“I’m telling you, we would. You would.”
“Thank you,” she said after a long moment. “But I’m going to have to say no.”
He seemed shocked, and the call quickly ended. Faith went for a long walk in Riverside Park, trudging along, thinking of what she had just turned down. It was hollow to her, what he was offering. What more would she need? What would make it good enough? An hour later she got into a cab and returned to his office without an appointment. He was there, and when she was shown in to his office again, she said, “There would have to be another component.”
“Tell me,” Emmett said.
“Every day I hear stories about the plight of women all over the world. I would like to think that in addition to providing speakers, we could also get out there and do something. If we find an emergency situation where we feel we could be of some immediate help, I’d like to have funds made available to take action, so that women could see relief right away.” She looked at him. “Are you already dismissing this?”
“Of course not.”
“We could be, say, eighty percent about speakers and summits, but twenty percent about what we could call, I don’t know, ‘special projects.’”
“Deal,” he said.
Over time, both arms of Loci, those uneven arms, had been highly productive. Women were forever summiting, endlessly climbing with ropes around the waist, wielding pitons. The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership—leadership being something that everyone now wanted, as if the world could be made up entirely of leaders and no followers, the way children might crave an all-fireman, all-ballerina society. And there had been a good number of those special projects over the years. Loci had paid the salary to employ a community health worker in a rural village in Namibia, and had paid for the defense of a woman on trial for the murder of her husband, who had abused and terrorized her for a decade.
But by 2014, over four years in now, it had become precipitously harder to get any of the ideas for the special projects that Loci presented past the people upstairs. These projects, you could tell, were a nuisance to them, a money pit. It wasn’t just that ShraderCapital had become stingier since the start of Loci; it had, but there was also outside resistance to some of the work. “Africa doesn’t need your help,” someone wrote in an influential online magazine, and it kept getting reposted elsewhere, replicating endlessly.
Faith was used to being criticized, and to being hated. There had always been some of that back in the height of the Bloomer years. But on Twitter at the inception of Loci, people wrote #bloodmoney and #FaithlessFrank. And then soon the concern became less about Faith’s collaboration with Emmett Shrader than it was about the foundation itself.
But by now it was clear not only that Loci hadn’t kept up with all the galloping changes in feminism, but that the way it presented itself was also a reason for vilification. Loci was doing good business, and naturally people were writing things on Twitter like #whiteladyfeminism and #richladies, and the hashtag that for some reason irritated Faith most, #fingersandwichfeminism.
She understood their complaints, she really did. There was so much waste with these events and receptions at which they were now supposed to seduce other corporations and big donors. People complained, with justification, that they shouldn’t have to give money to a foundation that was backed by a billionaire. And Loci was never supposed to have had to seek outside funding; ShraderCapital had been covering all costs. But that had changed, inexplicably; Emmett had gotten pressure from within.
So Loci at this moment in time was an uneasy hybrid. She’d adapted to the twenty-first century to a degree, but what she knew how to do best she had learned back in the beginning. The beginning had been the profound place for her, the pit, the root.
Despite the hazing on Twitter and elsewhere, the summits were doing so well, and the people upstairs had been weighing in more frequently and conducting studies and focus groups. Because of their input, the foundation had been encouraged to go celebrity-heavy; Lincoln had noticed, and so had most people. A shallowness had crept in. Too much of what happened at these events was just frivolous, Faith knew. That had rarely been the case in the beginning.
Some of the team seemed demoralized. Months earlier, like a doctor on grand rounds, Faith had gone around to check in on them, and soon realized morale was dangerously low. When she got to the cubicle of Greer Kadetsky, who’d been at Loci since nearly the start, to her surprise she found Greer with her head down on the surface of her desk, lightly asleep at eleven in the morning. Greer was usually focused and sharp, though lately that was less true. Lately, she could be seen whispering with the others, dissatisfied by the memos that came down from upstairs. Faith had been trying to pretend that the changes at Loci were not close to reaching a point of no return, but she couldn’t keep it up, and she knew she shouldn’t keep it up either.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Faith said softly, remembering that this was the way she had awakened Lincoln for school when he slept through his alarm—there had been cloaked irritation in her words then, as there was now—and Greer was mortified.
“Faith, I’m so sorry.” She sat up quickly and reached up as if to smooth out her face.
“Sleeping on the job. That’s not typical. Is it really so bad here now?” Faith asked. “Maybe it is,” she added. Then, “Grab some coffee and come talk to me in my office, Greer.”
Sitting on the white couch, and squinting in a band of sunlight, Greer said, “I didn’t really have that much going on this morning. At least, not that much that needed my immediate attention. That’s the way it’s gotten for me. It just feels so corporate lately. There’s so much attention to money, now that we’re supposed to solicit funds. I thought ShraderCapital was paying for everything. I miss the way it used to be,” Greer said bluntly. “When it was smaller. I miss writing speeches for those lunch talks.”
“You did a great job with them. I’m sorry they got phased out. Not my decision.”
“And I also miss the way those women used to come into the office. And I sat with them with my little tape recorder and I got to know them, and I saw what it was we were doing. I saw it; it was right in front of me. Someone’s life.”
“As you know, I agree with everything you’re saying.”
“I’m not sure we’re doing anything, Faith,” Greer said. “I like to think we are,” she added quickly. “It’s hard to know how much we ever did, quantifiably. We don’t have a product. And I know that from a money standpoint we’re a huge success now—and when we started, we weren’t. But I feel like we’re in a rut. Or anyway, I am.”