The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  She accepted only one media request to discuss the Stump protest, from the college’s own student daily; everyone else got the boilerplate statement, curtly emailed by Mrs. Bradford:

  Webster College is an educational institution at which we attempt to learn from one another as much as we learn in the classroom. This is an opportunity for our students, indeed for all of us at Webster, to do just that, and we will continue to support this nonviolent student action, in hopes that the exchange of ideas will benefit the entire Webster community.

  It satisfied none of them, of course. It satisfied her least of all, but the parameters were clear, and terrifying. And she would not be the college president who opened her institution up to a very winnable lawsuit.

  “You know,” said Douglas Sidgwick one morning in the middle of December, “this has actually happened before.”

  He’d come upstairs, unnecessarily, to present her with a hard copy of the formal proposal for the Native American Gathering—the term reunion had been jettisoned in favor of this warmer alternative—now scheduled for the first weekend in April: a gathering at the First Nations Center, dinners at the Webster Inn and the Alumni House, panels on the history and the individual stories and the current state of the Native American studies program. April was far, far in the future, Naomi told herself. All of this would be long concluded by then.

  “Has it?” she asked. She was surprised, and sort of relieved. Good.

  “Well, not exactly this…configuration, of course. But we did have a protest encampment around the Stump in the 1950s, and I believe it lasted for several days.”

  “Really?” Naomi sat back in her chair. She hated the note of childish hopefulness in her voice. “What was it about?”

  “Well, there was a student the college admitted in 1956, named Luther Merrion. From…I want to say Indiana. Arrived here to register for classes with the rest of his class and everybody was surprised to see that Mr. Merrion was not white. The registrar refused to let him register, and there was a protest. The students started gathering around the Stump and they stayed out all night, and for a few days after that, till it was resolved.”

  Naomi nodded in satisfaction. It made her happy to think that Webster had made such a gesture, so out of character, so distinctly ahead of its time. “You know,” she told Douglas, “it’s great to hear that. There were very few college students who would have protested like that in the 1950s.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Douglas said.

  “You kidding? Defending a black student’s right to register before the civil rights movement was even under way? It’s amazing. Yay, us.”

  “Oh.” Douglas seemed lost for a moment. “Well, yes, but that wasn’t why they were out there. They were making sure the college turned him away, is what was actually going on. And I mean, the boy was staying at a faculty member’s house while it was decided, which took a few days. But if he’d been on campus things might have gotten really…”

  She stared at him. It all took a moment to work out. “I see,” she finally said.

  “Yes. So. Definitely a precedent for camping out around the Stump! But very different circumstances, obviously.”

  Sometimes, often, she forgot what Webster had been like. Before Sarafian. Before blacks, Jews, women, LGBT people, anyone who was not a white male. And then someone told her a story like this.

  Webster was an institution that combined the strength of centuries with an almost diametrically opposed kind of strength—the strength (and courage) to change itself. The Ebenezer Scrooge of colleges, she had once said in a (holiday season) speech to the Boston alumni association, and it was only the obvious confusion and dismay on the faces of her audience that made her retire the allusion. Scrooge had always been her favorite Dickens character, an affection undimmed by the sheer weight of all the Christmas Carol adaptations she had seen (and mainly loved). Yes, Scrooge was odious, reactionary, rude, cruel, and most probably malodorous…but he was also brave. It was for a reason larger and deeper than his personal salvation that he broke open before his own grave in the dead of a Victorian night and forced himself to feel the pain and wonder of human connection. He changed himself because he had connected to some deeper and truer understanding of life.

  Webster College might have remained a precious and rigid institution, educating the wealthy sons (and, perhaps in due course, daughters) of the East Coast middle class. It might still be producing conservative politicians and guardians of the banking and manufacturing industries, who settled in the suburbs, sent their children to private schools, and, in due course, dropped them off at the very dormitories they had once occupied. But the college, like that miserable old man, had broken open to a deeper and truer understanding of what education was, and what it meant.

  The Omars, the Chavas…even the Hannahs were here because of such institutional courage, and Naomi considered it her responsibility never to lose sight of that. Webster students might rush on ahead into the right now of their personal college experiences, but that was to be expected. If, as they flew down the corridors and stairways of Webster Hall, they even noted the sepia photographs of dour young Webster men (posed with footballs, baseball bats, snowshoes, or fabulously antique typewriters), those images only lent the burnish of history to their own accomplishment of having been accepted to Webster. The self-involvement of this was neither awful nor particularly surprising, because the students were young and occupied the centers of their individual universes, same as students ever were and ever had. Each of these purposeful young people was the hero or heroine of their personal bildungsroman, every single one of which was art directed by a Hollywood master with a comfortable budget (towering trees with falling leaves, ivy-covered buildings, white marble, and—until the advent of Webster Dissent—an irreproachably green and pleasant quadrangle). They were enraptured by their own illusory success, but no more, in the end, than Naomi was by her own.

  “What happened to him?” she asked the repository of Webster’s institutional memory. “Do you know?”

  Of course he knew.

  “Luther Merrion attended Morehouse College and Howard University Law School. He became an appellate court judge in Indiana.”

  She sat with this for a moment. It felt good to have an idea to sit with, something she might actually be able to act on. “We should be doing something for him,” she told Douglas. “An honorary degree.”

  “It was talked about,” he said, looking distracted. “Sarafian wanted to do it, but he died first.”

  “Sarafian died?”

  “Luther Merrion died. Then Sarafian died. Same year, but in that order. So it never happened. Goodbye,” he said in his typically abrupt way, already turning to go.

  “Well, thanks for that,” Naomi told him. More accurately, she told the door after it had closed behind him.

  With the winter vacation now only a few days away, she’d have been forgiven for hoping the same Thanksgiving magic would descend again. Three weeks without the encampment, the freezing students who refused to speak with her, the weight of responsibility that never seemed to leave her, no matter what she was doing. For three weeks these students would be their families’ problem, and maybe a few of them, when they returned in an even bleaker, even more frigid January, with the prospect of months until the glorious mud of a New England spring, would decide that they’d made their point, and pack it in. Because she was getting very tired of defending their right to be outraged and committed, even as she simultaneously had to defend what she herself had done about it.

  What Naomi had done was erect a warming tent at the edge of the encampment, equipped with heaters, blankets, food, drink, and a ten-stall toilet trailer—the kind of toilet-trailer you found at your swankier outdoor wedding: porcelain sinks, hand soap, and premium paper products. This not inconsiderable structure (which was costing the college just shy of $1,500 per day) had been positioned far enough from the Stump not to intrude on the protest, but within a week or two the tr
ailer was completely swallowed up by shelters and bivouacs as new participants arrived, unfurled their ground cloths, and staked their claims to the action. Now, standing at her own office window, Naomi actually had to look for its flat roof among the shambles.

  What else had she done? She had maintained her open door, making sure that every parent, student, and trustee she spoke to knew that she was still hoping for a dialogue with protest leaders and participants, and was eager to hear their concerns and respond to their suggestions. She had returned to the Stump herself, on several occasions, initiating conversation with whomever seemed amenable, hoping that the ripple of her presence would somehow make its way to the person at the epicenter of the movement, but she never saw Omar. “How can we help?” she would ask the students, if they seemed even remotely open to speaking with her. But when they said that she could help by reversing the unconscionable denial of tenure to Professor Nicholas Gall, she told them that the tenure process was complex and rigorous, but above all private, and she could not discuss what might have contributed to the committee’s decision. Also, the decision would not be reversed. And there the conversation, such as it was, would end.

  She gave another interview to the Webster Daily, this time about her own experiences as a campus activist at Cornell in the ’70s (which unlike Webster in 2016 had actual, serious, worthy-of-action issues, even above and beyond the ROTC presence, like calling attention to the literacy rates for Tompkins County—outside of wealthy Ithaca, of course—and picketing one of the bio labs where scores of unfortunate dogs were being injected with fatal toxins. She gave the paper a highly unflattering photograph of herself and Daniel occupying the president’s office with their fists in the air (she did not identify Daniel to the paper, and was secretly pleased when they used the caption “President Roth and an unknown male”). She spoke passionately about the honor of protest, her personal imperative to speak truth to power, and how without justice there would be no peace, et cetera, et cetera.

  She canceled classes on a snowy Tuesday just before the break began, convening a “Day of Campus Discourse” on the “issues we face as a college, as Americans, and as human beings,” arriving early at Webster Hall herself to set up chairs and start the coffeemaker. But the only people who came were students who’d never joined the protest in the first place, and their major issue was when was all this going to be over? And outside Webster Hall, across the street on the Billings Lawn, under the snow and under the tents and bundled into their warmest clothing, her army of adversaries huddled and grew strong.

  The ones she knew, or knew of, were getting personal emails from her, naturally. Hannah, Elise, Chava, and Omar—she rotated them so daily so as not to seem pathetic.

  Elise, I would love to speak with you about what you’re doing. I’m very impressed by the stand you’ve taken. Would you come by my office for a few minutes this afternoon?

  Hi, Chava. Oy, I need to tell you that I’m hearing from your father a lot. Would you call him please? I keep telling him you’re fine, you’re doing something important. But he’s worried. While I have you, would you come in and talk with me for a few minutes? I’d like your thoughts on how to respond to the parents who are calling in.

  Dear Omar, I’m very concerned about your academic work. Please make an appointment to come in at your soonest convenience. I’d like to help you avoid automatic penalties. What you are involved in now is a legitimate and important project, but we need to make sure that you are on firm footing with the college.

  Hannah, would you please call me, for fuck’s sake?

  Hannah was the only one who responded, though she didn’t call. Her texts were brief, communicating only that she was alive and that her opposable thumbs were fully functional.

  But what Naomi could not do was make them stop. And that was where things stood when—at last, at last—the holiday break arrived and, like a rising flock, they all departed.

  Chapter Ten

  Just Annoying

  Bureaucratic Shit

  This time there would be no vacating for Hannah’s vacation. This time she stayed only as long as it took to clean up and complete a history paper for which she’d secured an extension, and then she was gone, off to New York to spend the break with another Radclyffe Hall resident whose family apparently owned a massive loft on a cobblestoned street in SoHo. It happened without discussion, and so quickly that Naomi did not at first comprehend how unhappy she was about this turn of events. But then, driving out from the train station in Springfield, waiting at the light, all of this came to her in a great rush of self-indulgent misery. And there was something else—something equally troubling. It had, at that very moment, occurred to Naomi that she could turn left at this particular intersection, instead of turning right, and that if she were, indeed, to turn left instead of turning right, then the path of least resistance would bring her smoothly to 91. And then the same path of least resistance would merge her onto 91 and point her north, and for the first time in years she could actually drive…not only as far as Northampton, which she sometimes still visited, or Amherst, which she also occasionally still visited, but farther up, all the way up past Greenfield and Brattleboro and Hanover…all the way back to Goddard. And no one would know, because she was alone in her car and would be equally alone in her house if she went home.

  She had told Hannah’s father once that she would never go back, and she never had. Not even for his funeral.

  It had long been Naomi’s habit not to correct people who believed that her long-ago marriage and her long-ago-conceived daughter were somehow related, and it was no great leap to assume that her ex-husband was Hannah’s other parent. If directly questioned, and if it were not possible to avoid directly answering, Naomi tended to say that Hannah’s father was someone she had known during her VISTA work in New Hampshire, and this was perfectly true. It was not a matter of being coy, and there was no drama—or if there was, it wasn’t drama she wished to indulge in herself, let alone convey to anyone else. What had happened in Goddard belonged to another Naomi, one who was not a feminist scholar or a college president, or a woman who guarded her emotions and was almost cryptically cautious in the offering of friendship. Most of all, it was a Naomi who was not Hannah Rosalind Roth’s mother. Even now, two decades since she had driven away from there, she couldn’t face the notion of going back. Back to what? A place that had never understood her, or wanted her there. Back to whom? Those people, even the ones whose lives she’d changed, whose lives she might actually have saved, hadn’t lifted a finger to prevent her leaving. And the one friend she’d made there, or thought she’d made, had turned out to be…not. Just, not. Even now, thinking about her filled Naomi with horror.

  When the light changed she gripped the wheel so tightly that her fingers throbbed, turned right (of course), and drove back home. Five days until Christmas Eve. Another twenty-four days until the college opened up again. And not a single plan except to resist the incessant pull of her own sadness.

  Francine, at least, was around, and when it warmed up unexpectedly on the day after Christmas the two women attempted a hike over one of their favorite trails, but the going was rough—slippery and filthy—and walking in single file did not make conversation easy. And something was not right with Francine, Naomi had decided, and having decided it she backdated this decision to the beginning of the fall, and perhaps even earlier. Surely the protest and Francine’s travel schedule and the cold weather weren’t the only reasons they hadn’t managed to get out on the trails till now. And yet, even summoning her full paranoiac abilities, she could not identify any friction or issue that had arisen in their friendship. Nothing, despite the simmering resentment of the honorary degree committee back in the fall, had changed in her own private support of Francine’s work, let alone in the way Webster’s president supported its dean of admissions. Watching her friend’s broad back ascend a muddy bank ahead of her, Naomi persuaded herself that whatever was happening with Francine was something els
e—something not about her and perhaps not about Webster at all. The marriage? There had never been a whiff of anything, as far as she was aware. Francine—mystifying as this had sometimes seemed to Naomi—loved Sumner Rigor. Their formal courtship and soberly conceived marriage, a marriage that would, by mutual wish, add no children to those produced by Sumner’s first union, was as genial and pleasant as any Naomi had ever observed. The two of them were like perfectly suited roommates, or good neighbors straight out of a Robert Frost poem in which everyone understood what was expected of them and the property lines were reassuringly drawn. They lived in harmony, traveled together, worked separately, visited Sumner’s children on the appropriate occasions, and entertained in a relaxed and welcoming manner. They appeared to value each other every bit as much as a happy couple should.

  She wanted to ask. She couldn’t ask. It was another thing, another boundary that been settled early on, within a year of her having arrived at Webster and found herself one stationary bicycle away from the also newly arrived (and newly wed) Francine at the college sports center. They both, it turned out, hated stationary bicycles, and treadmills, too. (The on-site childcare at the sports center was what got Naomi to the gym, but as soon as four-year-old Hannah was settled in the playroom she would remember how much she despised those machines.) Soon the two women had begun to meet for walks outside, and talk. And after that, Naomi supposed, they were friends. Francine loved Hannah, that was for sure, and Hannah had actually stayed with the Rigors more than a few times, when her mother was away at conferences or, later, speaking to alumni groups as Webster’s president. And over the years Naomi had met the important people from Francine’s pre-Webster life: her mother (who’d moved to Florida) and her sister (an antiques dealer in Michigan who came east for Brimfield every September), and a Vassar colleague she had kept up with. Naomi had met Sumner’s son Timothy, and Sumner’s son John, both (like their father) respectable and boring, and also Sumner’s twin sister, who lived in Seattle and did something tech-related. It was all very congenial, if not precisely intimate.