Rose's mother had died in the autumn of 1985, in the house in Wilkinsburg where Rose had grown up, and she had left her daughter, among a few pieces of furniture and a considerable quantity of opinion delivered in advance, the sum of three thousand eight hundred dollars. It was not a fortune. It was, precisely, a school nurse's mother's savings. It sat in the Delaneys' account through the winter, understood between them, without discussion, not to be wasted โ though wasting was a word with two definitions in their house.
Arthur taught music at a public school on the North Side, as he had since 1965, thirty-eight years in rooms that smelled of floor wax and valve oil. That winter a boy in his fourth-period class โ a clarinet player, thin as a reed himself, with an ear Arthur had noticed the way you notice weather coming โ had come to him after the bell and asked, with the terrible casualness of a child asking the worst question he knows, whether it was true the school was selling the instruments. The district was cutting. The good instruments, the ones the school lent to children who could not rent their own, were to be sold off or left to rot in a storage cage. Arthur had gone home and stood in the kitchen and told Rose, and Rose had listened with her arms folded, and when he had finished she had said the sentence that ranked, in his private history of their marriage, with her wedding vows: "Well. We have three thousand eight hundred dollars."
"We can't run an orchestra on three thousand eight hundred dollars, Rose."
"No," she said. "But we can buy nine trumpets. Or strings for the violin class for a decade. Orโ" and she had looked at him with the expression he had married, the one that meant she had already done the arithmetic of the heart and was waiting for him to catch up, "โor we can find out what it does buy, and start there, and see who shows up."
They had called it the Encore Foundation because Arthur said a concert wasn't over when the music stopped; the encore was the part where everybody admitted they wanted more. They registered it with the state for a fee Rose described ever after as the most optimistic money they ever spent. Arthur gave the lessons free, in the evenings, in classrooms borrowed through the kindness of principals and the strategic blindness of custodians. Rose kept the books, and the lists, and the children โ she could identify a child who had not eaten by the way he held his shoulders, and there was many an evening when the Foundation's most important instrument was a sandwich.
The first benefit concert had been Rose's idea, which she later denied, claiming it had been Arthur's, a marital fiction both of them maintained because the truth โ that it had been the idea of the St. Brigid's women's guild, who had offered the hall and sixty folding chairs and a coffee urn the size of a baptismal font โ belonged to too many people to fight over. Spring 1986. Arthur's students played: the thin clarinet boy, steady as a metronome by then; a cello section of two; a trumpet trio that had attacked its piece like boys let out of school. People gave what they had; the basket by the door collected, when Rose counted it twice that night, six hundred and twelve dollars.
"Well," Arthur had said. "Six hundred and twelve dollars."
"It's a start," Rose said, "which is more than a wish is." And she wrote it in the ledger in her round, unstoppable hand: First concert. St. Brigid's. $612. Underneath, because Rose believed a ledger should record what mattered, she had added: Nobody left early.
Arthur had bought the tuxedo for that concert. It was the extravagance of the decade in their house, discussed for a week. You cannot conduct children in a cardigan, Rose had said, not when people are giving you money on faith; they must see that you take it seriously, and a man takes it seriously in black tie. He had worn it that night in the church hall, under lights that buzzed, conducting nine trumpets' worth of hope. Forty years. The shoulders had been let out once and taken in once. It had conducted, by Arthur's private count, some three hundred concerts, most of them in school auditoriums and church halls and one โ one โ in a real hall, years later, which was not his concert at all, and which he thought about now, with the gala waiting downtown like a held chord.
Gabrielle Mensah had been ten years old in 1986.
She had come to the first evening class at the borrowed classroom with her mother, who worked nights cleaning offices and held her daughter's hand the way you hold something you are prepared to defend. Gabrielle had been assigned, by the school, a violin โ a school violin, bought by the crate in some forgotten year, varnish the colour of strong tea, and a crack running through the bridge like a fault line; a cracked bridge does to a violin's voice what a hand over