The Engagements Read Free

luxury. But over time, Frances came to enjoy life in Canada.
    There, she and her father grew closer than ever, the two outsiders. Frances was an only child, and if her father, like most men, had wanted a boy, he never let on. He treated her like neither male nor female, just as his one and only, his darling. Anything Frances wanted to do, he thought was swell. And if she didn’t like something and wanted to give it a skip, that was fine by him too. Her father had saved her from the cotillions and socials and dance lessons that were the fate of all her female cousins.
    As a girl, Frances had liked to write short stories. He read every one of them, giving her his critiques.
    “You’re not an editor,” her mother once scolded him. “You’re her father. You should just say the stories are grand.”
    But Frances thrilled to his criticisms. They made his praise all the "/>

At sixteen, while still in high school, she got a job at a community paper in Ontario, writing a shopping column. She went out and sold the advertising and wrote the ads, too, and made forty-five dollars a week in the middle of the Depression. That had lit a fire in her—she loved writing and selling. Most of all, she loved drawing her own paycheck. Her father was proud.
    Frances thought that her time in Canada had prepared her well for working at Ayer. The company president, Harry Batten, was a self-made man who liked hiring wealthy Ivy League types, with a strong tendency toward Yale. They had plenty of clients like that, too. Men with names like du Pont and Rockefeller. Frances was the only person in the copy department without a college degree, but she carried herself withas much confidence as anyone else, and no one seemed to notice the difference.
    Batten was fond of boasting that Ayer had an employee from every one of the forty-eight states.
    A Nordic Protestant from every state!
Frances thought.
Well done you!
The agency didn’t look fondly on Catholics, and Jews were out of the question. But then, every agency was like that. She kept her Catholicism to herself. She only called in sick once a year, on Ash Wednesday.
    Four years at the agency had gone by in a flash, her grandmother wondering each Christmas with greater urgency than the last when Frances planned to settle down and have a family of her own. Her parents had been older than usual when they married in 1911, after meeting by chance on holiday in the Thousand Islands. Her mother was twenty-eight, her father thirty. Another four years passed before Frances was born. Her mother could still remember all the questions and concerns her older relatives had thrown at her—she had married too late, they said. She was waiting too long for children. These complaints had hurt her deeply. So for a long time, she refused to bother Frances about such things. When the window for nudging opened, it was quite short, as Frances soon turned thirty-two, apparently the age at which everyone gave up hope. Just like that, she went from perhaps only a pitiable late bloomer to a full-blown maiden lady. It was a delight to have the pressure off, really.
    She worked for the most powerful advertising agency in the world. She found her job far more exciting than any man she had met in the longest. Even this—staying up until all hours, jittery with the fear of not getting it right—even this thrilled her.
    The irony of her situation wasn’t lost on her: she was a bachelor girl whose greatest talent so far was for convincing couples to get engaged.
    When Frances joined Ayer in ’43, 103 employees were at war—10 percent of the agency. The only clients they took on during that time were the Boeing Airplane Company and the U.S. Army. Advertisements for luxury goods were seen as vulgar. From June 1942 until September 1943, De Beers advertising was confined to spreading the word of the company’s contribution of industrial diamonds to the war effort. After that, jewelry advertising resumed, but they had to be