The ribbon was cut at two o'clock on the front steps, in a wind that kept trying to take the programs. The board chair said the necessary things, briefly, because she had learned in a year of working with the Delaneys that brevity was a form of respect. The foundation's director said fewer. Then Arthur was given the great ceremonial scissors, nearly the size of a cello bow and about as manageable, and the crowd β parents, children, neighbors, teachers, and Marcus Webb, who had come over from the Allegheny Grand on his day off and stationed himself, unasked and immovable, at the front doors to hold them for latecomers β counted down from ten at the top of its lungs, led by the fourth graders, whose enthusiasm for countdowns was total and whose grasp of tempo was their own.
The ribbon parted, and the cheer went up the hill street and came back off the brick houses. Inside, when everyone had been seated β Madison's ushers moving through the hall like shepherds who had read the protocol, Mr. Vargas never stirring from his chair, guarding Elena's program and his own card side by side on his knee β Rose stood up from the front row, unannounced, and said the only thing she had prepared, to no one in particular and to the whole room at once.
"This school has one rule that isn't about music," she said. "Nobody who comes to this door gets turned away by a list. If there's a mistake, we fix it with the person standing in front of us, looking at them. The list works for us. We don't work for the list." She sat down to applause that had an odd, thoughtful quality to it, like people applauding an idea they intended to use elsewhere. "Now," she said, to Arthur, in a voice the first three rows could hear, "they can play."
Gabrielle Mensah came onto the stage in black, baton in hand, and the hall did the thing halls do for people who belong to them: it settled, all at once, by consent.
She was fifty-one years old. She had been ten in 1986, a scholarship child with a borrowed violin and a bus pass, the Encore Foundation's first student, when the foundation was a Saturday program in a church basement and Arthur was a forty-five-year-old music teacher driving instruments around Pittsburgh in a station wagon. Now she conducted orchestras in three countries, and she had cancelled a rehearsal in Toronto to stand on this stage, and nobody who knew her had expected anything else.
She raised her baton, and the first youth orchestra of the Delaney School of Music β forty-one players, ages nine to seventeen, assembled from the foundation's partner schools, in black trousers and white shirts and an aggregate state of terror and glory β played its first note in its own home.
They played a folk tune first, the way Arthur had always started a year: something everybody's grandmother knew, so the audience could be on their side by the second bar. They played a movement of a symphony arranged down to their size, and if the arrangement had mercy on the horns, the horns repaid it by being magnificent.
And in the front of the violins, in the first chair, sat a ten-year-old girl named Maya with a borrowed instrument and her hair in two braids, playing the violin with the repaired scroll.
Arthur saw the violin before he saw the child. Forty years falls away oddly; a man's eyes keep their old loyalties. The scroll had been broken in 1974 by a boy named Dennis who had wept, and Arthur had paid for the mending himself and put the violin back into circulation without ceremony, and it had passed through eleven students since, and now it was here, in the hands of a ten-year-old in the first chair of an orchestra, in a school with his name over the door, being played β he attended to it with the whole of his professional soul β very well. Not carefully. Not preciously. Well, the way a door swings on a true hinge, without thinking about it.
"That's Gabrielle at ten," Rose said quietly, beside him, and Arthur nodded. For the foundation's first student had also been a ten-year-old first violinist with a borrowed instrument, standing where the light fell in a church basement in 1986, playing as if the violin were a rope and she intended to climb it out of the world she had been handed. Now the rope had become a road, and other children were on it, and Gabrielle Mensah stood with her arms raised, conducting forty-one of them at once.
The Delaneys sat in the front row, where they had been promised a seat a lifetime ago β though the promise, Arthur reflected, had never been about the gala, or the hotel, or the row. It went back to a wedding in 1968, and a young music teacher and a young nurse dancing to a waltz he had arranged himself because they could not afford a band that knew one. Everything since had been the same promise with more chairs.