The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Chapter Two

  The Tenant of

  Radclyffe Hall

  When Naomi Roth became Webster College’s seventeenth president, first female president, and first Jewish president (that is, if one accepted the gentleman-protests-too-much assertions of a certain Charles Myer Stone, who was Webster’s president from 1921 to 1935 and a man of self-described “solid German stock”), her daughter and only child Hannah Rosalind Roth was eleven and an effective gadfly in the making. Named for two of Naomi’s heroines—the brave Senesh and the inexcusably passed-over Franklin—young Hannah had seldom failed to make known her dissatisfactions with the world. Why did the nursery school cafeteria place upon her tray each day a sandwich of salty pink meat, when each day she refused to eat it? Why did the boys at recess start kicking a ball to one another even before they were out the door, while the girls went to the other end of the playground with the bucket of chalk? Of her grandparents—especially Naomi’s mother, who’d outlived her father by more than a decade—Hannah was bluntly vocal in her grasp of the circumstances (“They don’t like me, do they? Do they like you? I can’t tell.”) And when it came to the world beyond their American lives (first in Amherst, where Naomi did her PhD at UMass, and then in Webster), Hannah Roth flatly refused to accept that everyone else was apparently okay with the terrible endemic injustices of the world. A child lived off a garbage pile in an unpronounceable city in a country Hannah had never set foot in—and yet everyone just went about their business as if this were not the case? It was an outrage. It was a bafflement. And there was hunger. There was suffering. There were kids caught in the crossfire. There were men who threw shrouds over women to hide and imprison them. There were embryos from their mothers untimely ripped, only because they lacked a Y chromosome. There were women forced to bear children of rape. There was rape.

  Hannah had made her first march on Washington while still in utero. She’d been pushed along in a stroller for her second. By her third, she claimed to know the way from the train station to the Mall (MapQuest, admittedly, had been a big help in this) and where the porta-potties should be. Naomi’s own fundamental beliefs and political positions had not shifted a millimeter since she was Hannah’s age, and her life still orbited the principle of speaking truth to power, but…it was also true that at this particular point of her life…she was tired. And she was busy, with a child and a teaching career, and the deaths of first her father and then her mother to get through and manage. And look, the world was still full of terrible things! Some of the same terrible things there had always been, and even—who would have guessed?—a whole raft of new terrible things. No matter how many marches she’d gone on, how many petitions she’d signed (or, indeed, written), the meetings, the rallies, the online campaigns, Fair Trade symbols and recycling receptacles, no matter how clearly people were shown how the chickens and pigs were raised and who was stitching together the clothing in Bangladesh, people just kept eating the same things and buying the same things and throwing their plastic bags out with the garbage, to swirl forever in the Pacific Ocean. The melting ice caps could reach their knees before conservatives in Congress admitted all that annoying science wasn’t some lefty hoax, and classrooms of shrieking kids mown down in bloody heaps would fail to persuade them that any other rights trumped the right to bear arms.

  For Naomi there had come a moment, a few years before she became president, when she had quietly set down the burden of her own outrage. There will be poor always, pathetically suffering. Look at the good things you’ve got, she might have said in explanation, were she not just plain embarrassed to be quoting Jesus Christ Superstar. But the fact was that not many people did ask, or even notice, that Naomi Roth had retired from the ramparts. The people in question—her compadres, her kammerades, her fellow travelers—were just as tired as she was, it appeared.

  Hannah had been raised in the only way that Naomi, who never precisely planned on becoming a mother, could imagine raising a child: every opinion applauded, every argument celebrated, every position given the serious debate it deserved. Of course it helped that the two of them, despite Hannah’s clear taste for debate, were on balance in agreement, but this was not always the case. When Hannah declared eternal resistance to the consumption of animal flesh at the age of four, Naomi wasted precious time, energy, and money trying to move her, not because she thought it was healthier to consume meat than not, but because she had previously tried and failed at vegetarianism herself, and was totally uninterested in going through that again. Consuming a steak in front of her four-year-old daughter would never be a peaceful, stress-free experience, and preparing two meals for one dinner table was also going to be a major pain in the ass. She offered Hannah, therefore, adaptations: ground turkey burgers, lovingly raised and humanely euthanized fish. She bargained six vegetarian nights for a regular Sunday chicken. She proposed a guest exception for when company came to supper. All negotiations fell at her daughter’s small, Velcro-strapped feet. And the baleful expression, the reek of daughterly disapproval that met the hamburger Naomi might order in a restaurant, the scoop of osso buco over barley at her friend Francine’s house—the truth was, no meat tasted good enough to make up for that. She soldiered on for a couple of years, bringing home the bacon because it was her right to do so, serving up various cuts and steaks and ground-up bits for her own consumption alongside Hannah’s wok-tossed broccoli and mashed potatoes, and then, one day, exhausted by yet another frosty meal over chicken Marbella, she just gave up and stopped. Now, when Naomi ate meat at all, it was on the sly, and in fear of discovery, like a high schooler holding her cigarette out the bathroom window. Only in the guise of her presidential self, going about her official duties on campus and especially on the road—cajoling (and soothing) alumni, courting donors, convening with other presidents of other universities—did Naomi get to actually enjoy meat when it was unapologetically served. (Sometimes, in the South, she even got barbecue.)

  But there would be no barbecue, no flesh nor fowl nor creature that swam on the first Sunday evening in October, on this, the ninth autumn of Naomi’s Webster presidency, which happened also to be the autumn of Hannah’s sophomore year at the college.

  To anyone who did not happen to be her mother, Hannah Roth probably looked like any other Webster student, scuttling to class across the Billings Lawn with her head down, pulling closed with one hand a down jacket over a green Webster hoodie, her heavy rubber boots avoiding the icy patches on the packed-snow path. Hannah Roth was only a sophomore from Webster, Massachusetts, a probable history major, an active member of Webster’s activist community (which was, this being Webster College, essentially the entire student body) and resident of—O, Irony—Radclyffe Hall. She had that typical-for-Webster hair in a semi-intentional ponytail and a mildly underslept presentation, and her sharp edge and considerable intellect buried beneath a few layers of upspeak and I was, likes—the patois of her American generation, by which they might know one another where’er they roamed. Naomi herself had occasionally failed to pick Hannah out on the campus walkways and, once on Webster’s Main Street, when she was submerged in groups of other students, only reaching out for her—that was involuntary, she could not be faulted for that—when mother and daughter physically passed each other by, close enough to touch. The only thing that practically distinguished Hannah Roth from her fellow sophomores, history majors, or tenants of Radclyffe Hall were the weekly Sunday dinners she ate at the president’s mansion—aka home. Sunday was the night of the week Naomi most enjoyed, and the only dinner she still cooked herself. And even if it meant eternal ratatouille and tofu she was loath to allow any other commitment to impose itself on this night of nights. And so, barring the seriously ill student or incensed parent, or any of the other fires that could, and did, flare up on any college campus, Sunday afternoons would find her in the comically oversized kitchen of her official residence, chopping, grating, sautéing, and generally stirring the pot, as NPR delivered the bad news, with musi
cal interludes, from a shelf over the spice rack.

  The president’s mansion was formally named the Stone House, after that same solidly German (and not Jewish at all) president Charles Myer Stone, but it was indeed built of good, substantial post-glacial Massachusetts stone. When Naomi first toured the place in the immediate aftermath of her surprising nomination by the search committee, she had been overwhelmed by its scale, its baronial pretensions, and, quite frankly, by its physical chill, but the dwelling, like the job itself, was a cup she could not decline. Downstairs were meeting rooms, rooms for mingling with a cocktail in hand, and a central hallway ringed by the portraits of Webster presidents past. There was a thoroughly masculine den (dark paneling, massive leather chairs), and a long dining room with a stone floor and a timbered hearth straight out of Tom Jones, as well as the kitchen, which had been equipped with industrial-strength appliances for the college caterers. Upstairs: four bedrooms, another den (this one a bit more user-friendly, with a television), and at opposite ends of the corridors (as if Stone House were only another Webster dormitory), two identical bathrooms, unreconstructed in their Colonial Revival splendor, with dark wainscoting and wondrously original fixtures. It was mainly while using the bathrooms that Naomi found the wherewithal to think kindly of her predecessor, or at least of his taste.

  That first Sunday in October, walking downtown in the morning to buy the New York Times at Jerry’s and read it over eggs at the Webster Diner, Naomi had felt the first discernible chill of the autumn, and she’d decided to make something thick and hot, something Hannah could be counted upon to eat. She settled on a borscht recipe from one of the cookbooks she’d brought from their old house (now rented to a Latin professor and his family), and a last-of-the-summer-tomatoes and red onion salad. On her return she began the contemplative task of making a vegetable stock from the carrots and onions in the fridge, which was kept modestly stocked with staples by the catering staff—a distinct privilege of the presidential lifestyle. There was sacred music on the radio (there always seemed to be sacred music on NPR) and the act of cutting and peeling began to seem also, vaguely, sacred. Out of these roots of the earth she was making dinner for her daughter, the root of her own life, and all, or at any rate most, seemed basically well with the world. There were, on this particular day, at least in her immediate presence, no crises. The new freshman class was settling in nicely. The “Webster at 250” capital campaign had been launched months earlier without even the anticipated alumni grumbling, and she had begun to discuss her own pet project, a reunion and celebration of Native American graduates of Webster, with Douglas Sidgwick, the college’s unofficial guardian of institutional memory. Even the little group of protesters who’d begun, several weeks earlier, to gather at the Stump were bothering no one and carrying on a great tradition of nonviolent student protest. Not that anyone had said anything to her about why this particular group was taking its stand. But Naomi felt calm. And she felt, well…happy.

  Her daughter, Hannah Rosalind Roth, was coming to dinner.

  She left the tomatoes on the sideboard, ready to slice. She put the borscht on to simmer. She fed the cat, who, truth be told, did not look as if he needed to eat ever again. And then she went upstairs to run a bath and finish reading the highly overpraised novel of one of the college’s best-known graduates (and donors), a man she was due to host at a laudatory dinner a few weeks hence. She climbed into the deep 1920s tub, and the rising heat made it ever more difficult to follow the novel’s story: a missing briefcase full of something. A formula? A code? The paper-thin female character, described with a leering male eye, insufferably perky. She hoped that the author did not go around crediting the creative writing teachers he’d studied with at Webster, not for this. A car chase, cinematically described. The hero’s name was Chance. Of course it was. She set down the book and sank under the water and her hair, long and almost uniformly gray now, rose to the surface. It was so quiet under there. It was so warm, and still. It was—she would not see this for a long time—the very last moment of “before.”

  When Hannah arrived, a bit after six, she found her mother in the kitchen, taking a call from the dean of students, who had just taken a call from the superintendent of buildings. The students at the Stump were greeting the first autumnal chill not by abandoning their blankets and groundcloths and retreating to their warm dormitory beds, but by sinking tent poles into the dense Massachusetts soil of the Billings Lawn. This was…well, it was a couple of things. Certainly an eyesore. Somehow, surely, a fire hazard. And a crossing of the line, according to the dean, though Naomi wasn’t sure she understood whose line, exactly, or where the line had been located. But none of that mattered, because the problem, whoever it might have belonged to before, now belonged to her. “I will,” she said as she heard the door of the president’s mansion squeak open and slap closed. “I’m going to. I’m going to do just that.”

  “Hi,” she heard Hannah call from the foyer. “Mom?”

  “Yes,” said Naomi, hoping it served both interlocutors.

  “Where are you?”

  “Bob,” she said, gripping the phone with one hand, waving at Hannah from the kitchen doorway with the other. “Yes, I can see that. Yes, I will call him.”

  She reached for her daughter, hating that she had to share this moment with the dean of students.

  “Hiya,” said Hannah, who at least seemed intrigued. She mimed: Who is it?

  In response, Naomi made a face.

  “Where is he now?” she asked the phone.

  The superintendent, apparently, had gone home. Well, that was all right. And where was the harm, if some kids were camping out on the Billings Lawn? At least they were doing it with proper tents. Actually, she did know what the harm was, but she wanted her evening with Hannah more than she wanted to confront a gaggle of committed twenty-year-olds on the very first night of their serious entrenchment. Everyone would just have to chill till morning, and speaking of chilling, it would not be a disaster if the drop in temperature proved persuasive.

  They would meet on Wednesday and talk it over—that is, if the students hadn’t (literally) folded their tents and departed by then. “But, Bob, let’s not overreact.”

  “I just don’t want it to escalate,” he said, with a clear emphasis on the I, as if she wanted exactly that.

  “Can I have some wine?” said Hannah, and Naomi pointed at the fridge.

  “See you then,” Naomi said. “Good night.”

  She returned the phone to its cradle on the wall and shook her head in distaste. “Oy.”

  “Oy.” Hannah laughed. “Should I guess?”

  “It would be unseemly,” Naomi said, taking two glasses from the cupboard above the sink, “for you, an undergraduate student of this college, to guess which of your august deans, scholars deserving your respect and esteem, is behaving like a whiny toddler, so no you should not.”

  “Bob Stacek,” Hannah said simply. “Obvi.”

  Naomi sighed. “Well, with a rare and unique name like Bob. Obvi. But I’m invoking the Sunday Night Rule now.”

  Hannah looked disappointed, but the Sunday Night Rule had kept them sane, and the Sunday Night Rule went both ways: Pot-smoking friends, classmates who did not seem capable of producing their perfect test scores or eloquently argued papers, these were not to attract the attention of the president’s office, while faculty and administrators who, in the opinion of the president, behaved poorly or might not entirely deserve their cushy tenured berths, these were not to be paraded before the tenants of Radclyffe Hall.

  “Are those new earrings?” Naomi said. But what she actually meant was: Are those new holes in your ears? Because she suddenly could not remember whether her daughter had been thus punctured four times on the left (including into the wince-to-think-about cartilage) and five times on the right, or vice versa.

  “Yes. Willow and I did a trade. I loved these. I mean, I coveted these. I know it’s bad.”

  “But human,” said N
aomi, touching it. It was green and round and cold. Jade? Fake jade? “Human to covet. What did you trade for it?”

  “Nothing important. Silver thingy. Like a teardrop.”

  “The Elsa Peretti?” Naomi asked with a sinking feeling.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I only had one. I lost the other one somewhere.”

  “Okay,” Naomi said, trying to sound cheery. The Elsa Peretti earrings had been a gift from Francine Rigor when Hannah turned thirteen, the exhaustively negotiated age at which she would be permitted to pierce her ears. Francine, unlike Naomi herself, had pierced ears and a sizable collection of items to put in them: silver and gold, pearls and gems. She was partial to Elsa Peretti. The silver earrings had doubtless been expensive, not to mention sentimental. Well, they ought to have been sentimental.

  “They’re very pretty,” said Naomi, who knew when a battle was worth picking.

  “Yes, more my style,” Hannah said, fingering the little green stone. She handed her mother a glass of wine. Red. Left over from a trustee dinner two nights earlier. “I read somewhere you’re supposed to drink an inch of this every day. Then you don’t die young.”

  “An inch,” Naomi said, considering. “And it protects you from plane crashes and having a piano fall on your head?”

  Hannah pulled back her chair from the long table. “Well, it must,” she said dryly. “Because I read it in the science section of the New York Times. And they never lie.”

  Naomi went to the stove. She had left the borscht simmering for most of the afternoon, not because the recipe had said to do so but because she liked the idea of it there, making the sterile kitchen feel more like a kitchen was supposed to feel. Now it occurred to her that she had sacrificed the actual taste of the actual soup for some idea of soup, handmade by mother for child, and she delayed tasting it until she had sliced the tomatoes and the red onions, poured a bit of olive oil over the fanned-out slices.