The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  But Hannah only nodded and said she was handling it, she was on top of it, and then she went back to her Common App essay about how even a kid growing up in a rural Massachusetts town has a responsibility to be aware of global issues. She went in for regular meetings with the college advisor. She did not want to visit the Midwest. She did not want to visit the South. She didn’t even want to tramp through lovely Harvard Yard alongside the freaked-out debaters and math prodigies and their frantic parents. Whatever she did want, she kept it to herself.

  Webster Regional’s college counselor was actually pretty capable, according to Francine, who had taken any number of those students over the years—faculty kids and not a few unaffiliated locals. (Academic noblesse oblige, Francine had explained. It’s important to look after our own backyard.) Naomi, after her little flare of inspiration had been shot down, decided that what she really wanted to do was stay out of the whole thing and let the guy in the claustrophobic office handle it. And when, in due course, Hannah dispatched her one and only college application, Francine had done her the courtesy of never alluding to it, which made for a generally more intense atmosphere when they went for their walks, which they regularly did, that fall as every fall—swifter pace, steeper incline, more panting, less talking. In any case the whole thing was over in a couple of weeks; when Hannah clomped down the wide oak stairs one evening that December and announced that she’d been accepted early to Webster, her mother let out a long breath and thought, Well, that wasn’t so hard.

  Naomi never even told Francine thanks. She couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be right.

  Now she got up and went to the bread box on the counter. She had just remembered that there were a couple of baguettes there, also left over from the trustee dinner. They felt a bit stiff, but she took one anyway and ripped off the end.

  “Want some?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “You know, Hannah, it’s not just a question of what class Shakespeare took on Wednesdays. It’s about how his early education gave him the foundation for what he wrote later. Little village school, right? Produced the world’s greatest dramatist. That’s something you can care about.”

  “Well, I don’t accept that he’s the world’s greatest dramatist. And neither should you. I’m not saying he isn’t, just that it’s irresponsible to make a statement like that before you’ve acknowledged and studied the work of every single dramatist, from every culture, throughout history. But we don’t bother to do that, not in my class, not in the world. Isn’t this supposed to be about broadening the perspective? Citizens of the planet and all that shit?”

  Naomi dropped a few pieces of stale bread onto her cooling soup and drowned them with the back of her spoon. It was a heavy spoon and bore the college crest: the leaning tree that would become the Webster Stump. She wasn’t sure she felt up to this tonight.

  “Just to be clear, are we actually arguing about Shakespeare’s education? Or are you picking a more general fight with me?”

  Hannah, for the briefest moment, looked as if she was trying not to smile. But then she located some inner ferocity. “It’s a serious issue, though.”

  Naomi was unmoved. “Every issue’s serious to somebody.”

  “Oh, really? And this is why you’ve bothered to go out and talk to the students at the Stump? You want to see what’s on their minds?”

  Naomi sat back in her chair. She had lost the trail of this conversation somewhere, obviously. But where? What were they talking about again?

  “You mean the protest group? I don’t have a problem with them. I think it’s great when young people gather peacefully. I’m for it.”

  “You’re for it,” Hannah said. When she got frustrated her whole face flushed. It had always been that way. It was that way now. “That’ll be a big relief to them.”

  “What would you like me to do? Give them each a medal?”

  “Nothing so extreme,” Hannah said. She had sat back in her chair, leaving more than half of her borscht to cool in its bowl. “Go listen to them. Hear what’s on their minds. There’s a grievance.”

  “Really,” she said dryly. “I had no idea.”

  “It’s not a little thing. It might be, to the administration,” she said, pronouncing the word with extravagant archness. “But, you know, if we can’t respond to injustice on our own campus, how are we supposed to address global issues?”

  By doing a bit more than squatting on college property, Naomi thought.

  “What is the grievance? Nobody’s thought to tell me.”

  “Nobody should have to tell you,” Hannah said, with perfect snark. “And nobody should have to issue you a formal invitation, either. You’re supposedly our activist president. You give that speech to the freshmen every fall about the big sit-in at the administration building when you were in college. Should the protesters occupy your office?”

  “Jesus, no,” Naomi said, with whatever humor she could muster, though it was obvious that Hannah saw nothing funny about this…this…small and localized and not, truly, very significant gathering. A coming together of young, disgruntled people, buoyed by the very facts of their being young and their being disgruntled, did it matter so much about, you know, the issue? Animal, vegetable, mineral…it could be anything. From Webster’s recycling program (not comprehensive enough!) to the bequest some class of ’54 Texan had made to the football team, or something a political science prof had said, offhand, in a lecture, or the fact that the pad thai in the dining hall was inauthentic and hence culturally insensitive. It could be the trace elements of nuclear energy or mining or De Beers in the college portfolio (the exhaustively investigated and cleansed college portfolio), the fact that men outnumbered women on the faculty (still, but only just!), that wealthy students of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds were the still the norm in every admitted class (frankly unavoidable), or that dogs were not allowed in the classrooms or Mein Kampf was on the curriculum of at least three history courses or that Birth of a Nation was being taught in a film studies class on the rise of the art form, or that economics planned to offer a senior seminar on Ayn Rand. Or perhaps it was the old, old story of Josiah Webster himself, whose charitable educational mission of 1762, which culminated in the founding of Webster College, now looked a whole lot like plain old Native culture–suppressing, murderously insensitive, ethnically monomaniacal colonialism. Really, the possibilities were so numerous; who, when you got right down to it, even had the time?

  The fact was that until Dean Stacek’s phone call, less than an hour earlier, Naomi had barely thought about the group, except with a nostalgic, vaguely maternal kind of approval. They were there whenever she’d crossed the Billings Lawn, and had been since a couple weeks into the semester, reclining in the sweet afternoon sun, still warm into the first few days of October, at least until the air had taken on its current chill. They leaned against the Stump or against one another, textbooks and laptops unfurled, a few of the women knitting. (Knitting! When had that happened?) The scene they made was not an unusual one. Webster students were protesters. Since the 1970s students had self-selected for Webster—and not Williams, and not Amherst, and not Hamilton or Colgate or, increasingly, the Ivy League—because they viewed their own intelligence and fire as already in service to some more general human good. Pro-choice. Divestment in South Africa (later, divestment in Dow, Exxon, BP, anything related to oil). ACT-UP. Pro-choice (again). The day of fasting for solidarity with Darfur. Factory-farmed proteins out of the college dining facilities. Amnesty for the undocumented. Pro-choice (again, again, again).

  All good reasons to gather in protest, and for the record, most of the local requests had been responded to and honored by the administration, because if Webster wasn’t producing young people who cared to and believed they could change the world, what was it for? Naomi loved that kids were still with it enough to notice all was not well in the universe, and that mattered, somehow, even if it didn’t seem to affect them personally, what with their senior pro
jects and LSATs, and the recruiters who still came—yes, even to Webster—from Procter & Gamble and Citibank. This fierce little college, which had once declined membership in the then-forming Ivy League (that had been a question of funding for the athletics program, if truth were told), which waited till the last possible moment to accept women (but then went to male-female parity in three short years), which abandoned its commitment to Native American education within a few decades of the school’s formation (only to come roaring back two hundred years later with one of the best Native American studies programs in the country), turned out captivating, committed, brilliant, and fired-up young citizens. And Naomi loved them, if not exactly like a mother (she was the mother of only one of them, she cautioned herself), then in loco parentis, which was, it could be argued, one possible interpretation of her job.

  It made her feel a little guilty, sometimes, especially on Sundays, when she got to see Hannah like this, but also on other days, ordinary days, when she simply happened to cross paths with her daughter, on the Quad or one of Webster’s few streets. Once, purely by chance, the two of them had met at a late-night film department screening—the only two people on campus to turn out for Sunday Bloody Sunday—and they’d had the theater to themselves and shared a big bag of cheese popcorn. It meant that she was one of the very few Webster moms who could see firsthand that their child appeared happy, seemed to be eating enough, was hanging out with kids who gave every impression of being nice. All of those other students had left home. They had packed up their clothes and loaded their family cars. They had flown across the country and taken a Peter Pan bus from Logan or the Hartford-Springfield airport. They had set off on their own, or sent their traumatized parents away with a hug or a wave, and then they had either kept in touch with the place they’d come from and the people they’d come from or they hadn’t. But Naomi…she got to feel the presence of her daughter at Webster College. The Sunday dinners, the chance hugs in front of the Webster Inn, even the glimpses when they didn’t technically interact. She knew how fortunate she was. She knew not to abuse her privilege. She didn’t ask for more than was offered. And if, somewhere in that no-fly zone of conversation, there was an actual reason Hannah had chosen Webster, and if Naomi didn’t know what that reason was, so what? Because Hannah was still here. She was a college student, in a dorm, on her own, living her life and doing her thing, of course, of course. But she was still here, and their separation hadn’t happened, not really. And because it hadn’t happened, Naomi never had to admit to herself how much she’d dreaded it.

  Hannah declined coffee. She had an assignment for her Shakespeare class, and wanted a few things from her room upstairs. “You know it’s cold in here, right?” she asked as Naomi followed her out into the foyer.

  “Yes. At least, I know it empirically because I get told that a lot. But I don’t feel cold. Maybe I’m like that Kathleen Turner character in Body Heat, whose temperature runs a bit high.”

  “Maybe you’re a menopausal woman,” Hannah responded. “Ever think of that?”

  “No,” Naomi said, truthfully enough. She had powered through menopause a decade earlier, symptom-free, and had been so distracted by the other, outward changes in her life that she’d noted this one—this Change with a capital C—only in retrospect. Not even a whiff of trauma! “What do you need?” She turned on the light and her daughter walked past her into the oversized bedroom that had been hers for seven years. “There isn’t much left here.”

  Their move into the president’s residence had coincided with a moment of some acceleration of character on Hannah’s part. Certain childish things had been put away that summer, and certain people (two girlfriends, who had never been especially nice to her) abruptly left behind. Hannah, in the preparations for their move, had chosen to pack and store many of her belongings in the attic of their home, soon to be rented, furnished, to the Latin professor and his family. To her new and much bigger room in the Stone House she had brought a largely new wardrobe, two Hudson River school reproductions, a rather disturbing Henry Darger poster from their visit to the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and four boxes of books. Some of that was still there, but most of her belongings had moved on with her to the little room at Radclyffe Hall.

  “I need my down jacket. And my sleeping bag.”

  Naomi looked at her. Hannah had gone to the closet and was reaching up, grabbing at the shiny blue bag, its drawstring knotted.

  “Why do you need a sleeping bag?” Naomi asked, but as soon as she said it she realized that she already knew.

  “I’m going to start sleeping out with the others,” Hannah said mildly. “You can’t possibly be surprised.”

  Naomi said nothing. Her daughter was now feeling around on the shelf. “Didn’t we have another one? I need one for Omar. He doesn’t have anything.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s mine.” They’d had matching blue sleeping bags, supposedly capable of keeping you warm and toasty down to some Jack London–esque temperature. But they’d only used them a couple of times. The Presidentials in Maine one summer. The back porch of a friend’s summer house in Pennsylvania, where they’d had been, of course, up all night, unbearably hot. Not for years, though. “I can have it cleaned,” she said.

  “That’s okay. He’ll be grateful to have it.”

  “Who will?” Naomi said. She had lost the thread somewhere.

  “Omar. Jesus,” Hannah said, with an expression of such spectacular superiority that Naomi, on principle, declined to react. “You really have not been paying attention, have you?”

  No, she really had not been paying attention, and after Hannah left she did the strangest thing. Without thinking about it, without realizing what she was doing, not really, she closed the door behind her clever and lovely and breathtakingly decent daughter and went right back up the stairs to the room that was not—not really—the room Hannah had grown up in, pulled back the covers of the seldom-used bed, climbed in, shoes and all, and went sadly and instantly to sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Into the Woods

  Francine and her husband, Sumner, lived in a heavily forested valley eight miles north of Webster, in a development of larger homes, each out of sight of the others, called The Woods. The first time Naomi had driven out there, years before, she had become so lost that she’d had to drive all the way into West Webster just to find a public phone to call for directions, and even later, the GPS unit stuck to the inside of her windshield, its little screen would stubbornly refuse to admit that there was anything at all branching off the main road and penetrating the trees, let alone an exclusive settlement known as The Woods. If she was determined to go up there, in other words, she’d be on her own.

  Now, of course, she knew every inch of the journey, but after years of making her way here—by car, by bike, once, during a 2004 blizzard, on cross-country skis (which had ruined cross-country skiing for her, hopefully forever)—she didn’t need it. On a wet November Saturday she drove out over familiar roads with an apple pie from one of the roadside stands and a bottle of Merlot, listening to A Prairie Home Companion along the way. Garrison Keillor’s voice had a narcotic vocal element that always made her feel sleepy, each word a nepenthe puff, each sentence a lullaby mantra of its own. Speaking for herself, Naomi had long had a thing for Keillor, and there had been Saturday nights during the years in Goddard—after her husband had decamped for a more reassuringly counterculture place to live and a more reassuringly counterculture woman to live with—when the only thing that got her through a weekend was the news from Lake Wobegon. The notion that there were silent listeners everywhere in the country, leaning toward their radios in homes (and cars) from sea to shining sea, and they were connected to one another…something about that had sustained her. It was a time she thought of now as the very lowest point in her life, not even because of the lousy marriage and the baffling reality of her continued tenure in such a strange place, or even her myopic stubbornness in remaining so many years pa
st the time she ought to have left, but because things had not yet fallen into place for her intellectually, and she hadn’t yet admitted to herself that she was not a humble volunteer and aid worker, giving selflessly to the needy of Goddard, New Hampshire, with no hunger for personal advancement, but actually an entrepreneur with skills and that shameful character flaw: personal ambition. Before academia, students, the company of other feminist scholars. Before publication and a job title that she still could not quite believe. Before Hannah.

  Garrison Keillor was just completing a long and evocative description of an untended parking lot when Naomi swung into the Rigors’ drive, a curving little lane marked by a stone column with the 62 affixed to it in large brass numbers. The style of the marker was identical to every other stone column in the development, but inside the house itself there was only one aesthetic opinion that registered, and it was not Francine’s. Once, on a long-ago walk, Naomi had asked her friend about this, and Francine had offered the opinion that an ideal marital household included one partner who cared passionately about making things beautiful and another partner who did not care at all. Naomi couldn’t really argue with that. Francine might have come home to a hovel or a mansion, and as long as the kitchen functioned and the bathrooms were scrupulously clean, she spared not a synapse’s worth of thought for the way her home looked or how, for that matter, it was perceived by others. More likely than not, she would not have been able to tell you what color the walls were painted in the various rooms of her house or what pictures were hanging on them. She’d given Sumner carte blanche with the furniture, asking only that the bed be extra long (for her extra-long body) and the couch be upholstered in a dark color, because their dog at the time was also a dark color, and that seemed only practical.