The Devil and Webster Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Cover design by Kimberly Glyder. Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN: 978-1-4555-9239-5

  E3-20170222-DANF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Small School in the Woods

  Part I: Assemble Chapter One: Naomi Roth’s Defining Moment

  Chapter Two: The Tenant of Radclyffe Hall

  Chapter Three: Into the Woods

  Chapter Four: A Long History of Capitulation

  Chapter Five: The Very Soul of Webster

  Part II: Dissemble Chapter Six: He Lost a Few Years

  Chapter Seven: Pseud’s Corner Office

  Chapter Eight: Permission to Enter

  Chapter Nine: The Ur-Rule

  Chapter Ten: Just Annoying Bureaucratic Shit

  Part III: Symbol Chapter Eleven: The Basement of Sojourner Truth

  Chapter Twelve: This Is the Place

  Chapter Thirteen: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

  Part IV: Fumble Chapter Fourteen: No One Is Blaming You

  Part V: Shambles Chapter Fifteen: Speaking Truth to Power

  Chapter Sixteen: Not That Kind of a Bomb

  Chapter Seventeen: The Point of Looking Closely

  Chapter Eighteen: A Bit of a Mystery

  Chapter Nineteen: Veritas

  Chapter Twenty: The Entire Point of a College Education

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Reading Group Guide

  Newsletters

  For

  Ann Dorothy Zabin Korelitz,

  Nina Ann Korelitz Matza,

  and

  Dorothy Aoife Korelitz Muldoon

  This, Sir, is my case! It is the case not merely of that humble institution, it is the case of every college in our Land…of all those great charities founded by the piety of our ancestors to alleviate human misery, and scatter blessings along the pathway of life…Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak, it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land!

  It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!

  Daniel Webster, 1818

  Prologue

  A Small School in the Woods

  At the exact epicenter of the Webster College campus, which was also the exact epicenter of the open rectangular space known today as the Quad, but formerly (and still formally) as the Billings Lawn, a large and unlovely stump protruded from highly tended grass. The stump was a lonely vestige of the great elms that once loomed over Webster’s buildings and walkways, and filled the forests of New England in general before Dutch elm disease arrived, a half-century earlier. But this particular tree—this particular stump—was not a victim of that arboreal catastrophe; it had been chopped down many years before the first fungus-bearing Scolytus elm-bark beetle had met its first North American victim. That stump went back to the very beginning of Webster’s story and it was a beloved symbol of the college to its graduates. Everyone else had to have it explained to them, but wasn’t that what it meant to be an insider?

  The stump had a proper name, naturally—it was “the Webster Elm”—but nobody used that; everybody just called it the Stump. As in: “We’ll meet at the Stump at ten, okay? We can walk over from there.” Or: “Join us every Sunday at eight for sunrise yoga at the Stump!” Or: “Take Back the Night will leave from the Stump at midnight.” And of course there had been protests at the Stump. Many protests, over the years. Many sit-ins and vigils. Webster was populated by students who cared deeply, passionately about things, who thought globally and acted locally, and who had been admitted to Webster, now one of the most selective colleges in the nation, for precisely those reasons. The Stump was where they went when there was something they wanted, or wanted rid of, or when something terrible happened, on campus or in the world—safe spaces for women, dodgy institutional investments, more choices for vegetarians (back when “vegetarian” was radical enough; no one had even dreamed of “vegan”), the raging (sometimes drunken) Indian who once served as the college’s mascot (a slap in the face to those Native American students the college began to recruit in the ’70s), or the disasters—man-made or natural—the wrestling coach actually struck by lightning on the golf course, the student killed in a driving accident while on a study abroad program in Peru, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the towers, the basketball player dead in his bed from a drunken aspiration of vomit, and once, long ago, when a freshman from the Midwest who turned out to be black arrived on campus to matriculate, an actual encampment at the Stump for nearly a week. So many petitions and expressions of solidarity and rallies and moments of silence! So much empathy and outrage and passionate youthful idealism! But whatever cause or grievance brought Webster students to the Stump, what happened once they got there was always pretty much the same: a clear statement of purpose, a plainly identified leader, and lines of communication smartly established with Webster’s president, whoever he was at the time, after which that president would at least pretend to consider the students’ demands or sympathize with their feelings. But then, once the protesters had picketed a trustees’ retreat or a commencement to emphasize their point, the students would always just…go away. Had they graduated? Or transferred? Had Mom or Dad or whoever was paying Webster’s tuition read them the riot act? It didn’t really matter. The students of Webster College had convened, raised their voices, made their points, been heard…and then, having accomplished these things, they had departed, after which Buildings and Grounds would come along to clear away anything left behind. Then the area around the Stump would be reseeded and fenced off to give it a chance to recover. And that would always be the end of that.

  Exactly none of these prior protests, therefore, would have offered any guidance to Naomi Roth.

  Naomi Roth, who’d arrived at Webster as its first dedicated professor of femin
ist and gender studies and then became its dean of women’s affairs, and ultimately its first female president, and whose experience at Webster that awful year would come to seem…well, many things: inevitable, unforgiving…tragic, obviously. There were no crucial lessons in the college’s past, no kernels of sage advice from those former Webster presidents still living. It was all a new terrain, baffling and undiscovered, and once the thing began there seemed to be no way of stopping it, at least no way beyond the many ways she did try, and despite how sincerely she offered negotiation, then—to be blunt—capitulation. Nothing worked, and it even occurred to her that what began at the Stump that fall was not so much a protest in the way that she, a former student activist herself, had always understood “protest,” but rather an undefined compulsion to exchange ideas about what was wrong with Webster and wrong with the world. It was almost as if each of the students at the Stump encampment had come with some personal grievance, and in the airing of these grievances there emerged a general, generational, miasma of discontent: about Webster, the country, the way things were, that simply hung over the Billings Lawn and the campus itself, and represented, as Betty Friedan might have said, a problem that had no name. But, it was still Naomi Roth’s problem: first ignored by her, and then irritating to her, and then alarming to her, and then, all at once, intractably complex and a threat to everything she had done at Webster, and everything she was trying to do.

  It was Naomi herself who noted the deference paid to one young man, a dark and slight kid in a brown hoodie and heavy rubber boots, caked in November mud. And it was Naomi who asked who he was and began to wonder, possibly aloud, whether he would like to represent the group and talk with her in a calmer way about what was at issue here, and how the administration—how she, Naomi—could begin to make it right.

  And so: Naomi found him. She appointed him—you could make a case for that. And everything that happened later, to the college, to Naomi herself, but mostly, of course, to him, was her fault. You could make a case for that, too, and even if you couldn’t, Naomi herself could. She always would.

  His name, it would emerge, was Omar, and he was a sophomore from Oklahoma, though he was not, of course, really from Oklahoma. He was from Oklahoma the way someone with an Irish name was from Massachusetts, or someone with a Swedish name was from Minnesota, only not even that, because the Oklahoma address on his Webster application just happened to be that of the foster family he was living with at the time, after earlier stints with other foster families in Milwaukee and Houston. Why Oklahoma? It was one of those questions you sensed there was no point in asking. Why Milwaukee? Why Houston? Why America in the first place?

  Another question not worth asking, but for the opposite reason.

  America because, as Omar would later tell it—to his comrades in the finally named movement, Webster Dissent, to the earnest student journalists from the Webster Daily and the alternative Webster Contra, the Webster Tonight host on the college radio station, the Yale Daily News reporter and the Hartford Courant reporter and the AP reporter and the extremely famous reporter from NBC News and the also extremely famous host of Today—America had been his dream, for so many years in the refugee camp, far away in his cherished, blighted land.

  His dream among open sewers and plastic bags flapping in the dry air and the sacks of grain from World Concern and the brave little soccer skirmishes on the broken ground under the lights of the perimeter fence…far, far into the distance. The sorrow and boredom and filth, the anguish of watching his loved ones taken, one after the next until he was alone, the ache of wasted time as other boys in other countries got to study, dream, plan, move forward into their futures while he could only sit still: immobilized by frustration, tormented by longing.

  Such a terrible story. Such a terrible wonderful story because…look how Omar had journeyed from there to here, from that terrifying sad place to this lovely safe campus: buildings of gray stone, pretty fluttering trees, straight walkways to guide your footfalls as you progressed from destination to destination, and that single, misshapen stump left over from the past, to which you might tie yourself as to the mast of a listing ship. You couldn’t save everyone in the world, of course, but wasn’t it nice to think that a smart boy from such an awful life, burdened by so much suffering, so many losses, might still, incredibly, find himself at a place like Webster College?

  Webster College. Once a school of the richest, the WASPiest, the most loutish and most conservative of American men, and then later, after its extraordinary transition in the 1970s, the institution of choice for creative and left-leaning intellectuals of all genders and ethnic varieties. “A small school in the woods, from which, by the Grace of God, we might know His will” had been its motto in the early days, when Josiah Webster hacked his way north from King’s College (later Columbia) to establish his Webster’s Indian Academy beneath the towering elms. Two centuries later, with nary a Native American student in nearly that long, those words—like so much else about Webster—had been revised: “A small school in the woods, from which, by scholarship and thoughtful community, we might know the Universe.”

  That was how things stood when Naomi Roth became the college’s seventeenth president, and Omar Khayal, a sophomore from Oklahoma, Milwaukee, Houston, and a refugee camp under Palestinian stars, its doomed and mystifying icon.

  Part I

  Assemble

  Chapter One

  Naomi Roth’s Defining

  Moment

  What happened at Webster that year was harrowing, but it wasn’t the first harrowing scenario Naomi Roth had faced, either as Webster’s president or, indeed, in her prior roles at the college: professor, dean of women’s affairs, and reluctant member of the search committee for the very job she’d end up occupying herself.

  That earlier skirmish (later she would think of it as a baptism of sorts) had been the Radclyffe Hall mess a decade earlier, more or less concurrent with the announcement that Logan Coulson, Webster’s sixteenth president, intended to retire. Radclyffe Hall had brought the college, and Naomi as its situational spokesperson, the kind of attention that generated snark on Weekend Update and the gleeful nastiness of right-wingers everywhere. It also brought figures from Naomi’s life in its many phases—her New York childhood, college in upstate New York, the years in northern New Hampshire (first as a VISTA volunteer then as a leftover from some nonexistent social revolution), and later graduate school and academia—poking back into her life, with emails to her Webster address, messages on her office phone, and a deeply unwelcome letter from her ex-husband, enclosing three glossy photos of himself with wife number 2 and kids (which went straight into the garbage, but which having been seen could not be unseen). There had even been one painstakingly written note on pink paper from a third cousin in Florida (the envelope containing a folded AP clipping from a Fort Lauderdale weekly that made Naomi look very old and grievously fat) admonishing her to do something about her hair, because she had been “such a pretty girl when you were little.” The whole crazy—and crazily overblown—thing, Naomi now understood, had utterly changed her life.

  The incident began, as these things so often did, with a whimper, not a bang, and that whimper took the form of a Webster room selection in accordance with a sophomore’s designated lottery number, an enviably low number, as it happened. The sophomore’s choice of dwelling had been a single room on the third floor of Radclyffe Hall. Radclyffe was one of a number of large, once private homes that had been converted to themed residential housing when the college embarked on a wave of new construction—Science Complex, Language Cluster, Arts Neighborhood—in the ’80s. They ran in an opulent line down Fairweather Road, which was just beyond the athletic center and bordered its fields. First off the corner was the Co-Op House (genially socialist, with rotating food preparation, but not outright hippie), then the French House, then the German House, then the Sojourner Truth House, then the Gandhi Collective Center (those were the hippies), then the First Nations C
enter (Native American students in the ’80s had preferred this Canadian moniker, for some reason, and it had stuck), and then Radclyffe Hall, after which fraternities and sororities stretched to the end of the block. Radclyffe Hall, a squarish three-story structure, vaguely Queen Anne in style, with shared public rooms on the ground floor, was named not for the lesbian novelist but for a gruff 1908 graduate named James Radclyffe, who’d made his pile the old-fashioned way—by inheriting it—and would have been horrified, horrified, at what his namesake building had become. The “Hall” was added eventually, as must have seemed inevitable, and after a few years people just assumed that the name was a kind of pun about The Well of Loneliness, even though not all of the women who lived there were gay. Gay wasn’t the point; female was the point. “A living environment for women within the Webster community,” ran the description in the Webster Housing Handbook. Translation: Women Only.

  The sophomore, whose name was Nell Jones-Givens, would later claim to have been surprised by the impact of her room selection, which bubbled and brewed for a few weeks before, just prior to midterms, two women who lived at Radclyffe came to the dean of students’ office with an official objection. The dean, a perpetually irritated man named Bob Stacek who had been at Webster since his own undergraduate days, had swiftly drop-kicked the matter to Naomi, whether as chair of the Women’s Studies Department or as dean of women’s affairs she was never sure. Not that it mattered. Bob’s distaste for the situation was plain; indeed, he acted as if he’d been personally asked to dig bloody tampons out of the Radclyffe Hall toilets. And Naomi, who until that time had been so underinvolved in matters of college administration that she routinely spent her time in meetings surreptitiously making to-do lists, understood that this particular bell was tolling for her. And she had to admit: No one on campus was remotely as well prepared to address the issue at hand as herself, a tenured professor of women’s studies and gender studies, and author of the respectably read (for academic nonfiction) Divide and Conquer: Femaleness and Feminism in the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave.