When Beverly delivered the speech at lunch in an Italian restaurant in midtown to a small crowd of local media, everyone was quiet, appalled. Of course it was exciting for Greer to be the one who had shaped the speech, and to know that Faith, who was also in the room, knew it too. Faith came over to Greer afterward and lightly whispered, “Nailed it.”
But what excited Greer now wasn’t only Faith’s praise. While it would always feel extraordinary to know she had the admiration of Faith Frank, what also excited Greer was that the speeches she was writing might give the women who delivered them a chance to be ambitious too; as ambitious as she was.
* * *
? ? ?
Winter dissolved, and the office hummed louder and the beta lights burned longer and perhaps even greener, and work often extended deep into the night. Pizza was often ordered late, giving work the quality of a college all-nighter. Ticket sales still needed to be ramped up, Faith told the whole office once at two a.m., a slice of pizza in hand. The in-demand disabled former governor who was supposed to come give a barn burner at the first summit about sexual assault in the disability community had just canceled. “It’s crazy here,” Greer said to Cory on Skype even later that night. “No one can sleep, or have a life outside work. We’re all basically doing only this.” But she was excited, and he could hear it.
“Lucky you,” he said from his own desk in Manila, where it was afternoon and he was shuffling around papers in the service of companies he didn’t really care about. Other people in his office cared, but he didn’t, or at least not enough. “I think I’m supposed to like it more,” he’d said once. “Like you do.”
Everything, Faith said, depended on the success of the first summit. If it failed, then maybe ShraderCapital would pull out. Though the ticket sales were a problem, the advance press had been impressive, with camera crews appearing at work, and interviewers disappearing into Faith’s office for a long one-on-one.
On a Monday in March, a little over a week before the summit, after night had fallen and everyone was staying at work as long as they were needed, Faith said she had an announcement. She stood up before them and said, “I know you’re all tired. I know you’re worn down to the bone. And I know you have no idea how the summit is actually going to go. Neither do I. But I want to say that you are all the best people I know. And you have all been working your asses off, and there’s just so long that that kind of asslessness can go on”—laughter—“without someone having a nervous breakdown. Probably I’m that someone. So I’ve decided that what we all need is to get the hell out of here.”
“Right now?” someone called. “Taxi!”
“Oh, I wish. Actually, what I mean is that I’d like to invite you all to my place upstate this weekend. There will be food, and wine, and I think we’ll have fun. What do you say?”
It was very late notice, and though it wasn’t a command performance, of course everyone would go. It would be like entering a fortress and seeing its mysterious insides. They’d get to know a little more about Faith, who left very few clues about herself. On Saturday the group took the same train, and then they split up into different taxis, and headed for Faith’s house. Apparently there was very spotty cell phone service there in the woods. “Tell your loved ones you will be out of commission,” Faith had said to them.
Greer’s taxi plunged off the main road and onto a small weedy one that took them past a scrambled mess of greenery, and kept plowing through until suddenly the greenery thinned and parted, revealing a pretty brown-shingled house with red trim in the middle distance, with Faith standing on its porch, waving. She was actually wearing an apron and holding a rolling pin, and her hair was blowing. She looked like a beautiful, brave pioneer woman.
Once inside, Greer couldn’t even fully take in all the particulars of Faith Frank’s weekend house. Objects radiated various degrees of meaning, some of it probably imagined. A maroon leather chair was positioned beside a reading lamp, the leather indented and the dye rubbed off where Faith’s head had tilted against it over dozens of years. Briefly, when no one was looking, Greer sat in it, leaning her head back, but though it was no big deal she leaped up in a moment, like a dog that knew it wasn’t supposed to be on the furniture.
Greer’s room, which at first glance was simply a guest room, revealed itself to be something more. Across from the narrow white wrought-iron bed stood an old dresser with some knickknacks on it, among them a small, dusty trophy, on which was engraved:
Pee Wee Summer Soccer—1984
Lincoln Frank-Landau
Most Cooperative
Faith’s son had spent summers in this room. Now he materialized like a genie from the gold-plated trophy. Even in phantom form he was a mild threat, giving Greer, a perpetual only child, a sense of what it must be like to have a sibling. Or at least what it must be like to have a sibling if you were the child of Faith Frank. You would both be very lucky, except for the fact that you had to share your extraordinary mother. But maybe Lincoln had always felt he’d had to share her. Faith fought for women and girls—“When the world doesn’t look out for them, we have to,” she’d said—and maybe Lincoln had been in competition with them.
And maybe Lincoln had also felt he’d had to share his mother with the people at her job. For even now, Faith was intensely involved with the team at Loci. She went out of her way to call Greer into her office sometimes, or to sit with her and a couple of others at lunch once in a while, all of them with paper plates on their laps. She asked Greer about her life, and Greer shyly told her about Cory living on the other side of the world. Faith continued to praise Greer for the speeches she had been writing. Sometimes the women who told Greer their stories stayed in touch afterward, telling her about their lives—a new job, or a setback.
“You really bring out the voices of these women,” Faith had said recently. “I know we’ve talked about how hard it is for you to speak up sometimes. But maybe you’ve compensated, because I have to say you’re an excellent listener. And that is just as important as speaking. Keep listening, Greer. Be like . . . a seismologist, with a stethoscope pressed against the earth. Pay attention to the vibrations.”
Here at the house, Faith’s voice could be heard in the distance; she shouted something, and someone laughed and shouted in response. Now there was hammering on the door, and then a slightly less loud sound of other doors down the hallway being hammered on too. Marcella called, “Faith wants us downstairs for cocktail hour and food prep!” Everyone appeared downstairs within a minute or two; there were no stragglers.
In the kitchen Faith held up a knife and said, “Who wants to be my sous-chef?” and everyone volunteered, their hands shooting up. But Greer’s shot up the fastest.
“Okay, Ms. Kadetsky, the job is yours,” said Faith. “Can you do the onions first?”
“Sure.” Greer could do onions; they would unflower in her hands. If Faith had said, “Can you solve Fermat’s Last Theorem?” Greer would have said, “Why yes I can,” and then sat down at a blackboard, chalk in hand, and done it.
Faith handed her a mesh bag swelling with onions. Greer positioned herself at the counter, hoping to look like someone who belonged here. A pinot noir was brought out, along with hand-blown tumblers of different colors. Greer’s was sea-glass green, with little bubbles of imperfection trapped inside like carbonation, and she welcomed the bite of the wine and felt it charge to her head and her thighs at the same time.
“Tonight is steak night,” Faith announced to the kitchen, and there were sounds of approval.