Weber's letter had been exact about the third row. The hall was the academy's good room — older than the music building, wood and height and a ceiling that returned sound the way certain rooms return conversation, generously — and the Diallos' seats were where the cello's voice arrived with its whole body, before the hall's architecture had finished admiring it. They sat in the third row, in the middle block, with the program unopened on Moussa's knee. Renee Diallo wore the dress. She had not been announced, and she was not introduced; the school's new head, making her way down the aisle in the minutes before the house lights, greeted three families by name and passed the Diallos with a nod of the kind given to parents whose faces are becoming familiar, which was, in the economy of that evening, the precise denomination of honor the family had come for. A father two seats down, reading his own program, remarked to his wife that the cello boy's mother was somebody important at the city, he thought; the wife said she believed she was in police work; and the remark traveled no further, because the house lights were going, and because the remark was, in the end, only the lobby's weather, which the family had long since learned to dress for by being unremarkable in it.
Xavier, in the practice room, changed into the suit. The suit fit the way winter's hemming had promised, and the practice-room sink ran warm, and he stood with his hands under the water for the count the year had made habitual, in the room where he had warmed them before the audition, and he listened through the wall to the orchestra assembling itself — the oboe's A, the strings' weather of tuning, Weber's voice in the low register he used for last things. On the wall of the practice room, among the notices and the sign-out sheet for the room's use, there was a card, new that spring, printed by the music office for all the practice rooms. It gave the room's booking rules, and at the bottom, in the secretary's hand, it said the room could be held for scholarship candidates on audition days, by name, through the office, so that a candidate would have somewhere to be expected before the chair in the audition room. No one had shown him the card. He found it while his hands dried, the way you find the last page of a file you thought you had finished reading, and he stood looking at it until the oboe's A came through the wall again and the evening required him.
The program opened the way school programs open, with the younger ensemble and the sound of a building full of families settling into the particular happiness of watching their own children be better than expected. Xavier sat in the cello section with the repaired-crack instrument between his knees and the orchestra's whole season in his hands, and he played the first half the way sections play: as a citizen of a sound. The section leader, at the first stand, set the bowings with her eyes as much as her bow. Weber conducted with the economy of a man who trusts his preparation, which is the only conducting that lets an audience forget the conductor.
His parents listened from the third row with the whole of their year's practice in listening. Moussa listened the way he listened in his office, for the person inside the performance. Renee listened the way she had listened on a telephone line a year earlier to an officer adding up a column of figures: exactly, and without reaching in. When the first half ended and the hall exhaled into its intermission — the lobby's weather rising, programs fanning, the foundation's party circulating with the confidence of endowment — the Diallos stayed in their seats, as families of performers learn to do, saving their legs and their places, and Moussa read the program's note on the Elgar movement for the second time, and Renee looked at the stage, at the empty chair in the cello section's front half where her son's instrument leaned against his stand, and she thought — in the part of her mind that was not the chief's and not even, in that moment, the mother's, but simply the keeper of the year's accounts — of the inventory of places that instrument had waited in the last thirteen months: a gate's shade, a curb's edge, a locker, a practice room, a folder's worth of rooms where paper was read aloud. It had waited everywhere it was put, without protest, in the manner of instruments, and it would be lifted in a moment by the boy to whom it did not belong, in the school's eyes and the library's, and played like something he owned outright, which is the only way anything is ever played well.