The Class

by Erich Segal

  Ted Lambros laughed.

  “Andy, Andy, stop being a goddamn puritan. Everything in life doesn’t have to be done the hard way. Look, why not meet me in front of Brigham’s at twelve-fifteen tomorrow? The little blonde ice-cream scooper is a real firecracker.”

  He stood up and yawned. “Listen, it’s getting real late and I’ve got a nine o’clock. See you tomorrow.”

  Andrew Eliot sat there shell-shocked. He had not expected things to move so fast. There were a million questions he still wanted to ask.

  Outside Brigham’s the next day, he greeted Ted with annoyance.

  “What the hell kept you? I’ve been waiting for hours.”

  “Hey, I’m right on time. I had a class till noon. What’s the matter with you? C’mon, let’s get the show on the road.”

  “Wait, wait, wait, Lambros. I’ve got to know what to do.” Ted answered softly, “Listen, Eliot, just walk inside with me, order a cone, and when no one else is around I’ll introduce you to Lorraine.”

  “Who’s Lorraine?”

  “She’s your passport to paradise, baby. She’s a really good kid and just loves Harvard guys.”

  “But, Ted, what exactly do I say?”

  “Just give her one of your charming smiles and ask if she’d like to have a drink this afternoon. And Lorraine being Lorraine, she’ll say yes.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because she’s never said ‘no’ to anything in her life.”

  She came over the moment they reached the counter. Ted had not been lying—the girl was a real looker. As they chatted amicably, she leaned forward and Andrew could not keep from gazing down her carelessly unbuttoned uniform.

  Wow, he thought, can this really be happening to me? God, I wish I’d spent more time rereading those manuals last night.

  “So, what house are you in?” Lorraine inquired.

  “Uh—Eliot,” he replied without elaboration. Then he felt Ted’s elbow in his ribs and added, “Uh—would you like to come over this afternoon?”

  “Sure,” she replied. “Parietals start at four, don’t they? I’ll just meet you at the gate. ’Scuse me now, I got customers getting impatient.”

  “Well?” asked Ted when they were outside again. “Are you all set now?”

  Set? He was about to pass out.

  “Lambros,” he pleaded, “couldn’t you give me just a few tips? I mean about making the first move.”

  Ted stopped as they were both in the middle of Harvard Square in a sea of noontime students.

  “Andy,” he said indulgently, “say something casual like, ‘Lorraine, why don’t we go to the bedroom and fool around?’ ”

  “Isn’t that a little crude?”

  “Jesus, Eliot, she’s not Doris Day! I mean, she really loves to make it with Harvard guys.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly,” he repeated. And then as a final gesture he reached into his pocket and put something into Andrew’s hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a cultural first,” he replied, smiling. “You just got a Trojan from a Greek.”

  ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY

  September 30, 1956

  Had a really terrific day.

  I’ll never forget Ted Lambros for the favor he did me.

  As a matter of fact, I’ll never forget Lorraine, either.

  Danny Rossi returned to Cambridge in September with a revised view of the world—and himself. Artur Rubinstein had praised his pianistic skills. He’d conducted a real symphony—if only for a minute.

  Though he had hardly become a Casanova, his few brief encounters (two, to be precise) had led him to discover a new erogenous zone: the keyboard. He would now not be intimidated even by Brigitte Bardot—as long as there was a Steinway in the room.

  To become a triple threat musician, all that remained was for him to start composing seriously. As promised, Walter Piston took him in his seminar and Danny began to write in earnest.

  But he was growing ever more impatient to be free of all the trappings of “studenthood.” He had had enough of being known as some famous person’s pupil, protégé, or favorite. He now bridled at such distinctions. He was prepared to be a great man on his own.

  The Composition Seminar disappointed him. For it seemed to consist only of exercises in the style of various past masters. When Danny complained of his frustration at the “limiting” assignments, Professor Piston tried to clarify the logic of the method.

  “All great writers, whether they make prose or music, start by imitation. That’s what gives a man a sense of style. And only after that can he begin to forge his own. Be patient, Danny. After all, young Mozart wrote at first like pseudo-Haydn, and even Beethoven began by imitating Mozart. Don’t be so impulsive, you’re in august company.”

  Danny heard the cautionary words but really didn’t listen. Events at Tanglewood that summer had turned his head. While dutifully fulfilling all of Piston’s course demands, he started to seek outlets for expressing his own musical personality.

  And then the opportunity found him. His phone rang late one afternoon as he was finishing an essay at his desk.

  “Is this Danny Rossi?” asked a slightly nervous female voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Maria Pastore, president of the Radcliffe Dance Club. And—I hope you don’t think this is presumptuous—the group would like to put on an original ballet this spring. Naturally your name was the first one we all thought of. Please tell me if this is imposing and I won’t go on.…”

  “No, no,” Danny encouraged, “I’m very interested.”

  “You are?” Maria said delightedly.

  “Sure,” Danny answered. “Who would be the choreographer?”

  “Uh, well,” Maria responded shyly, “sort of me. I mean, I’m not a total neophyte. I’ve studied with Martha Graham and—”

  “Please,” Danny said with exaggerated magnanimity, “we’re all just undergraduates. Why don’t we have dinner at Eliot and talk it over?”

  “Gee, that would be terrific. Should I meet you near the superintendent’s office at, say, five-thirty or so?”

  “No,” Danny answered. “Why not come around five? We can talk things over in my room before we eat.”

  And inwardly he thought, If this Maria turns out to be a dog, I just won’t take her to the dining hall.

  “Your room?” Her voice was slightly nervous once again.

  “Uh—yes,” he answered suavely. “I mean, I’ve got a piano here and everything. If not, we can meet sometime in Paine Hall. But I should definitely be near a keyboard.”

  “Oh no, that’s okay,” Maria Pastore quickly responded, her tone belying her words, “your room would be fine. So I’ll see you Wednesday at five. I’m really excited about this. Thanks.”

  She hung up. And Danny thought, I wonder how excited I’ll be.

  At precisely 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, November 14, there was a knock on Danny Rossi’s door.

  “Come in,” he called out as he straightened his tie and then—took a sniff. He had somewhat overdone it with the shaving lotion. The room fairly reeked of Old Spice.

  He rushed to the window and raised it a few inches. Then he opened the door.

  “Hello,” said Maria Pastore.

  She was so tall that at first Danny did not even see her face. But what he did perceive was interesting enough for his gaze to linger before moving upward.

  She was extremely pretty, too. Long black hair framed her wide, soulful Mediterranean eyes. No question about it, they’d be eating dinner at Eliot that night. And many jaws would drop in admiration.

  “Thanks for giving me a chance to talk to you,” Maria bubbled with enthusiasm.

  “It’s my pleasure,” Danny Rossi replied gallantly. “Your idea interests me.”

  “I haven’t actually explained it to you yet,” she answered shyly.

  “Oh,” said Danny Rossi. “I mean, the notion of composing a ballet is really attra
ctive. Uh—could I take your coat?”

  “No, thanks,” Maria responded diffidently, “it’s kind of cold in here.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Danny, hurrying to close the window. “I like fresh air. You know, it sort of keeps your head clear.”

  He motioned for her to sit down. She did so, and throughout their conversation remained bundled up. Danny sensed that it was not merely because of the wintry temperature.

  She’s shy, he thought. But at least I’ll get to see what she’s been covering when we get to the dining hall.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “No, thank you. It’s really not good for dancers.”

  “I meant just a little drop of sherry.” (He believed the undergraduate maxim, “Whisky makes them frisky, but sherry makes them merry.”)

  “I really don’t like alcohol,” Maria said in a tone that was almost apologetic.

  “Coke?” asked Danny.

  “Fine.”

  As he listened intently to her ideas for a short ballet, Danny wondered whether Maria could sense that he was taking off her clothes as he was gazing at her. But in fact she was so nervous that she barely noticed anything.

  It took her half an hour to present her concepts.

  She had gone through the Idylls of Theocritus, the Eclogues of Virgil, and made some general notes from Robert Graves’s Greek Mythology, gathering enough material for a potential ballet scenario that she would call Arcadia (“for example, Apollo and Daphne could be an exciting sequence”). The principal dancers could be shepherds and shepherdesses, and for comic relief there could be a recurring motif of grotesque little satyrs running on and off stage chasing nymphs.

  Danny thought the idea was terrific. This was going to be one hell of a stimulating project.

  The next day at lunch, some guys he didn’t know passed by his table to remark on the extraordinary pulchritude of his dinner date the previous night. Danny smiled with masculine bravado.

  Yeah, he thought, the Eliot House dining hall has never seen the likes of her. When certain cruder types came straight out and inquired, “Are you scoring with her, Rossi?” he avoided the whole issue with genteel protectiveness of Miss Pastore’s honor.

  But the truth was as he walked her all the way back to Radcliffe he had concluded that he probably would never even get to kiss her. She was much too tall. And though the plans they made would bring her to his room on many future afternoons, he stood no chance of making progress.

  For she was five foot ten of Snow White—who, of course, was just platonic friends with all the dwarfs.

  ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY

  November 12, 1956

  There is a common misconception that preppies are perpetually cool. Calm. Unruffled. Never get ulcers. Never even sweat or get their hair messed up. Well, let me put the lie to that. A preppie hath eyes. He hath hands, organs, passions. If you prick him, he will bleed. And if you hurt him, he may even cry.

  Thus it was with my longtime friend and roommate, Michael Wigglesworth, Boston Brahmin, tall and handsome, stroke on the crew and general good guy.

  None of this, not even the genuine affection of his teammates and his buddies in the Porc or the admiration of his many friends in Eliot House, could keep his mind intact. When he went home to Fairfield for the weekend, his fiancée calmly informed him that, upon reflection, she’d decided to marry some older guy—who was nearly thirty.

  Wig seemed to take all this with stoic equanimity. At least till he got back to school. Then one evening, as he was going through the dinner line, he cheerfully remarked to one of the serving biddies, “I’m going to kill the Christmas turkey.”

  Since he was giggling at the time, the matrons laughed as well. Then, from inside his baggy, well-worn J. Press jacket, Wig produced a fire ax. And, swinging wildly, he proceeded to chase a turkey—which apparently only he was able to see—around the perimeter of the dining room.

  Tables overturned, plates flew in the air. Everybody—tutors, students, Cliffe guests—scattered frantically. Someone called the campus cops, but when they arrived they too were scared shitless. The only guy who had the cool to deal with the situation was senior tutor Whitney Porter. He slowly approached Wig and with unwavering calm asked if Michael was finished with the hatchet.

  This innocent question, so ingenuously posed, made Wig stop swinging and take stock. He didn’t answer right away. I think he was gradually beginning to realize that there was a lethal weapon in his hand, for a purpose that was not entirely clear to him.

  With the same uncanny tranquility, Whitney again asked Michael for the ax.

  Wigglesworth was nothing if not polite. He immediately offered the implement (handle first) to the senior tutor, saying, “Yes, sir, Dr. Porter.”

  By then a couple of doctors from the Health Service had shown up. The medics led Mike off, and, no doubt to their eternal gratitude, Dr. Porter insisted on riding with them to the hospital.

  I went to visit him as soon as they would let me. And it really broke my heart to see our Harvard Hercules looking so helpless. And alternating between tears and laughter. The doctor said he would “need a lot of rest.” In other words, they really didn’t know when—or probably even how—he would get better.

  Ten days after Michael Wigglesworth’s precipitous departure, Master Finley called Andrew into his office for a chat. It began, as so many of their previous conversations had, with many repetitions of his surname in various tones. The Eliot declarative, the Eliot meditative, the Eliot interrogative. These prefatory invocations once pronounced, he then said, “Eliot, I regard you not only as an eponym but a true epigone.”

  (Right after the conversation, Andrew sprinted back to his dictionary to discover that he had been praised first for stemming from the family that gave the name to his house, and second for being worthy of that name.)

  “Eliot, Eliot,” Master Finley repeated, “I am sorely troubled by the fate of Wigglesworth. I have been searching my heart and wondering whether there were signs I should have noticed. But I always regarded him as a veritable Ajax.”

  Andrew was slightly lost. The only Ajax he knew was a foaming cleanser.

  “You know, Eliot,” the scholar continued, “Ajax, ‘the wall of the Achaians’—second only to Achilles himself.”

  “Yes,” Andrew agreed, “Wig was a real ‘wall.’ ”

  “I would see him every morning,” the master continued, “as the crew stroked past my window. He looked hale.”

  “The crew is going to miss him.”

  “We all shall,” said Finley, shaking his silver mane sadly. “We all shall.”

  The great man’s next words were not unexpected.

  “Eliot, Eliot,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Eliot, Michael’s untimely departure leaves us with a space both in our house and in our hearts. And while one cannot find a second Wigglesworth, perhaps Destiny has played a hand in all of this.”

  He stood up, as if to spread his rhetorical wings.

  “Eliot,” he continued, “who can be unaware of the tragic events of recent days? As, after Troy fell, countless innocent inhabitants were iactati aequore toto … reliquiae Danaum atque immitis Achilli …”

  Andrew had had enough prep school Latin to realize the master was quoting the Aeneid. Was he about to say that Wig’s place was going to be filled by a Trojan student?

  Finley was frantically pacing the room, frequently gazing out onto the river where hale Mike Wigglesworth would never more be seen, when he suddenly whirled and fixed Andrew with a coruscating gaze.

  “Eliot,” he concluded, “George Keller will be arriving tomorrow evening.”

  GEORGE KELLER

  Something sinister in the tone

  Told me my secret must be known:

  Word I was in the house alone

  Somehow must have gotten abroad,

  Word I was in my life alone,

  Word I had no one left but God.

  ROBERT FROST


  CLASS OF 1901

  Budapest, October 1956

  George’s childhood had been dominated by two monsters: Joseph Stalin—and his own father. The only difference between the two was that Stalin terrorized millions, and his father merely terrorized George.

  True enough, “Istvan the Terrible,” as George often thought of him, had never actually killed or even imprisoned anybody. He was merely a minor official in the Hungarian People’s Working Party who used Marxist-Leninist jargon to castigate his son.

  “Why does he flagellate me?” George would complain to his sister, Marika. “I’m a better socialist than he is. I mean, I believe in the theory, anyway. And even though I think the party stinks, I’ve joined for his sake. Why is he so fed up?”

  Marika tried to mollify her brother. And comfort him. For, try as he did to deny it, George was genuinely upset by the old man’s disapproval.

  “Well,” she said softly, “he’d like your hair a little shorter.…”

  “What? Does he want me to shave my skull? I mean, lots of my friends wear Elvis Presley ducktails.”

  “He doesn’t like your friends either, Gyuri.”

  “I don’t know why,” said George, shaking his head in consternation. “They’re all sons of party members. Some are big shots, too. And they’re a lot easier on their children than Father is.”

  “He just wants you to stay home and study, Gyuri. Be honest, you’re out almost every evening.”

  “You be honest, Marika. I graduated first in my gimnazium class. I’m studying Soviet law—”

  At that very moment Istvan Kolozsdi entered the room and, immediately taking command, finished his son’s sentence.

  “You are at the university because of my party status, yompetz, and don’t forget it. If you were merely a clever Catholic or Jew, it wouldn’t matter how high your grades were. You would be sweeping some provincial street. Be grateful you are the son of a party minister.”

  “Assistant minister,” George corrected him, “in the Farm Collectivization Office.”

  “You say it as if it were a disgrace, Gyuri.”