Isaiah Coleman drove the last half mile slowly, not from caution but from appreciation. He liked well-kept things. He liked gravel that had been raked by someone who understood that raking gravel was a job worth doing properly, and he liked the beeches, and the lanterns hung at intervals along the drive, each one real flame behind real glass.
"You're smiling," Naomi said from the passenger seat.
"I'm appreciating the landscaping."
"You're appreciating the fact that you could buy the landscaping."
"I could buy the landscaping twice and have change for the gravel." He slowed for the turn into the forecourt, where a valet in a white jacket was already stepping forward. "That doesn't mean I don't appreciate it."
Naomi adjusted one earring, a plain pearl, the only jewelry she wore that she had not chosen for a reason. "George said the whole county would be here."
"George said the whole county, two senators, and a man who owns half the rail freight east of the Mississippi."
"And us."
"And us," Isaiah agreed. "The mystery guests."
He had dressed with his usual care, which was to say without any visible care at all: a dark suit, well cut, unremarkable; a shirt the color of skim milk; a tie that declined to comment. Naomi, beside him, wore deep green silk and the posture of a woman who had never once in her life entered a room hoping to be forgiven for it. They had been married twenty-six years, and he still, at the top of strange driveways, felt the small private astonishment of arriving anywhere with her.
The valet took the car. A young man with a clipboard took their names at the door, and here the evening produced its first small, perfect note of dissonance. The young man found the Ainsworth party, found the table list, found the carefully lettered invitation card Isaiah surrendered — and then looked up, and looked at Isaiah, and looked down at the card again, and checked it a second time, turning it slightly in the light, as though the embossing might confess to an error.
"Coleman," he said. "Isaiah and Naomi Coleman."
"That's right," Isaiah said.
"You're — " the young man caught himself on the edge of the sentence and rebuilt it in flight "— you're on the list. Of course you're on the list. Table assignment at dinner. Welcome to Pemberton House."
"Thank you," Naomi said, in the tone of a woman accepting a surrender.
"He checked it twice," she murmured, as they moved into the hall.
"He's young. He's thorough."
"He's twenty-four and he's never seen our names on a card that cost forty dollars to print." She took Isaiah's arm. "It begins."
The hall was two stories of oak and portraiture. Pembertons looked down from the walls in oil and gilt — Pembertons in Civil War sashes, Pembertons in flapper silk, Pembertons beside racehorses and Pembertons beside hulls of ships — and beneath them the autumn ball was assembling itself out of two hundred and fifty people who all seemed to know precisely where to stand. The orchestra had withdrawn to a gallery; a jazz trio had taken the near corner. There were bars in three rooms and champagne in all of them, and the flowers, Naomi noted, were white roses arranged with the confidence of a florist who had been told the budget was a rumor.
They were ten feet into the room when the evening produced its second note.
"Oh — excuse me — " A woman in gold lamé, sixtyish, diamonds at her throat like a second collar, had detached herself from a conversation and was holding out her wrap — an expanse of pale mink — toward Isaiah with the unhesitating gesture of a woman handing a coat to a man whose function she had read at a glance. "Would you be a dear? The cloakroom line is impossible."
Isaiah looked at the wrap. He looked at the cloakroom, where indeed a line had formed, six deep, attended by a girl in a black dress who was taking coats with the serenity of a saint in a painting.
"Of course," he said, and took the mink with both hands, the way it deserved. "I'll see it gets hung properly."
"You're a treasure." She was already turning away, already rejoining her conversation, the transaction complete, the treasure unexamined.
Naomi's eyes had gone very bright. It was not anger, exactly; anger was simpler. In twenty-six years he had learned the gradations of her silence the way other men learned wine.
"I'll take it," he said mildly. "It's ten steps."
"Isaiah."
"It's mink, Naomi. Somebody's grandmother. It wants hanging by somebody who knows what mink wants." He carried the wrap to the cloakroom, waited his turn behind a man in a dinner jacket who did not notice him at all, gave the wrap to the girl with the name of its owner — he had read the monogram inside the lining, a habit from years of looking at the inside of things — and returned to his wife with two glasses of champagne, one of which he handed to her with a small bow that only she could see was ironic.