The red awning above the storefront read QI GONG TUI-NA RELAXING INVIGORATING UNFORGETTABLE MASSAGE, words that did not register as interesting to most New Yorkers passing this street corner in the west 90s on a mild night in the fall of 2014. But Faith Frank knew their significance, and once a week after work she had the car and driver take her there, for she just loved a good Chinese massage. She felt, simply, that these bracing, almost disconcertingly vigorous massages helped her marshal her thoughts and make good decisions and stay calm and dispense advice to all the people who came to her for it.
She had discovered this one day, two years earlier, when she’d had a bad stiff neck, and in desperation on the way home from work she’d asked her driver, Morris—her contract with Loci had included the use of a driver and car—to stop there. As Faith lay on a table in this dim establishment with her face in a cushioned cradle, and a small woman working an elbow into the base of Faith’s spine, ideas began to jump out of her as if sprung from captivity. So now here she was again on this night, with another stiff neck. She’d been all checked out by her internist and found to be in good health, but the body still needed fine-tuning at this age. As Faith approached the staircase to enter the establishment, her cell phone softly pulsed against her breast like a companion heart, and she reached into her coat.
LINCOLN, read the display. “Oh hey, honey,” she said, invigorated in the way that she always felt when he called.
“Hey, Mom.” The voice of her son, Lincoln Frank-Landau, had been cautious since childhood, as if he was afraid to expect too much from life. “You’re in the middle of something?” he asked. The answer was always yes, not that she always told him that.
“Well, I’m about to be. Getting a Chinese massage in a minute.”
“Your neck is tight again?” he said. “Mom, you should slow down. All that travel is bad for you.”
“Oh, my schedule’s not so bad.”
“I actually don’t believe you. I saw on your website calendar that you have that Hollywood event coming up. And I saw who was going to be there. Jesus!”
“No, Jesus is not going to be there, Lincoln. We couldn’t afford him.”
“Well, it’s still a far cry from what you used to have at Loci in the beginning. Female sea captains.”
Faith laughed. “Well, ShraderCapital told us we needed to go high-profile. Everything is about branding, they say, which of course is a despicable thing, because it really means everything is about corporations. But here we are, in the America of today. So now, yes, we have the female action star of Gravitus 2: The Awakening. And did you read about the feminist psychic who’s been hired to entertain between talks?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s such bullshit,” Faith said. “I imagine her standing before a huge group of women, closing her eyes, and saying in this really spooky voice, ‘One . . . day . . . you . . . will . . . stop . . . menstruating.’”
Lincoln laughed easily. “Plus complimentary manicures, right? And all that foodie type of food. I saw a picture on Instagram recently. What were you serving?” he asked. “It was really exotic. Maybe pelican butter?”
Faith laughed too, and said, “Something like that.” But the subject of the excesses of the foundation, four years in, was actually depressing to her. Over the past two years in particular, the foundation had been relentlessly urged in this direction by an increasingly vocal presence at ShraderCapital. “I keep telling Emmett that rich women attending conferences with massages and wonderful food doesn’t get at anything,” she said to Lincoln. “That it doesn’t grapple with structural issues like parental leave, child care, equal pay. It doesn’t put hands on levers. And yet, as he kindly reminded me, we have to grow. And they’ve been generous.”
As she talked, she began to mount the stairs in the narrow, dark hallway. Distantly, a thin Chinese version of Muzak could be heard. “They’ve agreed to some things that they have no interest in,” she went on. “Though fewer and fewer over time. But I think I told you about the rescue mission we funded recently. One of those special projects we sometimes do. I had to fight for this one, they’re getting so infrequent.”
“Ecuador, right?”
“Yes. The young women who were saved from trafficking. A hundred of them. And then they were hooked up with female mentors.”
“Don’t say ‘hooked up,’ Mom. It sounds like you mean something else.”
“Good point,” said Faith. “But you get the idea. We connected them with women who taught them a trade. So sure, we may have a psychic, and mani-pedis, and fancy lunches with pelican butter, but we also have missions like this one. So maybe it evens out.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Actually,” Faith said, “one of the rescued young women is flying in for that LA event. And I’m supposed to introduce her.”
“Is it essential that you do it? Your neck? Your exhaustion?”
“Lincoln, I love you with all my heart, but please don’t tell me what to do. I try not to tell you what to do.” There was a churlish silence, and she wanted to break it fast, so she said, “So how’s the tax code?”
“Still kicking.”
“And still shockingly unfair?”
“Depends on your bracket,” he said.
This last part was a kind of vaudeville routine that they had been amusing only themselves with over the years since he’d become a tax lawyer. Lincoln was thirty-eight now and lived in Denver. Unmarried, dedicated, he resembled his father, Gerry Landau, an immigration advocate to whom Faith had been married only for several years, until his shocking death at exactly the age Lincoln was now. Gerry had been a pale, mild man who looked hamsterish with his aviator glasses off. With them on, he looked more himself: thoughtful, brainy, distracted. She’d liked him right away. The first time he took Faith anywhere in his car, an old yellow Dodge Dart, he’d had to clear so many papers and books and a bag of bagels off the passenger seat in order for her to sit down that it was comical.
“When you went to antiwar meetings,” she asked Gerry, “did you speak up a lot?”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “Those guys wouldn’t let me get a word in. And when I did speak, they interrupted.”
“Same,” she said.
Lincoln, now, looked like Gerry then, but much squarer in style, and with less hair. Already her son’s hair had fled his head, as if pushed away by the complexities of the tax code. She still hoped he would fall in love, her reserved and mild son. As a boy, Lincoln had always been resourceful and independent. But after Gerry’s sudden heart attack and death, Lincoln drew into himself and wouldn’t discuss it, preferring to act as though it hadn’t happened. Faith ached for Lincoln much more than for herself. She knew she would never marry again, would never give him another father. She was a loving, busy mother, distracted by her demanding work at Bloomer, and her political activity, and all the interviews she was asked to give back then. She rarely cooked, except for the occasional steak.
Once, when he was ten, Lincoln had screamed at her, “Why can’t you be like other mothers?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Why do I have to have Mrs. Smith?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you—”
“Why do I have to have Sara Lee?” he asked, a little hysterical now.
She’d said, “What? Who are those women?” But then immediately she realized. “Oh, Lincoln, I’m who I am,” she’d said. “I’m who you got, and I try to be the best I can.”