The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Every one of the Webster Dissent kids in the house that night had been interviewed, but only because she’d insisted. She hadn’t hung around for that. She couldn’t do that and also go to the police station, and it seemed more important to make sure they understood the college’s position from the get-go: deadly serious, fully committed to identifying and prosecuting the person or persons responsible.

  “Well, you know, it’s kids messing around. It’s, what, a frat basement, right?” the chief had said that first night, establishing the theme. He was a chief of recent vintage, and Naomi was just meeting him now. The previous chief had seen her and Webster through five years of raucous parties and minor assaults, and he had been brusque and unimaginative but basically sound, not that she’d been moved to forge a warm and fuzzy rapport with him. He had moved on to Florida or Louisiana or someplace without a mud season.

  “No. Not a frat basement. This is a dormitory for students of color. Do you understand?”

  It emerged a bit more harshly than she had intended, and he reacted with appropriate defensiveness. “Well, but still kids. Maybe there was drinking involved.”

  “It wouldn’t change a thing, from our perspective.”

  “Sure, but I take it this is part of a bigger problem you’ve got right now. I don’t know if isolating this one incident is going to make a lot of sense. Now if we can classify it as a vandalism we’re on firmer ground, so to speak.”

  She wanted to rip his head off. She took one or two deep and ineffectual breaths. She wished she had the college attorney with her, but Chaim had felt that bringing counsel into a friendly meeting might set an adversarial tone—not wise. In this instance, the college and the police ought to be united on the side of the angels.

  “Do what you need to do,” she told the chief. “But as far as we’re concerned, this is a hate crime, and as soon as you bring me the name or names of the perpetrators, and as soon as you charge them, I’ll be initiating disciplinary procedures to separate them from the college. I won’t have this at Webster. It won’t be tolerated.”

  Wild applause, she thought, noting his blank expression. Wild imaginary applause.

  She took his card. His name was Patrick Hogan.

  But of the precisely ninety-three students Chief Hogan and his men had interviewed that night and all the next day, not one of them had any idea who’d smeared human excrement on the basement wall of the Sojourner Truth house to form the words Niggers out. Not one had observed a person descending the basement stairs en route (possibly) to doing this. Not one had heard or overheard any person speak of intending to do such a thing, or heard or overheard any person speak of having done such a thing. A house jammed with innocents, who saw, heard, and apparently spoke no evil. It was a wash.

  What was there to do but reiterate her own outrage, the college’s outrage, and her complete confidence (this was a lie, of course) in the investigative abilities of the Webster Police Department, which was working closely with their own security officers? What happened at Sojourner Truth, she would say again and again, to anyone who asked and more than a few who didn’t, was not indicative of the culture at Webster. It flew in the face of the college’s noted openness and principle of honoring all cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, gender positions (and non-positions!), and sexual orientations (and non-orientations!).

  None of it mattered, of course. Out there, beyond the Quad, the town, the cozy grove of academe, Webster College had burst upon the American consciousness as an ivy-covered bastion of reactionary policies and racist personnel, where a beloved professor could be penalized for the color of his skin and a white supremacist could write that word, in shit, on the walls of the only building granted to students of color (admitted obviously for reasons of tokenism!), their one small solitary refuge among the Aryan Nations extremists who made up the student body, faculty, and administration.

  Currently, the only aspect of her job (or, to be brutally honest, her life) that was giving her any pleasure was the prospect of the Native American Gathering. On the day of her finally rescheduled meeting with Robbins Petavit, the Webster grad who tragically taught at Amherst, Naomi awoke to a barely remembered sense of energized purpose. This, she could do. This she wanted to do, and if the world was so intent on viewing Webster through a prism of distortion, then they were welcome to come and observe a few of the panels she’d planned for the Gathering. The advisory committee comprised six Webster alumni from across the country and two from Canada, and they were scheduled to meet in a week’s time at a college-funded retreat in Tulsa (moved from Webster itself, in light of the growing encampment around the Stump, because why should the delegates have to step in this mess?) to discuss how things might proceed. A week after that, invitations would be sent to every living Native American or First Nations graduate the college could locate—about seven hundred in number.

  That all sounded fine, very forthright and very productive, but Naomi knew that there was a subterranean current of resistance to the gathering, even within its advisory committee. She knew it because Douglas Sidgwick had related this news in his own special way, while perched on one foot in her doorway, his face a perfect Sidgwickian blank. “They don’t want to do it, you know. I mean they’re doing it. But they don’t really want to do it.”

  “They…” Naomi said, exasperated.

  “Advisory committee. More than half of them said they needed to think about it.”

  Well, that was okay, Naomi had told him. You want to think about anything that’s going to take up your time.

  “Yeah, no,” he said. Oddly, he nodded as he said this. “But everyone who said he had to think about it decided not to do it. Professor Petavit ended up asking some of his friends, which is how we got to the eight.”

  Okay, so that hadn’t gone smoothly, and it was news to Naomi. Still, she sort of appreciated not having heard about it till now. There just wasn’t room in her head for any more resistance.

  In the turbulent wake of Webster Dissent, Douglas Sidgwick had taken over the heavy lifting of the Gathering, though he—like the proposed advisory committee—had needed to think about it, since he was not (as he’d had no need to remind Naomi) very good at dealing with people. This was the reason Sidgwick would not be joining them at lunch at the Webster Inn, she suspected, though his stated excuse was a dental appointment.

  Naomi, waylaid by yet another difficult phone conversation (this one with Chava’s father, who had just learned from the registrar that his daughter intended to withdraw from the college, effective immediately), was late, of course. Ten minutes late, not terrible, but in light of the fact that she’d canceled their previous meeting, not really all right, either. She walked briskly along the sidewalk, her head down, dodging the bodies, and into the lobby of the Webster Inn, which was crowded with media types. This was when she realized that she had no idea what Professor Petavit looked like.

  “President Roth?” A man had approached, with outstretched hand.

  “Oh, hello!” said Naomi, relieved. He was younger than she’d imagined, his skin tone somewhere between dusky and dark. She hadn’t looked up his tribal affiliation. She’d meant to do that, too. And his Webster class, and his major. Everything, really. Chava’s father had driven it all from her head. “Naomi, please.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” the man said. “Do you have a few minutes to chat?”

  Naomi frowned. They were having lunch, she’d thought. “I made a reservation,” she said, gesturing toward the dining room.

  “Just a couple of minutes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the lawsuit.”

  “The…wait, are you Professor Petavit?”

  The man considered. He looked as if he were seriously weighing the question. Would it help if he were, in fact, “Professor Petavit”?

  “Sorry, no,” he finally said. “Steven Bishop, MSNBC. I’m a producer for Kathy Solomon’s show. You know Kathy,” he informed her, so confidently that she actually wondered if she did know Kathy. Who was K
athy again? It knocked her so efficiently off balance that she just stood there, looking at him, trying to decide whether she was actually angry, embarrassed, or merely generally disappointed in the human animal. But before she could pick one somebody else had joined them, and then another somebody else. Cards were extended: ABC, NPR. Just a couple of minutes, one of them said. “Couple of minutes” seemed to be the preferred euphemism for this species. “I’d like to bring you outside on the porch, if you don’t mind,” said a woman about her own age, who had evidently taken her by the wrist. Somebody else had a hand on her shoulder and was talking to her about Diane Sawyer. They were like a zombie mass, newly alert to the presence of living flesh.

  “I’m Professor Petavit,” someone said, quietly, behind her. “I kind of want to say: Come with me if you want to live.” He was laughing a little. Naomi looked at him. Unlike the other one, the one who had not been Professor Petavit, he was pale and, if not California blond, then at least very much blond. And pale. He was definitely pale. Did that make sense? But he did seem to know his own name.

  “I was in the dining room, waiting for you. I saw what was happening.”

  He had leaned in to say this. She nodded.

  “Great, let’s go.”

  That hand was still on her wrist. “President Roth?”

  “I’ve already stated our position on the protest and the tenure decision,” she said tersely. “If there’s something to add, I’ll say so, but the privacy of our students and faculty members is my priority.”

  “Yes,” said someone with clear impatience, “but—”

  The hand on her wrist tightened. Naomi took hold of the fingers and peeled them off. “Don’t do that,” she told the woman. “Not nice.” Then she followed Petavit to the dining room. To their credit, none of them came after her.

  “Well, thanks for that,” Naomi said, sinking into one of the inn’s faux-Colonial chairs. “I might not have made it through the lobby. I’m Naomi.” She extended her hand. “May I call you Robin?”

  “No,” he said mildly. “But you can call me Robbins. Don’t worry,” he added, noting her expression, “happens all the time. It’s a family name,” he explained. “Back to the 1840s.”

  “Oh. And Petavit?”

  “Also family. Back even farther. Wayyyy back.”

  “Right,” she said, remembering again that she knew far too little about him. “May I ask where your…what your affiliation is?”

  Petavit was looking over the menu. “Like many of us, I’m a mix. But the Petavit is Nipmuc. And the Nipmuc, as I’m sure you’re aware, are right here.”

  Naomi, who was shamefully not aware, said, “Right here?”

  “Webster, Massachusetts, and across the border in Connecticut and a bit of Rhode Island.”

  “Oh, my God,” she heard herself say. “I had no idea. I mean, I knew about the Praying Towns.” She stopped. She had no idea how offensive any of this was.

  “Yup, that was us. It was a Nipmuc who brought Josiah Webster here from upstate New York when his first Indian school didn’t work out. Do you know what you want?” he asked, and it took her a moment to realize he meant food.

  She ordered the tuna sandwich. She always ordered the tuna sandwich at the Webster Inn. It was generally safe. Petavit asked about the soup of the day and then the fish of the day. Naomi, glad for an excuse to look at him, found herself newly perplexed. There wasn’t a single thing about Robbins Petavit that called out “Native American,” “indigenous,” or any of the other currently approved verbiage to signify a category of people resident on the North American continent before the arrival of Columbus. At least not to her. What she saw, instead, was a collection of superficial observations, not one of which pointed her in the right direction. They included academic, Nordic, European, WASP, middle-aged. Also: attractive. He ordered a hamburger.

  “I used to come here for the hamburgers when I was in college,” he said, a little sheepishly. “When I couldn’t hack the food in the dining hall for one more day. My roommate and I would go down to the pub.” The pub was down in the cellar. It was technically off limits to Webster students, but maybe it hadn’t been then.

  “It’s still on the menu,” she told him. “Exact same burger, as long as I’ve been here.”

  “Which is how long?”

  Naomi smiled. She was kind of glad he hadn’t looked her up, either.

  “Wow. Seventeen years. Seventeen years in the fall.” If I last that long, she thought ruefully.

  “And before that?”

  “UMass, Amherst. I did my PhD there.”

  “Ah, did you love it? I’ve been very happy in Amherst, I must say.”

  Did I? she thought, already highly annoyed with herself.

  “Well, it’s a great town. I had a small child then, and I was a single mom, so my Amherst was mainly playgrounds and ice-cream parlors. I don’t know that I really got the full Happy Valley version.”

  “The past-life-regression, gluten-free, my-baby-sleeps-with-me-till-he-can-drive version?”

  She smiled. She hadn’t thought about Amherst in a while. “No, I got that. You don’t live there and not get that. I just mean, I didn’t have much of a community life. I was in the library or teaching or writing or taking care of my daughter. I don’t think I said goodbye to anyone outside my department when I left.”

  Their plates arrived. Petavit regarded his with satisfaction. “Exactly as I remember it. Same piece of kale for garnish.”

  “Well, but today you’re supposed to eat the kale, not look at it.”

  He picked the hamburger up and took a bite. He looked happy.

  “I hate to admit this,” Naomi said, eyeing her own sandwich, “but I don’t know anything about the Nipmuc…” Tribe? she almost said. Then she found a more dignified word: “Nation.”

  “Oh, well, not to worry. We’ve always been tiny. Only about a thousand today. But we’re part of the Algonquin group, basically. Algonquin were all over the northeast. Pennacook, Mohawk, Massachusett, Pequot, Quinnipiac. All cousins. We’re the ones who sold corn to the colonists in the 1630s. Kept them from starving. They gave us smallpox in return,” he said lightly. “Not a fair trade.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. In the 1630s her own people had just reached the Russian steppes. It wasn’t her crime.

  “I’m sorry about last month,” she told him. “I never cancel things. Well, almost never. But…I don’t know how much of our present situation you’re keeping up with.”

  “Oh”—he nodded—“only the part about how Webster is the place to be if you want to re-establish the Hitler Youth or do a degree in advanced racist political tactics. And the kids are running the whole shit show,” he said, cocking his head at the dining room window. They would be overlooking the Quad if they’d been seated closer to it.

  “So, just the basics,” she said grimly. “I don’t know how it got past me the way it did. Obviously, I missed something. When they set up out there I tried to get them to talk to me. They wouldn’t. And they still won’t talk to me. They’ll only talk to the media.”

  “Not your mama’s political action, in other words.”

  “No, indeed.”

  She sat back in her seat. Two bites of her own sandwich and she didn’t think she could eat any more.

  “Can I ask,” said Petavit, “and I apologize if I’m being blunt, but, is this conference—”

  “Gathering,” she corrected.

  “Gathering, specifically for Native American graduates. Is it some kind of spin because of your little problem?”

  Naomi stared at him. The fact that she had not anticipated this question was as arresting to her as the question itself.

  “No. No, it isn’t. I started thinking about doing this last spring, and talking it over with Douglas Sidgwick. We started planning early last fall. I’m sorry, I realize it looks…”

  Desperate, she was thinking. Because now she saw that it did.

  “Timely,” he finished.
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br />   “But it’s just coincidental. I have really wanted to do this, for a long time. In fact I can’t understand why it hasn’t been done until now.”

  “Well,”—he laughed uncomfortably—“I can. If you seriously want to know.”

  All of a sudden, Naomi felt it was the last thing she wanted, but of course she said yes, she seriously wanted to know.

  “Native people at Webster.” He sighed. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

  “I’m sure.” Naomi nodded. But she thought she’d better shut up.

  “So, you know the background. Josiah Webster was a missionary, not really an ‘educator’ as we’d define that today. Not unusual for that time, of course, but the difference was that he had a specific population in mind. By which I mean: us. And we were halfway there because we were already a Praying Town. We’d been exposed to Christianity already. Oh, yeah, sure,” he said to the waiter, who’d come to refill his iced tea.

  When he was gone, Petavit started again.

  “Webster only started becoming an educational institution when Josiah’s son took the funds Samuel Fairweather was holding out. Fairweather made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, because he needed the money, and maybe Nathaniel wasn’t quite as committed to the missionary thing as his dad had been, and the other Josiah, the Nipmuc Josiah, had been. Fairweather wasn’t interested in the Nipmuc or any other Native people. If he had been, Webster probably would have gone in a very different direction. Maybe by now we’d be an evangelical college with a focus on indigenous peoples. Or maybe we’d be a dedicated center for Native American studies. The guy with the money wanted something in return, and Nathaniel Webster did what he said, simple as that. And so here we are, two and a half centuries later. Two and a half centuries of white boys bound for Wall Street.”

  She didn’t bother taking issue with this. With anyone else, she might have. Instead, she said: “Until Sarafian.”

  “Sarafian, right. I overlapped with him for a year, but I never talked to him. I wish I had, but it just never happened.”