The Devil and Webster

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Oh, Naomi,” said Francine, and just the way she said that, which was a way she had never said anything before, or at least never anything to Naomi before, made her flinch. “That isn’t it. That isn’t the problem at all.”

  “No?” said Naomi.

  “The problem isn’t that you can’t speak truth to power. The problem is that you are the power. You see that, right? You’re the establishment. You’re the man.”

  “Well.” She tried to laugh. Her head spun. “I don’t think so.”

  “I think so. The students are the ones trying to speak truth to you. That’s what they think, anyway. I can’t believe this is a surprise.”

  But it was. It was more than a surprise. It was the kind of terrible shock you push back against with every bit of your strength, and then collapse beneath, because the pure, cold sense of it is so very heavy.

  “I’m on their side,” she said, without any conviction whatsoever. “I’ve been open from the beginning. I’ve been available.”

  “Irrelevant,” Francine said. “Their job is to place themselves in opposition to authority. You are authority, whether you embrace it or not. That you opt not to resist them makes no difference at all. They’ve barely paid attention to you.”

  Well, that was certainly true, Naomi had to agree. The night at Sojourner Truth House, hadn’t she waded into the crowd and settled herself, unacknowledged and unnoted? Their publicly identified adversary, utterly anonymous in their midst. She’d actually felt guilty about that, for hiding, but she’d also wanted to hear (at last!) what they had to say.

  “Look, you’re a good person. I’m sure you’ve followed your conscience in all of this,” said Francine. Her tone had notably shifted, but somehow not persuasively. “I don’t see you running a bulldozer through the encampment on the Quad. But sometimes that kind of move is probably kinder in the long run.”

  Naomi felt numb. She stared at her friend. “I thought you liked Omar,” was, unaccountably, the first thing it occurred to her to say.

  “Oh, Omar.” She sighed. “Yes, Omar is very special. Of course I ‘like’ him, not that that matters. I like Nick Gall, too. Or…well, I like his wife, and she likes him. But again, not relevant. This should have been over months ago. I think…”

  She seemed to trip over her own thought, and stop. Then, with intention, she continued.

  “I have wondered, sometimes, whether you’re not prolonging this intentionally. I’ve wondered if this is some nostalgia, some reaching back for you. I mean this with no disrespect, and I say it with affection.”

  And yet, the words strongly implied disrespect and the tone was fully lacking in affection.

  “I know how important this was for you. When you were younger.”

  “This?” said Naomi, with an archness even she could hear.

  “This position. This ritual of defiance. You do talk about your activist past, you know.”

  “Do I?” asked Naomi. Did she?

  “The Cornell stuff. Vivisection? And the Peace Corps.”

  Naomi regarded her. “Not vivisection. ROTC. And not the Peace Corps. VISTA. I wanted to do the Peace Corps. I think my husband was terrified of the Third World. He’d never been out of the country. He thought he would die.”

  “So you ended up in New Hampshire.”

  It sounded, she had to admit, absurd. And it had been absurd, but also horrible. And she had managed to leave there only after years and the end of her marriage and the end, in some ways, of what she’d thought she might accomplish in the world. Away with a packed-up car and a future Hannah Rosalind Roth, the size of a walnut, deep inside her body. It was so long ago.

  “Yes. Goddard, New Hampshire. But you know all this.”

  “And exactly how would I know all this?” Francine said. Her knuckles, Naomi saw, were tapping the pile of unread folders. “You’re not exactly forthcoming. I asked you about it once, years ago, you pretty much held up a ‘trespassers will be shot’ sign. And I respect that, don’t worry. And I know, I’m not such a big over-sharer, myself, but really, I hope you’re not under the impression that you have actually confided in me about your life before you got to Webster. For all I know, ‘Naomi Roth’ used to be an underground radical, or came out of the witness protection program. You were radical on campus at Cornell, then you went to live in northern New Hampshire for fifteen years. Then you left. Why did you leave? For that matter, why did you stay fifteen years if VISTA’s supposed to be the domestic Peace Corps and the Peace Corps is only for two years? You say you had a husband. I know you have a daughter. Are the two connected? Does Hannah even know her father?”

  Naomi couldn’t speak. Never, not once in all the years of their friendship, had she ever felt even a hint of this disrespect, this assault, and she withered beneath it. Francine had also seemed to run out of steam. She deflated, visibly, and Naomi suddenly saw anew how diminished her friend had become. Reading season? No. There had been many reading seasons in their friendship. Francine had never before appeared so depleted. Abruptly Naomi forgot how she had felt only seconds earlier. Before she knew what she was doing she reached her hand across the table and covered those tapping knuckles, that clamped fist.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Right away, Naomi saw that Francine was crying. She sat with her head down, her too-long hair hanging forward over her face. Never had Naomi seen this, never. Not even at her mother’s funeral the year they’d first met. It was as if someone had punched a hole in her.

  “Francine, what?”

  She only shook her miserable head. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right. Can I help?”

  Francine didn’t answer. Naomi watched her shoulders. They shook.

  “Is it Sumner?” she asked. “Are you guys all right?”

  Her friend looked up, her face streaked. “What do you mean, ‘all right’?”

  “I mean…is something going on? Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I can’t talk about it. I mean, I don’t want to talk about it. I know you don’t like him.”

  Naomi looked at her in shock. “That isn’t true. I’ve always liked Sumner.”

  “Oh, please. Sumner offends you. He always has. But he’s as much of his culture as you are of yours. His culture just happens to be everything you hate.”

  She saw that there was no point in denying this, and she didn’t want to. “He’s your husband. You love him and I love you. We might not have gotten beyond that, but I’ve always felt we were on good terms.” She stopped, reluctant to inquire further. But she had to. “Are we not? On good terms?”

  “Oh.” Francine shook her head. “I don’t know. Probably. It doesn’t matter. None of this is about you. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  “What is it about, Francine? What’s happened?”

  Francine sat back in her chair. She pushed away the folders as if they were a meal she couldn’t look at anymore. Then shook her head. “They’re trying to get rid of him. The school. They’ve been trying for nearly a year.”

  Naomi stared. She hadn’t been expecting that. A divorce, an affair—in the last few moments the marriage had suddenly come into play: Sumner, that entitled shit, was carrying on with someone, Sumner was moving on, Sumner had no conception of how fortunate he was to have Francine in his life. But the school?

  “Why?” she managed.

  “Oh, it’s all…it’s nasty and horrible. The board, they haven’t been behind him since four members were replaced a few years back. They think the school is stagnant, though Sumner’s been great on their endowment. The board, and the faculty…”

  Naomi’s eyes widened. “The board and the faculty?”

  “There was an incident. It wasn’t Sumner’s fault.”

  All at once, she didn’t want to hear any more.

  “That’s…a tough place to be in.”

  “A few of the teachers left. It was in the middle of the school year. They just resigned and left.”

 
“But that’s outrageous!”

  “I know,” she agreed. “Outrageous.”

  Naomi was thinking, scrambling. Multiple teachers, resigning in the middle of the year? It was a drastic step, a clear gesture of protest. There must have been something extraordinary to precipitate it.

  “Do you know why?” she heard herself ask.

  Francine nodded. “I do. At least, I know what they’ve said. But it’s a slander. I can’t…I really can’t talk about this. I don’t want to.”

  “All right,” said Naomi.

  “And the board, just…they just jumped right on top of him. That woman you met at our New Year’s party…”

  “That nasty woman?” asked Naomi.

  “She’s been a nightmare. Some private drama about how she’s been on the board for decades but never chair.”

  “Always a bridesmaid.”

  “Always a bitch.”

  Naomi started. Bitch.

  “Okay,” she said carefully.

  “That woman has had it in for Sumner since the beginning.”

  “But…wait, I thought she said she’d headed the search committee.”

  “She did. But she didn’t want him. She wanted someone else. If it weren’t for Billy Grosvenor, he wouldn’t have gotten the job. And now there’s even less support. I don’t know if he can hold on much longer. It’s ugly. Really ugly.”

  She had stopped crying, at least. She looked miserably at her files, her hands, some vague place past Naomi’s left shoulder.

  “I’m just…it’s been stressful. I apologize. None of this excuses the way I spoke to you.”

  “Please”—Naomi shook her head—“don’t think of it. But…Francine, isn’t Sumner going to retire soon? I mean, anyway?”

  Francine bristled anew. “We’ve discussed it, of course. But it’s immaterial. This is not the way his career should end, under a cloud like this. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s devoted himself to Hawthorne. He’s devoted himself to the board. And the teachers, not that they appreciate it. I’m sure you can understand how unfair it would be to ask someone to step down for something entirely beyond their control. I’m sure you’ve been giving that some thought,” she finished archly.

  Well, yes, Naomi did understand. And yes, she had been giving that some thought.

  “I wish you’d told me,” she finally managed to say. “I could have…” What? Helped? “Supported you. Or tried.”

  Francine shrugged. “Appreciate that,” she said simply. “Not much to be done, though. We’ll just have to wait and see what they decide. I mean, they’ve set a dedicated board meeting in May, so we wait for that. And just…carry on.”

  She pressed her palms over her eyes and exhaled. When she took them away, she’d been restored to semi-normality. “Work,” she announced. “Back to work. I have to get through this pile before I can go home. I am sorry, but I can’t talk anymore.”

  So Naomi, dismissed, rose and left her there.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Not That Kind

  of a Bomb

  Hannah had loved the Madeline books when she was a little girl. They hadn’t been Naomi’s choice. She had put her daughter on a steady diet of Free to Be…You and Me and Pippi Longstocking in a strictly Mattel-free zone, intent on raising a girl with no detritus of the patriarchy, and those privileged Parisian schoolgirls in their matching uniforms and neat straight lines, overseen by a Bride of Christ…they had definitely not been part of the plan. But once Hannah experienced Madeline and her crew at a sleepover in first grade, resistance had been futile, and soon the bedtime ritual chez Roth included one or more of the stories, and their frankly irresistible charms: the rabbit crack in the ceiling, the Spanish ambassador’s naughty son, the stray dog hiding under the blankets. Naomi, after so many readings, was struck by the fact that Miss Clavel, who was not a mother herself, nonetheless possessed an inner maternal alarm when it came to the children; she rose from sleep when some imminent disaster called to her, and raced to the girls’ bedroom fast and faster to discover the crisis at hand: puppies, a rumbling appendix, a room full of crying girls.

  Naomi had never considered herself particularly maternal, not even when she’d looked after a toddler for several months near the end of her time in Goddard. When Hannah was born, though, she had found, like most mothers, that the connection between herself and her baby long outlived the physical umbilical cord. One night, only hours after putting to bed a sparkling and chatty four-year-old, she’d woken to a physical seizure of panic and rushed to Hannah’s room, where a small feverish body tossed beneath a patchwork quilt. That had turned out to be something Naomi had never heard of, called Kawasaki disease, which was frightening and dangerous but also gone inside of a week, leaving Hannah cheery as ever and her mother forever walloped by the omnipresent terror of parenthood. Mother and daughter had spent those days in the hospital in Northampton, waiting for Hannah’s temperature to return to normal and hearing how fortunate they’d been to catch things early. Two weeks later, in a sour grapes gesture on the part of the illness, the skin of Hannah’s hands and feet peeled off in sheets.

  When Naomi sat up in bed, in the black hours later that night, she thought first of Hannah, and sat for a long moment in her bed, hand pressed to her heart, reviewing a lacerating array of possibilities. Only hours before, leaving Francine at the student center, she’d made an abrupt and unfortunate decision to go and look for her daughter again, to force some kind of a resolution. The day, already packed with so many lousy experiences, could not get any worse, she reasoned, by throwing one more uncomfortable encounter into the mix. At Sojourner Truth a truculent Chava Friedberg had met her with a deeply supercilious smile, holding the door open barely far enough to wedge a shoulder through. Hannah wasn’t there, she’d announced, and no, she didn’t know where Naomi could look. There had been a meeting in town, she didn’t know where, and maybe everyone was out at the Stump, or maybe Hannah was in her room at Radclyffe Hall. “She’s still a student, you know,” said Chava viciously.

  And you are not, Naomi had thought, remembering Chava’s withdrawal from Webster. So why are you still here?

  “Well, thanks,” Naomi had said, but this had been delivered to the door itself as it closed behind the girl. And fuck you, she added silently.

  At Radclyffe Hall a friendlier young woman delivered the same message, more or less. Hannah Roth wasn’t in. She might be over at Sojourner Truth—she was there a lot—or out on the Quad, at the Webster Dissent encampment. Had Naomi tried there? She came in and out to sleep and study, the young woman said, but she was traveling, too. She’d just been to Boston to be interviewed on TV, and she’d said something about New York, too, in the next few days, or maybe she’d already left for that. Maybe ask her friend Chava something?

  I’ll do that, Naomi said, bereft, and she’d turned and trudged back up Fairweather, back to the Billings Lawn, where she’d treated herself to a desultory jaunt around the edge of the encampment, fruitlessly looking for a body that resembled Hannah’s. Then she’d gone home, made herself tea, declined to check her email, and climbed into bed.

  Where was Hannah and what had happened to her? Because something had happened, or was happening. Naomi’s heart banged beneath her hand. Something is not right, Miss Clavel would have said were she here, able to speak English, and not a fictional character. But then again, when you cared for a dormitory full of girls, let alone a campus full of dormitories full of girls, and boys, something was always not right. The dramas, crises, drugs, self-harm: Webster College was an eternally unfolding disaster under her own personal aegis.

  Then the phone rang.

  A moment later she was out of the house, pajama bottoms still on, feet shoved into her furry snow boots. She’d thrown on a Webster sweatshirt and her parka and left her own door ajar behind her, purse and phone abandoned on the hall table. She was moving fast. She wasn’t hanging around. She couldn’t understand what he’d said, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to
wait. Peter Rudolph had made the call. He sounded terrified.

  The fire truck was pulling up as Naomi reached Billings Hall, and overhead smoke was twisting out through the shattered window on the third floor. She tried to tell herself that smoke was a good thing, or not as horrible a thing as flame would be, but then she saw the flames too, and smelled that indescribable smell of modern plastics melting. Dust and papers, wood and wood laminate, a telephone, a computer, all of it a single burning soup. She couldn’t make words. She found Peter Rudolph with the firemen.

  “No one’s in there, right?” was what she ended up asking first.

  “Someone’s in there?” one of the firemen asked.

  “No. No one. I hope. I don’t know.” She sounded hysterical. “How bad is it?”

  “This is President Roth,” said Peter Rudolph inanely.

  “That’s your office?” said the fireman.

  She looked up, as if she needed to check. “My office,” she said. It smelled so terrible. She didn’t want to take the air in. Out on the Billings Lawn she could see people emerging from their tents.

  The lights on the fire truck hit the façade of the administration building. It looked absurdly pristine except for the top floor, which also looked weirdly normal, except for the smoke and the flames. There were more flames now, or else the same number of flames but from an additional window. How did any of it make sense?

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she said to Peter Rudolph.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said the man standing a few feet from them. He had a cell phone to his ear and seemed to be running things. “Not that kind of a bomb,” he said, and it was the first time anyone had used that word. She thought she might throw up. That revolting chicken stew. How it had congealed around her spoon. It was all inside her now, solid, begging for escape.

  “Wait, what?” Peter Rudolph asked. “You know that? How do you know that?”

  But the man with the phone was gone. He was with the others. They had turned on the hose and angled it up. The water shot high onto the roof of Billings Hall and then into the window. Her window. Her office. The indignity of it was what she couldn’t get her mind around. All that water, hissing across her desk, into her chair. The leather blotter she’d pretty much destroyed only hours before. The chair that tipped back. The portrait of Josiah Webster in the conference room next door. Was that gone, too?