You can imagine the festive spirit with which I entered the Metropolitan conference room five minutes later, knowing that those confidential files were waiting for me upstairs.
Tibby had insisted. All right. Tibby had actually locked his hand around my arm and refused to relinquish the key until I agreed to attend Agatha’s anniversary party. “If I have to eat cake, you have to eat cake,” he said, and in the end it was this promise of implied solidarity that moved me to go along. I needed a friend, didn’t I?
Gogo was there, beaming. Gogo had known Agatha since she was a baby. In fact, Gogo had probably decorated the birthday room herself. The place was unrecognizable. Festooned with bunting, chock-a-block with hearts and sparkling forties, overflowing with refreshments and a cake of Agatha-like proportions. The honored lady stood there herself in the center of the sitting area, pursed of lip, gimlet of eye, pointy paper hat balanced atop her pointy shellacked head.
“Congratulations.” I lunged in to kiss the exact center of her leftmost patch of rouge. “Forty years of service! I’d never have guessed a day over thirty-eight.”
Gogo was filling paper cups with champagne. “I’m going to cry in a minute. Remember when you spanked my bottom for rearranging all the pens in the storage closet?”
“Spanked it good,” said Agatha with satisfaction. “You were just two and a half.”
“Well done, Mary Poppins,” I said.
Oh, the warm feelings packed into that room! Editors, writers, secretaries, even the typing pool, all guzzling down Lightfoot champagne and eyeing that cake like crocodiles at a zebra convention. That cake! Some zealous confectioner had created a three-dimensional chocolate-frosted telephone, with Congratulations Agatha! trailing in swirly icing letters from the receiver earpiece, and Forty Years of Service! shouting from the mouthpiece. How we were going to cut it up, I had no idea.
Within minutes, a dozen empty champagne bottles had piled up on the service tray, the ashtrays were overflowing, and the mood was turning fractious. “I think we’d better start the cake,” I whispered to Gogo.
“Not yet. Daddy wants to say a few words.”
“Mr. Lightfoot?” I owned myself shocked. S. Barnard had never made an appearance at any of the birthdays, engagements, anniversaries we occasionally moved ourselves to celebrate in the office. Word had it he only attended the Metropolitan Christmas party for a single ceremonial half hour, before departing by limousine for parts unknown but roundly suspected. “Why?”
“Oh, they’ve known each other forever.”
The room went silent as she spoke, so the word forever floated out cheerfully above our heads. I looked to the door, where Mr. Lightfoot stood in his elegant pin-striped charcoals, a royal purple handkerchief showing in a neat triangle from his breast pocket. A distinct air of martini wafted through the nimbus of cigarette smoke, suggesting lunch at his club with the Metropolitan’s largest advertiser.
“Miss Brown!” he said. He walked up to her, snatched her talons, and kissed each cheek pouch.
Someone coughed. I believe it was Tibby.
Mr. Lightfoot turned to face the assembled minions. One hand still held Agatha’s. Gogo pressed a paper cup of champagne into the other.
“Let me tell you about Miss Brown,” he said.
I measured the distance to the door. Too far.
Agatha was smiling a foundation-cracking smile, her lips stretched so wide that the scarlet had thinned out to fuchsia.
“I first met Miss Brown thirty-nine years ago. I was just out of Philips Exeter, working at my father’s magazine the summer before I started Harvard. I had never seen anyone like her. Gorgeous face, shining blond hair. Tits like torpedoes, out to here”—he motioned extravagantly with his champagne hand—“and an ass to match.”
No one made a sound. The word ass echoed its way around the room, nearly setting the champagne bottles to rattling. I could just see Gogo’s pink face at my periphery.
“She was every young man’s dream.” Mr. Lightfoot exhaled the memory and drank down his bubbly in a single large-throated gulp. He turned to Agatha and gestured wide, as if he were presenting her to the Queen of England. “And now. Just look at her!”
I looked obediently at Agatha’s shellacked head and paper hat and wide smile. I looked at the cherry-red tip of Lightfoot’s nose. I looked, for lack of anything better, at the enormous chocolate telephone in the center of the conference table: Congratulations Agatha! Forty Years of Service!
A furious and rapid clapping exploded the stunned silence. “Brava!” said Gogo. “Brava, Agatha! Hear, hear!”
“Hear, hear!” we murmured in chorus, and all at once, there wasn’t enough champagne in the world.
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