“What happened?” she asked Peter Rudolph.
“Campus Security got a call from the alarm company, just after three. The smoke alarm sent an alert. They called the fire department and I called the police. Then I called you. Then I came over myself.”
“Good.” Naomi was shivering. That seemed like the correct order.
Already it seemed to be slowing. Already the new smell, the smell of water, was mixing with the older terrible smells, making a different terrible smell. Could that have happened so quickly? Water in, fire out?
“It’s working,” she observed. It seemed miraculous, despite what was generally known about fire in combination with water. Behind her, cars were arriving, though they weren’t cars.
A stocky man stepped out of the first van and walked straight for the front steps, already filming. Peter Rudolph did nothing.
“Hey!” yelled Naomi. “Get back from there!”
The man turned his camera in her direction. She wanted to tackle him.
“Sir?” It was Patrick Hogan. “You need to move back now. Get back to the sidewalk.”
The cameraman complied, but slowly and walking backward to preserve his shot of Billings Hall. Another van arrived, and the first of the students from the encampment crossed the road.
“Keep back!” Patrick Hogan was taking charge, she saw. “Everyone back on the sidewalk. Let them work, please.”
The men, three of them, were going inside now. They would be working their way up, checking to be sure that no one was in the rooms they passed. Naomi, who was full of fear about so many things, was not afraid of that. A few minutes went by, and a first-floor window sash was raised, an arm stuck out and a thumbs-up given. A few minutes later, the same thing happened on the second floor.
The next wait was longer: five minutes, or eight. Then the fire chief, the one with the cell phone, the one who’d said it was a bomb, signaled to the others and the hose went slack. Smoke and ash seemed to fall from the window ledges. It was all over but the cleanup.
“I need to call someone,” Naomi said when she had calmed down. Actually she needed to call a bunch of people, but Will Rennet first, and then poor Mrs. Bradford, who’d unwisely let it be known on a number of occasions that she was an insomniac and likely to be up at all hours. “Will they let me inside?” she asked Peter Rudolph.
“No idea.”
“Can I go inside?” she called after the fire chief as he passed. He stopped and looked at her as if she were out of her mind.
“Uh, no. No, you may not.”
“But I need…” She petered to a halt. Actually she wasn’t sure what she needed, but she did want to know whether Josiah Webster’s portrait was all right. “Listen, can you just tell me how bad it is?”
When the men came out they gathered around her, and incredibly it turned out to be not that bad, at least in terms of the physical damage. Not too much bang, mostly smoke, said the man in charge. “Not that kind of bomb,” he told her. “Like I said.” It had been in the middle of the floor, away from the furniture. It had been small. It was early to say any of this, of course, and none of it was to be taken as official information, and naturally there would be an investigation, but he’d been in the first Gulf War and he’d seen a lot of incendiary devices. What they were dealing with, in his opinion, was a pretty simple item, not the kind to make anybody dead, just enough to ruin the curtains and scare the crap out of you. Of course, if it hadn’t been caught, the building would have gone up eventually. He shrugged. Then he was called away.
Patrick Hogan stayed with her, which she appreciated, but when she asked again if she could go inside he looked at her as if she were mad.
“Until they clear it, absolutely not.”
“I just want to see if anything can be salvaged.” She was thinking about old Josiah Webster. She was thinking of the outcry if that portrait had been destroyed.
“It will have to wait till morning.”
Instead they walked over to the Webster Inn, where the night manager kindly showed them into the dining room, turning on the light and even bringing them coffee. Hogan began to work on his report. Naomi, who was still in her pajamas, was grateful not to have to look him in the eye.
“Any thoughts?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?” She’d been stirring sugar around and around her Webster Inn mug.
“Thoughts. Is this connected to Sojourner Truth Hall?”
“House,” she corrected. “Sojourner Truth House.”
He did not apologize. It was the middle of the night for him, too.
“Somebody bombed my office,” she said with wonder.
“Looks that way,” said Hogan. “Any thoughts who?”
“Oh my God,” Naomi said. This was catching up to her, after an hour’s delay.
“It is disturbing. Has there ever been a bombing at Webster College?”
She tried to think, but the synapses refused to fire. The ’60s? Not at Webster. The ’70s, which had been like the ’60s everywhere else? She didn’t think so. Not even over the Indian symbol. Not even over poor Luther Merrion.
“I’m not sure. But I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry this happened to you.”
He said it without affect, and Naomi was certain he didn’t, personally, feel sorry about this, or have empathy toward her. But it still hit her hard. Something had actually happened here. The office of the president of Webster College had been bombed. Her office…had been bombed.
“Kinda getting through now, isn’t it?” he asked, observing her carefully.
Naomi nodded. “Kinda.”
“If I didn’t know better I’d say you were maybe in shock. Which is understandable.”
Oh, good, she thought.
“But it’s better to talk about it now. Sometimes if you can articulate an idea before you have a chance to decide it’s a bad idea, it turns out that wasn’t a bad idea at all.”
She tried very hard to understood what this meant, but gave up.
“For example, who did this?”
Naomi stared at him. “Are you kidding? I don’t know.”
“Who’s angry at you? Not only at Webster. At you.”
“Take your pick.” She rolled her eyes. “Have you seen the press? I’m the Mephistopheles of higher education. I tempt the unsuspecting students of the world with the dream of a progressive university, then I give them Kent State.”
She saw that he was confused. She hoped she didn’t have to explain Kent State to him.
“So the students are angry.”
“The alumni are angry. Liberals who have no connection to Webster are angry, because this place was supposed to be the Oberlin of the east and I turned it into a war zone. Right-wing loonies are angry because Webster exemplifies what happens when we stop telling the students what to learn and how to learn it. My daughter is angry at me for supposedly telling the world that our victim professor may not be the martyr she thinks he is.”
His eyes widened. “Your daughter? Could she be responsible for this?”
Naomi sat up straight. She suddenly felt very calm. Very calm. She hadn’t felt so calm, so sure, in months and months, not since before the first tent pole had been shoved into the earth of the Billings Lawn. It felt so sweet, that certainty. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing it again.
“No. Hannah didn’t do this,” she said to Patrick Hogan. “The person who did this was Omar Khayal.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Point of
Looking Closely
Omar was gone. Omar had left in the night, the night of the “incendiary device” (as the Billings Hall bomb was officially termed), and no trail of him had been found since then. Like many an object of fascination before him, Naomi observed, this young man from Bureij had known how to make an exit, and as the weeks miraculously passed without a trace of him she began to feel as if some bell jar of woe that had long been descending over her was now being just as gradually lifted. Air
came in. The clean air of Webster, Massachusetts, her home.
As for her office, the early word from the fire department was that the damage looked worse than it actually was, a concept she did not fully understand. (How could something in plain sight look worse, or for that matter better, than it actually was?) The carpet was ash and the walls scorched. The old desk was half charred and half pristine, but was a write-off (a shame—Naomi had always liked that desk) and the shredded leather blotter, bizarrely, had been mainly spared (though she threw that away, too). The Hitchcock chairs and her own wooden chair on the far side of the desk would also require replacement, and most of the class banners and Webster pennants, a collection on loan from the college archive, could not be saved. The old Drunkard’s Path quilt, one of the last things she still had from her time in Goddard, New Hampshire, was likewise gone.
But the building, Billings Hall, and its inner and outer structures had come through this indignity of ash and smoke in winning form, and she was elated. Smoke had barely entered the outer office (Mrs. Bradford had not lost a single one of the plants she kept on the window ledge) and the conference room had also been spared, though Josiah Webster’s portrait was sent to the college art museum for a checkup. No, she would not have to go to the Webster alumni with the heartbreaking news that this most Websterian of Webster structures must be condemned, nor to the board with a request for millions in reconstruction. A few weeks working out of the president’s house and twenty grand or so in cleanup and furniture replacement and she’d be able to put this particular chapter of the larger ordeal behind her. Except, of course, for the small matter of having been firebombed in the first place.
The item in question had been, the fire chief informed her, a not uncommon device, consisting of a plastic vessel filled with gasoline and a piece of clothing serving as a wick. Typically the plastic bottle was a milk jug, but in this case the arsonist had used an oversized water bottle that bore the Webster College crest, and the clothing was none other than that classic “Webster College—The Harvard of Massachusetts” T-shirt. The incendiary device had burned for about fifteen minutes before the gas fumes escaped and caught fire—plenty of time to open the window, shut the door, descend the stairs, and disappear into the night. Naturally the nonexistent security cameras in Billings Hall helped not at all.
Patrick Hogan went looking for Omar Khayal, but he was not to be found in any of the expected places. Sojourner Truth House had, overnight, been handed back to its actual tenants, and while there were a number of hangers-on hanging out in the common rooms and even in the disinfected basement, the more public faces of Webster Dissent had vacated the premises. Hannah returned to Radclyffe Hall and Chava went home to the Bay Area, where she began interning at a website devoted to student activism. Nicholas Gall continued to teach his two classes: the final two classes in his Webster College career, Naomi fervently hoped. He claimed not to know where his protégé had gone, though he was happy to let it be known that he himself had been offered a position at a traditionally black college in Georgia. Back to Rabun Gap, in other words, to inspire a whole new cadre of disenfranchised students and continue his important academic work on Lowe Stokes and “The Mountain Whippoorwill.”
Most wonderful of all, however, was the slow but undeniable unshackling of the Stump. One by one by one the tents were folded and taken away, their stakes pulled up, even the trash gathered and disposed of. On a Monday a few weeks after the Billings bomb there might be patches of mud visible between the lean-tos and shelters; a few days later the patches were more common than the tents. The flock was moving on, and as it did the media trucks, too, took off. The Webster Inn emptied of its unruly tenants. The emotional temperature cooled even as the days warmed up and slouched toward spring. And though Naomi knew she had done nothing to deserve it, she felt triumphant. It was ending.
Hannah, though nearby, maintained her distance, and Naomi knew better than to turn up at Radclyffe Hall a second time, asking to see her. She could only imagine what her daughter’s thoughts on the arson had been, or how it must have rattled Hannah to know that the very Hitchcock chair she’d sat in during their argument would be consumed by flames only a few hours later. That kind of thing could disturb on a very deep level, and as her maternal confidence returned to her, Naomi decided it was best to let Hannah initiate her own approach.
Given the fact that she had recently survived a very targeted act of violence, the Webster College trustees were giving her what she hoped was sincere support. President Naomi Roth was a victim now—a clear victim of a violent act. And though Omar Khayal had never once been publicly named as a suspect in the fire, the general feeling was that some loose cannon attached to or in sympathy with Webster Dissent had been responsible, which cast that responsibility in the general direction of the group but at no specific individual. Naomi, stunned by her reprieve, wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. She watched in grateful wonder as the various participants in this baffling episode drifted away: the Webster students returning to dorms and classes, their guests from other institutions departing for their own campuses, the educationally unaffiliated dispersing, more than likely, to their next points of conflict. Nicholas Gall and Omar Khayal had made some insidious mischief at the college, but now Gall was going, Omar was gone, and one day soon, when actual sun pushed away the last of the Massachusetts spring, sunbathers would return to the Quad and sunrise yoga would return to the Stump, and all would be as it had been before in the queer and evolved and beautifully creative world that Webster was. She had kept her chin up through a nasty bit of intended harm. She hadn’t betrayed her own ideological standards. And she was still here. And the threat was passing. Her office, indeed, was getting a fresh coat of paint.
Best of all, the Native American Gathering was now imminent and represented, Naomi dared to believe, the best possible antidote to that plague of ill feeling (and bad publicity) Webster Dissent had cast upon them. She had made sure that there were no other significant activities on campus that weekend, claiming the slot between the Persephone Festival and Welcome Webster, the weekend program for admitted applicants. Francine, emerging from her cave only a week or two earlier, had been pleased to announce that their successful applicants hailed from forty-nine states and thirty-one countries, and that the average GPAs and test scores of this group had not seemed to suffer at all from the barrage of negativity in the media. Webster, once again, had the fifth lowest admit rate in the nation, and their yield was only a sliver behind Yale’s and Princeton’s. Naomi could not help feeling some vindication.
The Native American Gathering kicked off with a welcoming cedar ceremony at the First Nations Center, led by two Lakota graduates and their daughter, a current senior. After this, and an invocation from the college chaplain (a hippie Episcopalian of impeccable counterculture credentials) and a more official greeting from two members of Robbins Petavit’s advisory committee, the entire group of nearly two hundred attendees walked over to the dining hall, a wing of which had been given over to them. There was wine, and better than usual Webster Dining Services food, but Naomi was elated to note that neither of these seemed as interesting to the alumni as the sheer fact of one another. From Josiah Webster’s time to Sarafian’s and beyond, no one had ever made this gesture to the ethnic constituency most publicly identified with the school. Men and women all over the hall were moving around the tables, greeting one another and talking excitedly. She sat beside Petavit, content to say little, fascinated by the intertribal rituals of linkage and distinction going on all around her. Two people could seem to belong to the same tribe, but membership in different bands meant that they were as far apart as Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Others would introduce themselves as cousins but look nothing alike. (“We’re all cousins,” Robbins said, laughing, when she mentioned this later.) Many of the attendees, especially those from earlier classes, wore clothing and jewelry that clearly signaled their Native American status; others looked indistinguishable from other W
ebster graduates; if you didn’t know, in other words, you’d never know.
Later there was a mixer in the cellar pub at the inn, and it turned out that Robbins wasn’t the only Webster student to have spent memorable evenings in its old pine-paneled booths. After the first hour the party looked like any Webster reunion, and Naomi, waving to Robbins, thought it was safe to peel off. She walked home across the Billings Lawn, keeping to the pathway between two large areas of reseeding, and felt a trill of joy at the thought of that new grass. The Stump itself seemed flatteringly lit by the half moon overhead, and the stars were out and bright. She went to bed an hour later, happier than she had felt in months.
In the morning she had breakfast with Robbins at the Webster Inn. He, too, seemed pleased and also surprised by how nicely the weekend was unfolding, and he told Naomi that he and some classmates had taken a very late walk down to Webster Lake and spent a couple of hours on the boathouse dock, catching up and having the kind of heart-to-heart you can only have with people who’ve seen you at your most imbecilic. “For that alone I’m glad we did this,” he said, making short work of his scrambled eggs and sausages. “But you know what? I think today’s going to be really memorable.”
Even as he said it, even with his clear elation, she had felt a chill.
“Me too,” she said bravely.
She had nothing to do but listen until the last panel of the day, a discussion with current undergraduates which she’d be moderating.
The program began with a talk from Robbins, telling again the story of how Webster College had ended up in the middle of a Massachusetts forest. The main characters of this tale, familiar as they might have seemed to Naomi, came newly alive in Robbins’s narrative, supplemented by visuals from the college’s art collection: Josiah himself, his 250-year-old image saved from incineration, and the other Josiah, his Nipmuc protégé, and also his actual son and heir Nathaniel, and Samuel Fairweather, the wealthy whaler who’d made Nathaniel choose between his father’s legacy and his own worldly ambitions. From there it was a two-hundred-year hyperspace leap to Oksen Sarafian. And here they all were. “My hope for today,” said Robbins in conclusion, “is that we can come to recognize that Webster does indeed have a place in the Native American landscape, and an important role, though it’s a role Josiah Webster wouldn’t recognize and might not understand. He intended his namesake school to change the Indians who attended it. We were supposed to become ‘civilized,’ which meant Christian, and we were supposed to bring Christianity back to our homes so that more of us could be changed. But in fact it hasn’t worked out that way at all. We are the ones who’ve changed Webster.”
The Devil and Webster Page 28
