The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “But see, that’s the thing.” It was the man who’d spoken on the Indian symbol panel. The one who’d told the story about the professor dressing up as a silent Indian. “By default, if the incident takes place at all it’s indicative of somebody’s values, and that somebody is part of the Webster community.”

  She shook her head. “That was never established. The police never identified a suspect. And this is a safe campus. We keep our doors unlocked a lot of the time. Anyone could have gotten into that basement and…committed that crime. Believe me,” she said fiercely, “no one wishes more than me that they’d arrested someone. I was appalled by what happened. And the house was full of peaceful protesters at the time. It was an affront to them and to me.”

  None of them believed her. Not one of them.

  “So, basically,” said the Chippewa girl, the pre-med cox who hoping to pass organic chemistry, “the situation is that we have this historically homogenous place, and then suddenly it undergoes a conversion and it looks different, and I’m not saying it isn’t different, but under the surface the pace of the transformation is a lot slower. So, like, Webster admits women, but those women come from the same socioeconomic class as the men always have. They’re the daughters of Webster graduates and the sisters of people who already go to school here. And the black students are really well educated and come from professional families. And the ones who come from overseas, even poor countries, are from the upper classes, and they blend right in with the old kind of Webster student. There aren’t that many poor people here, in other words. And if you’re poor, whether you’re Native or not, that’s the permanent underclass here, and they look at you, like, you should be so grateful to be here. So, like, when I was deciding between Webster and the University of Minnesota my grandma said, you know, do you want to stay where it’s a normal thing to be a Native person or do you want to go to this elite school in the East where you’re going to be this exotic creature? And I guess I wanted to have that whole Ivy thing, like the classic American college, but I’m just not happy. So I’m going to finish up the term and go back. I’m starting junior year at Minnesota in September.”

  Naomi stared at her. Are you crazy? she wanted to yell, but she stopped herself. The room broke into applause.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Bit of a Mystery

  That night there was a knock at her door. Naomi had been sitting on the long couch in the living room, drinking a glass of red wine. She knew who it was.

  He was standing on the front step, holding the classic red plastic cup. There’d been a cookout under a tent down at the river: planked salmon and corn and potatoes, a hodgepodge of simulated Native dishes the dining hall thought they could manage. She had skipped the whole thing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I looked for you.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She was standing, holding the door open.

  “I’m revisiting my wild college days,” he said, holding up the cup.

  “How’s that going?”

  He grinned. He was maybe a tiny bit inebriated, but she didn’t know him well enough to say. “Oh, not too bad. The quality of the beer is a lot higher than I remember.”

  “I had them order the good stuff,” she said. She still hadn’t made up her mind.

  “I’d like to talk, if you’re willing.”

  Naomi hesitated. She was, she discovered, willing. She stepped back into the entryway and he came in. He was carrying his satchel, old leather with a long shoulder strap. He put it down on the stone floor.

  “I never saw the inside of this place,” he said, looking around. “Sarafian lived here, right?”

  “Right. All my noble predecessors for the last century. It’s too big for one person, but I figured I should just relax and enjoy it. It won’t be forever,” she said. And then she thought: truer words…

  “Can I have a tour?”

  She led him around the ground floor. To the kitchen, where she gave him a glass of the same red wine, and the living room, and the parlor in the back whose glass windows overlooked the garden. The college landscapers had been in that week, planting annuals. She’d asked them: no orange. She’d never liked orange. But she always asked them that and they always forgot. Maybe they had no idea what they were planting.

  At the foot of the stairs, she waved a hand. “Like I said, it’s way too big for one person.”

  “Didn’t you say you had a daughter?”

  “Yes. Hannah. She was here with me while she was in high school. She’s a Webster sophomore now.”

  “And lives…where? In a dorm?”

  “One of the houses on Fairweather. Radclyffe Hall.”

  Petavit grinned. “‘And that night, they were not divided.’”

  “Ah.” She had to admit, she was surprised. “I see you know your lesbian classics.”

  “Isn’t that what a liberal arts education is for? Impressing women?”

  Naomi tried not to react. From this odd exchange she had taken one thing only: He wants to impress me.

  They went into the living room and sat. She had been here for an hour, at least, on this very couch, trying not to think about him. Now he was here.

  “I wanted to say,” began Petavit, “that I was very surprised by what happened. And I am very, very sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” she said, not looking at him. “I suppose I didn’t think it through.”

  “You thought it through. But what we sometimes forget—well, I forget it a lot—is how badly young people need to feel their specialness. And one way they feel it is to transmute any kind of discomfort into outright oppression. That kid in his creative writing class, maybe he didn’t have the best teacher in the world, but he wasn’t being oppressed. And I haven’t spent all that much time at Webster in a couple of decades, but I’m very sure that girl from Minnesota wasn’t being ostracized because she’s a Native student. Or poor.” He paused. “She did say she was having trouble in organic chemistry.”

  Naomi sighed. “Yeah.”

  “I imagine it’s got to be pretty intense at a place like Webster, if you’re going pre-med. I didn’t get through organic chemistry, myself.”

  She took a sip of her wine.

  “Not to compare myself. But what I mean is, maybe it’s a way of her saving face. I’m going home to be with more people like me, where maybe it’ll all be a little easier. You see?”

  Naomi nodded. She did see.

  “I think, what I’m trying to say is, you tried to do something good. That’s the important part.”

  “Yep. Just like Josiah Webster. Good intentions, all the way to hell. But I guess it’s better to have tried and failed…” She smiled weakly.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s a failure. Down there in the tent people are talking and laughing. It’s a beautiful thing, very meaningful. They’re having fellowship. They have strong feelings for Webster, too. And this speed bump, it’s not a referendum about Webster. It’s just part of the—”

  “No, please!” Naomi groaned. “Do not say ‘journey.’”

  He looked chagrined. “Actually, I was going to say ‘journey.’”

  She smiled. “Well, I’m sorry then.”

  “Hey, we’re Native people. The journey is important. And we take the long view most of the time, because we’ve been here a good long time. Webster College is still pretty young at two and a half centuries. It’s going to keep changing long after we’re gone.”

  To her own surprise, this affected her. She thought about it, in silence, looking not at him but into her own wineglass. She didn’t drink red wine very often. It had been there, in the larder, and she’d needed something.

  “So, cheer up.”

  Naomi glanced at him. “It’s been a rough few months. It’s been the hardest thing. I still don’t understand it. And my daughter isn’t speaking to me.”

  Petavit nodded. Naomi was shocked. She could barely believe she’d said any of it out loud, let alone with Robbins Petavit in the room. She did
n’t know him. She didn’t know him at all.

  “Would you like to tell me?” he asked.

  That was about nine thirty, not later than ten. She sat with him and told him every bit of it, though not what Hannah had said in their last meeting, the night of the firebomb, which would have been too much. It would have hurt too much. Sometime around midnight he took her hand. It terrified her, but she didn’t pull it back.

  “How old are you?” she asked at one point.

  They were exactly the same age, it turned out.

  Naomi must have fallen asleep first. Robbins had found a blanket in one of the closets, but they were still in the living room, still on the couch. Neither of them said a thing about going upstairs; it had been agreed upon: this, but not that. Here, but not there. She had loosened her clothes but hadn’t taken them off. No one had touched her for years, she realized. At least, not like that. When she woke up her head was on his thigh and he was sleeping, half reclined against one of the cushions. The phone was ringing.

  “Yes?” His legs jerked under Naomi’s head. She sat up.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll get it.”

  The phone in the hallway was old, a heavy Bakelite thing attached to the jack by a cloth-covered cord. It emitted a distinctive metallic ring, utterly unlike the tone of a modern receiver. Not many people had this number, but the ones who did were almost certainly calling because something bad had happened. She climbed to her feet and moved toward it. Fast and faster, she thought, but the truth was she didn’t move fast at all. The truth was she didn’t want to know.

  “Hello? This is President Roth.”

  It was Peter Rudolph from campus security, but there was nothing wrong, he told her. Not at Webster.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  A police detective from Hartford, Connecticut, was trying to reach her. There was a Webster student down there. Possibly a Webster student. Who needed to be identified.

  She closed her eyes. “Identified?”

  “He was calling from the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Who is it?” she asked stupidly.

  Peter Rudolph paused. “They don’t know. They need someone from Webster to identify him.”

  Him? She could have wept. “Him?”

  “It’s a male. College aged. He has a Webster ID. Are you willing to go?”

  There was a tall grandfather’s clock in the hall, across from the phone table, a gift to the college from some grateful graduate a hundred years earlier. It wasn’t exactly accurate, but it was accurate enough. Three forty in the morning.

  “What does the ID say?” she asked, bracing herself.

  She could hear him breathing. From the living room next door, she could also hear Robbins breathing.

  “It’s Omar Khayal,” Peter Rudolph said. “I mean, that’s what the ID says. Of course, it might not be him.”

  “I’ll go,” Naomi said. She wrote down the address, then she hung up the phone and stood, just stood, for another long moment. Did that matter, that she was still standing there? How could it matter, if he was dead? But then, how could Omar be dead?

  “What is it?” said Robbins. He was in the doorway.

  “I need to go to the medical examiner’s in Hartford.”

  “Is it a student?”

  “Former student. He actually…”

  “Wait,” said Robbins. “You don’t mean…I’ve forgotten his name. The boy who was in charge of the protest?”

  Quite unexpectedly, Naomi started to cry. “I don’t believe this. In Hartford? What was he doing in Hartford?”

  “I’m driving you,” said Robbins. He looked very awake and very sober. “Where are my shoes?”

  “You don’t have to.” She wiped her face. “This isn’t your responsibility.”

  “I’m driving you. You know where to go?”

  She looked down at the pad she’d written on. There was an address. “Yes.”

  “All right. Do you…maybe a different shirt?”

  The shirt she was wearing had lost a button. It was not something to wear to a morgue. She had never been to a morgue. She went upstairs and put on a different shirt, a white shirt with all its buttons, and black pants. Then she took off the black pants and put her jeans back on and put on a black sweater over the white shirt. Her hair was loose and halfway down her back. Her mother had once told her that once a woman reached forty she had to cut her hair short. Her mother had also said that when hair started to go gray it must be dyed, and then gradually, at some undefined point in the future, allowed to become gray again. It was unseemly not to do these things. Naomi reached back and touched her long gray hair. I am unseemly, she thought. She had been unseemly for at least fifteen years. She had been unseemly for all of her adult life. But how could Omar be in a morgue in Hartford, Connecticut?

  They drove in Robbins’s Subaru, southwest on 84, rarely seeing other cars, a straight shot to Hartford through the night. Naomi didn’t say much, except to thank him, repeatedly, for what he was doing, until he asked her to stop.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said instead. Then she said that repeatedly.

  “Did you know where he went when he left school?” They were reaching the first East Hartford exits.

  “No. The police wanted to talk to him about the firebomb in my office, but they had no idea where he was. I think they looked at Nicholas Gall’s place in Georgia, and his own town in Oklahoma. Well, not his town. It’s where he applied to Webster from. But they couldn’t find the family he’d been living with. Beyond that he could have been anywhere. And he wasn’t a formal suspect, just someone they wanted to talk to. Because of me,” she said with a sudden, deeply guilty pang.

  “You thought he was responsible for the firebomb.”

  “No! Well, it occurred to me. But…nonviolent. That was his whole thing. He was post-violence. His father and brother had been killed in the West Bank. He refused to be a suicide bomber. Some American who worked for an NGO helped him get refugee status here. It was all in his application essay. Very powerful essay.”

  “I imagine,” Robbins said quietly. After a moment he asked, “When was he expelled?”

  “He wasn’t expelled!” She hadn’t meant it to sound as nasty as it did. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “From the kid on the panel today. Yesterday. I mean, ‘kicked out’ was what he said.”

  “Well, he was not expelled. We were putting him on academic probation because he’d done no work at all in the fall semester. He didn’t show up to a meeting with me and the dean of students, and then he gave the press some story about how we were kicking him out, we’d thrown his stuff out on the sidewalk. Never. I’d have been happy for Omar to go away for a semester and then come back and get serious about his work.”

  “With the emphasis on ‘go away’?”

  Her face felt hot, even in the cool car. The indictment, though mildly spoken, and probably not even intended, was still there. It simply reminded her of what she already knew. “I can’t believe this,” she said again.

  The Hartford County medical examiner’s office was one of a half dozen nearly identical buildings on a municipal campus in West Hartford. They drove around for a few minutes, trying to read the signs in the darkness: ANIMAL CONTROL, PUBLIC HEALTH. They found it on their second circuit, an unremarkable single story the color of sand, with a door that slid open at their approach. Inside, a drowsy security guard sent them downstairs to an appropriately grim corridor. There was no one there except down at the end, a maintenance worker on one of the wooden benches.

  “Should we ask her?” Robbins said after a moment.

  Naomi looked down the corridor. The woman was leaning back against the wall and had her eyes closed. She looked as if she were trying to take a nap.

  “No.”

  They stood in silence for a few minutes. Somewhere in the building, not far away, a conversation could be heard, muffled and not easily locatable. “Do you want to sit?” Robbins said fi
nally.

  “No.”

  She walked to a door, the nearest door, and knocked. There was no answer. Naomi moved down the corridor toward the dozing maintenance worker, knocking and calling “Hello?” as she went. At the third door her knock was answered.

  “I’m sorry,” she told the man who answered. He was slight and nearly bald, though with very full blond eyebrows—an arresting combination. “I wanted to let someone know we were here.”

  “Did someone call you?” he said, not unkindly.

  “Someone called security at my college. Webster College. They called me. I’m afraid I didn’t get the name of the original caller.”

  Even as she said this it struck her as the height of idiocy. Why on earth hadn’t she asked for a name?

  “Detective Miller?”

  Naomi shrugged. “I’m sorry. I was asked to come to this address. I was told that a student from Webster College was…I mean, I was asked to identify him. I’m the president,” she said, feeling like a total fool.

  “Okay.” He nodded. He wrote down her name on a form on a clipboard. “Just give us a minute, we’ll bring you in.”

  He disappeared back into the room. Robbins, behind her, asked, “Do you want me to come with you?”

  She shook her head. “It’s okay. Thanks for the offer. I’d better do it alone.”

  But that’s not exactly what she was thinking. What she was thinking, selfishly, was that she didn’t want him to see her as she did this. If she were going to lose control, if she were about to say something about how she felt, which was that she was somehow the cause of this, whatever this turned out to be, she couldn’t bear for him to witness it. Robbins took a seat on the nearest bench. Naomi stood, steeling herself, her jaw set. A moment later the door opened again.

  “Naomi Roth?”

  It was a black woman in her thirties, forties. A bit on the short side, more than a bit on the stout side. “I’m Detective Miller. I called your campus security office.”

  Naomi shook hands. “You spoke to Peter Rudolph.”