The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  In the office upstairs, she asked to speak with the manager. A skinny man in glasses stepped out from behind a door and greeted her warmly.

  “I’d like to become a member,” she said.

  “All right. Are you new to the area?”

  “No, sir. I’ve lived here most of my life.”

  “Splendid.” He pulled a pen from a jar as if to take notes. “And what is your husband’s name, ma’am?”

  “I have no husband. Just me.”

  The man chuffed. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but all memberships here are for men.”

  “I know plenty of women members. Rose Jackson. Meg Patterson.”

  “Well, yes. But their husbands are members too. We’ve never had a woman on her own.”

  “As my father likes to say, there’s a first time for everything.”

  He smiled warily. “Around here, things don’t change very much. That’s part of what our members cherish about it.”

  “Is that so?” She traced a white-gloved fingertip across the counter. “How would I proceed if I just wanted to give it a try?”

  “You would need a sponsor, and I doubt you’ll find anyone willing to take that on.”

  She thought immediately of Ham.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Thank you, Mister—”

  “Adams,” he said. “Floyd Adams.”

  “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Adams.”

  As she turned to go, he stammered, “Even if you did find someone, the board would have to discuss it. It’s never been done before. And even if they approved you, women absolutely cannot vote here. That’s non-negotiable. It’s against policy.”

  She felt a flutter of excitement. He was considering it!

  “Very well.”

  “And you couldn’t golf with the men, of course. Strictly against policy.”

  “Of course. Would I be permitted to breathe the same air, or is that also against policy?”

  He smirked as she walked out.

  She had decided that the company outing would be just the place to ask Ham and Meg to sponsor her. But now she was running out of time.

  “Meet me at my car in ten minutes?” she said to Dorothy.

  “You’ve got it. I can’t wait to leave, Fran! I may go down to the lot right now and just putter around.”

  Frances found the Pattersons standing against a tree, eating burgers off of one paper plate.

  “I’ve got a big favor to ask,” she said.

  Ham looked worried. “Oh?”

  “Well, not so big. It’s just that I was thinking. I love golf, as you know, and I’m an Ayer man through and through. Perhaps I ought to join Merion.”

  Ham laughed. Not the reaction she was hoping for. Frances plowed ahead.

  “They say I’ll need a sponsor, and I thought you might be it.”

  She could tell that poor Ham would rather be anyplace else on earth in this moment.

  “Far as I know, there aren’t any single ladies that belong there,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel strange?”

  “No, not really.”

  “And you spoke to Merion about this? They’d allow it?”

  “They said they’d think about it. I need to get the sponsor first.”

  “Huh.” He frowned, and she saw what a large thing it was to ask—the men of Merion wouldn’t want her around, and he wouldn’t want to be responsible for her presence.

  “Can I give it some thought?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  Frances kissed Meg on the cheek and started in the direction of her car. She hadn’t cried in ages. Years, probably. But now she felt tears in her eyes, and quickly tried to blink them away.

  She knew a woman had to choose one path or another, and she had chosen hers long ago. But on occasion, it hurt to see what she had given up. Not children, not even love, but just the normal things that every coupled woman took for granted.

  As Frances walked, she heard quick footsteps behind her. She turned to see Meg.

  “Wait!” she said. She touched Frances’s arm and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. But there’s a good chance Ham and I will be moving to New York.”

  “What?” Frances said. “When?”

  “He’s gotten an offer from Young & Rubicam. It’s a lot of money. The man said his talents could be put to better use in New York. He said they’re doing much more sophisticated stuff up there, and the pay is better, and he said—oh, never mind. I’ve already said too much.”

  “No. Tell me,” Frances said. “What did he say?”

  “He said that Ayer is dying. But of course he’d say that, right? He works for Ayer’s competitor!”

  It wasn’t the first time Frances had heard it. A few years ago, they started saying that Doyle Dane Bernbach had turned the business upside down.

  But Frances agreed with Harry Batten on this one: she just didn’t believe it. And anyway, it didn’t impact her even if it was true. She would never leave Philadelphia. She didn’t have the kind of personality it took to move around every six months, or whatever they did in New York. They might pay you a hell of a lot of money, and then you’d have to figure out the hard way that as soon as they felt like it, you’d be out on your neck. She had heard that in New York, it was the rage now to make every potential employee go through a full psychological evaluation. They’d take you to lunch, and if you so much as used the saltshaker, they wouldn’t hire you.

  It was a zoo up there. Cocktails at breakfast, staying in the restaurant all afternoon. In Philadelphia, you had two drinks at lunch and went back to your desk. It was just a more respectable place. She only ever wanted to have one job and grow in it. Ayer was the perfect agency for her—old-fashioned and conservative, maybe, but solid and dependable.

  “The reason I’m telling you all this, is just to say that I don’t care what anyone at Merion thinks, and neither should Ham,” Meg went on. “We won’t belong there much longer anyway. Don’t you worry, Frances. I’ll get him to sponsor you.”

  She felt unbearably grateful. “Really?”

  “Sure! It will be fun to shake things up at stiff old Merion for a change. We’re some of the youngest members, you know. They probably expect these sorts of shenanigans from us.”

  “Aww Meg, you’re a peach.”

  Frances could see Dorothy in the distance, leaning against the passenger-side door of her car, smoking a cigarette. After the meeting, they would probably go out for a couple of cocktails. Then Frances would go home and fix dinner for herself, and watch television with the dog at her feet.

  Just like that, she was happy again to be free. Right as rain.

  Part Two

  1972

  Evelyn stood at the kitchen sink, arranging the flowers in a crystal vase. The roast was in the oven, and the aroma had just begun to fill the room when Gerald walked in.

  “Smells delicious!” he said.

  Since returning home from her errands, she had left him alone in his study. They called hello to one another when she arrived, and that was all. But now, as he wedged in beside her to fill a glass of water, she said, “I saw Julie.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown. At the bookshop.”

  “What did she say?”

  Evelyn could feel a lump rising in her throat.

  “She said Teddy’s asked her for a divorce. So that’s why he’s come, then.”

  Gerald rubbed his temples. “I was afraid of that.”

  “But you said you thought he had realized his mistake.”

  “That’s what I hoped.”

  “He wants her to say in court that he abused her. And I’m supposed to say I witnessed the whole thing.”

  “Christ. Has he lost his mind?”

  “Yes!” she shouted, so loudly that they were both caught off guard by the sound.

  “Oh now, come on,” he said, hugging her. “It will be all right.”

  “How can you say that
? You want our son to be divorced?”

  “Of course not. I’m sick about it. But there’s nothing we can do.”

  When she was Teddy’s age, divorce was something people only whispered about. A scandal. An absolute last resort. An escape from horrible drunkenness or insanity. But in the last few years, divorce seemed to be everywhere. There was even a new law in some states, declaring “no fault,” to help avoid the exact situation poor Julie was in. Maybe it made sense in a court of law, but practically speaking a marriage didn’t get destroyed for no reason. It had to be someone’s fault.

  Is this how America would be now? Anytime the wind blew you might leave behind your entire life and start another? What would it do to her granddaughters, and all the other children like them? Evelyn had been lucky with Gerald; he was a wonderful man, and theirs was a happy marriage. But she thought of others who were less fortunate—her parents, for instance, had never gotten along. Even so, they had kept their vows until the end.

  Since she and Gerald were young, what it meant to be an American had changed. There was so much emphasis on the self now—self over country, self over family, self over all else. Her son was a shining example of the consequences.

  “I don’t want to see him today,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Well, we can’t exactly turn him away.”

  “Why not?”

  Of course she knew why not, and that was why she was standing here arranging flowers when she’d rather be crying into her pillow.

  “Evie! They haven’t gone to court yet. Nothing is carved in stone. Maybe when he gets to town, sees his girls, sees us, he’ll have a change of heart.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “Julie was so cold to me,” she said. “Like I was a stranger. Or no, something even worse than that. Gerald, she’s taking the girls away. All the way back out west.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath. “You have to remember that it’s not you she’s angry with.”

  “I know, but the thought of her leaving for good—I miss her already and she’s just across town. I haven’t missed anyone quite so much since Nathaniel.”

  Gerald ran a hand up and down her back. “I know.”

  “And maybe it’s even harder, since she’s still here. I can see her, but she won’t let me in.”

  Gerald shook his head. “Imagine what Nathaniel would say about all this.”

  “He’d say our son needs a swift kick in the you-know-where.”

  Her husband let out a laugh. “That is exactly what he would say.”

  Over the years, they had often asked one another what Nathaniel might make of a new trend or a story in the news or some bit of drama in their lives. It was a small way of keeping him alive, even though he had been dead now for far longer than he had lived.

  Gerald was Nathaniel’s roommate at Harvard, and he had been one of only ten guests at Evelyn’s first wedding. Outsiders might think it odd, but she and Gerald had a perfect understanding about Nathaniel. They had both loved him dearly, and they would each continue to love him that way until the end. This didn’t threaten either of them. They saw no point in pretending he had never existed. In fact, she would go a step further and say that they both believed pretending he never existed would be strange and quite impossible.

  Evelyn met the pair of them at a college swim meet in 1927, when she was a senior at Wellesley. Gerald’s cousin was on the Radcliffe team, and they had come to cheer her on. It was Gerald who spoke to Evelyn first, right after she won the freestyle competition.

  “That’s quite a sidestroke you’ve got there,” he said, catching her eye as she dried off by the edge of the pool.

  “Thanks.”

  “You look good doing it, too.”

  Then Nathaniel swooped in behind him in his raccoon coat, as dashing as any man she had ever laid eyes on. “Please don’t mind my friend. He doesn’t get out much.”

  Evelyn laughed.

  “I’m Nathaniel Davis,” he said.

  “Evelyn Green.”

  By the time she got to the locker room, she had secured a date for Saturday night.

  Until college, she had been painfully shy. But at Wellesley, surrounded by lively, outgoing girls, she began to come into her own.

  She had a roommate named Midge, who bought Liberty magazine every week, and from its pages they learned all the latest dance steps, which they practiced unabashedly in the bathroom mirror, shuffling and tapping across the wide tile floors. In bed at night, they read Dorothy Dix’s advice column aloud to one another. DD, as they called her.

  Midge introduced Evelyn to shorter skirts and crepe dresses and felt cloche hats, to which they secured jeweled brooches their mothers had given them back home for an entirely different purpose. They wore Mary Janes with high heels and buckles. Midge taught her about rouge, powder, lipstick, eye shadow, and nail polish, though Evelyn never wore as much as the other girls. She knew her father would be mortified to discover that she had ever been seen in public with makeup on her face. Midge made her own shift dresses, with dropped waists, and tassels fluttering at the hemline. Her entire life, Evelyn had known adult women to wear corsets, pulled as tightly as possible, so as to make the waist look tiny, the breasts high and full. But Midge insisted that they go free, other than the bust bodices they used to flatten their chests and create a more streamlined look.

  Midge helped her get ready for her first date with Nathaniel.

  “What’s he like?” she asked as she ran shadow over Evelyn’s eyelids, and Evelyn replied, “Handsome.” Truly, she didn’t know much more than that.

  At dinner, she learned that he was also well mannered, smart, funny, and kind. He had grown up in Pittsburgh with three sisters, the only son of a steelworker. He read Hemingway and Faulkner, and liked poetry. He was studying literature, and hoped to become a lawyer someday, and then later, maybe a politician. After dinner, they went to a jazz club and danced until closing.

  On their second date, they came in third place at a dance marathon, lasting fourteen hours on their feet. Her heels bled the next day, but she could not remember having had a better time in all her life.

  On their fifth date, he told her he was worried about his roommate. They were getting to the point where they should be looking for the girls they would marry (this he said with a knowing nod in her direction, which thrilled her), and still Gerald never dated serious women, or even appropriate ones—just a string of chorus girls and waitresses. They tried to fix him up with Midge, but Midge said he was too silly, not intellectual like Nathaniel, or handsome enough, either. Gerald did tell terrible jokes, and he would flirt with a hat stand; a reasonable woman could hardly take him seriously. At twenty, his hairline had already begun to recede, and he was shorter than Evelyn, though admittedly she was tall for a girl. Next to Nathaniel, he looked slight. Gerald came from a tremendously wealthy family. One got the impression that he didn’t have to try very hard at anything, so he didn’t. For Nathaniel, affording a Harvard education was a struggle. He cleaned toilets for his tuition, and had worked for this opportunity all his life. For Gerald, Harvard was a given, simply what a Pearsall man must do.

  “He’ll find a proper woman who will help him spend his inheritance,” Evelyn told Nathaniel. She herself had grown up around them—the wives of rich and powerful men, who entertained and kept the house running. No doubt, her father had wanted her mother to be that sort of wife.

  “But that’s just the trouble,” Nathaniel said. “I want him to find someone who will love him despite all that, not because of it. He’d be miserable with some stuffy socialite.”

  Evelyn was touched by how much he cared for his friend. It was the mark of a good man. She thought to herself that they ought to make a point of including Gerald when they went out. In the months that followed, the group of them—Gerald, Nathaniel, Evelyn, Midge, and anyone
else who cared to join—spent their nights roaring through the streets of Boston in Gerald’s car, with the girls in the rumble seat in back. They ate cheap suppers and went dancing and drank at hidden speakeasies that the boys somehow knew how to find. Gerald always tried to pay the bill. When the rest of them resisted, he’d say, “It’s not my money, it’s my old man’s.” He always left a huge tip, 30 percent at least. It made Evelyn wonder if he was very generous or just awful at math. Nathaniel said it was the former.

  They graduated in 1928, the year Herbert Hoover was elected president on the slogan “A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” She remembered Gerald merrily saying, As long as there’s not a chicken in every garage—that could get strange. At which they had all rolled their eyes.

  Their merry band split up then: Midge accepted a proposal from a medical student she met at a Boston University mixer, and followed him back to his tiny hometown in Indiana. She sent Evelyn letters, saying she had never felt so cold. The New England chill was nothing, she said, compared to this. Indiana cold crawled inside of you, under your skin and into your ears and nose. A coat and hat were no match for it.

  Gerald went to Chicago to head up a new division of his father’s company. Nathaniel reported that Gerald found his coworkers to be a bunch of wet blankets; they never wanted to go out after work, perhaps because he was the boss’s son. I’m lonesome. I miss our days of getting spifficated in Cambridge, Gerald wrote. Evelyn laughed when Nathaniel read this aloud. She missed them too.

  She herself had decided to stay on in Boston, mostly to be near Nathaniel. Just before graduation, she heard someone in her dormitory talking about job openings for teachers at a public school. It was in a dangerous neighborhood, and no one wanted to work there, the girl said. Evelyn applied the next day. It gave her something to do, something meaningful enough that her mother might approve and not question her decision to stay.