The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Which means?” said Naomi.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m keeping track. There’ll be a list when you’re ready.”

  But when would she ever be ready?

  She thanked Mrs. Bradford and went back to what she’d been doing, which was nothing, basically. Naomi sat, tipped back in her presidential chair, grinding her presidential ballpoint pen into the presidential leather blotter on her presidential desk as the afternoon hauled itself along. She was thinking, or trying to, but it wasn’t getting her anywhere, and the hours passed with only the defacement of her blotter to show for them. The winter sun went dull and then out. The building was quiet. From across the room, a photograph of Hannah, dressed for Halloween as Rosie the Riveter, eyed her, making her ever more miserable. There were no more Sunday dinners with Hannah now. There hadn’t been one since Christmas. And anyway, she was furious with Hannah.

  But being furious at Hannah hurt so physically that it took her breath away, and immobilized her all over again.

  At four the Webster Daily reporter arrived for their interview. This was the same young woman who’d interviewed her about the protest last fall and again, only a few weeks earlier, about Nicholas Gall. In the moments before her arrival Naomi roused herself to review the statement she and Chaim Wachsberger had settled on, and which she intended for the Daily to run, in full.

  Webster College maintains the utmost privacy in matters of academic standing and academic discipline, just as it does with regard to our tenure process. We decline, now and in the future, to comment on a student’s standing, and have every confidence in those faculty and administration members who make decisions on academic standing only after lengthy consideration and an effort to work with the student in question. The college will not participate in speculation about a student’s action or actions that may lead to his or her separation from the college, whether temporary or permanent.

  Deviation from this language would not be tolerated, she warned the reporter, a junior from St. Louis, not if the Webster Daily wanted the door kept open for future. And the Daily would indeed want the door kept open; the very fact that this small college newspaper (albeit the second oldest in Massachusetts, after the Crimson) now controlled a vital source for a national news story had given its staff a taste of the media vortex; they wouldn’t want to risk that.

  And no, she had no comment on the Sojourner Truth investigation, except to say that it was ongoing.

  And no, she had no response to Nicholas Gall’s latest laments. He was free to express his opinions, but she herself remained committed to protecting his privacy.

  That should have been all there was to their meeting, but as the girl rose from her chair she declined to actually leave. Naomi, who had absolutely nothing else to do, could not stop herself from showing impatience, even so.

  “Yes?”

  “Well…” the girl said. “I take it, given this statement, that you’re not going to comment on the Clarion piece.”

  “I…” Naomi frowned. Clarion. She knew that name. Which one was that? “Could you be more specific?”

  The girl gave her an unmistakable look of superiority. Naomi did not like that at all.

  “It’s a news and commentary site attached to a conservative think tank in Washington. They ran an item about Webster today. We’re already preparing our coverage.”

  She couldn’t help feeling relief. “Well, I’m sure it’s not the first time a conservative site has written about Webster.”

  “No, I mean, they have a source on the board. Well, ‘close to the board of directors’ is the citation. You haven’t seen it, in other words.”

  Again, that very unpleasant superiority, accompanied by an equally unpleasant…oh my God, was it pity?

  “I have not.” There was no relief this time.

  The reporter produced her cell phone from a back pocket, and her fingers moved over the screen. It took no time at all.

  A source close to the Webster Board of Directors had informed the Clarion, and thus the world, that history professor Nicholas Gall was being denied tenure at Webster College due to a plagiarism charge that he had elected not to deny. Plagiarism was indefensible at any academic institution, and undergraduates were routinely expelled for such infractions. Webster College, like any other conscientious college or university, owed it to its faculty, undergraduate, and alumni constituents to identify and respond promptly to this kind of behavior. It should therefore be stressed that the responsibility for Professor Gall’s current circumstances was his alone, and his decision to obfuscate those circumstances had only brought additional grief to himself and also, most unfairly, to Webster. The source could only add that he—or she—was personally appalled by the behavior of this faculty member, and by the equally reprehensible lack of leadership on the part of the college administration. The college deserved more. Higher education, which comprised the basis of a decent and informed society, deserved more.

  Which made Naomi, apparently, personally responsible for the decline of civilization. She couldn’t help feeling amazed that Milton Russell thought her so powerful. Or that he had actually gone and done this. That little shit.

  She barely managed to get the girl out the door before losing it completely, but soon she was alone again, the room nearly bereft of light, and it wasn’t hard to fall apart the rest of the way. Mrs. Bradford, with a tap at the closed door, announced her departure, which was a relief. Now Naomi hadn’t even the strength to hack away at the leather blotter with her pen, let alone form some intention of what to do. She was hurtling back and forth between outrage and exhaustion, with crushing embarrassment on either side.

  People like Milton Russell, you never got to leave them behind, no matter how far you went or how well you moved things forward. They were put on earth to bellow that things were much better before, that every form of progress was a diminishment. It was a sleight of hand she had never understood, this magical wash that obscured the awfulness from the rearview mirror: backstreet abortions, unstigmatized drunk drivers, fatal diseases we couldn’t even remember the names of today. For the Milton Russells of the world, no societal gain was worth what had been lost, and no possible benefit to Webster was worth the ongoing presence of those people he’d referred to as “highly unattractive.”

  This was a class of rhetoric that belonged on the playground, of course, but she hadn’t been shocked to hear it from Milton Russell.

  Many years earlier, at the time of her own student activism, an incendiary op-ed piece had appeared in one of the student newspapers at Cornell, decrying a national plague of “ugly protesters,” young people opposing everything from apartheid to the visit of a Playboy photographer in search of subjects for its “Girls of the Ivy League” issue. The author hadn’t troubled himself with ideologies; he didn’t ask himself why anyone would take to the streets or occupy the administrative buildings of their campuses. He didn’t wonder who they were or how they had come to care about the world beyond their own lives. The burning question that exercised him was: Why did they always have to be so…unattractive?

  Naomi, when she’d read this, was outraged. And yet, whatever else she’d been at that time (agitator, feminist, crusader for the way things ought to be), she had also been…a girl. Whose mother’s many injunctions—that she was too top-heavy not to wear a good bra, that she ought to be ashamed to leave the house with unshaven legs, that her waves and snarls of heavy black hair resembled nothing so much as a bird’s nest left behind in a tree—still howled in her ears. An ugly protester was precisely what she knew herself to be. A protester. And an ugly.

  How absolutely boring, she thought now. Not to speak of counterproductive. That even in this twenty-first century, even after two major waves (and how many wavelets?) of feminism, and ample examples, worldwide, of the utter competence of women to rule the planet (or at least their individual countries), your modern college president (subcategory: female) should still carry around her own inner middle schooler who wished
only to be pretty. Inside Naomi Roth there surely resided…an also Naomi Roth: a once and forever kid with rolls of pudge around her midsection, a stubborn spattering of pimples on her shoulders, and hair that would not yield to any influence of any kind. Such a Naomi Roth was, and would always be, her constant companion.

  She paused for a further pointless and self-punishing interlude to imagine how all this might have gone differently with a different version of herself, a Naomi Roth who was not now and never had been an ugly protester. This eugenically altered Naomi would not be named Naomi, any more than she’d be named Roth. She’d have a very American name, like Lisa, and her surname something Ayn Randian, like Rearden, and she’d have light hair and light skin and be long and sturdy of limb, and her field of study would be something like art history or classics. She’d have run her department and written her books (how many? more than Naomi’s two, at least) and raised a family in one of the glorious Federal houses on the green in West Webster, her kids now scattered to the Ivy League and her husband nearing retirement from the bank in Boston to which he’d been selflessly commuting for decades. Lisa Rearden would not have needed to procure a wardrobe for her new life as a college president; to the contrary, her sensible, eternally appropriate dresses and suits would not have required so much as an alteration for years (she’d still be at her college squash-playing weight, thanks to the fact that she still played squash!), and in fact a few of her favorite pieces would have been handed down from her mother—true vintage, not that Lisa would consider them such.

  What would Lisa Rearden have done with Webster’s unruly board, or at least its most poisonous member? What, for that matter, would she have done about Webster Dissent? Or Omar? Or Nicholas Gall? Naomi imagined her Mayflower doppelgänger out on the Billings Lawn in an ancient Barbour jacket, thoughtlessly clomping through the mud in wellies she’d picked up in England on her junior year abroad. In the faux newsreel running through Naomi’s head this president tipped her sturdy chin precisely as Margaret Thatcher had always done, listening (pretending to listen?) with pursed lips and an already formulating verbal clobber. You are being ridiculous. If you wish to protest inequities, I can assure you the world is full of them. Must you really waste your efforts on an intellectual community devoted to academic freedom and discovery? Go feed yourself at the overstocked dining hall and return to your overheated dormitories and get on with your work. I am ashamed of you!

  It was shocking how easily this came, how clearly she could hear Lisa castigating the students: Omar, Chava, Hannah. Hannah. And surely Lisa Rearden was just stating a truth she held to be self-evident: that a blow struck against a poorly identified enemy is a wasted blow, and by the way, if you were sitting around trying to drum up enemies where none existed, then you obviously had way too much time on your hands, you clueless and privileged pseudo-PC wannabe losers.

  Naomi roused herself. She had no idea what time it was, but it was dark, and the dark carried with it a sudden and intractable sadness. Maybe she would just stay here tonight, she thought, with unexpected levity. Maybe she would become stuck to the old leather of the chair until they (who? the paramedics? the trustees?) came to cut her away, clearing the space for the eighteenth president. God help him. (And yes, obviously, he would be a him.)

  Then something happened. Then there was sharp knock at the door of the outer office and a nearly forgotten voice. She sat up in her chair. She wasn’t stuck at all, it turned out.

  “Yes?” Naomi said, and it wasn’t the voice of an autocratic Ayn Randian—far from it.

  “Mom,” someone said back. It wasn’t a question.

  “Hannah?” Suddenly Naomi was up. She was across the room, hand on the doorknob. “Hannah? Is that you?”

  It was Hannah. It was Hannah, but nearly unrecognizable: gaunt and grim, wrapped in a heavy brown coat Naomi had never seen before. She threw her arms around her daughter, but Hannah pushed back. “No. I’m here to talk.”

  Naomi nodded. She was so pathetically happy to see her. It was a miracle. “Sure.”

  “Mom,” Hannah said, “you need to do something about this. You need to retract it.”

  “The statement?” she asked, forcing her own head to clear. “I just gave that statement, to the Daily.”

  “No. No. About Gall. It’s everywhere. You’ve got to say something. Look, I’m trying to help you.”

  She shook her head. “That wasn’t me. The Clarion? You think I’d talk to a right-wing think tank?”

  Hannah sat in one of the Hitchcock chairs. She was keeping her coat wrapped tight across her chest. Her hair, Naomi noticed, was short—above her shoulders. It hadn’t been above her shoulders since…well, Naomi couldn’t remember.

  “You cut your hair.”

  “I’m not here to talk about my hair. Or my studies. Or anything but this, so let’s try to stay on topic.”

  “Well, then, I’d better sit down.”

  And so she returned to her chair. The blotter on her desk was an outright desecration, she saw. She couldn’t believe she’d done that.

  “I just found out about the interview,” she told her daughter. “The reporter from the Daily asked me for a response. Obviously I’m appalled.”

  “Then say so. It’s unconscionable for Webster to slander Nicholas Gall this way.”

  “Are you sure it’s a slander? The accusation might be unconscionable but also perfectly true. Have you considered that?”

  “Of course it isn’t true!” she said. “This man is inspirational to hundreds of students.”

  “Which is fascinating, but not relevant,” Naomi said tersely. “If so many intelligent young people decide to support an individual they know so little about, that’s not something I can control. I am furious with…with the person who made this statement, but my position is that the college will not comment on private matters like tenure. Or academic standing. And I won’t. Would you want me to give interviews about your grades to the media? Don’t you have a right to privacy?”

  “Privacy is important,” said Hannah, “but I hope you understand that even if you, personally, didn’t say Nick Gall was a plagiarist, you’re still responsible for the statement. It’s on you.”

  “I don’t see that at all, Hannah. I’m as shocked by it as you are. And if turns out to be someone on the board or someone with an official connection to the college, I’m going to come down on that person like a ton of bricks. But I don’t think the Clarion is going to identify the source, even if I ask politely.”

  Hannah leaned forward. Her eyes were dark and angry. “I thought it would be a different equation with someone like you in charge. I was proud of you.”

  That hit her hard. The past tense of it. The unassailability of it.

  “I’m sorry you’re disappointed in me. My job is complicated. But this isn’t complicated. This is very clear to me. I’d welcome the chance to explain it to you.”

  “No thanks, I’m good,” her daughter said. “I’ve had a long education in how the strong take advantage of the weak. A black guy and a Palestinian kid. Very nice.”

  “Oh no,” Naomi said, shaking her head. “No, that is not okay. That is not okay at all. For one thing, I can’t see any way in which Nicholas Gall has been disadvantaged. He’s had a light teaching load and a long run at tenure. He could have done a great deal in that time. For whatever reason, he chose to spend his time differently. How differently, I have no idea, since the guy doesn’t leave much of a written trail. He had the usual warnings and extensions. Do you know about the extensions?”

  “Jesus, listen to you!” Hannah shook her head. “You gave him an extension—can you hear how patronizing you are? You gave him an extension, and gee, he still fell short of your expectations. I’m just stunned. Stunned. How is this the same person I grew up with?”

  “There was nothing untoward about Nicholas Gall’s tenure process.” Naomi could barely get the words out. “It’s the same one everyone has. It’s the same one I had. If I’d…If it were s
hown that I’d done what…what it’s alleged he did, I wouldn’t be sitting in this office. I wouldn’t be employed by this university.”

  “There are other reasons to give someone tenure, apart from publications.”

  “There are other factors. But publications are the most important thing. I understand that he’s a great teacher. He’s a teacher students are passionate about. Obviously. And that’s incredibly important, to have great teachers. But publications are paramount. The strength of our faculty is the most important thing we have. Without it we’d be a very different college.”

  “You mean,” Hannah said, “differently ranked. That’s what you mean. Ranked lower, meaning fewer applicants, meaning less competition to get in, meaning less prestige, meaning less alumni loyalty, meaning less money for Webster.” She glared at her mother, waiting for her to disagree, but this in fact was a very succinct summary of how things stood in academia. Naomi couldn’t help being impressed.

  “I can’t talk about this.”

  “Well, that’s convenient. Should we talk about Omar? Do you know there’s a rumor out there that Omar—Omar—was responsible for the Sojourner Truth basement? Who do you think’s behind that?”

  Naomi froze. Only hours earlier Milton Russell had made this very suggestion, but it was outrageous, of course. Surely even he hadn’t said that in public. Oh my God, she was going to kill Milton Russell.

  “I can’t imagine who would say such a thing,” she told Hannah. “It’s an appalling accusation. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the police believe that. Well, I don’t know what the police believe,” she said, feeling, suddenly, very defeated. “If they believe anything, they’re not sharing it with me.”

  But if this was a play for sympathy—intentional or otherwise—it hadn’t worked. “Character assassination. Plain and simple. And I can promise you, even if you don’t see that, the rest of the world is going to. I mean, holy shit, Mom. This kid’s family is gunned down on the street in front of the entire world, isn’t that enough? Dad, older brother. The mom dies of grief. The terrorists wanted to use him as a suicide bomber, did you know that? And he wouldn’t do it. So instead he drags himself to this country, the country that underwrites his father’s and brother’s murderers, which means he can never go home. And all he wants is an education so he can get past all of this bloodshed. And this is the person being accused of writing racist statements in shit on the walls. Are you following this?”