A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [132]
Life at Women’s World Banking was consuming. The two dozen employees were mostly young, female, unmarried, and childless. Driven by devotion to “the mission” and an esprit de corps cultivated from the top, they toiled long hours in an office culture that more than one of them remembered years later as having the intimacy and intensity of a dysfunctional family. Barry pegged the pay and benefits to those of other not-for-profits; she scrimped, she told me, only on vacations. The staff was international and impressively credentialed. Kellee Tsai, the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, had come straight from a financial analyst’s job at Morgan Stanley, putting away her pearls and lipstick and fully expecting a cohort of hirsute women in vintage clothing. Instead, she found hyperarticulate women in saris and handcrafted jewelry, and Christmas parties catered by a high-end Upper West Side boîte. The financial products and services coordinator was a young Australian woman with an MBA from Harvard who had run the Australian government’s food aid program in Ethiopia. The regional coordinator for Africa was a Kenyan-born, British-trained accountant who had been the first in her peasant family to go to university. The communications coordinator, a British-born lawyer, had grown up in Pakistan and Iraq, where she could remember having watched her mother water-skiing on the Tigris in a bikini. Other staff members were Indian, Ecuadorean, Colombian, Canadian, American, Honduran, Haitian, Ghanaian. The calendar was crowded with conferences in foreign capitals such as Tokyo, Accra, and Mexico City. “In many ways, it was one of the most dysfunctional organizations I’ve ever worked in,” said Nina Nayar, who worked at Women’s World Banking as Ann’s assistant. “But I have never felt such warmth, such passion, such excitement. It was like a soap opera: You’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re celebrating, you miss people, you love people, you hate people, and you know that this is all psychodrama, but you’re so hooked on it that you have to be there every day at three o’clock to see this thing.”
Office space was tight. Despite her seniority, Ann doubled up in a small, dark room in the back of the building with Kellee Tsai, who was a few years older than Maya. Accessible only through a windowless word-processing zone nicknamed “the bunker,” the room had back-to-back desks and a view into the wall of the next building, a few feet away. Women’s World Banking had not lavished attention on developing well-oiled office systems; if a person needed something done, she might be best off doing it herself. Ann, for the first time in a long time, was without secretarial assistance. “She couldn’t type to save her life,” one colleague remembered. And on matters technological, she was the opposite of self-sufficient. An aspiring Irish-born playwright named Donald Creedon, who had worked as a Manhattan doorman before learning word processing, served as “computer coordinator.” He devoted his time to helping staff members get their computers to do what they wanted. Ann, wedded to an outdated version of word-processing software, needed constant assistance. Creedon, ensconced in the bunker, would hear her cry out in frustration. “Then she would call my name—without moving,” he said. “The expectation was probably, ‘You can come and help me type this thing. Because I need help.’”
Ann’s office became a magnet for younger colleagues. When she was stuck on a piece of writing, she might be found holed up back there—like the village elder, Creedon thought—telling stories. They were not about her but about people she had met, worlds she had known, absurdities she had witnessed. Stories sprang from her head fully formed, many of them endowed with the clarifying wisdom of myths. Younger women would find excuses to wander down to word processing for a chat. With her glasses on a chain around her neck or perched on the tip of her nose if she was reading, Ann seemed perpetually on the verge of smiling. She was mischievous and witty.