The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Sumner, in almost comical contrast, was a guy who obsessed over the details. He tried four shades of green in the foyer (they all looked the same to Naomi) before picking the one he vastly preferred. He went to Brimfield at least twice a year, usually coming away with nothing, because there was nothing—in field after field stretching along Route 20, each of them crammed with dealers—that he liked enough to bring to his home. Curtains were made only after a trip to Boston for the fabric, and custom sewn by a woman whose name he’d gotten from the director of Old Sturbridge Village. He had selected the most baronial of the available house styles from the plans for The Woods, and then filled the large new rooms with objects supporting that illusion. The chandelier you circled when you went upstairs was from Waterford. The dining room was long, with a long table and a long sideboard. The masculine den was painted dark red and had a wall of hunting prints.

  The library, adjacent to the living room, was, at least, a real library, with real books, and Naomi did not doubt that every one of the volumes on the dark and glossy wooden shelves had been read by Sumner, possibly more than once. Sumner adored history, and he had taught it at a Connecticut boarding school with a reputation for bad behavior. (He and Francine had met eighteen years earlier, when she had come through as a Vassar admissions officer.) But he wasn’t teaching history anymore. For the past sixteen years he had been the headmaster of a private K through 8 school in Southborough called Hawthorne Academy. Naomi, who had visited the school only once, to speak at the annual Founder’s Day celebration, had had to remind herself that the large campus and stunning facilities were in use by students aged thirteen and under. Hawthorne Academy, founded in 1922, appeared to have an endowment that many prep schools would envy, and not a few colleges to boot. And Sumner loved it. He loved the somber responsibility of serving as a school head and the perpetual high spirits of young schoolchildren. He even appeared to love the parents, and Naomi supposed it was possible that even wealthy and ambitious mothers and fathers might not have ventured too far down the rabbit hole of Ivy League madness by eighth grade, and were still, more or less, a pleasure to be around.

  She descended the steeply pitched drive to the house and turned her car around before parking next to Francine’s Subaru. There was an unfamiliar car there already, a red BMW, and Naomi tried to remember if Francine had mentioned another guest, but her email, a few days earlier, had merely said “Come Saturday for dinner? 7 pm?” She reached in for the Merlot and entered the house through the open garage, calling “Hi!” from the mudroom.

  “Hello!” Sumner called back. He was in the kitchen, basting something that smelled truly spectacular on the stovetop.

  “Oh my God,” Naomi said. She kissed him on the cheek and set down the Merlot on the countertop. “What is that?”

  “That,” said Sumner, “is a saddle of venison. And no, I did not shoot it myself. Not that I wouldn’t have loved to shoot the ones who decimated my roses this summer.” He settled the copper pan back onto the oven shelf and closed the door. “A proper hello!” he said, giving Naomi a squeeze. He picked up the bottle. “Oh, this looks fantastic.”

  “The woman at Webster Wines recommended it. You know I don’t know anything about wine. I didn’t know we were eating Bambi, though.”

  “This will pair beautifully with Bambi.”

  “And…we’ll agree never to mention Bambi to Hannah, okay?”

  “We will never mention it to Hannah.” He laughed. “I value my life too much.”

  He reset the timer on the stove. Sumner was practiced at a certain kind of social interplay, the down-to-earth schoolteacher mingling with the parents of his students in a paneled room, beneath the portraits of men in academic robes. He shared with these men and women an origin story of New England winters and old schools, a common root of observed traditions and somber expectations. They knew one another, accordingly, when they met, and fell into the old rituals and means of communication, and the sight of this had always riveted her, but then again, she too had always been able to recognize a member of her tribe. (Years before, she had come upon a Jewish woman, clearly a misplaced New Yorker, standing in mute and horrified judgment of the lettuce selections in her New Hampshire supermarket, and all but embraced her on the spot.) And besides, he was a good egg. Or a good enough egg. And besides, it didn’t really matter what kind of egg he was, because he was Francine’s egg, and Francine was her friend.

  “Come along,” said Sumner, taking the wine. Naomi walked behind him into the living room, eyes on the back of his yellow cashmere sweater. He was a tall man, taller by an inch or two than his wife, which could only have appealed to her enormously. He had, moreover, a wondrous head of white hair (prematurely white hair, Francine had once informed her: white since the age of twenty-five) that his face had only gradually, and quite gracefully, caught up with. Sumner, at the time of Francine’s fateful Vassar visit to his boarding school, was the divorced father of two college-aged sons. They had no children together.

  “Frannie,” he said, “Naomi’s bought us a lovely Sonoma Merlot.”

  “Hi!” Francine popped to her feet. She was a woman who had never accepted and would never accept the reality of her substantial height, whose every decision of posture (slouched) and clothing (disappear-into-the-background colors, usually black) and hairstyle (severely parted in the center, bluntly cropped at the chin) seemed motivated by the wish to minimize. Sometimes Naomi watched Francine move among other people, ducking and bobbing, trying to get down to their level. So much wasted effort. It made no difference at all.

  “Welcome home,” said Naomi, because her friend was only just back from a two-week admissions swing along the West Coast, the Southwest, and Texas. She was eyeing the person on the opposite couch. Unknown person, classification: male of a certain age. Her heart sank.

  “Naomi, this is William Grosvenor.”

  He reached out with a long arm, also cashmere clad, but barn red. Nantucket red. Another of the tribe, she thought.

  “A pleasure,” he said. “Billy, please.”

  “Billy chairs my board,” said Sumner. “His daughter Caroline was with us from…was it first grade?”

  “Kindergarten,” said Billy. “All the way through.”

  “She’s at Groton now. A senior. Lovely girl and a super tennis player.”

  Why are you telling me? Naomi thought crossly. The dean of admissions is right over there.

  “Want some of this Chardonnay?” Francine said. “Or shall we open up the Merlot?”

  “No, this looks great,” said Naomi. She took a glass from Sumner, resisting the urge to ask for an ice cube. Putting ice in her white wine was a mild vice, as vices went. But it still wasn’t something she wanted to admit to.

  “How was the trip?” she asked, taking a seat beside Francine.

  “Oh, fine. Intense. Somebody left a package at my hotel in La Jolla. That was creepy.”

  “What kind of package?” Naomi said. “Not…a bribe?”

  “Better a bribe than a threat!” said Billy Grosvenor, which didn’t make Naomi warm to him any more.

  “Well…brownies. From a girl who said she was applying early. With a CD of her playing a violin concerto. The note said I was supposed to relax in my hotel room, eating the brownies and listening to the concerto.”

  “Ick,” Naomi said.

  “I threw it all out. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not crazy. Besides, somebody probably put her up to it. Otherwise, though, it was a great trip. The college counselors kept taking me aside and telling me their students are coming in with Webster in their top three. Which is anecdotal, obviously, but I’m very pleased.”

  Naomi nodded. The college’s flourishing appeal to current high school students could not be attributed to any one thing; it built upon itself, and undoubtedly contained a hefty dose of whimsy, but they were still entitled to enjoy the moment. Little Webster College!

  “More popular than Harvard!” Sumner quipped. />
  “Well, not quite. But over half the Ivy League, yes. Depending on how you juggle the numbers.”

  “It boggles the mind,” said Billy Grosvenor, not very kindly. “I mean, when I was applying, this was the safety school.”

  Francine and Naomi, instinctively, looked at each other, reached an instantaneous meeting of the minds, and looked away.

  “I don’t doubt that,” said Naomi, as diplomatically as she could manage. “A celebrity makes a college selection and suddenly the whole deck is reshuffled. Or a popular professor. Or someone uses a beautiful campus to film a movie or a TV show, and then it’s on everyone’s radar. Remember when John Kennedy Jr. decided to go to Brown instead of Harvard?”

  Grosvenor nodded. “I remember that. My father wouldn’t stop talking about it. But he was a Harvard man, so he took it personally.”

  “Well, after that Brown really came into its own. It was always a great school. But in the shadow of some of the others.”

  “Like,” said Sumner brightly, “Wait, the football star wants to date her?”

  “How are you holding up?” Francine said sharply, turning to Naomi. This had the immediate effect of terminating the former subject. “I have to say, the first time I walked across the Quad after I got back, I was shocked.”

  Naomi frowned into her iceless glass. “I don’t think it’s a major issue. It’s only a small group.”

  “Not really,” Francine said. “There were five people there when I left on my trip. Just a few hours a day. Now there are thirty or forty out there, in sleeping bags. And they’ve got plastic sheeting up. What’s this about?”

  “What is ‘this’?” said Sumner, looking intrigued.

  “This is about young people expressing their discontents in a creative and nonviolent way. This is our students saying they care about more than just themselves. Even if I wanted to confront them, which I don’t, I have nothing to confront them with. I mean, trespassing? It’s their college. And by the way, they’re the neatest protesters in the world. They recycle everything. I’m proud of them.”

  “It’s starting to be an issue in the office,” said Francine. “We have people coming in for their interviews after the campus tour, and they’re all talking about it.”

  “Good!” Naomi smiled. “We want students who notice a protest and are curious about it. I mean,” she said, remembering whom she was talking to, “I would imagine we want those students.”

  “That’s the criteria now?” Billy said. “I’m not sure they know that at Groton.”

  “No,” Francine said. “They wouldn’t. It’s part of the secret position paper we admissions officers generate every fall at our undisclosed summit. Every year it’s a new thing. Specific hip-to-waist ratio. Ability to rap in Latin. Kids from towns beginning with the letter Z. We can’t let it get out to the general public or everyone would be moving and going for lipo.”

  “But how do you learn to rap in Latin?” Sumner said. “I did Latin all through my school years, and at Colgate. I couldn’t rap in Latin to save my life.”

  “Well,”—Naomi shrugged—“it’s a good thing you’re not applying to college today.”

  He got up. He went back to the kitchen and a moment later they heard him call that dinner was ready.

  “I bought the venison from my contractor,” Billy told Naomi and Francine as he walked behind them into the dining room. “Hunts with a bow and arrow. Seriously. He freezes most of what he hunts, for his family, but he offered me the saddle.”

  “Oh,” said Francine. She seemed uneasy with only two degrees of separation between the forest and her dining room. “Well, that’s great.”

  “I can’t wait to see what Sumner’s done with it,” he said happily. “Ladies?”

  He pulled out Naomi’s chair. Then Francine’s.

  What Sumner had done with it was to braise it with mushrooms and onions, and serve it over spaetzle. Naomi was not unhappy to see meat come her way, but she, too, was having a moment of difficulty in pairing the gamey smell of her plate with the memory of mothers and foals, frolicking in the forest. Bambi, all joking aside, had been one of the first films she had ever watched with her daughter, and she could not help recalling its unambiguous indictment:

  What happened, Mother? Why did we all run?

  Man was in the forest.

  But now Sumner was looking at her in confident anticipation. She took a deep breath and ate.

  “Oh, Sumner,” said Francine. “So good.”

  “Delicious,” Naomi said. “You know, I think I’ll take that Merlot now. Or anything red.”

  He got up to fetch it for her, and when he returned Billy was talking about the company he’d started the year before, which was “not a hedge fund, exactly.”

  “What is a hedge fund exactly?” Naomi asked. “I mean, I know what it is. Well, not technically, but generally. But what makes a hedge fund a hedge fund?”

  “Volume,” Sumner joked.

  “Small groups investing their own or others’ funds,” said Billy, who did not appear to joke, or at least not about this. “Often using high-risk methodology, like leverage. Usually by invitation. You can’t just walk in the door and hand them your money. Well, I suppose with some you can, but most of us like to have that control.”

  “But you said,” Naomi pointed out, “you’re not a hedge fund.”

  “No. I’m not looking for investors at all. Sometimes they come to me through someone I know and trust, and sometimes we open a door to that person, but it’s rare. Mainly I invest funds for my family members and longtime friends.”

  “How nice,” Naomi said.

  “Billy has been so extraordinarily generous to Hawthorne,” Francine said, and Naomi instantly caught the note of warning. “He’s just made a gift of some acreage adjacent to the campus.”

  “Beautiful acreage,” Sumner said. Naomi, who was not unclear about the price of acreage in Southborough, Massachusetts, was reluctantly impressed.

  “And full of deer!”

  The two men laughed. Francine speared a cube of venison, observed it for a second, and put it in her mouth.

  “I wanted Peter and his friends to be able to walk in the woods,” said Billy humbly.

  “Peter is Billy’s fourth grader.”

  “My second marriage,” said Billy, disconcertingly.

  So did that mean, thought Naomi, that this was not a fix-up? She certainly hoped that was the case. Billy was not, she was chagrined to note, entirely unattractive. He shared with her ex-husband, Daniel, a certain lankiness that she had always been drawn to. The cashmere sweater, Nantucket red though it was, hung with a pleasing drape over an obviously slender frame. He had hair, too. Brown hair, only a little gray. Hair was important. She didn’t care what they said about baldness and masculinity. She would take hair and femininity every time. But she didn’t like him, so none of that mattered.

  “How many children do you have?” Naomi asked politely.

  “Three,” he said. “Matilda’s at Harvard. Caroline’s a senior at Groton. My ex-wife and I have Peter, who’s nine.”

  “Our fourth grader,” Sumner clarified unnecessarily.

  “Do you have children?” asked Billy.

  “My daughter, Hannah, is a sophomore at Webster.”

  “Well, that’s…” He paused to laugh. “Unsurprising.”

  “Actually,”—Naomi glanced at Francine—“I was very surprised. I kept out of it completely. I mean I kept out of her college application process in general, apart from one or two general conversations. When she decided on Webster, naturally I was delighted.”

  “Why naturally?” Billy asked. He was refilling his own wineglass with the Merlot Naomi had brought. “I hope you’re not trying to keep her close to you.”

  She stared at him. She was trying to come up with some scenario that would make this statement not extraordinarily rude. Who was this man? He’d only just met her!

  But “Of course not” was all Naomi could manage.


  Francine, who did not cook much but had made a cake, served it with coffee back in the living room. Sumner had reanimated the fire from its own embers, and Naomi looked into it, feeling the warmth all the way out to her place on the sofa. Billy had excused himself to the bathroom. Sumner had gone for milk.

  “I am so sorry,” said Francine, taking the opportunity.

  “No, don’t be silly. Unless…it’s not a fix-up, is it?”

  “Well, it’s not my idea of a fix-up, let’s put it that way.”

  “Oh lord.” Naomi shook her head. “Really?”

  “He wanted to meet you. He asked to meet you.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “He’s interested in Webster. For the daughter.”

  “Well,” she said, “you know better than anyone else, that has nothing to do with me. Unless, are you saying this is a development issue?”

  “Actually,”—she glanced over her shoulder, toward the kitchen—“I don’t think it is, no.”

  She couldn’t immediately grasp this. “But…acreage? In Southborough?”

  “Family property. It couldn’t be sold. Some tax thing. But it could be donated. Very lucky for Hawthorne that it happened to border the campus.”

  “And the hedge fund that isn’t really a hedge fund?”

  “Family money, again. Look, he’s wealthy, obviously. But not development wealthy. He’s important, though. To Sumner. Very, very important to Sumner. I’m sorry.”

  Naomi frowned. “Why are you sorry? It’s been a lovely evening.” But that wasn’t exactly what she meant, and she really did want to know why Billy was important to Sumner.