The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Smells good,” Hannah said, rolling the stem of her wineglass between her palms. “I didn’t know you like beets.”

  “Every Ashkenazi Jew loves beets. We crossed the steppes, powered by beets.” Naomi dipped the ladle down into the stainless steel pot. The dark magenta solids fell obligingly in. And Hannah was right. It smelled divine.

  “I thought that was potatoes,” her daughter said.

  “Cucumbers. Potatoes. Beets. My father loved beets,” she remembered out loud.

  “Oh yeah?” Hannah sat up straight. She was interested in anything to do with her grandparents. She hadn’t been while they were alive, but now she viewed them as withheld pieces of the puzzle, kept back to make things tougher to solve. “So, like, what did he like to eat? Borscht? Is this a family recipe?”

  Naomi couldn’t stop herself from laughing. There had never been anything like a “family recipe” in her memory. Her mother had loathed cooking; she had been a stranger in the strange land of her own kitchen, struggling to extract basic sustenance from its alien food-making apparatus—stovetop and oven. As soon as the brave new world of frozen and “instant” meals materialized in her local D’Agostino’s she resigned any feelings of guilt over the matter, and their mealtimes became a cycle of aluminum trays with peel-back covers, punctuated by dinners out (Naomi’s parents were partial to two diners in their Upper West Side neighborhood) and, naturally, it being Manhattan, takeout and delivery. When Naomi remembered that her father loved beets she was only remembering the descriptions on restaurant menus: sliced beets, beet salad, and, yes, borscht.

  “This is a Silver Palate recipe. But yes, he did like borscht, I remember. Do you want a little sour cream on yours?”

  Hannah inhaled the bowl Naomi passed her, and then nodded.

  “Where’d you find those tomatoes? It’s late for good tomatoes.”

  From the Webster Farm Co-Op, Naomi told her. “We had some great stuff for the trustees’ dinner the other night, and Will Rennet was here. It’s nice to be able to feed him the vegetables he endowed.”

  “That is an abuse of privilege,” said Hannah. “The vegetables are supposed to be for everyone. Not just the trustees.”

  “They’re not just for the trustees,” said Naomi, sitting opposite her daughter and taking a very deliberate bite of a yellow and red tomato. “The farm grows food for the community. The trustees are a part of the community. Ergo, Will Rennet gets a nice tomato when he comes to supper.”

  “A tomato he personally endowed.”

  “Sure,” she conceded. “But I believe I have made my point.”

  Hannah drummed her fingers on the tabletop, an old habit that, in her case, did not seem to signal boredom or impatience. Her fingers were long and bony, ending in narrow fingertips with short and never polished nails. Much of her, indeed, was long and bony, so unlike Naomi herself. Naomi had once pretended, at least inwardly, that she had made Hannah all alone, that there was no other half of her daughter’s composition meriting acknowledgment, but the conceit had not been maintainable after Hannah reached the age of four. At four her child had suddenly elongated into a shape that neither Naomi nor any woman related to her had ever assumed; even then it was clear that she would be tall and straight, her only curves concave. Hannah’s hair grew lighter with time, and bones emerged at the collar, hip, wrist. Naomi, who had produced, in her lifetime, yards of waves of Ashkenazi tresses, fanning behind her in a nimbus of ethnic glory, who was broad of torso, thick with muscle, and gifted with the general physical density of a shtetl woman who’d had to pick her own potatoes (and beets, and cucumbers), looked undeniably like her mother, Rachelle. Rachelle had looked like her own mother, Judith. There was only one photograph of Judith’s mother, Gerda (born in Kiev in the last years of the nineteenth century; died at Babi Yar at the official end of civilization), but she had looked very much like Judith, who had looked like Rachelle, who had looked like Naomi. Hannah looked like none of them. Hannah was, Naomi thought, watching her daughter lift the soup spoon to her lips, the first of her line ever to have produced a visible collarbone.

  They talked about Radclyffe Hall and the mood therein, which was peaceful (thank goodness), the only issues currently up for debate having to do with matters menstrual. (“Whether to menstruate?” Naomi suggested. No. Whether to allow disposable sanitary products. It was not a subject Naomi especially wanted to consider, really, at least over such a deeply crimson bowl of soup.) One girl was moving out—it wasn’t conducive, she had explained, for her music, which had come as a surprising statement to the others, given that not one of them had ever heard a note—even a recorded note—emerge from her third-floor chamber. But: whatever. There was a waiting list to get into Radclyffe Hall. There was always a list. And at least two of the current residents had friends hoping for the vacancy.

  “Still like your room?”

  Hannah liked her room fine, having hauled over the quilts she had slept beneath since childhood (the quilts had been made by a New Hampshire sewing collective that Naomi had established in her long-ago VISTA days), and the oversized and scarily close-up portraits she had made of Naomi during her edgy photography phase in eleventh grade, and the flute she no longer played (not—in truth—a great loss to the world of flutes and flautists). She liked the window seat that overlooked what had once been the back garden (it was now a thoroughly ignored brick patio, complete with unused grill). She liked the food, which was reliably vegetarian if not always exactly tasty. And Radclyffe Hall, which really did feel like a home with its kitchen and wood-burning hearth, was still close enough to the Billings Lawn and hence the center of campus that she could roll out of bed a few minutes before the bell in its classic tower chimed the start of the class period, and still stroll in on time. The house could, in years when the inhabitants were especially in sync, offer a highly creative communal environment (Naomi was thinking of the annual one-act play competition, open to dormitories, fraternities, sororities, and college-owned living cooperatives, which Radclyffe Hall had dominated over the past few years) and tended to rank high on surveys of student housing satisfaction. She hadn’t been surprised when Hannah, who like her infamous predecessor, Neil Jones-Givens, scored a highly advantageous lottery number, had similarly selected a cozy bedroom under the eaves in Radclyffe Hall.

  In fact, Naomi happened to know that her daughter lived in the very chamber once briefly occupied by Neil Jones-Givens, though Neil had never actually returned to it after decamping to Health Services in the early days of the crisis. His parents had arrived to pack up the little room in Radclyffe Hall, and everything in it, including Neil himself, went back to the Midwest. Naomi, for her own part, had hoped it would not end there, and it didn’t; when fall rolled around again, Neil returned, looking broader and more muscled, infinitely more hirsute. He had an apartment off campus and a decidedly fierce attitude about what he wanted from his remaining time at Webster, which included a senior independent study in queer studies (Webster’s first, fittingly), and a summa cum laude. The last Naomi had heard, Neil Jones-Givens was a law student at the University of Illinois.

  Hannah had never said anything to her mother about the Radclyffe Hall affair, and probably had no idea that she was sleeping in the same bed, under the same sloping ceiling, as that now-forgotten campus martyr, Neil Jones-Givens. But that was less surprising than it sounded. If the events that had so tortured Radclyffe Hall and the college in general (and Naomi’s life in particular) were taking place today, while Hannah herself was a Webster undergraduate, the subject would be dominating their Sunday dinners and, Naomi knew, the lion’s share of her daughter’s intellectual bandwidth, but the autumn Radclyffe Hall exploded her daughter had been ten years old and oblivious to any part of Webster except, perhaps, its swimming pool, art gallery, or the annual Persephone Festival (which celebrated the arrival of post–mud season spring with bands and outdoor parties), and possibly Naomi’s own little office in Crump-Eustis Hall, where Hannah sometimes spent day
s coloring or reading if there was no school. Of course the controversy had come up once or twice. How could it not? Not even the most narcissistically distracted child can fail to miss a perpetually ringing kitchen phone, with ABC or People magazine or the booker for Greta Van Susteren or someone equally barky and terse on the other end of the line, or the town car forever in the driveway, waiting to ferry Mom to a morning interview at the affiliate studios in Springfield or Boston.

  But that was all of ten years ago. That was the misty past. And within the magical prism that was time on a college campus, only the great and wondrous now ever seemed real.

  Life at Webster, for the students at least, existed in this eternal present, as the college endlessly regenerated itself with eighteen-year-olds and regularly discharged its own collective memory into the ether. And so, for those young people engrossed in their own college adventures, it followed thus: There was no longer a Neil Jones-Givens at Webster, and therefore there might never have been one at all, unless, of course, you cared enough to actually go looking for him in the archives, where he might certainly be, alongside every other sepia-toned rugby player and Latin scholar who’d ever smashed a pipe against the Stump. Even the most historically minded of Websterites, those with a vague or even informed idea that the college had preexisted them by a couple of centuries, still experienced each hallway and walkway, each portrait of a past Webster president, even the old Stump itself, as belonging not to some former Webster student, not to the historic continuum of Webster students, but to themselves, alone, and to their own exclusive experience of right this minute.

  Neil Jones-Givens and his difficulties, Radclyffe Hall’s struggle (For…what? Sovereignty? Identity?)—they felt as distant from the glorious now as the town’s colonial skirmishes of two centuries earlier, when the Billings Lawn itself was only an indistinguishable patch of woodland around a settler’s log house, and the Stump was…well, Naomi supposed, only another tree in the forest of New England elms. Such paroxysms in the life of the institution! Such obsessions for the students and the faculty and for Naomi herself as their spokesperson and figurehead! Such critical bullet points in the great Webster story. And then? And then the entire cast of undergraduate characters had marched across a platform, flipped a bit of tassel from one corner of a funny hat to the other, and scattered off from the little Massachusetts town and out into the wide, wide world.

  After which: poof! The whole damn thing evaporated. The lawns were reseeded. The dormitory boilers serviced. The tenure decisions made. And another crowd of stressed-out high school juniors trudged across the Billings Lawn, moms and dads and bored younger siblings in tow, trying to keep up with a backward-walking undergraduate.

  Bright college days, indeed, thought Naomi, who could barely remember her own through its haze of pot and constant sex with Daniel, her future husband.

  “How’re classes, honey?” she asked now.

  “Well,” Hannah said archly, “if you mean, how am I doing. Like, grade-wise? Fine. I’m doing just fine. But if you want to know are my classes scintillating, am I having that awesome educational experience we hear so much about, I have to be honest.”

  “Oh, be honest.” Naomi had to fight the urge to roll her eyes.

  “Like, no. I mean, I get out of bed, I read the Times, I get up to speed with every fucked-up thing that’s happening in the world, and then I trot off to my Shakespeare and His World seminar, to talk about the curriculum at young Will’s school in Stratford, and there’s a disconnect, you know?”

  Naomi set down her spoon. “No. I don’t know.”

  They were facing each other across the table. It was a narrow table at that.

  “Just…why do I care about this again? Why do I care what class Shakespeare had on Wednesdays when there’s rampant shit all over the planet?”

  Naomi shrugged. “Well, you must care a little bit. You signed up for the class.”

  “I needed a European history seminar cross-listed with English, that met in the afternoons.”

  “Ah.”

  “Because I’m still not sure if I’m declaring English or history, and I had to make room this semester for a science distribution, because, as we all know, a broad understanding of arts, humanities, and science is the foundation of a liberal arts education, and the intention of Webster College is to graduate young scholars who are connected to knowledge across the spectrum of disciplines, the better to enable them to thrive in and positively impact this very complex and connected world of ours. Because isn’t that exactly why I’m here?”

  Naomi smiled. She knew better than to take this particular bait.

  That her daughter had landed, of all the colleges in all the towns in all the world, right here at Webster had of course been an issue widely discussed by many people, whether it was any of their business or not, but it had never been a topic between by the president and her daughter, nor between Naomi and Francine Rigor, Webster’s dean of admissions and Naomi’s closest friend. For the two women, who usually walked together in the wooded hills just west of the campus at least once a week, the topic had been radioactive in its neglect, and from the early decision deadline to the notification day one month later, and even afterward as Hannah attended the Welcome Webster weekend for admitted applicants and Naomi wrote a check to the bursar, and mother and daughter hoisted a massive duffel across campus to the freshman dorms down near the lake—the subject of Hannah Roth’s Webster application and college choice had remained utterly lockboxed between all involved. Not only was it never discussed, but the fact of its having never been discussed was similarly never discussed.

  Even now, even at moments when they were technically speaking of Webster, and Hannah’s experience as a student thereof, or Naomi’s experience as an administrator thereof, there was a kind of no-fly zone in the middle of the subject, which neither of them had ever breached, despite provocations like the one her daughter had just offered, and this was the actual fact that, out of the thousands of American colleges and universities Hannah Roth might have applied to, the vast majority of which would have been delighted to admit her (Hannah had been her class valedictorian and, over three attempts, had clawed her way up to a 2250 on the SAT), she had selected exactly one: the one on her literal doorstep, the one her mother was president of. The process by which she had made this decision had not been shared with Naomi, who in truth had been dreading the whole kid-applying-to-college ordeal for years. Not a word. Not when Hannah was in fifth grade and they had moved into the Stone House and her daughter, for the first time, was seeing Webster students every day, their lives in her face (for better or worse), and another mother might have said something innocuous like “Maybe you’d like to go to Webster one day.” Not when Hannah was in tenth, and the first tendrils of college-related anxiety began to percolate through her high school friends, a few of whom were more than happy to tell Naomi that they would love to go to Webster one day…if only they could get in. Not in eleventh, as the general stress began to intensify, frog-in-boiling-water style, and most reasonable parents would at least have broached the subject, and not in twelfth, when each of her daughter’s classmates seemed to be in full possession of everyone else’s SAT scores and class ranking. Between them, Naomi and Hannah had avoided any conversation about this whole thing, by silent, enthusiastic, and mutual agreement.

  Except for once—one time, during their only joint meeting with the college counselor at Webster Regional. This was a very stressed-out guy doing his best to serve nearly two hundred students (a quarter of whom, to be fair, weren’t pursuing college, and half of whom, also to be fair, were going straight into the UMass system, and perfectly happy to be doing so).

  “She’s a legacy at Cornell,” Naomi had said in the middle of their session.

  He’d been talking about the legacy thing, the counselor had, and Naomi, now that she was thinking about it, suddenly remembered that she herself had actually gone to Cornell, which was, the last time she’d checked, an Ivy League sc
hool. She had even graduated from Cornell, once certain matters of disagreement with the institution (mainly involving whether ROTC had the right to operate on campus, and whether undergraduates had the right to occupy administrative offices) were expunged from her official record. So wasn’t Hannah in line for a leg up there? And didn’t she deserve it? (Here, Naomi conveniently spaced on the fact that she had tithed not a single penny to her alma mater.) It was the whiplash in perspective, she would later think, this through-the-looking-glass disorientation, so unsettling, so dangerous, that had come to her as she listened to the counselor. But then she had always thought of Hannah as, well, as Hannah. And Hannah was bright and tough and generally wonderful, the kind of person who’d go out there and make things better, or at least less bad. And yet, until that very moment, Naomi had never once thought about how Hannah would likely appear to a college admissions officer reading her application (yes, even in spite of the fact that her closest friend was—wait for it!—the dean of admissions at a highly competitive college!). Hannah Rosalind Roth—another smart, decent, busy, and likable girl from an exurban school in a state crammed with brilliant college applicants. But not a STEM female, not a recruited athlete, not a legacy, not first in her family to attend college. Not a lot of things, when you broke it down according to the maddening algorithm of competitive college admissions in America, circa 2014. And suddenly, there in that cluttered and claustrophobic office, the desperate situation had broken through at last.

  And so Naomi said it: “She’s a legacy at Cornell. What about applying to Cornell?”

  “What about no way?” Hannah had said.

  And that, at least, took care of Cornell, but it didn’t quite explain the fact that Hannah, when all was said and done, chose Webster and only Webster.

  Naomi had been bracing herself, of course. She had said nothing about keeping her daughter close, and saw every reason to assume that Hannah, having spent nearly every day of her life in New England, might wish to sample another setting (with another climate) for four years, or indeed the rest of her life. When the topic moved into range, she confined herself to cheery, supportive questions, unburdened (she hoped) by innuendo. Had Hannah considered the Midwest? So many great colleges out there. Should they plan a trip down south to look at a few places? Any interest in a city school? New York or Chicago, even Boston? (So close, Boston. Naomi regretted even suggesting it. Would Hannah think her mother was afraid to let her go?)