“If that happened, I’d be terribly sad, because it really wouldn’t be fair. Academic dishonesty is a pervasive problem, and I’d be surprised if there were a campus anywhere in America that hasn’t had to deal with it. You know the motto of a certain pretty good college over in Cambridge—Veritas, right?”
There was a bit of gratifying laughter. Not much, but a bit.
“Unfortunately, having ‘truth’ in their motto didn’t prevent them from admitting a student who’d plagiarized virtually every word he wrote in his college career, including his academic work, his application materials, and even a poem he won a writing prize with. This happens, in other words. If people are motivated to lie, they’re going to lie. But honesty—whether it’s academic or personal—it’s the bedrock of everything we do. If we gave that up that ideal, I don’t think there’d be anything left to teach.”
“Well, we know what Eduardo Sombra did,” the young woman said. “What we don’t know is what the professor, Nicholas Gall did, or didn’t do, to be denied tenure. And since the two of them were close, I do think it’s pertinent. At the very least I’d like to hear whether the professor knew about Sombra?”
Again, Naomi’s vision was drawn back to Gall’s wife, who sat glaring back from her desk. Today she wore another of her African cloth shirts, a jarring lavender and black.
“It’s not that I don’t understand your curiosity, but the privacy of the tenure process, I’m afraid, has more weight, far more weight, than your wish to know the details. As for what Professor Gall knew about his protégé, you are going to have to ask him.”
If you can find him, she thought sourly. The previous week, Gall had failed to turn up for his classes. Professor Kinikini had let her know this in an email. He had asked an adjunct to finish up the last few weeks of the term, and left it at that. The department was no more eager than Naomi, it seemed, to have Gall back in a Webster classroom.
“If there are no more questions about admissions…” Francine said. She got to her feet optimistically. “I’d like to thank you for coming. We have copies of my statement at the door, if you need them.”
There were a few stragglers, hoarding questions they didn’t want to share with their colleagues, but both Francine and Naomi were firm in declining to answer. They did this without even looking at each other, like a practiced, synchronized team, and soon they were alone with Leanne Gall at the other end of the room, still seated, still glaring.
“That went…”
“All right,” Francine said.
“Better than all right. You were very, very good.”
She shrugged. “Years of angry parents wanting to know why their kid didn’t get in but the kid’s awful friend did.”
“Well,” Naomi said, “you should thank every one of them, because you came off as calm and virtuous.”
Francine gave her a tired smile. “Are you saying I’m not naturally calm and virtuous?”
“No, you are. You are. But these are trying times. Anyway, maybe we’ll get lucky now, and they’ll go away.”
“Maybe.” She nodded. “So. Walk this weekend?”
“Love to. Let’s go to Wells State Park. We haven’t been there in a while.”
“Okay, good. I need to go call Sumner. He wanted to know how it went.”
Naomi gave her friend a quick hug. She felt light. She was so ready for it all to be over.
Francine walked through the lounge, stopped at her assistant’s desk and said something to Leanne, then went into her office and closed the door. Leanne never took her eyes off Naomi.
There was no other way out of the room, which was annoying. Naomi was trying to hold on to that lightness, that optimism. Already it was leaking. She started to walk toward the door. She didn’t get far.
“I don’t appreciate the way you were looking at me,” said the voice, so icy it made Naomi wince.
Right back atcha, she wanted to say.
She would have to pass within a few feet of Leanne’s desk.
“I wasn’t looking at you in any particular way,” Naomi said. “That must have been uncomfortable for you to listen to.”
“Uncomfortable?” the woman said. “You think?”
“I’m sure you were fond of Omar.”
“Like you give a fuck about Omar. Like you give a fuck about anything but yourself.”
Well, that gets right to it, thought Naomi. She stopped in front of Leanne’s desk. It was either that or stalk out. Instantly she knew she’d made the wrong choice.
“I just meant…I’m sure this has caused a lot of upheaval in your life.”
“You mean the part about how I have to pack up my house and move? Or the part about how somebody on the board, like maybe you, decided to tell the world my husband was a criminal and that’s why he got fired.”
So many ways to go, thought Naomi: the leak that hadn’t come from her, the plagiarism that wasn’t technically criminal, or the fact that denial of tenure wasn’t strictly the same as being fired. But her heart wasn’t in any of them.
“Where is your husband?” she asked instead. “He didn’t show up to teach last week.”
Leanne looked annoyed, as if this were an inconvenience to her.
“Nick went down to Georgia. I have to take care of the move while he gets ready to teach in the fall. Back to Rabun Gap. But my family’s up here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Naomi, surprised to note that she did feel some actual sympathy. “He put us in an impossible position. Like I said over there, honesty is everything. It’s the bedrock.”
“Oh, what bullshit,” said Leanne Gall. “You people. It’s one thing if someone like Nick does what you say he did, but then she does what she does and you all look the other way. You think what she did isn’t as bad?”
Naomi felt warm. She was standing about six feet from Leanne. Her legs were suddenly immoveable.
“I don’t understand what you mean. If you have something you want me to know, you’d better say it.”
“Oh, okay,” Leanne said with rich sarcasm. “You want me to? I’m happy to. Your friend who’s so calm and virtuous? Ask her how she put the daughter of her husband’s boss on the waitlist, so the two of them would have some leverage when he was about to get fired. And then ask her how she took the girl off the waitlist in exchange for him keeping his job. You think that board of his just gave him a new contract when they were about to fire his ass? They just had a last-minute change of heart?”
Naomi, numb, couldn’t say a thing.
“No, they did not. I heard the two of them on the phone. She just wanted to accept the kid, but he thought it was better if they put her on the waitlist. That way they had more control. So he got a new contract and the boss got his daughter in. On the exact same day. I went home that night and I looked it up on her Facebook. ‘I just got into Webster!’ She posted it a couple hours earlier. You know we’re probably not going to the waitlist at all this year, except for her. You think that’s okay, madam president?”
Naomi wanted to shake her head no, but she couldn’t feel her head at all.
“Well, I don’t. So next time you go preach about honesty and the bedrock of the institution and all that crap, you keep it in mind.” She got to her feet. Naomi had never seen her upright—always Leanne Gall had been seated at the desk outside of Francine’s office. Now she rose and Naomi’s gaze rose with her. She was tall, epically tall, and radiated command. She stood with regal stillness for an excruciating moment, then took her purse from the back of her chair, offered a disarmingly pleasant smile, and walked unhurriedly from the long room, closing the door behind her.
Naomi didn’t move. She couldn’t move, because she knew it was true, and knowing it was true broke her apart. That and understanding what had to happen next. For the longest time she stood, steadying herself in the empty room, concentrating on remaining vertical.
Francine was on the phone when she went in, with her elbows on the desk, nodding her head. She looked up at the s
ound, and didn’t react right away. “Hang on,” she said, but not to Naomi. “Hang on. Naomi’s here.” She straightened a bit. “I thought you’d gone.”
“No,” Naomi said.
The two of them looked at each other.
“Oh,” Francine said at last. “Oh yes. I see.” She put the phone to her ear again. “Sumner, I need to speak with Naomi. I’ll call you back. No. No, I don’t know. I don’t know.” And she placed the handset, very gently, into its cradle, looking at it intently as if daring it to move. Then she looked at Naomi. “All right,” she said.
“Is it true?”
Francine closed her eyes and let out a long breath. Then she opened them again. “You know it is. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”
“Well, knowing it and believing it. Two different things. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you would do something so…”
What? Asinine? Or merely appalling?
“Naomi, we were in a terrible situation. We felt very desperate. And this applicant, she was fine. A strong student and an athlete. She’s going to do very well at Webster. There’s no loss here.”
“Oh,” Naomi sighed, “but there is. Plenty of loss. The fairness of the process, even just the intention of fairness. That’s an untenable loss. I’m amazed that I need to explain this.”
But she didn’t need to explain it. Naomi saw that on Francine’s face, and Francine knew everything that Naomi knew, probably more. She knew that she was no longer the dean of admissions at Webster College. Already, that was over, and so much more besides.
“I let your daughter in,” Francine said suddenly. “Hannah’s great, but they’re all great. You know that. But I let her in, instead of others. Was that fair?”
She felt so tired. She wanted oblivion, horizontal and total, and now.
“Probably not.”
“And how is that different from this?”
“It probably isn’t,” Naomi said. “But it doesn’t matter. If you want to fight, I’m willing. I can do that, even in public. After this year I could take on anyone. But I hope you’ll go quietly. That would be better.”
“For you,” Francine said bitterly.
“And you. And Sumner. And also this girl who’s coming to Webster in the fall. She doesn’t need to be humiliated. But if you want, as I said, I’ll take you on. I’m fully capable of that, it turns out.”
Francine seemed to sink into her chair. Her hands were on the desktop, palms flat. She turned her head away.
“What am I supposed to say about this?” Francine wanted to know.
Naomi sighed. “I’ll leave it to you. ‘Personal reasons unrelated to recent events at Webster’ should be enough.”
“People are going to assume I was fired because of Omar.”
Under the circumstances, Naomi thought, that was a gift.
“And I suppose this is you speaking truth to power. The principle your whole life is organized around.”
Naomi started. There was loathing in the way it was said. She had never suspected. She shook her head sadly.
“No, I don’t think I can do that anymore. As you pointed out to me, I’m the power. This is me speaking power to truth.”
Francine couldn’t look her in the eye.
“I’m leaving now,” she told her friend. “If there’s anything else you want to say to me, say it now, because this is the last conversation we’re going to have.”
But Francine had nothing to say, so Naomi left her to not say it.
Chapter Twenty
The Entire Point of a College Education
The reseeded grass seemed to be off to a decent start. Naomi walked slowly across the Billings Lawn. The sprinklers were just winding down, and she caught the end of the spray from one near the Stump, but, strangely, it wasn’t unwelcome. In a few weeks the seniors would undertake their final Webster ritual here, assembling on the eve of graduation to smash clay pipes against the flat surface of the old stump itself, reenacting a scene of good-natured collegiate destruction that supposedly went back to Josiah Webster’s days. It was another myth, probably, but after a long enough time it had become as good as a truth. For all she knew every single thing she’d ever thought of as a real event had started out as some kind of story. Once those hundreds of students and their hundreds of parents and siblings and friends had swarmed this spot to smash their pipes and then, the following day, collect their degrees, the poor lawn would need yet another generation of grass seed, and another period of care. It was the least of her responsibilities.
When she got to the Stone House she found her daughter on the steps, reading a book, mindlessly rotating a plastic cup of iced tea on the top step. Hannah looked up only when her mother blocked her light. “Oh, hi,” she said, genially enough.
“Well, hello. Did you forget your key?”
“No, I have it,” Hannah said. “I just…it didn’t feel right to go in.”
“That’s funny,” Naomi said. She sat beside her daughter on the top step, but not too close. She didn’t want to push her luck. “I mean, it’s your home.”
Hannah turned and looked up at the edifice: its baronial dimensions and massive blocks of stone. The late sun hit her jaw and neck and one end of that sculpted clavicle where her shirt was loosely buttoned around her neck. Sometimes Naomi failed to see how lovely Hannah was, and sometimes she got reminded. That whole beauty thing—she’d been so militant about evading it when her daughter was young. She got annoyed whenever someone, well-intentioned, called Hannah “pretty” to her face. “Pretty” was the patriarchy. “Beautiful” meant no one expected you to achieve, and Hannah had so much to achieve in the world. But here her child had gone and grown up beautiful anyway, despite Naomi’s efforts. It was out of her hands. She needed to make her peace with it.
“You know what’s strange?” said Hannah. “I never thought of this as home. I know I lived here for years, but it’s the president’s house. It wasn’t ours.”
“Well, I get that. But I loved living here with you.” She was surprised to hear how sad that came out sounding. “You want to talk about it?” Naomi asked, after a moment.
Hannah drank the last of her iced tea, then set down the cup. “I applied for the transfer last fall. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I meant to speak with you about it, but…well. You know. I was angry with you. And now I’m angry at myself.”
Naomi was feeling strangely calm, as if she’d imagined this exact conversation and now it was simply being played back. The actual lines had undergone a rewrite, but the scene was more or less intact. Hannah was leaving. The rest was noise.
“Why should you be angry at yourself, Hannah?”
Hannah looked away, out over the Billings Lawn where the disappearing sun was throwing back reddish light onto the grass and the Stump. There was a boy on the Stump now, cross-legged, facing west. Even seated you could see how tall he was, and how thin. He had hair that was probably blond, but in that light it, too, was red. He was hunched over something on his lap.
“I thought I knew him. It took me days to believe any of it was true. I kept thinking it had all been manufactured somehow. Someone just put Omar into this other person’s life, and walked him into a shootout, just to get rid of him. Or he was somewhere else in the world, but this person in Hartford had his ID for some reason. I was trying to come up with some solution that would explain everything, but they just got more and more convoluted. And then I went down to Hartford, to the funeral.”
“You did?” Naomi was surprised.
“Yes, with some of the others. And I saw his body, so I knew it was him. And I saw all the people in the church who were grieving over Eduardo Sombra. I couldn’t get my head around any of it. I still can’t.”
Naomi nodded. “I know.”
“Why did he do it?” Hannah said. “I mean, why not apply to college as himself? He could have gotten in, here or somewhere. It was all so unnecessary.”
“Not to him, I guess,” Naomi said sadly.
“But I can tell you right now, you won’t get an answer. I’m sure a lot of people have a lot of theories, but that’s not the same as the truth. I don’t think there is a whole truth. Even if Omar were here and you could ask him: Why did you make all this up? What did you want from us? He probably wouldn’t be able to answer.”
Hannah seemed to shudder. “I’d gone on television and talked about his childhood. I talked to journalists about how he’d refused to carry a suicide bomb. That’s a lot for me to handle.”
“And so unfair,” Naomi reminded her. “And not your fault, at all.” She thought for a moment. “Do you think…did he do those things?”
Her daughter turned to her.
“My office? And even…that basement?”
Hannah shut her eyes tight. “I don’t know. I hope not. But…everyone was away over the winter break. I was in New York. He was with the Galls, that’s where he was spending those couple of weeks. And by the time we all returned the basement was there, that’s how we found it. Which only means it isn’t impossible, though, believe me, even that I couldn’t get to right away. And the night of the fire, we had a meeting at Professor Gall’s house. We were working on a statement about institutional openness. Then we all said good night and everyone left. I went back to my room and some of the others were sleeping out or at Sojourner. All I know is, that was the last time I saw Omar. The next morning he wasn’t on campus, and he didn’t get in touch with me, or anyone. So, I mean, what I’m saying is that if someone showed me evidence it was him, I’d probably accept it. And the basement…it could have been anyone, and that means it could have been him. It doesn’t make any sense, but it could have been. That’s as far as I can go, I think.”
“You have an open mind, in other words.”
“Yeah. Open mind. The entire point of a college education.”
She’d said it with sarcasm, but Naomi smiled. “It kind of is. I mean, consider the alternative.”
They sat in silence. Hannah moved closer. She draped a long arm over her mother’s shoulder.
The Devil and Webster Page 33