The Engagements (8 page)
Tonight’s gala promised to be a lavish affair. Two hundred people in the ballroom of a private London club, dinner and dancing, and speeches from all the bigwigs at De Beers. Frances had never met or even spoken to these men before this week, despite decades spent working for them. They were just as she had expected—polite and dignified, but slightly removed, and positively oozing wealth.
The week had gone by in a flash. There were lots of new Ayer people she hadn’t met before, as well as a few of the old greats, including Warner Shelly, who was almost completely blind. He had a chaperone—as did she—who had to take him to his room each night and make sure he could find the keyhole in the door.
There was no mistaking the fact that they had all seen better days, even Ayer itself. At dinner the night before, she watched a business executive in his twenties turn to his date and say, “Mr. Young and Mr. Rubicam both came from our agency, you know.”
The girl looked unimpressed.
Frances sat now in her opulent suite at the Dorchester, perched on the edge of the bed, smoking.
She sipped her martini.
She had ordered the drink and nothing else besides from room service ten minutes earlier. A handsome Brit in a neat tuxedo delivered it on a silver tray. The act felt decadent and incredibly silly. But Lou Hagopian had told her to have whatever she wanted, and at her age she was finally willing to accept such a , but she didallbackyard about the command. It would be a rude awakening when she had to fly home to Pennsylvania tomorrow, to the dim rooms of her house, to her dog, who probably wondered where on earth she had gone. She had never left him before for even one night.
“We want you to feel like Cinderella,” Hagopian said over the phone after she accepted his offer to come.
A very old and crotchety Cinderella with no hopes of meeting Prince Charming
, she thought to herself, though she only replied, “Well, thank you.”
She laughed now, despite her nerves. If she had had to guess two months ago, she would have said that life’s big adventures were all in the
past. But here she was, living like royalty. They had given her a chauffeured limousine for the week. There had been a luncheon every day, parties each night, and shopping and sightseeing in between.
She wished her father were still alive to see it. He would have been so proud. And her old pal Dorothy Dignam from the office—imagine if the two of them could have come here together! Dorothy had passed away less than a year earlier. Her obituary said she was ninety-two. As was the case with a lot of women, the first time anyone knew her real age was the day she died.
Frances thought of her that morning, as they took a tour of the De Beers headquarters.
“Look up there,” said one of the PR boys when they reached the building.
Her eyesight was terrible, even with glasses, but Frances could just make out the words carved in stone above the massive doors: "UGI8A">Thinki
.
“You must be so proud,” he said. “It’s considered one of the greatest lines in advertising.”
“I know it is,” she said. “I’m glad that it is.”
A week of the same compliment over and over, and she still hadn’t come up with a better response than that. Ever sed, the De Beers folks had been telling her how much her work meant to them. She felt awfully pleased to be honored, especially at this point in the gameince she arriv
At the end of this evening’s program, they would show a shicling the campaign’s success, and then she would speak. Mary Frances Gerety would have the last word. At least for tonight.
The dinner was two hours away. She felt desperate for a nap. But she still hadn’t worked out what she’d say onstage. Back home, she had sat down several times to write her speech, but something else always grabbed her attention. The doorbell rang or some interesting segment came on the news, and suddenly she forgot all about De Beers. Of course, this was how she had always worked. She was at her most creative when she waited until the last possible second—a mix of necessity and fear had served her well.
Maybe she would open with that. Tell them that if she hadn’t been such a master procrastinator all her life, what they were here to celebrate might never have come to pass.
Frances stood up. Her whole body felt sore from all the walking she’d d that,” she said.Y their husbands for a fone. They had seen the Tower of London. Oxford Street and the British Museum and Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster. Yesterday they took the train out to Bath, where the most famous and celebrated former resident was Jane Austen, though it seemed to Frances that Austen had lived there only for about three minutes.
She had been athletic all her life. While they were traipsing around the city, she was too proud to mention that these days she rarely walked farther than the distance from the front door to the end of the driveway. But now she was paying for it. And somehow she’d have to squeeze into high heels tonight. Torture devices, that’s what they were. Frances had no idea how women worked and wore heels at the same time. For her, it was utterly impossible to think a clear thought while standing on the tips of her toes.
She recalled a young Marilyn Monroe predicting such a fate for old-timers. Marilyn, who never got to get old. Or never
had
to get old, depending on how you looked at it.
Frances belted it out as she made her way into the suite’s yellow sitting room. “Time rolls on and youth is gone and you can’t straighten up when you bend. But stiff back or stiff knees, you stand straight at Tiffany’s. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
She plopped into a chair at the mahogany desk and looked out the window at the lush green treetops of Hyde Park. She cupped her chin in her hand and placed her elbow on the desk, a position she had assumed on a thousand other occasions when she was on deadline.
De Beers had been one of the few campaigns that invented a need that didn’t previously exist. She jotted this down. Usually, when you wrote an ad, you wanted to highlight that something new and exciting had come along. But with De Beers, it was the opposite: Not only were they to impress upon average women and men—especially the men!—that diamonds were now an imperative for marriage, they were to make it seem as though it had always been that way. Before they got started, diamonds were for the wealthy alone. But now everyone and their mother wore one.
They did it again years later with
Long Distance Is the Next Best Thing to Being There
. The campaign drove AT&T’s profits through the roof. Until that line, no one made long-distance calls. It was just too expensive. But the print ads grabbed people’s hearts, and eventually the television
spots with the line
Reach Out and Touch Someone
took the whole thing over the top, with treacly melancholy music and video of babies talking to grandfathers three thousand miles away, and lovers telling each other how much they missed being together, and the soldier calling home from the battlefield.
Be All You Can Be
was another one. With that line, Ayer created a volunteer army, while making it seem like an American tradition.
Frances didn’t think it was a stretch to say that De Beers was bigger than both of those in terms of inventing the thing you could not do without. Of course, that sounded like bragging. She scratched out everything she had written.
Maybe she ought to get dressed first.
She had decided to wear a blue taffeta gown with a long, full skirt, and a jeweled shawl. The ensemble hung on the back of the bathroom door. Frances went to it and ran her fingers over the fabric. Each night this week, as she put on another frock, she thought of the woman back home to whom it belonged, and imagined that friend by her side. She had saved Meg’s for tonight.
Before Ham died, Meg said that someday the two of them would take the grand tour of Europe. Afterward, everyone encouraged her to do it on her own, but Meg wasn’t the type.
Frances held her glass up to the dress.
“Cheers, darling,” she said, draining her drink.
She thought she just might call up the butler for one more.
Seven o’clock arrived in what seemed like seconds, and Frances was being whisked off to the club in her private limousine. There was an honest-to-God telephone in the backseat, beside an ice bucket stocked with champagne. She was slightly tipsy and had the strongest urge to call someone, but who?
Instead, she placed her hands in her lap and clasped them together like they couldn’t be trusted otherwise.
They got to the club, and her chauffer, Richard, rushed round to open her door. She had to lean heavily on his arm to get out. Yes, she was a clunky old thing, but still she felt like a starlet tonight. She greeted the doormen, who nodded their replies without a word. Frances wondered if someone had instructed them not to speak, like those soldiers who stood guard outside Buckingham Palace.
The dining room was magnificent, with crystal chandeliers and sprays
of white orchids and roses on every table. It looked like the Academy Awards.
She found her seat, at the same table as Warner and a few others from Ayer. She tried to enjoy the cocktails and the chicken and the Yorkshire pudding, but all she could think about was the fact that soon she would take the stage and she still hadn’t a clue what she’d say.
No one knew that she was going to speak. That was a secret between herself and Hagopian and a handful of others. Lou Hagopian seemed to be channeling Tony Bennett—he loved the spotlight, and he was so smooth that it seemed like his every word might be scripted. If only whoever had written his lines could have done hers too.
After dessert, as planned, a girl from public relations came to find Frances in the crowd and ferried her backstage.
There were many lovely speeches. The chairman of De Beers paid homage to her! She was utterly overwhelmed.
Then they showed a video, a creation of Bob and Deanne Dunning, the husband-and-wife team who had left Ayer and started their own company at some point in the seventies.
It opened with a scene from
Casablanca
, Ingrid Bergman saying, “Sing it, Sam.”
And then the song. “As Time Goes By.” Its notes played on as dozens of Frances’s ads flashed across the screen.
A voiceover announced, “The engagement of Ayer and De Beers began in 1938 with a letter postmarked Victoria Hotel, Johannesburg, South Africa.”
From there, the story was told, beginning to end: Of the surveying they did in the thirties, of Gerry Lauck’s plane going down the first time he traveled to South Africa. Of all the advances they had made from one decade to the next. It culminated with a silly thing that the latest creatives had made, a De Beers ad that took the form of a music video. A floppy-haired rock band looked sullen and severe, but by the end the lead singer had proposed to his girlfriend with a diamond.
As soon as the song ended, it would be her turn.
Frances had never felt so nervous in all her life. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears. For a moment, she allowed herself to picture like an elephant was sitting on my chesty. They
But she tried to be calm. She reminded herself that she had always done her best work under pressure.
The curtain parted, and she had no choice but to step onto the stage.
When they saw her walking toward the podium and her name splashed acort film chron
After they left, Evelyn took to her bed. She had been there now for thirty minutes. She once read that Edith Wharton wrote her novels tucked in under the covers, with her dogs all around. It seemed a somewhat depressing way to spend one’s days. Bed was for sleep or sickness or, occasionally, sadness.
She could not guess how long it would be before she saw her son again. She knew now that he really would go through with the divorce, and when she pictured what this meant, she wanted to fall into a deep sleep: Julie would go, taking the girls from her. On holidays, she and Gerald would eat alone at their long dining table that could seat sixteen. Her granddaughters would grow up without a father. They could send money if Teddy refused to, but no amount could make up for his absence.
When she heard Gerald coming up the stairs, she held her breath. As soon as Teddy left, she had pushed past her husband toward the bedroom. It was a move so uncharacteristic that Gerald had laughed. This had proven a grave mistake, which she could tell he realized as soon as their eyes met and he saw her expression. Now that half an hour had passed, she felt embarrassed about how she had acted. It was a tad dramatic, to be sure. But she was truly livid with him. This was one of the few times she could remember in life, and certainly the most consequential, when Gerald’s response to something was so utterly different from her own. If he hadn’t talked her into having Teddy over for lunch. If he had flown to Florida right away after Teddy first met Nicole.
If if if
.
He came in now with a mug in his hand, and set it down on the nightstand.
“Made you some tea.”
She couldn’t remember him ever doing this before, other than when she was down with the flu.
“Thank you Pat Flaherty’s from driving hometown driving,” she said.
“I gather you’re still mad at me,” he said.
“Yes.”
She felt like an actress in a play. In four decades, they had had very little practice at fighting. They were both lousy at it.
“I’ll only say this once more,” she said. “And I’ll try to be as clear as I can. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you didn’t try to change his mind when you had the chance.”
“That’s not for me to do, Evie.”
