The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Her heart went out to them. She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t help it, they were so bereft, so divinely outraged. How many times had she herself taken the harm done to another person and made it her own harm, her personal harm, and pushed back against it with all her strength and will? The world would never work if people refused to perform this exact alchemy, to recognize that any injustice paid to one of them was paid to every one of them, and it was the duty of those who had a voice to speak for the voiceless. She had spent those days on the floor of the president’s office at Cornell not because she was an impoverished and endangered village child in Vietnam but because she was not. She had marched for women’s rights not because she had experienced rape or lack of access to abortion but because it might have been her, it might one day be her, or her child, or her friend, or the woman behind her at the checkout counter, who had as much right as Naomi did not to be raped or denied crucial healthcare and who was also, therefore, her responsibility.

  Watching one of these nominally joint interviews, Naomi was struck by the silent understanding between Omar and Gall, the rhythm of their partnership. Side by side on the couch, in a room that could have belonged to any college-town hotel in New England (but this time was, she recognized, the conference suite lounge at the Webster Inn), she analyzed their spoken participation at 75 percent Omar and 25 percent Gall, with Omar contributing fully rounded narratives of gratitude and admiration and Gall answering direct questions with marked pause of consideration and an air of allowing himself only a few carefully chosen words. As if, Naomi realized, with a spike of outrage, he were afraid of saying the wrong thing, of what they might do to him if he misspoke or inadvertently angered the gods of Webster. They. Meaning her. Meaning me, she saw.

  “Webster believes that it is an evolved place,” said young Omar Khayal of Bureij, Palestine. “For so long it was, you know, entirely white and male and heterosexual and conservative, and this was the Webster that so many remember. And then, when it finally experienced an evolution in the 1970s, I think, the college persuaded itself that it had become a city on a hill, a community that repudiated its earlier self, you see?”

  The interviewer—Naomi knew her face, but not her name—nodded.

  “But this is not true,” said Omar, and Naomi could hear now, as she sometimes could not, the lilt of his mother tongue, there beneath his English. “Webster is not a city on a hill. Webster is still the reactionary place it was before. It is a place where we who are ‘other’ are made to feel, constantly, that we are not part of the real Webster. We are tolerated. And still, sometimes, the true feeling of the real Webster breaks through that very tolerance. You may ask, how could the incident that happened here have happened at Webster College? At such a supposedly liberal and welcoming place, how could a member of our community have written this word, this disgusting, offensive word, in human waste, on the wall of the one student building on campus that is dedicated to the African-American experience at Webster? But that is not the same question we are asking, because we see this place as it really is. Our question is, why did it take so long?”

  The interviewer nodded sadly. Her face was drawn with deep concern. “Professor Gall?” she said, turning to him as Omar sat back in deference. “Is that your question as well?”

  One…two…three…Naomi counted off the beats as Gall appeared to think, deeply, carefully. He looked so very sad, so very disappointed, and when he finally spoke it was with an air of integrity having gained the upper hand over loyalty, even heartfelt loyalty. It pained him, obviously. But truth must be paramount, and that was all.

  “I have devoted many years of my life to Webster College,” he said, his small voice crowded further by emotion. “I have believed in Webster as an ideal. I can’t bear to think that this is a place where such hatred and discrimination can flourish. But I can no longer pretend that it is not.”

  There. Done. Nicholas Gall sank back against the faux Williamsburg sofa with its pseudo-colonial pineapple print, and spoke no more. His honesty, his disappointment—they had exhausted him.

  Naomi declined to sympathize. She was furious. And every week, as it passed, left her more furious still.

  Francine, in one of her very few phone calls (mud season was also her season in what she called the admissions cave, in which her thousands of applications were winnowed down to the nascent class), expressed distracted support of the hang in there variety, and let her know that “everyone who knows what’s going on” supported her unequivocally. (Given that so few people really knew “what’s going on,” this was not the comfort Francine probably intended it to be.) Could they have dinner? Naomi asked, feeling especially fragile at the sound of her friend’s voice but already knowing the answer.

  “Oh, sweetie, I wish. But I’ve got the entire Midwest before we start meetings in two weeks. I can barely take a shower.”

  “Of course, of course. Carry on!” Naomi said bravely. “Admissions is the umbilical cord of the college, and all that.”

  “A metaphor I always found ever so slightly nauseating,” Francine said. Then she asked if Naomi had been keeping up with the scandale unfolding at a very large, very famous, and very respected university in a state adjoining their own.

  Naomi’s heart leaped. It was unkind, of course, but if ever there were a moment for academic schadenfreude, this had to be it. “Tell me. Please, tell me.”

  A certain international communications empire had been hacked by certain persons unknown, dispersing years of emails sent and received by executives from the lowliest low to the highest high all over the internet. Naomi had heard about the first delirious skim of this trove—five-thousand-dollar-a-night call girls, homophobic slurs about the CFO (a noted Democratic fund-raiser)—but that story had disappeared months earlier. Over time, however, the scrutiny, like an archaeological dig, had continued to descend through layers of stuff, uncovering as it went items both ordinary and precious. It was a vein of the latter that Francine now brought to her attention.

  Several years earlier, the company’s CEO had evidently contacted the university in question to discuss the possibility of a gift in honor of his distant cousin, a graduate of that fine institution. The cousin had died some ten years earlier, but there was apparently no time like the present for the CEO to memorialize him with a pledge of $5 million, which could be used as the university saw fit. The institution, naturally, responded with gratitude and pleasure, and asked if the CEO would accept an invitation to campus in order to be thanked personally. No need, the CEO replied, as he would be visiting in a month or so with his son, a high school senior. That very university, by pure coincidence, was his son’s first choice college.

  What followed was a series of emails that basically confirmed the deepest suspicions of every disgruntled parent of every rejected applicant, ever: a genteel dance around the bald fact of that money and the offer of acceptance it counterbalanced, in which a custom and private tour for the CEO and his son was led by the dean of admissions himself, and a civilized glass of Merlot was enjoyed on the back patio of the president’s residence. And every single piece of it, the obsequious thank-you for the money and the detailed instructions for its transmission, the queries about father and son’s visit to campus, the informational packets and student interest forms to be left at their hotel, the highlighted map showing the way to the president’s residence, the follow-up reminders that the official early decision deadline was nearing, and the slightly more urgent query about whether the boy would be finishing and submitting his application before the official deadline (kids today! so laid-back!)…every last smarmy piece of it was online for every last person on the planet to peruse.

  The money changed hands. The application was successful. The young man in question was a current sophomore at that very university. And admissions officers from sea to shining sea were saying silent prayers to their higher powers that the institutions they served had not been the first choice of the son of the CEO of this particular interna
tional corporation: There but for the grace of You go I.

  Naomi heard this. She tried just to let it sit with her, but it wouldn’t sit still.

  “You mean, you too?”

  “Me too what?”

  “Well, could it have been us? Is that what we’d have done with a gift of five million and a rising senior?”

  Francine seemed to take a long time to consider this.

  Webster alumni were generous. They loved their college. They loved it, for the most part, even when it transformed before their eyes: homogeneous to heterogeneous, conservative to beyond liberal, provincial to global. The older graduates were still remembering the college in their wills, endowing chairs and underwriting athletic facilities. The younger graduates were funding international programs and scholarships for students from Third World countries. But if there had been a situation like this, a specified or implied quid pro quo, Naomi had not been made aware of it.

  “That hasn’t happened,” Francine said finally, to Naomi’s relief. “You know we work closely with Development, but five-million-dollar gifts haven’t come our way. I mean, in conjunction with an applicant.”

  “But, if they had?”

  Another silence. Naomi could picture her friend’s expression: tired, cautious. Why cautious? If they were having this conversation in the woods, on one of their walks, would it seem so charged? Francine was good at her job. Francine took the ever-growing crush of applicants (twenty-three thousand last year) and produced gloriously diverse classes of eighteen hundred. Somehow. Naomi hoped she was not conveying anything less than utter confidence. She was about to say as much when her friend spoke.

  “My feeling is that I serve the institution. That’s the bottom line, and it serves the institution to receive a gift of five million dollars, so if the applicant is qualified and likely to contribute, I have no moral issue. People bring many different gifts to Webster, and we appreciate them all. Personally, I enjoy having a good improv group on campus. I happen to know the dean of faculty is fond of John Philip Sousa marches. You need a glockenspiel for that. Every other year or so the marching band director says Find us a glockenspiel! Now if you’re really lucky, your five-million-dollar applicant does improv or plays the glockenspiel. But even if he doesn’t he still looks like a pretty compelling candidate, so long as he can do the work and isn’t an axe murderer. Like I said, though: hasn’t happened yet.”

  “But, just for the record, you’d run something like that by me, right?”

  “You mean, by you personally? Not just Development?”

  “Oh.” Naomi sighed. “Right. Of course. Development.” That was what Development was for. Sometimes it shocked her, how out of her depth she felt at this. After five years. “I’d want to know about a five-million-dollar gift. I’d want to write a thank-you note.”

  Francine laughed, but it wasn’t a very happy-sounding laugh. “I can assure you that my colleagues in Development write elegant and heartfelt thank-you notes on your behalf, but I hear you. If it ever happens.”

  “If it ever happens,” Naomi echoed. And she let Francine get back to her work. And Naomi went back to what she herself was doing: steadily, incrementally losing control.

  Meanwhile, the term careened forward. In spite of the widening gyre, classes were happening, parties were happening. Some members of the community—most, actually—still seemed happy enough to do what they’d come to Webster intent on doing in the seminar rooms, lecture theaters, and labs. Vaguely, Naomi understood that plays were being performed and the basketball team was having a respectable season, and the reading series went on as scheduled in the poetry room of the Loring Library each Sunday night. And yet she left Stone House each morning already in a panic about some unfolding episode in the Webster Dissent saga—a new appearance on a national news program, a new think piece on a website everyone read—and all through the day she would be yanked back and forth between the hurtling train of this and the background (but still deafening!) noise of ordinary Webster and its students, faculty, staff, administration, physical plant, institutional challenges and aspirations…until she fell asleep with the light on and her reading glasses still on her face, the laptop slipping, slipping to the side.

  And in between: the phone calls, the emails, the insistent voices, requesting, opining, complaining, haranguing, mocking, or actually praising her, which was weirdly the most distasteful of all. Every single person she had ever known—and every single person she had never known—was trying to get in touch.

  And if that wasn’t true, it still felt as if it were. Every single person.

  Well, not every single person.

  Naomi had not heard from Hannah since the night she’d left home at the end of winter break, and could not be sure where her daughter was spending her nights. At Radclyffe Hall? Down in the mud of the Billings Lawn? Perhaps, as the apparent media liaison of Webster Dissent, Hannah had been stashed (or had stashed herself) away somewhere off campus, the better to manage access to the movement’s two certifiable household names—Nicholas Gall and Omar Khayal.

  Or was that three new household names?

  Doctor was a title Naomi had never done much with, and this turned out to be some small relief as that honorific was very much a part of her brand-new public persona, “Dr. Naomi Roth.” Public, as in: belonging to the public, fulfilling the public role of, say, villain, like, say, Bull Connor upholding the God-given principle of segregation or Lieutenant William Calley bringing the war home to My Lai. All of those remote broadcasts from the edge of the quad, she could not help noting, made a meal of the mud, the now filthy tarps and tents, and the clearly fatigued young activists, but not one saw fit to include the very expensive toilet trailer, or the heating stations she’d insisted on, or the dedicated tent for health center staff, which always had a doctor or nurse in residence, even at night. These kids had to be the most coddled protesters in the history of nonviolent resistance, Naomi thought, taking her now customary place at the window to survey, again, her battered demesne: the muddy turf, the bodies, standing, lounging, chilling, most of them clad in once-brightly-colored parkas. Around this the media trucks, the reporters, the bloggers (for all she knew), the gawkers. (Perhaps Gawker itself.) And then the college buildings, the bare trees, the white winter sky. Even in its ugliest season and under its greatest assault for years, if not ever, Webster was beautiful. This spot in the woods, selected by Josiah Webster and his protégé, the other Josiah, the Native American Josiah, and cleared by the first students—it must have called out to them somehow. There must have been some prospect, some feature that had prompted the little party to stop exactly here and put down their packs and pick up their saws and shovels. Like Brigham Young on the ridge above the Salt Lake Valley, intoning, for the ages: This is the place. And it was still the place, two and a half centuries later. And it was her place, Naomi thought, allowing this whiff of sentimentality to briefly elbow aside her reportedly steely resolve. But for how long would she be able to hold off this narrative of Dr. Naomi Roth versus the noble young activists? It had first occurred to her a few weeks earlier, quietly, and truthfully without much pain, that Dr. Naomi Roth would likely end up hoisted on this particular petard. It was the way these things went, she knew better than most. Unless you were a Ronald Reagan, bulldozing an encampment of protesters and blithely loping on into the future until it was Morning in America for all! (Or at least for everyone who mattered!) But Naomi was no Ronald Reagan (thank all that was holy for that). One way or another, Webster Dissent was going to do her in. The only questions were, When would it happen? and Was her own daughter going to lead the charge when it did?

  Chapter Thirteen

  What a Long, Strange

  Trip It’s Been

  The Webster cops had nothing. Weeks after the Sojourner Truth basement had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life by a crew of Webster Dissent activists (an event duly recorded by the Associated Press), they were still flummoxed by what had happened on Fairwea
ther Road. That night, first in the house and after at the police station, she’d been frustrated to see that they did not immediately grasp the enormity of the event. The word “vandalism” kept coming out of various mouths: one belonging to the patrolmen who’d come to Sojourner Truth, one belonging to the clerk at the station, and even the one belonging to the chief, who’d arrived to confer with his men, and—reluctantly, and only because she was there and wouldn’t leave—Naomi. It was not “a college prank,” she insisted. It was not “frat boy behavior.” It enraged her that she had to explain this to them. They did not know what, or who, Sojourner Truth signified. Perhaps, she thought unkindly, they did not know what nigger signified, either.