A Hand on the Sleeve
“He was here. He'd be here all evening — far from any other door.” She laughs on cue, turns her head toward Stephen Voss at the right moment, and her palm lies on Jacob’s sleeve — “exactly as much as was proper for an official couple.” The hand under her palm “lay there like a stone. Before, he’d have been the first to turn it over. She noted it and chose not to examine it.” “He was here. He’d be here all evening — far from any other door. She didn’t need to know anything more.” A glance below the edge of the tablecloth, one word, without looking: “Tonight.” The palm returns to the sleeve. “He hadn’t noticed it was gone.”
This is the coldest point of her arc — and the most logical. The whole evening is built as an alibi: as long as Jacob sits at the table he cannot turn up at the peeling facade, and his motionless hand under her palm is not a defeat but a condition of the operation. Note the words “chose not to examine it”: she registers every signal and sets each one aside, the way she set aside the splinter in chapter eighteen. Psychologically this is the limit of compartmentalization: feeling and action no longer touch at all. She arranges “the rest” and smiles at her father’s joke. One word under the tablecloth weighs more than the toast to heirs — and she is the only one at the table who knows it has been sent.
