"The lockers," Arthur said. "Very binding."
"Gabrielle Mensah has never once in her life been late paying a debt. Not the violin, not the visits, not the telephone calls on my birthday." Rose patted the square of the invitation through his jacket, once, the way she had once patted a child's chest to check the breathing. "Front row, aisle seat, because of your knees."
"My knees are fine."
"Your knees," Rose said, picking up her bag, "are a subject on which the conductor has ruled, and there is no appeal from the podium." She switched off the kitchen light. "Come along. We'll lock up, and we'll walk to the bus like citizens, and we'll be there in time to watch them polish the antiques' card."
Arthur took his hat from the hook โ a good hat, older than some of the orchestra โ and his stick, which he carried for the bus steps and described as a conductor's spare. At the door he stopped, as he always stopped, and did the round of the house with his eyes: stove off, taps still, windows latched, the clock on the mantel ticking beside the space where the invitation had stood since April. Then he stepped out onto the porch, into the blue October evening, and drew the door to, and turned the key with the care of a man who has locked this door ten thousand times and intends, God willing, to lock it ten thousand more.
"Ready?" Rose asked, on the step below him, her hand already raised for his arm โ the arrangement of fifty-eight years, she took his arm not because she needed the support but because it was the formation in which they went toward music.
"Ready," Arthur said. And then, because the truth of the whole evening seemed to him suddenly plain: "Forty years, Rose. Sixty chairs to four hundred, and the same sticky F."
"The F," Rose said, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow as they went down the path together toward the corner, the streetlights coming on ahead of them one by one like ushers lighting a hall, "will be somebody else's problem tonight. Tonight, Arthur, we just sit in the front row and listen."
Behind them the house ticked on in the dark, patient as an instrument at rest, and ahead of them the city assembled itself, street by street, toward the river and the bright hotel, where โ though they could not yet see it โ a ballroom was filling with light, and an orchestra was tuning, and a woman of fifty with a baton's worth of promises stood somewhere offstage with a seating plan she had drawn up, in her head, when she was ten years old.
Marcus Webb had walked the ballroom at four o'clock, the way he had walked every ballroom he had ever been responsible for, slowly, with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes on the things other people walked past. A ballroom at four o'clock was a promise not yet kept. It was linen and ladders, men in aprons carrying chairs two at a time, the smell of furniture polish under the stronger smell of coffee from the staff urn. By seven it would be candlelight and string music and four hundred people believing the room had always looked the way it looked. Marcus's whole profession, forty years of it, was the distance between four o'clock and seven, and he had never once stopped finding that distance sacred.
He stopped at the third chandelier from the stage and looked up. "That one's humming," he said.
The electrician, on the ladder beneath it, didn't argue. Marcus's ear was a known quantity at the Allegheny Grand; he had tuned pianos in his youth for pocket money, and the training had never left him โ the conviction that a room, like an instrument, was either in tune or it wasn't, and you could always tell if you were honest about listening. "Transformer," the electrician said. "I'll swap the dimmer before sound check, Mr. Webb. Before Ms. Mensah can hear it."
He walked on. Forty linen cloths, ivory, pressed to a standard the laundry contractor had twice tried to renegotiate and twice failed. He ran a thumb along the fold of one as he passed, not checking it so much as greeting it. At each table a low arrangement of white roses and greenery waited in water; by six the florists would have them placed and the room would soften. Place cards stood in little silver holders, calligraphed โ an expense Stephanie Kwan had defended to the board on the grounds that a fortieth anniversary happened once. Marcus approved of the calligraphy. He approved of any money spent on the theory that people who had given generously for forty years deserved to find their own names written beautifully.