by Erich Segal
“In that case, Dickie,” Andrew interrupted his old buddy’s reverie, “we’d better lug it up the stairs. If a Cliffie passes while we’re standing here you might just have to perform in public.”
“Don’t think I couldn’t,” Newall answered with bravado, quickly adding, “come on let’s get this paraphernalia up the stairs. Andy and I’ll take the couch.” And then, turning to the largest member of their trio, he called out, “Can you manage that chair by yourself, Wigglesworth?”
“No sweat,” the tall athlete replied laconically. And with that he lifted the huge armchair, placed it on his head as if it were a large padded football helmet, and started up the stairwell.
“That’s our mighty Mike,” Newall quipped. “Fair Harvard’s future crew immortal and the first man from this college who’ll play Tarzan in the movies.”
“Just three more steps. Please, you guys,” Danny Rossi implored.
“Hey, listen, kid, the deal was we’d deliver it. You didn’t say there would be stairs. We always take pianos in an elevator.”
“Come on,” Danny protested, “you guys knew that they don’t have any in Harvard dorms. What’s it going to take for you to deliver this up just three more steps into my room?”
“Another twenty bucks,” replied one of the burly delivery men.
“Hey, look, the damn piano only cost me thirty-five.”
“Take it or leave it, kid. Or you’ll be singin’ in the rain.”
“I can’t afford twenty bucks,” Danny moaned.
“Tough titty, Harvard boy,” growled the more talkative of the two movers. And they ambled off.
Danny sat there on the steps of Holworthy for several minutes pondering his great dilemma. And then the notion came to him.
He placed the rickety stool in position, lifted the lid of the ancient upright, and began, first tentatively and then with increasing assurance, to animate the fading ivories with “The Varsity Drag.”
Since most of the windows in the Yard were open because of the Indian Summer weather, it was not long before a crowd surrounded him. Some spirited freshmen even began to dance. To get in shape for conquests up at Radcliffe and on other social battlefields.
He was terrific. And his classmates were genuinely thrilled to discover what a talent they had in their midst. (“The guy’s another Peter Nero,” someone remarked.) At last Danny finished—or thought he had. But everybody clapped and shouted for more. So he started taking requests for pieces as varied as “The Saber Dance” and “Three Coins in the Fountain.”
At last, a university policeman happened on the scene. It was just what Danny had been hoping for.
“Listen,” the officer growled, “you can’t play a pianer outside in the Yard. You gotta move this here instrument into a dorm.”
The freshmen booed.
“Hey, listen,” Danny Rossi said to his enthusiastic audience. “Why don’t we all bring this piano up the stairs to my room and then I’ll play all night.”
There were cheers of assent as half a dozen of the strongest present started carrying Danny’s upright with festive alacrity.
“Wait a minute,” the cop warned, “remember, no playing after ten P.M. Them are the rules.”
More hisses, boos, and grunts as Danny Rossi politely answered, “Yes, sir, Officer. I promise I’ll only play till dinnertime.”
Though he, of course, was not privileged to be moving from the cubicle he’d occupied throughout his high school days, Ted Lambros nonetheless spent much of that afternoon purchasing essential items in The Coop.
First and foremost, a green bookbag, a must for every serious Harvard man—a utilitarian talisman that carried the tools of your trade and identified you as a bona fide scholar. He also bought a large, rectangular crimson banner whose white felt letters proudly boasted “Harvard—Class of 1958.” And, while other freshmen were hanging identical chauvinistic fabrics on the walls of their dormitories in the Yard, Ted hung his over the desk in his tiny bedroom.
For good measure, he acquired an impressive-looking pipe from Leavitt & Pierce which he would someday learn to smoke.
As the afternoon waned, he checked and rechecked his carefully purchased secondhand wardrobe and inwardly pronounced himself ready to meet tomorrow’s Harvard challenge.
And then, the magic aura broken, he headed up Massachusetts Avenue to The Marathon, where he would have to don the same old hokey costume in order to serve lamb to the lions of Cambridge.
It was a day of standing on lines. First in the morning at Memorial Hall, and then just after 6:00 P.M., when the dinner column began to form at the Freshman Union, winding outside, down its granite steps, and almost into Quincy Street. Naturally, each freshman wore a tie and jacket—although the garments varied in color and quality, depending on the means and background of the wearer. The rules explicitly proclaimed that the only civilized attire in which a Harvard man could take a meal.
But these formally accoutred gentlemen were in for a rude surprise. There were no dishes.
Instead, their food was scooped out into a tan plastic doggy bowl divided into unequal sections of undetermined purpose. The only rational compartment was the cavity within the hub of this contraption, which could hold a glass of milk.
Ingenious as it was, it could not hide the fact that freshman food was absolutely wretched.
What was that gray sliced stuff slapped at them at the first station? The serving biddies claimed it was meat. It looked like innersoles to most and tasted much that way to all. It was no consolation that they could eat all they wanted. For who would ever want more of this unchewable enigma?
The only real salvation was the ice cream. It was plentiful and filling. And to an eighteen-year-old this can compensate for almost any culinary lapse. And did so in prodigious quantities.
No one really bitched in earnest. For, although not all of them admitted it, they were excited just to be there. The tasteless food gave every person in The Class an opportunity to be superior to something. Nearly all of them were used to being number one in some domain. The Class contained no fewer than 287 high school valedictorians, each painfully aware that only one of them was good enough to match that achievement at Harvard.
By some uncanny instinct, the jocks had already started to discover one another. At one round table in the outer circle, Clancy Roberts was subtly campaigning for the freshman hockey captaincy. At yet another, football linemen, who had met an hour earlier at Dillon Field House, savored what would be among the last meals they would be obliged to take with the plebs. For, once the pads were on, they’d be dining at the training table in the V-Club, where the meat, though no less gray, would be served twice as thick.
The huge, wood-paneled hall reverberated with the loud chatter of nervous freshmen. You could tell who had gone to high schools and who to prep schools. For the latter dressed in matching plumage—shetland jackets and rep ties—and ate in larger groups, whose conversation and laughter were homogenized. The would-be physicist from Omaha, the poet from Missouri, and the future lawyer-politician from Atlanta ate alone. Or, if after twenty-four hours they could still stand them, with their roommates.
Harvard did not choose your living companions without much deliberation and analysis. Indeed, some keen sadistic genius must have spent innumerable hours on this strange apportionment. And what a task it was—a smorgasbord containing eleven hundred wholly different dishes. What would you serve with what? What would go well and what give interpersonal dyspepsia? Someone in the administration knew. Or at least thought he did.
Of course, they asked you for your preferences. Nonsmoke, athlete, interested in art, et cetera. Preppies naturally requested and received accommodations with their buddies. But then, they were the few conformists in this monstrous colony of oddballs, where exceptions were the norm.
What, for example, could they do with Danny Rossi, whose singular request had been a dormitory as near as possible to Paine Hall, the music building? Put him with another must t
ype? No, that might risk a clash of egos. And what Harvard wanted was harmonious tranquility among its freshmen, who that week were in the process of receiving the most agonizing lesson of their lives. They were about to learn that the world did not spin uniquely around them.
For reasons inexplicable to everyone except the college powers, Danny Rossi was assigned to share his rooms in Holworthy with Kingman Wu, a Chinese future architect from San Diego (perhaps the link was California), and Bernie Ackerman, a mathematics whiz and champion fencer from New Trier High School in a suburb of Chicago.
As they all ate dinner at the Union that evening, it was Bernie who tried to puzzle out why they three had been thrown together by the mandarins of Harvard roommate-ism.
“It’s the stick,” he offered as a solution. “That’s the only symbol that connects us three.”
“Is that supposed to be profound or just obscene?” asked Kingman Wu.
“Hell, don’t you see it?” Ackerman persisted. “Danny going to be a great conductor. What do those guys wave at a orchestra? Batons. Me, I’ve got the biggest stick, ’cause I’m fencer. Get it now?”
“And me?” asked Wu.
“What do architects most often draw with? Pencils, pens. There’s the three sticks and the solution to the mystery of our being put together.”
The Chinaman was not impressed. “You’ve just awarded me the smallest one.” He frowned.
“Well, you know where to stick it, then,” Ackerman suggested with a self-congratulatory chuckle.
And thus the first eternal enmity among The Class of ’58 was born.
In spite of his outward self-assurance, Jason Gilbert was nervous about going to the Union on his own for that inaugural repast. So desperate was he that he actually sought out D.D. in order to propose they go together. Alas, his roommate was already back before Jason had even dressed.
“I was the third on line,” he boasted. “I had eleven ice creams. That’ll really please my mom.”
So Jason ventured out alone. As luck would have it, near the steps of Widener Library he ran into a guy he’d played (and beaten) in the quarter finals of the Greater Metropolitan Private Schools Tourney. The fellow proudly introduced his quondam rival to his current roommates as “the S.O.B. who’s going to knock me off for number one. Unless that guy from California beats us both.”
Jason was happy to join them, and the talk was mostly of the tennis court. And the wretched food. And doggy bowls, of course.
ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY
September 21, 1954
My roommates and I celebrated our first night at Harvard by not eating there. We elected instead to go into Boston, have a quick meal at the Union Oyster House, and then move on to Scollay Square, the sole oasis of sleaze in the city’s desert of puritanical decency.
Here we attended the edifying spectacle at the Old Howard. This venerable burlesque theater has housed the legendary strippers of the age, not least of whom was tonight’s attraction, Irma the Body.
After the performance (if that’s the word for it), we all dared one another to go backstage and invite the leading lady to join us sophisticates for a drop of champagne. First we thought of composing an elegant epistle (“Dear Miss Body …”), but then decided a live emissary would be more effective.
At this point there were huge piles of braggadocio being hurled back and forth. Each of us showed our tremendous latent courage by pretending to be on our way in. Yet no one took more than two steps toward that stage door.
I then came up with a brilliant solution: “Hey, why don’t we all go?”
We all eyed one another to see who’d be first to respond. But no one did.
Then, in a sudden, inexplicable fit of conscientiousness, we unanimously decided that discretion bade us get some sleep to prepare us for the rigors of a Harvard education. The spirit, we reasoned, must take precedence over the flesh.
Alas, poor Irma, you don’t know what you missed.
Twelve freshmen stood in a straight line, stark naked. They were of varying somatotypes, ranging from corpulent to frail (Danny Rossi was among them.) Their physiques were as disparate as Mickey Mouse and Adonis (Jason Gilbert was also among the dozen). Before them stretched a wooden bench some three feet off the ground, and behind it an imperious gymnasium official who had menacingly introduced himself as “Colonel” Jackson.
“Awright,” he barked. “You freshmen are about to take the famous Harvard Step Test. Which, as you don’t have to be a Harvard man to figger out, involves the stepping up and stepping down on this here step. Clear so far? Now, this here test was devised during the war so’s we could check our G.I.s’ fitness. And it must have worked, ’cause we beat Hitler, didn’t we?”
He paused to await some expression of patriotic enthusiasm on the part of his charges. But, losing patience, he continued laying down the rules.
“Okay, when I blow my whistle, you start climbing on and off the bench. We’ll be playing an LP and also I’ll be beating time with this here stick. Now this procedure will continue for five entire minutes. And I’m watching all of you, so don’t goof off or miss a step or you’ll be majoring in P.T. exercises the whole darn year.”
Danny trembled inwardly as this officious ogre rambled on. Shit, he told himself, these other guys are so much taller than I. For them it’s just like stepping on a curb. For me this lousy bench is like Mount Everest. It isn’t fair.
“Awright,” Colonel Jackson snapped. “When I say go, you start stepping. And keep in time!’
Go!
And they were off.
As an LP blared stridently, the monster pounded his stick with relentless, debilitating regularity. Up-two-three-four, up-two-three-four, up-two-three-four.
After a few dozen steps, Danny was beginning to tire. He wished the colonel’s beat would slacken even slightly, but the man was an infernal metronome. Still, at least it would soon be over—he prayed.
“Half a minute!” Jackson called out.
Thank Cod, thought Danny, just a little more and I’ll be able to stop.
But an agonizing thirty seconds thereafter, the official bellowed, “One minute down, just four to go!”
No, thought Danny, not another four minutes. I can barely breathe. Then he reminded himself that if he quit, he’d have to take a gym class with this sadist in addition to his other courses! And so he mustered all his inner fortitude, the courage that had once fueled him on the running track, and fought beyond the limits of his pain.
“Come on, you puny carrot top,” the torture master bellowed. “I can see you’re skipping steps. Keep going, or I’ll make you do an extra minute.”
Sweat was pouring down all of the dozen freshmen’s limbs. And even splashing onto their neighbors.
“Two minutes. Just three more to go.”
Now Danny sensed in desperation that he’d never make it. He could barely lift his legs. He was sure he’d fall and break an arm. Farewell to concertizing. All because of this ridiculously useless exercise in animality.
Just then a quiet voice next to him said, “Take it easy, kid. Try to breathe normally. If you miss a step, I’ll do my best to block you.”
Danny wearily looked up. It was a blond and muscular classmate who had uttered this encouragement. An athlete in such splendid shape that he had breath enough to give advice while he was stepping regularly up and down. All Dan could do was nod in gratitude. He steeled himself and persevered.
“Four minutes,” cried the Torquemada in a sweatshirt. “Only one to go. You guys are doing pretty good—for Harvard men.”
Danny Rossi’s legs were suddenly rigid. He couldn’t take another step.
“Don’t quit now,” his neighbor whispered. “Come on, babe, just another lousy sixty seconds.”
Then Danny felt a hand reach underneath his elbow and pull him up. His limbs unlocked, and stiffly he resumed the grueling climb to nowhere.
And then at last, deliverance. The whole nightmare was over.
“Awright
. Everybody sit down on the bench and put your hand on the neck of the guy on your right. We’re going to take pulses.”
The freshmen, now initiated in this sweaty rite of passage, gladly collapsed and struggled to regain their breath.
When Colonel Jackson had recorded all pertinent fitness information, the twelve exhausted freshmen were instructed to take showers and proceed, still in their birthday suits, down two flights of stairs to the pool. Because, as the overbearing instructor so aptly expressed it, “Whoever cannot swim fifty yards cannot graduate this university.”
As they stood side by side under the showers washing off the sweat of persecution, Danny said to the classmate whose magnanimous assistance would allow him countless extra hours at the keyboard, “Hey, I can never thank you enough for saving me out there.”
“That’s okay. It’s a stupid test to start with. And I pity anyone who’d have to listen to that ape give orders for a whole semester. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Danny Rossi,” said the smaller man, offering a soapy hand.
“Jason Gilbert,” the athletic type replied, and added with a grin, “can you swim okay, Dan?”
“Yes, thanks.” Danny smiled. “I’m from California.”
“California, and you’re not a jock?”
“My sport is the piano. Do you like the classics?”
“Nothing heavier than Johnny Mathis. But still, I’d like to hear you play. Maybe after dinner sometime in the Union, huh?”
“Sure,” Danny said, “but if not, I promise you a pair of tickets for my first public performance.”
“Gee, are you that good?”
“Yes,” said Danny Rossi quietly, without embarrassment.
Then they both descended to the pool and, in adjoining lanes, Jason with flamboyant speed, Danny with deliberate caution, swam the obligatory fifty yards that marked their final physical requirement for a degree at Harvard.
