Chapter 8

Marisol Beaudry took off her glasses, put them back on, and looked down at the accession card.

Then she looked at Reinhardt, and then at the room, and then at the old man standing on the doormat with the rain behind him.

"Lot Twelve was misdescribed in tonight's catalog," she said into the microphone. "The date is wrong. The pipe history is wrong. Under the terms of sale printed in every catalog in this room, a lot that has been materially misdescribed is withdrawn, and any announcement on it is void."

"Marisol." Reinhardt's voice cracked across the floor. "Don't you dare."

"I'm the auctioneer of record," she said. "It's my license."

She turned the card over. On the back, in the memo field, typed on a parish typewriter in 1974 by a secretary who had long since gone to her reward, were two words.

"Memo field," Marisol read. "'Choir shoes.'"

Nobody moved.

"The donor left a note with the console in 1974," she said. "The secretary typed the gist of it. Two words."

Wil's hand came out of his shirt. He walked up the aisle and laid the fan of pink carbon on the podium, and Marisol picked up the top one and read it into the microphone.

"Postal money order, twenty-two dollars. Memo: choir shoes. Signature: W.T."

She picked up the next. "Memo: choir shoes. W.T." And the next. "Choir shoes. W.T."

She read six of them. Then she stopped, because there was a sound coming from the third row.

Cleo Baptiste stood up.

"Those shoes were mine," she said. "All thirty years of them."

She said it to the room, not to Wil. Her voice filled the gallery the way it had filled halls in nine countries.

"Nineteen seventy-four. I was eleven years old and I sang the high part, and there was a box in the choir room with my name on it and a pair of black patent shoes inside, size five and a half, and a card in the lid." She took a breath. "Then in nineteen ninety-four the money orders started. Twenty-two dollars, every spring, made out to me at the parish. I was directing by then. I bought shoes for the children with every one of them. Ninety-four through two thousand two. Then nothing. Eleven months, nothing. I thought he'd died. I went to the post office and asked, and they couldn't tell me anything. Then in two thousand four they started again, and I stood in the church kitchen and cried, and I still didn't know his name."

She opened her clutch.

She took out a small square card, gone soft at the corners, the kind that used to come in a shoe box, and held it up so the light caught it.

"Nineteen seventy-four," she said. "Tucked in the lid. 'Wear them out, then come sing.'" She turned it so the room could see. "Signed W.T."

Marisol laid the card beside the money-order stub, and the two slanted signatures lay there side by side, fifty years apart, the same hand.

Somebody in the back row stood up. Then the woman in pearls. Then the dealer in the bolo tie. Then all of them - two hundred people in black tie, standing in a room where nobody had told them to stand.

Reinhardt made one more try. "He gave it away," he said. "He's owed nothing. This changes nothing."

Wil put his hand in his left breast pocket and took out the envelope.

He didn't open it. He just held it up.

"I didn't come to buy it back," he said. "I've got four thousand dollars in here for the roof fund, and I was going to leave it on the table by the door and take the ferry home before anybody in this room knew my name."

The silence after that was different from the one before.

Then, from the last row, a woman's voice, dry and carrying, said: "Stop."