A Singular Woman (39 page)

In mid-1992, Ann made the decision to move back to the United States. Barack was to marry Michelle Robinson at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in early October—an event to which Ann looked forward with great pleasure. On a visit to Chicago in advance of the wedding, she got in touch with Mary Houghton, the president of ShoreBank, a bank holding company that Houghton and others had founded in the early 1970s in an effort to show that banks could play a constructive role in low-income black neighborhoods. Houghton, who had also advised microfinance organizations, had met Ann at a party in Jakarta in the late 1980s and remembered her warmly as “forthright, sharp-tongued, opinionated, happy.” When Ann contacted her, they agreed to meet for what Houghton remembered years later as an agenda-free brunch in downtown Chicago. Ann's contract in Jakarta was to wind up the following January. She was moving back to the United States and would need a job. Houghton offered to put her in touch with a nonprofit based in New York City whose interests seemed aligned with Ann's. Conceived during the first United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975, the organization, called Women's World Banking, had set out to promote full economic participation for low-income women by helping them develop viable businesses. Toward that end, it offered support, training, and advice to several dozen microfinance organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, which in turn offered credit and other financial services to women producers and entrepreneurs. The original board had included Ela Bhatt, the founder of the Self Employed Women's Association, whom Ann had first encountered during her eye-opening trip to India in her first weeks at Ford. Women's World Banking was governed by women and run by women and existed first and foremost for the benefit of women.

In mid-September, Ann received a letter from Women's World Banking, alerting her to a job opening. Embarking on a monthlong trip to Hawaii and the mainland, Ann sent off her résumé and a letter asking to be considered. In New York, she met with the president of Women's World Banking, Nancy Barry, in a French restaurant near the organization's offices in Midtown Manhattan. Barry, a Harvard Business School graduate in her early forties, had worked at the World Bank for fifteen years before becoming president of Women's World Banking. Smart, charismatic, and driven, she was a product, she liked to say, of both the decentralized culture of Women's World Banking and the command-and-control ethos of “the World Bank of Men.” At Women's World Banking, she wanted to influence the policies of banks around the world to better serve the poor. Ann had more experience with poor women than anyone in the Women's World Banking office, Barry could see. She had also influenced the design of the services offered by Bank Rakyat Indonesia, which ran the largest self-sustaining microfinance program in the world. At their first meeting, Barry found Ann's size jarring, she told me. The staff of “Wild Women's Banking,” as it had occasionally been called, was so young and attractive that it had been suggested Barry had a “looks problem.” But she was impressed by Ann's intelligence, experience, and independence of mind. She could see that Ann had a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at herself, and the charm to win people over. So Barry offered her a job that had not previously existed: coordinator for policy and research. In many countries, government and bank policies favored big over small businesses, the formal over the informal sector. They favored male clients, who owned property, over women, who did not. Governments also placed restrictions on the activities of independent-sector organizations in ways that held back microlending, limiting loan sizes, rates of interest, and the outside funding those organizations could receive. Ann's job would be to help Women's World Banking and its affiliates persuade policy-makers to change all that. “This was not like we had a position for a policy coordinator,” Barry told me. “But in my mind we had a whole agenda waiting to happen if we had the right person.”

Moving to New York City for the first time was not easy at age fifty. Ann arrived in Manhattan in late January 1993 during a cold snap so bitter that her lungs ached when she breathed. Three weeks into her stay, a truck bomb detonated in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center, injuring a thousand people and killing six. Ann, with a starting salary of $65,000 a year, had expected to be able to find a two-bedroom apartment for about $1,500 a month within walking distance of the offices on West Fortieth Street. But because two-bedroom apartments were renting for more than $2,000, she was forced to settle for an antiseptic one-bedroom in a forty-story tower near the United Nations for $1,550. She parked most of her books and belongings in storage in Hawaii, for which she paid another $250 a month. (A “wardrobe inventory” she put together around that time listed a remarkable forty-eight skirts, half of them marked “sm” and apparently not in use.) Women's World Banking paid for two weeks in a hotel near the office while Ann looked for an apartment, but she got stuck there for ten extra days, at her expense, waiting for the credit clearance needed to sign a lease. She spent $8,000 on housewares and furniture from Pier 1 Imports, and another $1,500 on winter clothes. She had never worn panty hose in her life, she told friends. The small amount of savings she had accumulated dwindled, and her credit card debt rose. Afraid of the subway system, she spent money on cabs.
“Aduh! Aduh! Aduh!”
she would say, falling back on an Indonesian expression of pain in the face of the rushing crowds. Ann missed Indonesia. The best Indonesian restaurant in New York seemed no better than the lowliest
warung.
From her room on the twenty-sixth floor of the hotel, she gazed at the sky, remembering the full moon in Bali and wondering why she had traveled so far from Made Suarjana. She told herself she would stay in New York for two or three years, then move to Bali. Suarjana could start a civil-society organization or a publishing house, and she would look for work as a consultant.

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. She worked her dark, shapely eyebrows for emphasis, her toothy grin for punctuation—sometimes the tip-off that she had made a joke at the expense of someone present, who might catch on a minute or two late. “Maybe because she was an observer, she saw how ridiculous things could be,” recalled Brinley Bruton, a young program assistant in the office. “I remember her literally sitting back and wiping tears away from her eyes because she was laughing so hard. She had that kind of laugh—a belly laugh.”

One of Ann's stories—at least as one colleague remembered it years later—concerned a group of village women from Africa and Indonesia. On some earlier occasion, Ann had invited them to get together to talk about their lives. During a discussion of similarities and differences, the Indonesian women mentioned an unusual practice: After childbirth, a woman would put a salt pack in her vagina, ostensibly to restore its firmness. The practice was painful, the women conceded. But it was thought to help women remain “young” for their husbands. The African women were incredulous: Why would a woman willingly inflict pain on herself? “The Indonesian women—or so Ann told the story—asked, ‘What do you do, then, to be able to continue to please your husbands?'” recalled the colleague who was present. “The African women all rolled about laughing and said, ‘We find a bigger man!'”

Sometimes, Ann was the anthropologist in the field, with Women's World Banking as her village. She could capture the essence of a personality in an anecdote, even in a subordinate clause. “She would not be the type who would do well in a conventional organization, because she was very straightforward in her views on everything and often did it with humor—humor that had a bite,” Nancy Barry told me. Ann toyed with the idea of writing a murder mystery set at one of Women's World Banking's global meetings, during which sleep-deprived staffers pulling all-nighters in the service of the mission occasionally almost came to blows. It was said that a delegate had returned to her home country after one global meeting and promptly expired. A recurring topic of conversation in the office concerned who would be the murder victim in Ann's book, some of her colleagues told me. Others, however, said the victim was to be Barry; only the identity of the murderer remained up for grabs. “Of course, it could have been anyone,” Ann confided conspiratorially to Creedon. “Because, God knows, there were enough people who had a motive.”

Several younger women in the office told me that in those days, they wanted to be Ann. Her assistant, Nina Nayar, an Indian woman then in her mid-twenties, had an undergraduate degree in anthropology, a master's in South Asian regional studies, and experience working in Ahmedabad with the Self-Employed Women's Association. The child of supportive but protective parents, Nayar told me that Ann, by example, taught her how to live. To Nayar, Ann seemed unconcerned about society's opinions about working women, single women, women who married outside their culture or tradition—women who, as Nayar put it, dreamed big and pursued their dreams and were fearless in the pursuit of adventure and knowledge. Ann did not seem, at least to Nayar, to feel that marriage as an institution was essential or even particularly important. What mattered was to have loved passionately and deeply, to have had lasting relationships, to have lived honestly and without pretense. She never spoke of her marriages as mistakes or failures; they had simply worked out differently than expected. Nor was she haunted by decisions she had made. “The past was her past,” said Wanjiku Kibui, Ann's Kenyan colleague, whom Ann affectionately referred to as her in-law. “But it was not a prison.” When Nayar told Ann that she intended never to marry, Ann suggested Nayar was simply trading one orthodoxy for another. Ann advised Nayar to remain open. Niki Armacost, who became the communications coordinator, said of Ann, “She was the opposite of uptight. It was like, ‘Oh, interesting! So
that's
how those people live.' I think she was a very principled person, but she was not a judgmental person. She had a set of principles, and tolerance was one of the principles. But she didn't lecture people about those things.”