The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  There hadn’t been anything resembling good news at Ayer in ages. They were losing clients left and right, and they both knew it.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “You know Deanne Leety, right?”

  “Of course I do, Gerry. What’s going on?”

  Deanne Leety was a young and gorgeous thing who had been working in the copy department for three or four years now. They all made a fuss over her—so smart, so vibrant, so creative. She’s like the new Frances Gerety! Gerry Senior had once said, and Frances had responded, Oh? Whatever happened to the old one?

  A year ago, Deanne had gotten divorced. She went off to work in the New York office. Frances had never thought to wonder what she was working on.

  “Right,” Junior said now. “Well. She’s giving you a hand on De Beers since you’ve been so busy.”

  “No I haven’t,” she said. “Not any busier than usual.”

  “Right. Well.”

  She suddenly felt overheated. The Ayer building might have been the last one in Philadelphia without air-conditioning. Frances stretched the phone cord to its absolute limit and pushed the window open. A cool breeze swept in, causing the papers on her desk to fly about the room.

  “When you say she’ll give me a hand, do you mean she’s taking over my account?”

  He paused. She could tell he was nervous.

  Frances sat down.

  “Are you dropping the motto?” she asked quietly.

  “No! We still love A Diamond Is Forever. It’s not as drastic as it sounds. Your retirement is coming up, that’s all. It seems like a good time to begin the transition.”

  “My retirement is over a year away,” she said.

  “That’s not so long, Frances.”

  “I don’t know how closely you watch this account, but the diamond engagement ring tradition has been at an all-time peak these past few years. Somewhere between six hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand carats are being sold annually in the marriage market now. An average of half a carat per ring.”

  “Yes, but a lot of that is down to marriage rates that have already started to decline. And you know as well as I do that times are changing. These days, everybody under twenty-five seems to pooh-pooh everything everybody over twenty-six believes in. We need to find a way to sell the same old product to a whole new generation. The client wanted some exploration to that end.”

  It was true that many leading magazines wouldn’t cover diamonds in their editorial every year anymore, or even every other year. The publicity department had done their job almost too well, and the novelty of diamonds had worn off a bit. But that was publicity. As far as her job went, Frances had kept it as fresh as she could.

  “I’ve done that a hundred times before,” she said. “I can do it again in my sleep.”

  She had been the only person to write for De Beers for the past twenty-four years. She had worked on other accounts: Yardley of London, Sealtest, Canon, Crane stationery. They had even given her a bonus for some silly thing she wrote about a princess telephone. (It’s little! It’s lovely! It lights!) But De Beers was the focus of her entire career.

  “How long has this girl been writing my account?” she asked. She felt like a wife asking her husband how long he’d been sleeping with his bookkeeper.

  “She and Jerry Siano in the art department have been working together on some ideas for a few months,” he said sheepishly.

  “Months!”

  They were both silent. She assumed he was waiting for her to make a scene. Lord knew she had never been afraid to do so in the past. Four years earlier, his father and Ayer’s president, Warner Shelly, had gone to Johannesburg to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ayer and De Beers. She felt stung for an instant upon realizing she wasn’t invited. Nobody had thought of her. Frances said nothing, but when they came back all smiles, telling everyone that they’d never been wined and dined like that in their lives, that they had each been given a gold watch, she began to see red. She was the one who had done all the work!

  Poor Gerry waltzed into her office to show her the watch, and Frances snapped, “Where’s my gold watch?”

  Well, his mouth flew open and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. No one dared to talk to him like that. No one but her. She had often thought it again since: Where’s my gold watch? Or better still, my diamond watch?

  But just now she felt too stunned to raise a fuss.

  “Why don’t I have Deanne come down on the train tomorrow morning and show you what she’s done,” he said.

  Frances didn’t respond. That sounded like absolute torture, but she didn’t have much of a choice.

  “There’s something else,” he said.

  “Dear God, what?”

  “We’re moving some of creative to New York. Including De Beers.”

  Everyone had been expecting it ever since Harry Batten died two years back. Each time they lost another account, the reason the client gave was the same—they weren’t in Manhattan, therefore they were out of touch. It was the exact opposite of the way it had been when she first got hired, when their outsider status made them seem more fully American than everyone else.

  But they had been falling behind for a long while. They were the last of the big agencies to get 50 percent of their business in broadcast.

  “AT&T threatened to leave, and that was the last straw,” Gerry said now. “Warner wants art and copy in New York by next month.”

  “I can’t just up and move to New York.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s all right. Plenty of people will stay in Philly. Just some big accounts will go. You’ll stay on where you are until you retire. You can take it easy.”

  “I don’t want to take it easy,” she said.

  She knew De Beers didn’t have to move anywhere. The Oppenheimers never even came to America. They wouldn’t know the difference between ads written in New York City and Timbuktu.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Finally he said, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just the cycle these things take.”

  He was right. It was a ruthless business. Out with the old, in with the new. She had always known this, she had just never been the old before. For the first time in her life, Frances imagined how Betty Kidd must have felt when she came along, all eager and ready to take over. Poor Betty.

  They hung up, and Frances sat with her chin in her hands, just staring at the wall. This shouldn’t cause such a sting. She’d still have her other accounts. And yet.

  At noon, she gathered up her purse and hat, and strolled to the elevator. If anyone asked, she would say she had gone to a meeting.

  She drove out to the Main Line, where the city skyscrapers were replaced by grand old houses and lush trees. Once she got to Merion, she went down into the wood-paneled lunchroom, not bothering to lift her head as she walked past the ladies playing bridge in the parlor. She had never been here on a weekday before.

  The waitress was a college girl named Victoria.

  “Hello, Miss Gerety,” she said. “A martini, two olives?”

  “Yes please, dear. And the chicken salad.”

  “Right away.”

  When the drink came, she gulped half of it down in one sip.

  “Happy Birthday, Mary Frances,” she said out loud.

  She felt utterly alone, ready for a pity party, though a couple of her girlfriends were taking her to dinner later. She wasn’t alone, not really.

  She wished she had a recording of the entire exchange from this morning, so that she might play it back and hear every word with fresh ears. Gerry had said that times were changing and they needed a new approach. The idea that she couldn’t handle the job was ludicrous. It had been only a few years since she had last saved De Beers. Had everyone forgotten already?

  In 1960, the De Beers folks decided to be in cahoots with the Soviets rather than compete with them, when they discovered massive diamond deposits in Siberia. The diamonds were small, mostly between .2 and .4 carats
, and there were millions of them. There was no use for stones like that in the market Ayer had created, in which bigger was clearly better, but De Beers intended to control all the world’s diamonds, wherever they were found and whatever the size.

  Gerry went into a tailspin. “We’ve spent all this time telling people that a real marriage proposal can only be expressed by the largest stone possible. They want us to cut that off and say, ‘Sorry, folks, now it’s all about small diamonds’? We’ll lack any and all credibility.”

  “All right,” Frances said, her wheels already turning. “What is there to make a diamond special, other than its size?”

  He waited only half a second before answering. “I can’t think of a damn thing.”

  “I’ll work on it,” she said. “Not to worry.”

  At home that night, she poured herself a drink and wrote down fifty ideas or more, all of them awful. She feared that Gerry was right—you couldn’t spend three decades telling women to want something and then all of a sudden demand that they desire its opposite.

  In the morning meeting the next day, for the first time she could recall, Frances had to admit that she had nothing. They threw around more bad ideas—maybe women could get a large diamond and a small one now. Absurd things like that.

  Afterward, she went to her office and pulled out a book she kept of all the ads she had ever written. She felt a bit emotional flipping through those pages. She was looking for something to spark her imagination, though she couldn’t say what.

  Eventually, she landed on a page from the fifties, covered in white daisies. They had tried for a brief time then to be a bit more scientific about rings. In that ad, she wrote about color, clarity, cutting, and carats. The idea wasn’t a huge hit, so they dropped it and went back to lovey-doveyness.

  She went to the creative director to tell him about it.

  “The 4 Cs,” she said. “What if we turn that into an official term? Something a woman would go to her jeweler and ask about. That way, you could buy a teeny stone, but feel confident that it’s far more perfect than a gem three times as big.”

  “I like the idea, but I can’t imagine women caring about how clear a stone is under a microscope, can you?”

  She shrugged. “If the ads are convincing enough, why not? And if the jewelers will get behind it, which they ought to.”

  “But it didn’t work last time,” he said.

  “Well, maybe we just didn’t push hard enough.”

  They added a box called “How to Buy a Diamond” to all the ads. Ask about color, clarity, and cutting—for these determine a diamond’s quality, contribute to its beauty and value. Choose a fine stone, and you’ll always be proud of it, no matter what its size.

  Frances wrote lots on the topic—for four years in a row they ran a full-page ad that was nothing but a chart dedicated to defining the 4 Cs. The publicity department worked the idea into stories for newspapers and men’s magazines about how to acquire the best diamond. And now television hosts and Tiffany and every bride in America talked about the 4 Cs as if they were a concept as old as time.

  More recently, Frances had begun to work on the idea of developing a diamond engagement ring tradition in countries where it didn’t previously exist—countries like Sweden and Germany, where the custom of giving a plain gold band was firmly entrenched—to help get rid of the surplus of small stones.

  Meanwhile, De Beers came up with a new ring. They called it the eternity band, meant as an anniversary gift, and made of twenty or more little Siberian diamonds, running in a line around the entire finger. In 1964, Frances focused her attention on this, and came up with the slogan Diamonds bespeak an ever-growing love. The campaign was a huge success.

  Yet here she was, just four years later, getting the brush-off from the same men who had been praising her for a quarter century.

  Gerry Junior had said it wasn’t personal. Maybe that was true in theory. But Frances had made her work her life. Who was she without it?

  She had never once thought about retirement, though she knew it was coming. Oh, maybe in some vague sense she had pictured herself moving out to the suburbs, waking up at ten and playing golf on a Tuesday. She had thought about what she might do besides work. But she hadn’t thought of not working, the void that would leave.

  Her parents died in 1959, six months apart. Her mother went first, and after that it was like her father couldn’t find a single reason to stay alive. Frances kept in touch with her cousins, but her true family had been gone for years. What did she have, then? Other people could sink into their grandchildren, or rediscover their spouses, or whatever it was they did. Her longest relationship in life had not been with a man, but with a company.

  Gerry Lauck Senior once showed her a letter written by Cecil Rhodes, who founded De Beers in the 1880s. Rhodes had never married either. In that letter, he wrote to a friend, “I hope you will not get married. I hate people getting married. They simply become machines and have no ideas beyond their respective spouses and their offspring.”

  And yet the two of them, he and Frances, were more responsible than anyone for the diamond engagement ring tradition.

  “Excuse me? Fran?” came a voice from behind her. For a second she thought it was the waitress noticing her empty glass, but of course the waitress wouldn’t call her that. She turned to see Meg Patterson standing there.

  “I thought that was you. I was upstairs playing bridge when you came in. We just finished for the day. Mind if I sit?”

  Frances smiled. “No, please do.”

  She owed Ham and Meg for the fact that she even got to be here. They had had a whale of a time trying to get her her membership, with various old geezers on the board threatening to leave the club if a single woman was admitted. But now there were a few other maiden ladies who belonged, too. Of course, they still couldn’t vote and probably never would be allowed to. But Frances didn’t care about that. She didn’t want to vote. She wanted to golf and drink martinis on the terrace at sunset.

  Meg pulled a pack of Parliaments from her purse and offered one to Frances before lighting her own.

  “Do you have a meeting here today?”

  “No. I took the afternoon off. It’s my birthday.”

  “Ahh! I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”

  “How could you?”

  The waitress brought the salad and offered to refresh her drink.

  “Yes please,” Frances said. “And what will you have, darling?”

  “A White Russian would be great,” Meg said. “Thanks, Victoria. Please charge everything to Ham’s account.”

  “No!” Frances protested, but Meg raised a hand to say that she would not argue. “It’s your birthday.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So what do you think about the big news?” Meg asked. “Ayer in New York.”

  Frances wondered if everyone on earth had known longer than she had. It seemed that in a single day she had become obsolete. She remembered now how thirteen years ago, just before she joined Merion, Meg had told her they were moving to New York. But they never had. Ayer was their family, and Ham was loyal, like Frances herself.

  “I’ll stay here,” Frances said. “I’ll go back and forth, as I do now. Nothing’s going to change for me.”

  Meg nodded. “Ham’s going to try commuting from here, too. I don’t want to give up our house, I love it too much. Our neighbors are such lovely people. Ten years ago, I might have been up for a New York adventure, but now I’m stuck in my ways.”

  Frances patted her hand. “Me too.”

  “After Ham retires, I’d like to travel, though,” she said. “I’ve never seen Europe.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “I’ve always envied you a little, Frances.”

  She laughed. “Good heavens, why?”

  “You’ve just always seemed so in control of your own destiny. I’ve ended up someplace I didn’t expect to be. I pictured myself as a mother, ever since I was a young girl. But chil
dren weren’t in the cards for us, I’m afraid. And that makes me, what? A housewife?”

  “A damn fine one, I’m sure,” Frances said.

  Meg shrugged. “Sometimes it just feels like we can’t tell what we’ve given up until it’s too late.”

  Frances was still awake at two a.m. She should have called Dorothy to talk about what happened, or else her cousin Margaret, but now it was far too late. She knew she wouldn’t sleep.

  She tried to soothe herself. This was how things went. She had had other accounts taken away from her before, and she’d gotten accounts that had been taken from someone else. Nothing personal.

  Morning came, and she put on her smartest dress, but she still looked like a disheveled schoolmarm. Her hair hung limp in a gray bob, and she had no choice but to wear the thick glasses she’d been sporting for several years now. She couldn’t see a thing without them.

  When Deanne Leety stepped into her office in stacked heels and a tailored pantsuit, Frances had the strongest urge to crawl under the desk and die. She had never seen a woman in a pantsuit, other than on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily.

  “Hi Frances,” Deanne said. “Is this still a good time?”

  “Of course. Sit down.”

  Deanne held a fat file under her impossibly thin arm. “I brought along my ideas.”

  Frances nodded.

  “Good. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Deanne opened the folder. She was an entirely feminine creature, pretty and fashionable, but somehow more confident than any other woman Frances had ever seen in this or any office building. This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.

  “First, let me say how much I admire your work,” Deanne said. “I like how many of your ads tell a story.”

  Frances forced a grin. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve just done some updating, really. Trying to appeal to the hippies and the dreamers. Like this—”

  Deanne slid a piece of paper across the table. The illustration was a psychedelic blast of bright orange and blue: a woman with long flowing hair, a crown of flowers resting on her head, and her bare arms wrapped around the waist of the man in front of her. There was a cartoon lion crouching behind the pair.