The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “I am following it,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what I can do about it. I would never have said such a thing about Omar, but I can’t possibly control every other person in the world. People have a way of speaking their minds, and if the Clarion is happy with an unsupported anonymous source, a source with an obvious agenda, then I’m not going to be able to prevent it. Much as I would like to,” she added.

  “‘A source close to the board of trustees!’ Are you telling me you couldn’t have stopped that?” Hannah had gotten to her feet. She stood over her mother, looking grimly down. You are too thin, Naomi was thinking. In her head, she was screaming it. She couldn’t see it under her daughter’s heavy coat, but that collarbone, protruding at the best of times, must now be alarming. This was a new sensation, a new terror. Hannah had never had food issues, she was sure. The fever of body hatred, the fear of sustenance, Hannah had made it through her teens without any of that, due in part to her natural, unmissable height and slenderness, and in part (Naomi dared to hope) to her own constant maternal affirmations. Fat was a feminist issue; everyone knew that. But thinness was even more of one.

  “I have no idea who gave the interview. I’m as appalled as you are, but I can’t do anything about it now. It’s done. And the college—”

  “Oh, the college,” Hannah sneered. “The college, the college. Webster is the great emancipator, isn’t it? Webster sprinkles its liberal fairy dust over this downtrodden soul, and he’s supposed to be so grateful he doesn’t notice he’s just being victimized by yet another constituency.”

  Now Naomi, too, was losing her cool. “Victimized by admitting him with a full scholarship? A first-class education and a valuable degree, free room and board and medical care, and limitless opportunity? That’s rough. We never should have done it. We never would have, if he hadn’t applied and asked us to.”

  “That,” Hannah said, taking a step back, “is the worst kind of paternalism. I can’t believe you don’t see this. You’ve hurt him. You’ve hurt him just like the Israelis who killed his family or the terrorists who tried to make him blow himself up. And just like them, you don’t even care that you’ve hurt him.”

  Naomi, at that blinding moment, actually did not care. She was that furious.

  “I care,” she managed finally, but she was barely convincing herself.

  “Oh yes. That’s obvious. Well, how about this? You’ve hurt me, too. And that’s not so easy to dismiss, is it?”

  It was not. Naomi wanted to hurl herself out of her chair and across the desk. She wanted to grab Hannah’s shoulder and, like a fractious child, make her take it back. But Hannah was leaving; their conversation, their contretemps, was over with no resolution. “Wait!” Naomi said, but Hannah, her coat once again tightly wrapped, was crossing the room, opening the door.

  And you’ve hurt me! she wanted to say, but she wasn’t sure whether she was speaking for herself or merely parroting her daughter’s words, and anyway she didn’t get to it soon enough. By the time she’d put the notion into language, Hannah was already gone, down the stairs and more than likely out on the stone steps of Billings Hall. Naomi sank back into her chair, the pain of this new awful thing mixing freely with all of the other bad feelings: the board, the blame, the lies, the drone of her own failure, the noxious Milton Russell. These things, they coiled around her in a winding sheet, until she was lashed to the mast of her own head, fully immobilized,

  Another hour must have gone by—Naomi couldn’t be sure and actually wasn’t that interested, but finally, at some moment that seemed no different from the one before it, she found herself on her feet. She was up. She was leaving, after an absurdly long day of difficulty and pain, finally up out of her chair and into the hallway. She shrugged on her coat and pulled the door closed behind her till it made its heavy metallic thunk. I arrived this morning, she thought, descending the flights of stairs. I worked all day. Now I am leaving. It wasn’t complicated. The air outside was crisp but lacked the brutal whack of the previous weeks, so when her hand went automatically to the zipper of her coat it changed its mind and left the parka flapping at her hips. Naomi looked around. The media types of the morning had moved on, or perhaps merely retreated to the four or five vans parked at the Quad’s southern edge. It was past eight, she imagined, then confirmed with a glance at the library’s clock tower; classes done, the students were mainly where they belonged, ensconced in their dorm rooms or in the library doing what they’d theoretically come to Webster to do. The Quad itself was dingy with old snow, pockmarked with new mud. Around the Stump, the encampment was at capacity, with hunching, stamping bodies filling the spaces between the tents and lean-tos. The dissenters were like the soldiers in that famous painting of Valley Forge, she thought, grateful that the temperature seemed, at least, to be on the rebound. The winter might just possibly end without their having lost a single Webster toe to frostbite. Which was, under the circumstances, a tiny victory.

  The classroom and administrative buildings on the eastern and western sides were uniformly dark, and only the student center on the southern edge was alight. This vigorously modern structure, composed of New Hampshire granite, had been erected a year or two after Naomi’s arrival at Webster, and had gradually been annexed to the older structures on either side, making all three into a kind of Frankenbuilding of cafés and meeting rooms, the film and media programs, and a basement cavern of pinball and arcade games. Apparently it was a widely disseminated anecdote that Webster’s president could often be found at Josiah’s, the student center coffee shop, hanging out and chatting with students (this had been reported to Naomi at freshmen parents’ weekends; apparently the prospect of grabbing a latte with the president had proved the tipping point in many a decision to apply to Webster), but in fact Naomi never had held court at Josiah’s or anywhere else in the building, and she had no idea how this particular rumor had begun. It was just another Webster myth, along with the happy Indians welcoming the Gospel or the good-natured shenanigans of Webster’s pre-Sarafian bright college days.

  But just at the moment she actually was, she realized, a little bit hungry. That was interesting. That was kind of encouraging, too. And obviously there was nowhere else she was supposed to be, and no one to miss her. Why shouldn’t she get herself a coffee at Josiah’s? Why shouldn’t she buy herself an entire dinner?

  Naomi set off, walking the perimeter of the Quad instead of cutting through the encampment. She felt unaccountably brave, as if procuring dinner for herself in some modestly public place were an outrageous and ballsy act, on par with those Victorian adventuresses trekking across the Kalahari. No one bothered her, or perhaps the darkness rendered her invisible, and even the two or three groups of men clustered, smoking, around the vans barely looked her way as she went by. She took her parka off as she swept through the revolving door and went straight into the café, smelling some kind of gumbo and some kind of baking chocolate and instantly wanting them both. Naomi lifted a tray from the pile and slid it across the ledge in the direction of food. She took a bowl of the gumbo (it was actually chicken stew) and a brownie and was just putting her wallet back into her pocket and turning to look for a seat when she saw, thrillingly, Francine, tucked into a corner, bent over a table with a telltale stack of folders.

  “Why, hello!” Naomi said, rushing heedlessly to her friend and sitting without asking. Only then did it occur to her that she might not be welcome.

  “Oh,” Francine said. She looked up but a forefinger went instinctively to the place she’d left. “Oh, Naomi.”

  “I’m sorry!” she said pathetically. “I wasn’t thinking. Of course you’re working.”

  “’Tis the season.” Francine nodded. “I mean…”

  “I should have known. I’ll leave. I was just…” Just? Naomi considered. Was this “grabbing a latte”? Did she sound as ridiculous as she felt?

  “No, no, I’m glad to see you. If I can just finish this folder I can stop for a bit. You know, we don’t like to s
top in the middle. You lose the information. It isn’t fair to an applicant.”

  “Yes!” Naomi was remembering. “Applicatus interruptus. Right?”

  Francine smiled briefly. It was a term she’d made up, and too risqué to share with most people. But Naomi was not most people.

  “Very much so. Just a sec.”

  She bowed her head over the folder, which like all Webster application folders was green. She was reading intently, making notes at the bottom of the reader’s card. She frowned through the two essays and the guidance counselor’s letter, pursing her lips and nodding in a way that made Naomi think of a Hasidic Jew, davening. Naomi ate her chicken stew, which had a smoky overtone that she hoped was intentional and not the result of a scorching. She was trying not to look at the pages in front of her friend. She’d fought, for years, a fascination with these very pages, the invisible kids behind them, the invisible parents behind them. Here, before her eyes, was evidence of that devil’s bargain between top-ranked colleges and the elements that kept them top ranked, because Webster and the others did indeed invite—encourage—every possible student to apply, and then denied entry to all but a sliver of them. There were many reasons for such a contradiction, and they’d been explained to her many times, and Naomi had in turn explained them to others, but when you got right down to it she couldn’t fathom the specific horror of having to make these decisions. A basketball player from Georgia or a robotics whiz from northern New Jersey? An equestrian who’d bring her own horse (and a strongly hinted-at donation) to campus or a waif from Bangladesh who was being sponsored by a famous tech philanthropist? How could you weigh innovation against opportunity? How could you put a value on simple security—the experience of growing up in a stable society with guaranteed schooling—when others had no such thing? Francine had managed to pepper Webster’s classes with the children of devoted and generous alumni, but she had also discovered Omar Khayal—for better or, as it was increasingly looking, for worse. Her method, whatever else it was, had no madness in it. Naomi knew that she wanted only the best for Webster.

  “O…kay…” Francine finished, with an extravagant crossing of a final t. “I get to stop now. Not for long, but for a bit.”

  “I should have left you alone. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No, I’m glad. Human interaction is good for me. I’m in the cave. It isn’t nice.”

  “A cave sounds nice to me,” Naomi said, with extravagant sarcasm.

  “Oh, God. Yes, I’m sorry, I heard that Omar Khayal’s been expelled. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Naomi sighed. “Well, that’s good, given that it isn’t true.” She stirred her rapidly chilling stew with a spoon, just for the sake of it.

  “It isn’t true? You haven’t expelled him?”

  She studied her friend. Francine, she was now noticing, looked terrible. Her face was drawn and the circles beneath her eyes had deepened to aubergine. Her hair was long; Naomi wasn’t sure she’d ever seen it this long. Usually, by the time it hit the shoulders Francine had taken herself in to have her chin-length bob restored. It was the cave, she supposed. Every admissions officer she’d ever known spent the winter in one, reading, reading.

  “No, of course not. We don’t expel students for academic failure. We put them on academic probation with the hope of their eventual return. You’d have to do something illegal or contra to the honor code to get expelled. But in Omar’s case, we hadn’t even gotten as far as probation. He didn’t show up for a meeting, and then he made his own announcement before he could not show up for the rescheduled meeting. He didn’t answer emails. I did what I could, though I suppose I could have done more.”

  “Well…” said Francine. But she declined to make the expected noises. No! You tried so hard!

  “Really, what was I supposed to be doing? My door’s been open for months. I’ve tried to get him to talk to me for months. What kind of protest declines dialogue with its opponent?”

  “A modern one,” Francine said dryly. “These kids are not like we were. You were,” she corrected. “Interaction across the battle lines isn’t what they’re after. They want to build their own constituencies. They want to represent something to their peers more than they want to gain respect from their opponents.”

  “Or accomplish anything,” Naomi said, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, they’re accomplishing plenty. They’re compiling influence. They’re emerging from the crowd.”

  “Gaining ‘likes.’ Getting ‘retweeted.’”

  “That’s part of it. No point denying it.”

  “Building their brands. Getting famous.”

  Francine shrugged. “Fame is power. Omar grew up powerless, remember. It’s not like he’s a Hollywood starlet. He has the entire Middle East to heal. Shouldn’t we be helping him?”

  Naomi had stopped stirring her stew, which had now congealed into a cold gray sludge. What she had already consumed was now hard and heavy in her belly. She couldn’t imagine why she’d eaten it.

  “You’re not…defending him, I hope?”

  “What has he done that needs defending? He got fired up about a perceived injustice. He established and led a nonviolent protest to call attention to it. Just as you would have done under the same circumstances. Unless I’ve missed something?”

  “You have,” Naomi told her. “But it’s something I can’t talk about publicly. A small matter of tenure denial due to a small case of plagiarism.”

  She couldn’t believe she’d actually said it, even to Francine, even after the “source close to the board of trustees” had said much more. She watched the words land. Plagiarism first, then tenure.

  “Oh. Well, fuck.”

  The word sounded utterly out of place in Francine’s voice. Cave language, Naomi supposed. The Francine she knew did not curse. She said “witch” when she was annoyed with a female person, “jerk” when she disliked someone male.

  “You mean Gall.”

  “I do. You’re maybe too busy to have heard that a right-wing website made this public today. I am apparently responsible for that, as well, or I was supposed to prevent it from happening.” She shook her head. “As to the plagiarism itself, I can neither confirm nor deny.”

  “No. Of course.”

  “But he’s made himself very free to imply that his dismissal wasn’t for cause, and everyone knows how popular a teacher he is. So that leaves race, at least according to these students. But it was always the plagiarism. We’ve protected him, and we’ve taken the heat for that, from his defenders. It’s untenable.”

  Francine nodded. “For you, you mean.”

  “Yes. I guess from his perspective it would be nice if this lasted forever. Why should the matter of his academic dishonesty interfere with all of the teaching positions he’s being offered? And the honorary degrees. And the lectures and appearances? You know, I had Hannah in my office an hour ago. She hasn’t spoken to me for almost a month, and now I’m Roy Cohn. This whole thing, it’s like a wildfire. It keeps whipping around and tearing off in a different direction.”

  Francine observed her. “Boy, you’re pissed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this pissed.”

  “You weren’t around when Maddie Douglas invited everyone in the seventh grade except Hannah to her princess bowling party.”

  Francine laughed sharply. “Oh, yes I was. That was impressive. That was rock star trashing a hotel room pissed. But you know, this is something different. It’s quieter, but it’s worse.”

  “Well,” Naomi conceded, “it’s personal.”

  Her friend looked at her. “No, I don’t think so. It’s not personal. Not like having your daughter ostracized really is personal. I understand that you feel disrespected, Naomi, I mean majorly disrespected. You’re being accused of something and you can’t respond to the charge. But it’s also true that neither the plagiarism nor the tenure denial had anything to do with you.”

  Naomi looked over at the food line. She wanted something, it occurred t
o her. But what she wanted they didn’t sell at Josiah’s. And she was too exhausted and too embarrassed to go downstairs to the pub.

  “No more than Omar not attending class all fall has to do with me. But I’m supposedly the author of his arbitrary expulsion, too.”

  “All fall?” Francine said, mystified.

  “According to his professors. Nicholas Gall gave him an A, which is the only reason his GPA wasn’t a zero last term. Still, it’s well below the cutoff for academic probation. That’s officially what he’s on, by the way. And this fiction about his belongings being put out on the street? God, it’s infuriating.”

  “Then why don’t you just tell people that?”

  “Oh…same old, same old. Privacy.”

  “Your privacy?”

  Naomi looked at her, less than kindly. “No, of course not. Omar’s privacy. We’re as entitled to discuss his academic standing as we are to talk about Gall’s plagiarism. Which is to say: not at all.”

  Francine was nodding. One hand, her right, was rhythmically tapping the pile of application folders. She wanted to get back, Naomi realized. She was ready to get back. She wanted to push this away, because she could, as Naomi could not.

  “Like a quandary for Talmudic scholars to deconstruct.”

  Naomi shook her head. “No, there’s no quandary. Not about this. I’m not allowed to do anything, say anything. It’s kind of horrible, actually. My whole life has been organized around the principle of speaking truth to power. Now I can’t speak.”