The board then took up the structure, as it had promised itself in the autumn it would, when the personnel were done. The admissions parent committee was reconstituted on the security director's and the interim head's joint recommendation: parent members would henceforth review scholarship files by number, with names, photographs, and schools removed, and their assessments would go forward as one input among several, recorded, with the committee's minutes kept — as they had always been kept, in the chair's bound book, a practice the board saw no reason to change — by a staff secretary, so that the hand that wrote the objection would not also be the hand that kept the book. The new rules were not aimed at any person, the minutes said, in the formula boards use when a rule is aimed at exactly one person's conduct, forever, under the name of everyone. The interim head was confirmed in the post, with the board's thanks for a year of repairs, and she accepted in a speech of ninety seconds in which the only memorable sentence was her last: that the school had learned, at some cost, that its gate was a text its visitors read before they read anything else the school had written, and that it intended to go on writing it carefully.
Of the year's departed figures, the record kept only what it needed. Dr. Ferris had taken a post, announced in the education press in the winter, at a foundation concerned with school leadership, in another state; her letter of resignation remained in the board's file with its four days and eleven versions mercifully unrecorded except in the memory of the secretary who had typed them. The security director, asked by the interim head whether he intended, now that his memorandum had been adopted in every particular, to write a final one closing the matter, said that memoranda were for matters that were open, and that he would keep the log instead, which was the memorandum's permanent form. Anton Weber submitted his department's report in the same week, and it contained, among the year's enrollments and results, a single line in the scholarship column that closed a circuit the year had opened: the west-side cellist, admitted to the second round in January, had been awarded a full music scholarship for the fall, on the strength of an audition at which — the report noted, in Weber's driest hand — her name had preceded her to the gate.
Weber read his own report before submitting it, in the music building, in the evening, with the building emptying around him, and he sat for a while with the line about the cellist and with the memory the year had installed in him of another scholarship file and another arrival, and he did a thing that no policy required and that the account records because the year had been, at every turn, about what people did with paper that no one had demanded of them. He wrote to Moussa and Renee Diallo — not to the department, not to the city, to the parents, at their home — a letter of two paragraphs, on the school's paper, in his own hand. The first paragraph said that their son would play the slow movement of the Elgar at the spring concert, with the orchestra, and that seats were being held for them in the third row, which was where the hall's sound was best for the cello, a fact he offered without explanation of how he knew they would want the sound considered before the sightlines. The second paragraph said that he had kept the chairs set out on a certain April afternoon of the year before, for an audition that had begun late, and that he had never found the professional form in which to say that the school's music had been waiting in that room for the boy while the boy was on the curb outside it, and that the letter was that form, arriving, like the school's other letters that year, later than it should have and in full. He signed it and sent it through the mail, at the ordinary rate, and it arrived on a Tuesday, and Renee read it standing at the kitchen counter, and put it in the folder — at the back, as the latest thing, in front of nothing but the apology, which it now preceded in the family's affections if not in the clasp's order — and she said, to no one in particular and to the family in general: the school writes good letters now. Moussa said: it had the file for it. Xavier said nothing at all, because he was reading the first paragraph again, about the third row and the sound, and about the piece he was going to play at the tempo of the music.