"Ahh." The satisfaction traveled six hundred miles without losing any weight. "You should know what you're walking into. Reginald will preside — he does love a receiving line, poor man, it's the last formation in which he's still the tallest. The boy, Chad, will be there with his chin up, playing heir. There's a banker from the syndicate coming too, one of the nervous ones — I invited him specially. He doesn't know why his loans feel heavier than they did in June." George chuckled, a sound like gravel in a silk bag. "Nobody in that house has the faintest notion who's coming to dinner, Isaiah. I've sat through four board meetings this autumn listening to them discuss the Coleman offer for the automation contract — the contract, mind you — as if Coleman Dynamics were a vendor to be managed. A vendor. I nearly bit through a breadstick."
"George," Isaiah said, "tell me you didn't arrange this for the pleasure of watching their faces."
"My friend," George said, injured, "I arranged it because you are the most significant prospective partner in that company's ninety-year history, and the family should meet you socially before the proxy materials make the introduction in print. That it will also be the single most enjoyable evening of my retirement is a coincidence I am prepared to live with."
Naomi, over the rim of her glass, mouthed: Mischief. Isaiah conceded it with a slight inclination of the head.
"One warning, in earnest," George went on, and the delight went out of his voice, leaving the banker. "Reginald Pemberton is not a fool, whatever else he is. He's a man watching his grandfather's house fill with water and telling the guests it's a water feature. If he sniffs the size of what you're holding — the debt especially — he won't panic. He'll perform. He'll try to make you the story of the evening before you can become the fact of the year. Don't let him choose the ground."
"He won't," Isaiah said.
"And don't—" George hesitated, and affection made him clumsy. "Don't enjoy it too much, either of you. They're frightened people, under the varnish. Frightened people with good tailoring are still just frightened people."
"We'll be kind," Naomi said, leaning toward the phone, in the tone of a woman closing a meeting. "We'll be so kind they'll have to look it up afterward to find out what happened to them. Goodnight, George. Eat something green."
"Naomi Coleman, you are the only person alive who can dismiss me and bless me in one breath." The line went dead on his laughter.
For a while the kitchen was quiet except for the house settling, which in a house that size was a small music of its own. Naomi rose and went down the hall to the dressing room, and Isaiah followed, because after thirty-one years he knew when a decision was being made that he would be permitted to witness but not to argue with.
She had laid out two suits on the cedar chest. On the left, the new one: midnight blue, cut by a man in New York who made four appointments a year and spoke of shoulders the way priests speak of souls, the suit Isaiah wore when Coleman Dynamics needed to look like what it was. On the right, the older one: plain, dark, a good suit and no more, bought off a rack in Chicago in a year when the company had been rich enough to afford it and not yet rich enough to forget the rack. He wore it to church. He wore it to funerals, and to the graduations of employees' children, which amounted, in his private theology, to the same category of occasion.
Naomi stood between them with her arms folded, conducting the last negotiation of the week, which was with herself.
"The blue one tells them the number before you open your mouth," she said. "Every man in that room reads tailoring the way you read a ledger. They'll spend the whole night doing arithmetic about you." She touched the sleeve of the plain suit, lightly, the way she touched his shoulder in church when the sermon found her. "This one tells them nothing. This one lets them relax." A pause. "I have been married to you a long time, Isaiah Coleman. I know what your kindness looks like, and I know what it costs people who meet it unprepared." She lifted the plain dark suit from the chest and held it out to him, and her eyes were bright with the particular mischief that George Ainsworth, six hundred miles away, would have recognized as family. "Wear this one. Let them see whatever they came to see."
The Pemberton estate announced itself the way money prefers to announce itself when it has been money for a long time: quietly, and from a great distance. The drive was half a mile of gravel raked into corduroy, flanked by beeches that had been old when the first Pemberton made the first fortune, and at the end of it the house stood in its own weather of light — every window lit, the stone façade washed amber, a string orchestra already audible through the open terrace doors, playing something wistful in three-quarter time as if the evening were a waltz and everyone in it knew the steps.