The Wall of Famous Faces

When Sloane arrived at Bellweather & Pike, she was still learning the rhythms of the office: where to find the good coffee, which partner liked his emails clipped and formal, which hallway carried voices and which one stayed blessedly quiet. She had followed a rainstorm of professional upheaval into the firm a month earlier, and the move still felt temporary in the way a borrowed coat does.

The office itself was decorated by committee and, somehow, by no one. Along two walls of the main corridor stretched a massive mural: hundreds of portraits, each one framed in a square panel, each one the size of a torso or larger. Famous leaders, athletes, writers, actors, and historical figures stared out in a dazzling, exhausting grid. Beneath them ran inspirational quotes in polished lettering that all seemed to insist on perseverance, vision, greatness, and success.

The mural ended near the supply room and the path to the kitchen. To reach either, Sloane had to pass close to a portrait of Anne Frank. Sometimes she could skirt ten feet away; sometimes she had to walk within inches of the panel, her face level with Anne’s. The image was impossible to avoid.

That was what unsettled her: not a panic, not exactly, but a constant, unwelcome tug at her attention. Her family carried the memory of the Holocaust like an inheritance that had never quite been unpacked. Her grandparents had survived war and terror. A great-aunt had been on Schindler’s list. Sloane knew the history intimately. She had spent hours in museums, read the books, watched the films. None of that made her less aware, in the middle of a workday, that it felt grotesque to have one of the most recognizable victims of genocide mounted at eye level outside the office supply room.

For days she considered saying something. Could the company paint over that one square? Replace it with someone else? Wasn’t that reasonable?

She imagined raising it with the newer partner she now followed, or with the older one, who seemed kind enough. But she hesitated. She was new. The office was new. Everything felt fragile.

So she said nothing.

Months passed. The mural became part of the background noise of the place, though not before it gave her plenty to think about. She would take the longer route to the kitchen some days and the shorter one on others, choosing, oddly, to stop giving the portrait so much power. With time, she even began to make jokes to herself about it.

There, she would think, nodding toward the wall as she passed. My esteemed colleague.

Or: Good morning, Anne.

The humor was dark, but it helped.

It also helped that the rest of the office seemed incapable of looking at the mural without launching into debate. At lunch, people argued about who belonged there and who didn’t. They questioned old reputations, noticed absences, joked in a way that was only half joking.

"The number of people on this wall who were also terrible in private is getting hard to ignore," one paralegal muttered once.

"Anne Frank is somehow the only Jewish figure up there," someone else said. "You’d think they could have found room for another."

"Didn’t Walt Disney have some ugly views?"

"And why is there a queen but no one from half the countries she ruled?"

The wall turned into a social puzzle no one had asked for, and the office became a place where people routinely stopped working to discuss the ethics of portrait placement.

About seven months after she first noticed the mural, Sloane stumbled across the letter she had once drafted in her head, the one she had nearly sent asking whether the company could alter it. She read the responses from people who understood what she had not: that erasing a face tied to such devastation would not feel like a simple fix. It would land as disrespect, perhaps even as a wound, to coworkers whose families carried the same history she did.

That realization hit her hard.

She had wanted control over one visible piece of chaos in a season when much of her life had felt out of her hands. Instead, she saw how easily a request meant to soothe herself could become something that hurt others.

The thought filled her with relief, then embarrassment, then gratitude.

She had not raised the issue. She was glad.

After that, she kept walking past the mural with a little more perspective. Anne Frank remained there, silent and unavoidable, but the image no longer felt like a personal affront so much as one more uncomfortable artifact of a workplace that had confused grandeur with good taste. If anything, the wall had become a lesson in legacy: how people are remembered, who gets centered, and how careless symbols can be when dropped into ordinary life.

Sloane never asked for the portrait to be painted over. Instead, she learned to notice the absurdity of the entire display, to keep her focus on her work, and to leave the wall to its strange, uneasy arguments. When the office got too ridiculous, she would glance at Anne’s panel and think, with a private smile, that at least some colleagues deserved more dignity than the décor around them allowed.