drafted it, and I make no apology for its plainness. Dale Okafor meets me at two, about the Reading furnaces. Mr. Pemberton." He extended his hand, and after a moment that had ninety years in it, Reginald Pemberton took it. "Your house does things properly. See that your family learns to."
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They left him alone at the end because he asked for it — one sentence to Sloane, and the room emptied with the relieved orderliness of people who have been given a shape for the day at last. The boardroom settled into its library quiet. The portraits resumed their certainty.
Reginald stood at the window with his back to the room, a big old man in a chairmanship's suit, looking down at the river and at the roofs of the works beyond the lawn.
"You were at my table Friday," he said. "My wife put you there. Eleanor does the seating — ninety years of Pembertons, and the seating chart is the last true power in this house — and she put a stranger at the high table because she said the list looked inbred. Her word." He turned. The architecture of his face had not softened; something behind it had. "I've had the weekend, Mr. Coleman. A man can think a great deal in a weekend when he's not sleeping. I've thought about the audits. The banks on Thursday — I knew about Thursday by supper; I'm not the fool my son is. What I cannot settle, and I have turned it over like a stone, is the timing of the man. So I'll ask it plainly, and it's the only question I've got left that's worth the asking."
"Ask it, sir."
"Did you decide all this Saturday night, at my table?"
Isaiah was quiet a moment. The clock over the door did its work.
"No, sir," Isaiah said. "Saturday night, I decided to go through with it. There's a difference — and the difference is your son's toast."
The actuaries came on a Tuesday, three of them, with the careful faces of people who carry bad news in good briefcases. Isaiah Coleman had set aside the conference room on the forty-first floor, the one with the windows that looked down the length of the harbor, and had told Caleb to have coffee brought in and to stay. "Whatever it is," he said, "we hear it together."