He came from the direction of the service corridor with the unhurried solidity of a man whose job it is to arrive without alarming anyone, and mostly succeeding. He was in his fifties, broad, with gray in his mustache and a radio on his shoulder and eyes that did the room once, thoroughly, the way Arthur's eyes used to do a stage. His name was on a brass tag. JENSEN. Beneath it: SECURITY SUPERVISOR.
"Evening," he said. "I'm Carl Jensen. I understand there's a question about the guest list."
"There is a question," Arthur agreed. "It's a good question. We've been enjoying it."
Jensen's mouth moved — almost. He turned to Madison, who gave him the facts in her level, professional voice, and Arthur noticed that in the retelling he and Rose had become a situation somewhat smaller than they were: no record, an invitation card, claims to be founders. She did not say it unkindly. It was simply that the facts, traveling from person to person, lose the way hymns lose verses.
Jensen looked at the invitation, which Madison handed him. He looked at it longer than she had. He looked at Arthur's face, then at the tuxedo, then — and Arthur marked this, and filed it away with gratitude — at Rose, as if she were the one whose account would settle it.
"Mr. Delaney," he said, "is there anyone inside tonight — anyone at all — that I could fetch, who'd know you on sight?"
"Half the foundation board," Arthur said. "The conductor. Probably the coat-check lady, if she's the same one. Her name was Dot. She used to keep cough drops in the ticket envelopes for the children's parents. But Carl — may I call you Carl?"
"Everybody does, eventually."
"Carl, I won't have them fetched. Not the conductor, eleven minutes before she conducts. Not the board, at their dinner. We are not a problem to be brought in to them like a lost umbrella. We mailed our reply in June. We are on the list, or the list is at fault, and either way I won't make an eighty-two-year-old woman—" he did not look at Rose; he didn't need to; he could feel the temperature of her attention change, "—I won't make my wife stand in a doorway and be vouched for at her own table. If the room in there has no record of us, then the room in there will have to proceed on that basis, and so will we."
Jensen was quiet a moment. The radio on his shoulder murmured something in static and he turned it down without looking, out of old habit, the way Arthur used to mute a metronome.
"Sir," he said, "I believe you." He said it simply, and then, because he was an honest man trapped in a dishonest minute, he added the rest of it. "But believing you doesn't give me a seat to put you in. If I walk you past them—" he nodded at the table, at Madison, who had gone very still, "—and I'm wrong, it's my job. And if she's wrong—" he stopped. "Everybody's got the same problem tonight. The list is all anybody's got."
"Yes," Arthur said. "We had noticed that the list was having a wonderful evening."
What happened next happened the way such things do — not as an order, not as a cruelty, but as a series of small reasonable sentences that added up to a door closing. Jensen asked, apologetically, whether they'd mind stepping a little to the side, away from the entrance, so the arriving guests could get to the table; the senator's party was coming back out for photographs; the flow, he said, and trailed off, because flow was a word for water and he knew it. Madison, with her eyes somewhere over Arthur's shoulder, said the foundation's office could be contacted on Monday to sort out the records. Monday. Rose received the word Monday the way she received all weather.
They stepped aside. It was done courteously, at their own pace, and nobody touched anybody, and that was somehow the worst of it — that it could be done so gently and still be done. They stood by the tall windows where the coats of the found were being handed over a counter with little brass-numbered tickets, and from there they could see the ballroom doors open and close, open and close, each opening letting out a breath of warm music and laughter before the doors took it back.
A couple in their sixties, found and ticketed, passed close, and the woman said, not to them but near them, the way people say things near statues: "Oh, that's sad. They must have got the wrong night."
Rose's hand came to rest on Arthur's arm. It had come there in theaters and hospitals and at the gravesides of both their parents and at the front of a hundred school auditoriums, and its meaning had never once been hold me up. Its meaning, always, was: here is where we stand. We stand here.
"Arthur," she said quietly.
"I know."