The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Omar Khayal. She sat for a long moment trying to figure out why the name sounded so familiar, and when she could not she Googled it, and when her computer auto-corrected to Omar Khayyam she understood. Of course. How much of the strange thing he emitted came from that—the little chiming charge from a name that wasn’t even his? The prophet. The way they looked at him. The way she’d looked at him.

  The father from San Francisco called again the next morning, and when Naomi spoke to him (listened to him) she received the apparently calamitous news that Chava had gotten a C on her last paper in European history, this girl who had never received anything below an A in her entire life. And that Chava’s roommate had been calling Chava’s father to say that Chava had not been in the room for more than a week, not even to use the shower or wash her clothes, let alone to sleep in her own bed. Also that Chava had an organic chemistry exam in a few days that she had not begun to prepare for.

  “I saw Chava last night,” Naomi said as soon as he paused for breath. “She seems really okay. Of course it’s concerning that her schoolwork is taking a hit, but you know, it’s the kids who never stop driving themselves academically that we really worry about, in a way. She’s having a different kind of educational experience right now. But it’s temporary, I’m sure.”

  “How can you possibly be sure of that?” the man asked. He sounded irate.

  Because I’m a mother, she almost said, but that wasn’t it. The fact was, she had no business thinking anything at all about Chava, whom she’d only met once, in the dark. And it was actually quite possible that there was a great deal that was wrong, not just with Chava but with all of them.

  “Do you even know why they’re doing this?”

  “A popular professor has been turned down for tenure,” she informed him, as if she herself had been in constructive negotiation with them for some time.

  “That’s it?” he asked, the outrage bounding down the line. “A professor?”

  “Apparently. But it’s often the case that general or individual discontents can coalesce around an issue like this. The bottom line is that they’re upset. They’re coming in later today, to talk to me,” she said.

  “In other words,” he said darkly, “these kids have got you over their collective knee.”

  She declined, to the best of her ability, this distasteful image.

  “We are opening a dialogue,” she told him, trying to keep her cool. “Dialogue is the foundation of everything. Figuring out what you think, learning to articulate that and learning to listen.” It’s what we in the business call “education.” She didn’t say that aloud.

  When he finally let her go, she sat back in her chair. She was exhausted. She had not slept much the night before, and what little sleep she’d managed had been broken. Hannah, after a cruel hour or two, had returned a text at one in the morning with a terse Mom. I am fine.

  Was she? I wouldn’t know, Naomi thought. Hannah might have been, at this moment, a sophomore on the opposite side of the country from her concerned parent, but instead she was only a short hop down Fairweather Road to Radclyffe Hall—what was the difference? I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. Evelyn Waugh had written that about Catholicism, but it was just as true for parenthood, wasn’t it? More true, thought Naomi, who had no authority in asserting this, even to herself, given that she had never believed in a Catholic god nor any other kind of god. Had Evelyn Waugh been a father when he wrote that? She had no idea.

  This Nicholas Gall—she’d had to catch up, and quickly. What she’d known of him came only from the tenure file with its lightweight CV, and the general scuttlebutt that his classes were always oversubscribed. The previous evening she’d emailed the acting chair of anthropology, and he’d come in first thing that morning to fill in the gaps: Francis Kinikini, an ex-Mormon of Tongan descent who’d once played football for Brigham Young and whose own fieldwork had been done, not surprisingly, in Polynesia. He was filling in for the long-term chair, whose sabbatical year in Burkina Faso could not have come at a less convenient moment, and he sat Naomi’s office Hitchcock chair looking supremely uncomfortable, as if he feared that any question he might be asked was a question he didn’t quite have the authority to answer. But Kinikini had been around for most of Nicholas Gall’s Webster career, and while it was true that he hadn’t specifically been paying attention to his popular colleague, he’d seen enough.

  Nicholas Gall had arrived at the college as an adjunct, one of three teachers imported at the last minute when a tenured professor decamped to Yale and, almost simultaneously, two faculty members failed to return from fieldwork sabbaticals—one because he insisted on remaining in Yemen for an additional six-month period and the other because he had dropped dead on the island of Lesbos. Gall had been teaching at a community college in Georgia that offered anthropology courses through its social sciences department, and though he’d been there only two years, that had been long enough to win—twice—its student-selected distinguished professor award. Before Georgia he’d been at a four-year school in the Ozarks, teaching the anthropology foundation course for future majors, as well as Ozark history and culture. There, again, Gall had received a number of student-generated accolades, including the distinguished teacher award, three times in a row. Before the Ozarks, Naomi was stunned to discover, Gall had spent a decade on his doctoral thesis at UMass, Amherst, meaning that he had almost certainly been there while she was working on her own degree. He had been a UMass undergrad before that. He had actually grown up down the road in Springfield.

  A hometown boy. A prodigal son, returning.

  Well, prodigal. Not so much. After all, when you looked at Gall’s journey in chronological order it looked like a success story; obviously, he had not had a privileged start, but he had still earned a doctorate and was teaching college, with a few very pleasant laurel wreaths to boot—not so shabby. It was only if you considered Gall’s story in reverse that it all began to sour, beginning with the worst of academic crimes and reaching back through two employers who’d declined to hold on to him, despite the fact that he was popular with students. Something had gone wrong here, but what?

  “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Kierkegaard said that, and Naomi had always admired the eerie perfection of this simple insight. Considered in reverse, from her presidential office in Billings, her own life certainly seemed as if it must have been intentional. Her rise at Webster, and before that the later-in-life return to academia, and before that the in-the-trenches experience of grassroots organizing in Goddard, New Hampshire, and before that her pure, youthful political activism…when you looked at everything from that perspective, where else could she have ended up but here, in the corner office on the third floor of Billings?

  But while it was happening, while every single step of that was happening—from the early activism to the decade-long detour of “volunteer” work in a town that truly did not comprehend why she’d come, to the husband she’d stopped loving but had stuck to long enough for him to leave her, to the unexpected child who’d become the most important presence in her universe—nothing had actually felt intentional. Nothing had even felt rational. The truth was that it had all been one extended stumble, a meander during which she had trailed a few ethnic identities and picked up a few political notions: no narrative, and certainly no plan, she thought, only half-listening to Kinikini elaborate upon Nicholas Gall’s more recent misdemeanors. But I myself am a fraud and a dissembler, it suddenly came to her.

  She had done some things in her life that even she had to categorize as successful, but they had never quite registered as accomplishments while they were actually happening. Moving to back-of-beyond New Hampshire as an irredeemable (Jewish, feminist) outsider and starting a little company that somehow earned national (pre-internet) attention and supported a dozen women? Accompli
shment. Getting a PhD and a tenured position at Webster? Accomplishment. Singlehandedly raising the extraordinary Hannah Rosalind Roth to near-adulthood? Massive accomplishment.

  And yet she had never quite believed she could accomplish this.

  She remembered surreal approbation of her Webster inauguration, held a few weeks into a glorious fall term; the students had made a cheering corridor across the quad from Webster Hall to the athletic arena (it was threatening rain), and that unmistakable sense of a wedding procession was echoed in the academic bridesmaids who preceded her to the ceremony. These were female college presidents from all over the country, most of whom she’d never met or even spoken to. “Welcome to the ultimate sorority” was a phrase used more than once in their congratulatory calls after the college made the announcement. Barnard, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Dickinson…she would pick up the phone in her poky little office and a clipped little voice would say: Please hold for President So-and-So. (Naomi doubted they even knew she was answering her own phone.) She’d wanted to ask them everything, these amazing women, these college presidents, but the whole thing dazzled her out of her senses. “We have to stick together,” said the brilliant president of the University of Pennsylvania. Only a few months earlier Naomi had heard this same brilliant president of the University of Pennsylvania speak to a major conference on higher education. Brilliantly. For an hour. Without notes. “Seriously, no one else can even imagine the insanity of this job,” she said on the phone, as if she and Naomi were actual friends, or had even met. “Do you have kids?”

  A daughter. A teenager, Naomi had sputtered.

  “Yeah. Like that’s not a full-time job in itself. But you know the best way to get something done is to give the job to someone who already has too much to do. That’s usually a woman, right?”

  “Right.” That was true. That was crazy! Why had she herself never recognized such a simple truth?

  Five of them had even shown up at the inauguration: the astonishing presidents of Swarthmore and Smith and Oberlin and Trinity and Connecticut College. The luminous president of Smith had given a speech just before Naomi’s swearing in and had thousands of Webster students, parents, faculty, alumni, and staff laughing, and then getting choked up. Hilarious, powerful. Afterward there’d been a quick hug, and then the luminous president of Smith was gone, back to Northampton in a car driven by her administrative assistant. The only contact she and Naomi had had since then had been a hug before a panel at the annual conference of the American Association of University Women and a gracious, proper exchange of letters the previous year, when the husband of the luminous president of Smith died suddenly of an aneurysm.

  The luminous president of Smith was substantial, lovely, calm—even, Naomi supposed, in grief. The astonishing women who had walked her down the aisle to this unexpected bridegroom, this Webster College, any one of them could have stepped in at the last moment, and no one, once they’d fanned themselves and roared in shock, would have sent her away, because these were the very women that women like Naomi had dreamed of seeing in the presidents’ offices of colleges and businesses and governments. These were the exceptional creatures, credits to feminism who would begin the great redress of all that patriarchy had wrought, forever and everywhere. And yet, “President Roth”—it was as unreal today as it had been on that day, the day of her inauguration, and now she began to think she understood why. President Roth was a pseudonym, and her office was Pseud’s Corner. Pseud’s Corner office, she thought, not really amused. And I am in it. For why?

  Nicholas Gall, Kinikini was saying, for maybe the fourth or fifth time, was one of the most popular teachers in the department, and had been since he’d come to Webster. If Webster had a student choice award (naming opportunity, the pseudonymous President Roth automatically thought) Gall would certainly have won it, judging by his scores on RateMyProfessors.com and the Webster-specific site some imp had set up for students to vent anonymously. He had crab-stepped from his initial adjunct status onto the tenure track, in itself a highly unusual—well, all but unheard of—maneuver. How had he managed that? Naomi wondered aloud, but Kinikini only shrugged and said something about the department’s need for a dedicated folklorist. The man who’d died in Lesbos had been their only folklorist, and apparently they weren’t all that easy to find. Folklorists, often—not always—were the country cousins of anthropology and sociology departments, but sometimes they came out of English, sociology, linguistics, religious studies, music, and ethnic studies, and hiring one was not as straightforward as interviewing a dozen candidates at the MLA or the AHA, and picking your favorite. But here one was, on the spot as it were, popular with the students and working hard on his first book, an adaptation of his doctoral thesis on “The Mountain Whippoorwill.”

  Professor Kinikini himself had arrived at Webster shortly after these events, and found his new colleague, Nicholas Gall, already in situ, an avoidant guy with oversubscribed classes and not much to say in those few department meetings he attended. In the years since then, various administrative positions had rotated through the department, but Gall declined to act beyond his compulsory responsibilities. He didn’t offer himself for any committee work, either specific to his department or for the college as a whole. He didn’t attend any department social events, not even the locally famous Christmas party of his anthropology colleague Michel Louviere, who prepared a mind-blowing gumbo from a closely guarded family recipe each year. But shirking work and avoiding social contact—while hardly strategic in terms of achieving tenure—were not criminal, and they were not particularly unusual. If Gall chose to isolate himself from his colleagues and concentrate, instead, on his own scholarly work and the challenges of being an inspirational teacher to his students, then this was not to be vilified. Webster’s reputation as an academic center, its attractiveness to the nation’s best students, and its own institutional pride—all were built upon these very things.

  But. Nicholas Gall did not seem to be concentrating on his scholarly work. He made no evident headway on a publishable version of his doctoral thesis (which was what he had told Professor Kinikini and Kinikini’s predecessor he was doing), and he seemed not to have begun another project. He declined an opportunity to write a chapter for a textbook another anthropology professor was editing, though this would have netted him an easy publication credit and required no extraordinary effort (the chapter was to cover basic fieldwork principles and techniques, which any anthropologist could easily discuss). He attended no conferences and gave no lectures at other colleges. Each autumn he requested, and received, department funding to travel to Georgia, where he spent the winter break in the mountains near Rabun Gap. Each June he added to his dossier of professional credits: nothing.

  And as for being a superior, inspirational teacher to his students…well, those websites could be somewhat problematic. Looking beyond the numerical ratings to the actual commentary unveiled a theme that went something like this:

  “Professor Gall is a smooth dude. I totes played World of Warcraft all semester and I still passed the final.”

  “I don’t know why, but I got an A in his course.”

  “Need a mid-morning place to snooze? Check email? Gall’s your guy.”

  In brief: Nicholas Gall graded high and his classes demanded little. Very high and very little. Doorways and Crossroads (Anthro 113) and Loki, Coyote, and Br’er Rabbit (Anthro 115) had been like secret performance drugs passed between Webster students for the past eight years. No wonder he was a popular guy.

  At a formal review the previous year, Gall had been told that a tenure offer was unlikely, and unless he had publications the department wasn’t aware of, or were shortly forthcoming, he ought to be thinking about his next move. Webster’s academic protocols called for a final year of teaching once tenure had been formally denied, and this was a courtesy to allow teachers an opportunity to plan, but in fact very few took up the offer. Typically, given a year’s warning, those who knew which way the wind w
as blowing were already making arrangements to leave.

  Gall wanted to stay at Webster, that much was clear. Since his warning he had moved quickly to publish an academic monograph, adapted from a portion of his UMass thesis, with a private press located in the North Georgia mountains. A copy of this slender book, which had a plain green cover with only the title “The Mountain Whippoorwill” and Lowe Stokes and the author’s name, Nicholas Gall, in white letters, was not much more substantial than a pamphlet. It had been allocated its own official folder from which Kinikini extracted it now and he handed it over, apparently assuming that Naomi would want to examine such a critical piece of evidence herself. “The Mountain Whippoorwill” was a poem Naomi had never heard of, and Lowe Stokes was a fiddler she had likewise never heard of (honestly, what fiddlers had she heard of?) who had won some fiddle contest in Tennessee, had his hand blown off, and played for the rest of his long life with a metal contraption attached to his forearm. Sitting in her high-backed leather chair, in her corner office and reading the century-old poem as the afternoon began to choke all the light out of the room, she felt increasingly disoriented. Kinikini sat on the other side of the broad desk, waiting as she read, and she let him wait, and she let it take her far from where they were both sitting:

  Hell’s broke loose,

  Fire on the mountains—snakes in the grass.

  Satan’s here a-bilin’—oh, Lordy, let him pass!

   She had never read much poetry. She really had no idea what to think about it.