“All right,” Cory’s mother said, coming over to her, and the two women stood in silence, neither one moving, both of them short, and as still as the turtle at their feet. They waited for Alby, the way sailors’ wives used to wait for their husbands to return from the sea. The silence seemed to go on for too long, and then, as if the sound barrier had suddenly been breached, there came a scrape of wheel on road, and they both looked up at the same time and saw Alby make the turn onto Woburn and head in their direction. Watching him approach, they both shifted into a state of unaccountable, shared happiness.
Alby kicked his way back up the slanted drive and wound up at the feet of Greer and his mother. He was out of breath, his face hot, his narrow shoulders heaving. “Greer, what was my time? What was my time?” he asked her. At which point she realized that she had forgotten to stop the little silver stopwatch, which still beat on in the palm of her hand.
* * *
? ? ?
One night late that summer when Greer was sitting in bed at her computer, an email popped into her inbox from an address that she didn’t recognize: [email protected]. She clicked it absently, assuming it was spam. Later she would say to Cory, “What if I had deleted it and never wrote back? It makes me ill to even think about.”
Dear Greer Kadetsky,
You wrote me a very kind note a couple of months ago at a low moment for me. I fear I didn’t write back; my apologies. You can imagine the volume of notes I received. I’m reaching out personally to a small number of people as I put together a team for a grand new venture, and since you’d been interested in applying for a position at Bloomer, I wondered if you might be interested in coming in for an interview for this instead. It will be very different, though I’m afraid I must be slightly mysterious about it at the moment.
Warmly,
Faith Frank
Warmly! That was a new one to Greer. She had never seen anyone sign an email that way, and it seemed to her somehow not only adult but also more than that: rich, sophisticated, knowledgeable. She wanted to sign her own return email to Faith that way too, but felt that it would be like a little girl trying on her mother’s ball gown. Greer wrote a response quickly, a pulse tapping in her eyelid:
Dear Faith Frank,
I was just sitting here checking email and suddenly you appeared. Different email address, same person. Of course I am VERY interested in your grand new venture, despite the mysteriousness—or even because of it. Please let me know how to arrange an interview. Thank you so much for thinking of me.
Sincerely,
Greer Kadetsky
Then it was even more shocking when Faith wrote back immediately.
Dear Greer,
That’s wonderful! My assistant Iffat Khan will be in touch with you in the morning.
Warmly,
Faith
P.S. Why are we both still awake? As my mother used to say, we should hit ourselves over the head with a frying pan to get to sleep!
To which Greer replied:
Dear Faith,
Note to self: must buy frying pan. No chance of sleep now. Too excited about prospect of gnv (aka grand new venture). Good night!
Greer
Three days later she was on the bus going back down to New York City. The address this time was a mirrored glass midtown skyscraper called the Strode Building. In the lobby Greer was ID’d, and a terrible photo was taken of her in which she appeared to have a snout. Worse, she had to wear the photo as a badge, and was sent through a turnstile that flung its jaws open to admit her; and then she shot up to 26, where the elevator opened onto a space so blank and white and expansive that she could not tell if it was still under construction, or if this was the way it was permanently meant to look. It was like a floating space station, an empty field with a complicated geometry of cubicles hinted at in the remote distance, everything white, and no boldface institutional name hovering above the reception desk, so she still did not know exactly where she was.
“I have an appointment with Faith Frank,” she told the receptionist with pleasurable but carefully modulated self-importance. The young woman nodded and spoke into a headset, and momentarily another young woman appeared—elegant, composed, a tiny stud in her nose the size of a seed.
“I’m Iffat Khan,” the second woman said. “Faith’s assistant. It’s great to meet you. Come on back. Faith’s in with some people.” Greer followed her down a white hallway that led like a tributary into a large white office. At a long white desk that was made from a repurposed door—a remnant of a building in which secret suffrage meetings had taken place long ago, she’d learn on her first day of work—sat Faith Frank, and around the room, standing and sitting, were several women of various ages, and two men.
Faith rose to greet her. Of course she had grown a few years older since the night in the Ryland Chapel, and up close the change was slight but noticeable; she wore it well. Faith still was a person of gravitas and glamour, intelligence, cheekbones, warmth, greatness, all of which was once again exciting. Faith introduced her to everyone, but Greer could barely pay attention to the names, and soon these people stood and left, so it didn’t really matter who they were. If she was hired she would immediately learn their names.
“Did you get some sleep since I wrote you?” Faith asked.
“Yes, did you?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing I brought you this,” Greer said. She reached into her bag and with a flourish brought out the small frying pan she had bought at the Target near her parents’ house and carried with her down to the city, just in case it seemed appropriate to give it to Faith, which, she’d figured, it probably wouldn’t. But now she was taking the risk. Faith looked surprised, but then she smiled. Suddenly they had a private joke between them.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said Faith. “Very funny. I’ll definitely conk myself over the head with it when I can’t sleep. And whenever I do that, Greer, I’ll think of you.” She put the pan on a side table and said, “Let’s get down to business before someone comes in with another emergency.” They sat together on a white sofa that looked out on the skyline, the workday. It was impossible to look out on the city from high up without thinking for a second of 9/11, even nine years later. Any overarching view of the city seemed to call for a brief, noble hush. Smokestacks steamed; lights stuttered; there was movement along the grid. The quiet moment now wasn’t unpleasurable. It was just a moment of seriousness, born in something terrible, but now uncoupled from it.
Faith took a pull on the mug of tea in front of her. Nearby were little tins of oolong and Earl Grey and jasmine. A tea ball lay on its side, with sprouts of used leaves poking through the holes like hair in old-man nostrils. “After Bloomer closed,” Faith began, “I was in a daze, maybe even a mild depression. I went up to my weekend house just to regroup. And one day I got a call from an old friend. We go back a number of decades, and our paths have been very different, to put it mildly. He’s Emmett Shrader, the venture capitalist.” She paused. “You do know who I’m talking about, right?”
Greer nodded, but she wasn’t completely sure; she knew who Emmett Shrader was, roughly, just as she had once known who Faith Frank was, a little less roughly, though she badly wished she could Google the venture capitalist and billionaire right now, as she had originally done with Faith, so she could be knowledgeable during this interview. “He said he wanted to make me an offer,” Faith said. “I thought that meant he would buy Bloomer and it would have yet another life, straggling along. But he said no, sorry, it wasn’t that; Bloomer was no longer viable in today’s world.”
“Not even the website?” asked Greer. “I mean, if you revamped it, obviously. No offense,” she quickly added. “But I’ve wondered about that.”
Faith shook her head. “No. He said he admired our mission all those years, admired our determination, but that he has bigger plans. He told me he wants to bring some of the ideals of feminism out into the world in a new way. So here’s what’s happening,” Faith continued. “His firm is underwriting a women’s foundation. What we’re going to do, mainly, is connect speakers with audiences. We want to address the most urgent issues concerning women today. We’ll have summits, talks, conferences. He’s offering significant funding.” She paused. “I know we’ll get criticism, Shrader being Shrader.”