"—and Mrs. Delaney is next to you, because you'll behave if she's there." And she had gone off down the hallway with her case, and he had stood there in the smell of floor wax being extremely careful not to make a fool of himself in front of the lockers.
She had kept every other promise she had ever made to him, in sequence, like notes. She had gone to conservatory on scholarships that Rose tracked in the ledger alongside the trumpet strings. She had come home, which none of them had dared to predict: home to Pittsburgh, to the River City Philharmonic, first as its concertmaster — and Arthur had sat in the front row that night, aisle seat, Rose beside him, and wept without any embarrassment whatsoever, because some promises arrive early and some arrive on time and his knees, by then, were a subject on which Gabrielle had been entirely right. And then, two seasons ago, the Philharmonic had made her its music director. Its conductor. Gabrielle Mensah, who had arrived at a borrowed classroom with a cracked bridge, would stand tonight in the Allegheny Grand ballroom and conduct the orchestra she led, at the fortieth anniversary of the Foundation that had issued her Instrument No. 7, return date: when you no longer need it.
She still had it. She had told Arthur, last spring, that the Foundation could have it back when they pried it from her, and Rose had said, "We'll enter it in the ledger as a permanent loan," and Gabrielle had said, "Enter it as a debt paid forward, Mrs. Delaney," and all three of them had understood that the accounting, at this point, was ceremonial.
Arthur lifted the tuxedo jacket off the bed and put it on over his shirt, standing in front of the closet door with its forty years of programs: church halls and school auditoriums rising like a tide line, then the youth orchestra, the conservatory, halls in other cities reached by bus and by train. On top, at the height of his eye, the most recent: last spring's Philharmonic program, with Gabrielle's photograph on the cover, baton raised, mid-beat.
He checked the tuxedo's inside pocket, though the invitation was downstairs on the mantel, because the pocket was where it would ride and he wanted the route rehearsed. Wallet light as a rumour in the other pocket; handkerchief, pressed, in the breast pocket. The jacket settled onto his shoulders the way it had settled for forty years, and the man in the mirror — tall still, stooped a little now, the careful hands of a musician folded in front of him, white hair combed — looked, Arthur thought, like the usher. He smiled at himself. That was more or less the job he had had all his life. An usher of other people's music, showing it to its seat.
"Arthur." Rose's voice came up the stairs with the accuracy of long practice. "The taxi is at six, but your car has opinions. Come and have your tea before it goes cold and blames me."
The car. The car was a sedan of an age that mechanics described as "honest," and it had developed, in the last year, the habit of considering each request to start as the opening position in a negotiation. In September it had required three attempts and a silence. This morning, because Arthur planned for the frailty of machines as he once planned for sticky piano keys, he had gone out in his dressing gown and tried it, and the engine had turned over once, with the sound of a drawer being opened in an empty house, and declined. He had stood in the drive in the October chill and considered the battery, and his knees, and the bus schedule, which he knew the way he knew the fingering of scales: the 61C would take them to within four blocks of the Allegheny Grand — and Rose had settled the question at breakfast with the finality of a ledger closing.
"We will take the bus there like citizens," she had said, "while it's light and we're fresh. And we will take a taxi home like dignitaries. It's one taxi in forty years, Arthur. The Foundation can survive the scandal."
"The Foundation isn't paying. We are."
"Then we can survive it. Eat your eggs."
Now, in the front room, the tea was on the tray, and Rose was in the green dress. She had put it on while he was upstairs; she moved about the kitchen in it with a tea towel over one shoulder, entirely unceremonious — Rose's method with finery being to refuse to be intimidated by it. The dress fit the way it had fit in 1998, and when she turned at the counter with the teapot he felt the familiar small rearrangement of the heart that had been happening to him since a church picnic in 1966, where a young nurse named Rose Callahan had informed him that he was holding his trumpet wrong in the photograph and would thank her later.
"I was not holding it wrong," he said now, apropos of nothing, accepting his cup.