The audience reaction was huge. More laughter, more clapping, and then everyone calmed down, immediately understanding that Faith was the one to pay attention to now. Faith, who sat across from him. How would she react to this? She was a women’s libber who had been brought onto the show solely to occupy that role. What would she say or do? Faith sat still, her hands in her lap. She realized that she looked like a joyless schoolteacher, and this irritated her. But there was no good way to look when the men in your midst began talking this way about women. You could look prim, or you could look angry, or else you could laugh along with them, which was the worst of all.
She decided to bypass Holt Rayburn entirely. He was an ass, a well-paid ass of the literary variety. Men like him romped through the world, and it wouldn’t be possible to take away his sense of freedom or security. She ignored him now and looked right at the camera, which confused both him and the host. One of the cameramen waved to her, mouthing, “Look at the men, look at the men,” but she ignored him too.
“I think men are afraid that if women are doctors and lawyers and the openers of jars,” Faith said, “then the men will have to do so-called women’s work, and God knows that scares them out of their minds. There’s nothing we can’t do, but there’s a lot that they’re afraid to do.”
The audience was with her now. The same people who had been clapping for Holt Rayburn were clapping for her. “Like throw a children’s birthday party,” she said. “Oh, or give birth.” Whooping ensued. “We’ve always found ways to get things done when men weren’t there to help. We’re resourceful and determined and patient.” Now she turned back to Holt Rayburn, who had let the cigarette between his fingers burn down to an ignored, fragile column of ash. “You, Holt, did mention one legitimate problem. But I think I’ve figured out what to do about it.” Faith smiled her beautiful, calm, and sunny smile, and then she crossed her long legs in their baby-blue suede boots and said, “I have decided that from this day forward, I will never buy food in jars again.”
That sound bite would be replayed for decades, until finally it was hardly ever played again. A few years after the show Holt Rayburn, drunk after a book party in the Hamptons and with several DUIs on his record, struck a woman on a dark road, and as a result she had to have a leg amputated. He served a couple of years in jail, and by the time he got out he had written a novel about it, New Fish, which became a bestseller, though a more modest one than Cloud Cover, but by then he was weary and sallow-faced. He died of a stroke that year, a small, sweating man who seemed confused by why things were becoming different in the world, different for women and different for him.
Being a good and appealing public speaker elevated Faith Frank and made her not just speak more but do more. Faith went to marches for the Equal Rights Amendment. She hung around after meetings, long into the night, to talk to many women. When abortion clinics were targeted, she was one of the people who tried to work with judges to make sure people were safe. Partly she did all of this because of Holt Rayburn and the image of the hard-to-open jar.
Faith was comfortable around all kinds of women, including lesbians, some of whom she got to know pretty well. One of the most vocal of them, Suki Brock, had kissed Faith once during a rally, and Faith had just smiled, touched her arm, and told her she was flattered.
“Listen, if you ever swing that way, Faith,” Suki said, “swing over to me first, okay?”
Faith had said, “Sure thing,” which was code for no. She didn’t want to be kissed by Suki, or any other woman, even the ones who proudly called themselves separatists. Faith had seen a photo of two women farmers, looking like a kind of single-sex American Gothic, one of them wearing overalls and no shirt. Her breasts poked out like parentheses from either side of the overall top. Women these days had begun moving to farms and communes and collectives. Was it a utopia? Living with anyone had its challenges, Faith knew. There was no perfect way to live.
Faith traveled easily among radical women, among housewives, among students, wanting to learn, as she said. “What do you stand for?” a very young interviewer from a student newspaper once asked her.
“I stand for women,” Faith said, but while early on this was a good enough answer, later it sometimes wouldn’t be.
Back then, being this person, this Faith Frank person who elicited strong and perhaps not entirely explicable feelings in many people, she became who she had been meant to be. After her appearance on the talk show opposite Holt Rayburn, Faith rose up, becoming more famous than the magazine of which she was one of several editors. Her books became bestsellers; her TV appearances attracted many viewers. Over time, she deliberately kept herself from thinking too often about Emmett Shrader, though of course she followed the narrative of his rise: how he had begun as a low-level executive at Nabisco but then, using the money of his wife, heiress Madeline Shrader, née Tratt, she of the Tratt metals fortune, he had started his own venture capital firm, ShraderCapital. Everyone knew how that had gone, the phenomenon it was, the billionaire he became.
But everyone also talked about his unsavoriness, perhaps no worse than anyone else’s at that level, but more disturbing because of his liberal leanings; they spoke of some of the surprising connections he made and shady projects he invested in, one involving a gun-cleaning company touted by the NRA, another a baby food manufacturer that sold its products to the developing world at sharply upticked prices. But all of it appeared to be counterbalanced by good. Business conducted at that level was something that Faith couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
The Roe v. Wade decision in ’73 had created an antichoice siren call that needed to be responded to and battled, and Faith was committed to it. Three years later, Anne McCauley from Indiana, rising up out of nowhere, it seemed, won a Senate seat based on her outspokenness against abortion. “We will fight Roe every day. We will dismantle it bit by bit over time,” she said into microphones, her voice even and reasonable, her posture uncommonly good.
Whenever Faith saw Senator McCauley on television, she thought of how easy it would be to tell the truth publicly about her, to simply release a statement to the press saying that eleven years before Senator McCauley became such a strong and vocal opponent of legal abortion, she had in fact undergone an illegal one herself in Las Vegas. That would probably have put a slamming halt to her antichoice influence and political rise. Faith was furious with Annie for what she’d already done, which in practical terms affected the lives of the poorest women more than anyone else, denying them help. She didn’t know what had caused the shift, especially since you might think that Annie’s experience with her illegal abortion could have caused her to see the urgent need for legal abortions. But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it. Faith had read that Annie was religious. Had she found religion as a way to manage her thoughts about the abortion? Or maybe it was something else entirely. If Faith could see her now, she would say, “Annie, really?”
Decades later, the team at Loci repeatedly tried to get Senator McCauley to come speak at a summit. The first time they tried, Faith had said nothing, tensely waiting to see what would happen, what Annie would do. The senator’s office predictably said she would be unable to come. That was probably for the best. Because even if Faith had gotten her alone in a room and said, “Annie, really?” Annie would certainly have replied, “Yes, Faith, really.”
They both believed what they believed; their convictions filled them fully. But just as Annie would never reveal her own history publicly, Faith wouldn’t reveal it either. It wasn’t her information to give. It was private. I get to decide, the women had sung at that gathering. Despite everything, Faith never told anyone.