The Class

by Erich Segal

  The mood was festive and the talk was all of Ted.

  “I hear your lecture was even more exciting than our last student riot,” Sally Foster joked. “I’m sorry I had to miss it. But somebody had to stay here and prepare the goodies. And Bill insisted that my tacos would entice you to come to Berkeley.”

  “I’m already enticed,” said Sara Lambros, smiling happily.

  Sensing that her casual remark had made Ted slightly uneasy, Sally quickly added, “Of course, I’m not supposed to say that sort of thing, am I? I always put my foot in my mouth. Anyway, Ted, I’m under strict orders to see that you keep circulating among the various literary lights.”

  And there was indeed a high-voltage group of San Francisco intellectuals. Ted noticed Sara in animated conversation with a character who looked amazingly like the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And on second glance, it was Ginsberg.

  Ted had to meet the author of Howl, the radical ululation in verse that had generated so much literary controversy in his undergraduate days. As he approached, he heard Ginsberg describing some personal apocalyptic experience.

  “Looking through the window at the sky, suddenly it seemed that I saw into the depths of the universe. The sky suddenly seemed very ancient. And this was the very ancient place that Blake was talking about, the sweet golden clime. I suddenly realized that this existence was it! Do you dig me, Sara?”

  “Hi, honey,” Ted smiled, “hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Not at all,” she answered and then introduced her husband to the bearded bard.

  “Say, I hear you guys may be moving west,” said Ginsberg. “I hope you do—the sense of prana’s real strong out here.”

  Just then they were interrupted by Bill Foster.

  “Sorry to break in, Allen, but Dean Rothschmidt is desperate to have a few words with Ted before he goes.”

  “That’s cool. I’ll be glad to continue fascinating Ted’s old lady.”

  The Dean of Humanities wanted to express his admiration of Ted’s lecture and ask if he could drop by his office at ten the next morning.

  As Ted was returning to Sara, Cameron Wylie cornered him.

  “I must say, Professor Lambros, your lecture was absolutely first-rate. I look forward to reading it in print. And I do hope we’ll have the pleasure of hearing you at Oxford sometime.”

  “That would be a great honor,” Ted replied.

  “Well, when you get your next sabbatical I’ll be happy to make some arrangements. In any case, I do hope we’ll stay in touch.”

  A bolt suddenly struck the lightning rod of Ted’s ambition.

  Two days earlier, Cameron Wylie had spoken highly of his Sophocles book. This evening he was admiring the talk he had just delivered. Might not a letter from the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, repeating those same sentiments, tip the precarious balance at Harvard in Ted’s favor?

  In any case, he could lose nothing by seizing this most propitious moment.

  “Professor Wylie, I—uh—I was wondering if I could ask you a rather special favor.…”

  “Certainly,” the don answered amiably.

  “I—uh—I’ll be coming up for tenure at Harvard next year, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to write on my behalf.”

  “Well, I’ve already composed rather a panegyric for the Berkeley people. I wouldn’t mind saying the same sort of thing to Harvard. I won’t ask why you would choose to endure the cold Cambridge winters. In any case, it’s past my bedtime and I must be off. Please say good night to Sara for me. She’s chatting with a rather hirsute character and I wouldn’t want to catch his fleas.”

  He turned and marched off.

  Ted smiled with elation. Within his chest the fires of aspiration burned brightly.

  “You were fantastic, Ted. This was the proudest day of my life. You snowed everybody.”

  As they headed toward their room at the Faculty Club, Ted could hardly wait to tell her his good news. “Even old Cameron Wylie seemed pretty impressed,” he remarked casually.

  “I know. I overheard him telling two or three people.”

  He closed the door behind them and leaned against it. “Hey, Mrs. Lambros, what if I told you that we might not have to leave Cambridge?”

  “I don’t get it,” Sara answered, a little off balance.

  “Listen,” Ted confided with intensity, “Wylie’s going to write to Harvard for me. Don’t you think a letter from him would boost me up into tenure heaven?”

  Sara hesitated. She had been so elated this evening, so enchanted by the whole Berkeley experience, that this “good” news actually came as a disappointment. A double disappointment, in fact. Because in her heart she sensed that Harvard had already made up its mind and nothing could change it.

  “Ted,” she replied with difficulty, “I don’t know how to say this without hurting your feelings. But all Wylie’s letter can do is say you’re a good scholar and a great teacher.”

  “Well, Jesus, isn’t that all there is to it? I mean, I don’t also have to run a four-minute mile, do I?”

  Sara sighed. “Hey look, they don’t need a letter from Oxford to tell them what they already know. Face it, they’re not just judging you as a scholar. They’re voting to let you into their club for the next thirty-five years.”

  “Are you trying to suggest they don’t like me?”

  “Oh, they like you all right. The question is, do they like you enough?”

  “Shit,” Ted said, half to himself, his euphoria suddenly tumbling into an abyss of desperation. “Now I don’t know what the hell to do.”

  Sara put her arms around him. “Ted, if it’ll help any in this existential dilemma, I want you to know that you’ve always got tenure with me.”

  They kissed.

  “Ted,” Dean Rothschmidt began the next morning, “Berkeley’s got a tenured slot in Greek Lit. and you’re our unanimous first choice. We’d be willing to start you at ten thousand a year.”

  Ted wondered if Rothschmidt knew that he was offering him nearly three thousand more than he was currently earning at Harvard. On second thought, of course he did. And that was enough to buy a hell of a nice new car.

  “And naturally we’d pay all your moving costs from the East,” Bill Foster quickly added.

  “I—I’m very flattered,” Ted replied.

  The pitch was not over. Rothschmidt had further blandishment. “I don’t know if Sara will recall, with all that madness at Bill’s last night, but the gray-haired gentleman she spoke with briefly was Jed Roper, head of the U.C. Press. He’s prepared to offer her a junior editorship—salary to be negotiated.”

  “Gosh,” Ted remarked, “she’ll be thrilled.” And then he added as casually as possible, “I assume I’ll be getting a formal offer in writing.”

  “Naturally,” the dean replied, “but it’s just a bureaucratic formality. I can promise you this is a firm offer.”

  This time he took Whitman to lunch at the Faculty Club.

  “Cedric, if there still is any enthusiasm for my being kept at Harvard, I think I’ve got some new ammunition.”

  His mentor seemed pleased at what Ted reported. “Well, I think this strengthens your case considerably. I’ll ask the chairman to call Wylie for his letter so we can bring up your tenure at the next departmental meeting.”

  My tenure, thought Ted. I actually heard him say my tenure.

  The formal vote took place twenty-four days later. The department had for their consideration Ted’s bibliography (four articles, five reviews), his book on Sophocles (and the critiques of it, which ranged from “solid” to “monumental”), and various letters of recommendation, some from experts in the field whose names Ted would never know. But one certainly from the Regius Professor at Oxford.

  Ted and Sara waited nervously in the Huron Avenue apartment. It was nail-biting time. They knew the meeting had begun at four, and yet by five-thirty there was still no word.

  “What do you think?” Ted asked. “Is it a good
sign or a bad sign?”

  “For the last time, Lambros,” Sara said firmly, “I don’t know what the hell is going on. But you have my fervent conviction both as wife and classicist that you truly deserve tenure at Harvard.”

  “If the gods are just,” he quickly added.

  “Right.” She nodded. “But remember, in academia there are no gods—just professors. Quirky, flawed, capricious human beings.”

  The phone rang.

  Ted grabbed it.

  It was Whitman. His voice betrayed nothing.

  “Cedric, please, put me out of my misery. How did they vote?”

  “I can’t go into details, Ted, but I can tell you it was very, very close. I’m sorry, you didn’t make it.”

  Ted Lambros lost the carefully polished Harvard veneer he had worked a decade to acquire, and repeated aloud what he had said ten years earlier when the college had denied him a full scholarship.

  “Shit.”

  Sara was immediately at her husband’s side, her arms around him consolingly.

  He would not hang up till he asked one final burning question.

  “Cedric,” he said as calmly as possible, “may I just know the pretext—uh—I mean the grounds—I mean, in general terms, what lost it for me?”

  “It’s hard to pinpoint, but there was some talk about ‘waiting for a second Big Book.’ ”

  “Oh,” Ted responded, thinking bitterly, there are one or two tenured guys who still haven’t written their first big book. But he said nothing more.

  “Ted,” Whitman continued with compassion in his voice, “Anne and I want you to come to dinner tonight. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of anything, really. So will you come?”

  “Dinner tonight?” Ted repeated distractedly.

  Sara was strenuously nodding her head.

  “Uh, thanks Cedric. What time would you like us?”

  It was a warm spring night and Sara insisted that they walk the mile or so to the Whitmans’ house. She knew Ted needed time to gain some equilibrium.

  “Ted,” Sara said as he shuffled dejectedly, “I know there are at least a dozen four-letter words going around in your head, and I think for the sake of sanity you ought to shout them right out here in the street. God knows, I want to scream too. I mean, you got screwed.”

  “No. I got royally screwed. I mean, a bunch of uptight bastards just played lions and Christians with my career. I feel like kicking in their goddamn mahogany doors and beating the shit out of all of them.”

  Sara smiled. “Not their wives too, I hope.”

  “No, of course not,” he snapped.

  And then, realizing the childishness of his outburst, he began to laugh.

  They both giggled for a block until suddenly Ted’s laughter turned into sobs. He buried his head on Sara’s shoulder as she tried to comfort him.

  “Oh God, Sara,” he wept, “I feel so stupid. But I wanted it so bad. So goddamn bad.”

  “I know,” she whispered tenderly. “I know.”

  For Stuart and Nina it was the greatest summer of their lives.

  Every morning he would get on his bike and pedal over to the Rossi house, often passing Maria and her two girls in the station wagon on their way to enjoy Edgar Waldorf’s stretch of private beach with Nina and the boys.

  Stu would return in the early evening, at once exhausted and overstimulated, grab Nina by the hand, and take her for a long walk by the sea.

  “How’s the great classical composer at writing show tunes?” she asked during one of their promenades.

  “Oh, the guy’s so fantastically versatile he could write a rondo with his left hand and ragtime with his right. But he doesn’t pander.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of his audience. Some of his melodies are—you know—pretty complex.”

  “I thought the secret of success on Broadway was simplicity,” Nina remarked.

  “Don’t worry, hon, he isn’t writing Wozzeck.”

  “This is exciting. I mean, I know your words are terrific. But I’d really like to hear what Danny’s done with them. Apparently, Maria tells me, he hasn’t even played anything for her.”

  “Well, every artist’s temperament is different, I guess,” said Stuart, picking up a bit of driftwood and hurling it out across the water.

  “And every marriage, too,” Nina added. “Do you think they’re happy?”

  “Hey, honey,” Stuart cautioned, “I’m his lyricist, not his shrink. I just know he’s a good working partner.”

  On Labor Day weekend, Edgar Waldorf flew in with Harvey Madison to hear the fruits of his young geniuses’ summer toil.

  Ever munificent, he arrived laden with presents for the Kingsley sons, the Rossi daughters, and the authors’ wives. As far as “the boys” were concerned, they would have to have something for him.

  After a huge Italian dinner, the two visitors, the artists, and their wives repaired to the living room for the first hearing of the score to Manhattan Odyssey.

  As Danny sat at the piano, Stuart narrated, here and there injecting a bit of dialogue to show how deftly he had made Joyce theatrically viable. And then he would introduce the songs. His lyrics were ingeniously set. The music was muscular, the rhythms bold.

  After the lively octet in Bella Cohen’s fabled brothel, the privileged little audience broke into applause. Then Danny proudly commented, “You don’t hear many Broadway scores with songs written in five.”

  “What’s five?” asked Edgar Waldorf.

  “It’s a kind of tricky rhythm, five-four. Never mind what it is—as long as you like what you hear.”

  “Like it?” Edgar exclaimed. “I love it, I love it. Maybe five symbolizes the number of years we’re going to run SRO.”

  “Why stop at five? Why not six or seven?” interposed Harvey Madison, unable to resist the agent’s impulse to up the ante.

  The authors together sang the final duet between Bloom and Stephen, his surrogate son. Then they looked to their families and arbiters for judgment.

  At first there was reverential silence.

  “Well, Nina?” Stuart asked his wife impatiently. “Would you buy a ticket to this thing?”

  “I think I’d go every night,” she responded, exultant at the ingenuity of her husband’s work.

  “Did it get my wife’s approval?” Danny asked.

  “Not that I’m a professional critic,” Maria began shyly, “but I honestly think that’s the best musical score I’ve ever heard—by anybody.”

  Edgar Waldorf rose to his feet to make an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen—and geniuses—it has been my humble honor to listen to the first playing of what is undoubtedly the most fabulous musical ever to sweep Broadway off its feet.”

  He then turned to the authors. “My only question is—what are you guys going to do with the ten million bucks this is going to earn you?”

  “Nine,” Harvey Madison quickly corrected, professional even in jest.

  Now it was the men’s turn to walk the beach.

  Edgar had to complete the financing. He hoped the tape he was bringing back to New York would do the trick. But they still needed to discuss the director and the stars.

  Having so admired Jerome Robbins’s work on West Side Story, Danny wanted him to direct and choreograph their show.

  Stuart enthusiastically agreed.

  But Edgar, obsessed with the British origins of the Times critic, plumped for Sir John Chalcott, whose recent work at the Old Vic had been so well received.

  “After all,” the producer reasoned, “we are dealing with one of the great classics of the English language. Why not put it in the hands of someone who is accustomed to dealing with the immortals?”

  “ ‘Immortal’ can be a synonym for ‘dead,’ ” Danny Rossi commented.

  “Please, Daniel,” Edgar retorted, “I’ve got a gut feeling on this. I think Sir John’s name would add even more class value.”


  After another quarter of a mile, he succeeded in twisting their arms.

  Then the talk got around to principals. They started with passionate unanimity. Not only did they all agree on Zero Mostel, but the star himself had already consented merely on the basis of the novel.

  Casting the female lead proved more difficult. Danny had what he thought was a sensational idea. He had written the role of Molly—who is a professional singer even in Joyce’s book—for someone with real vocal ability. So he proposed what was to his mind the supreme voice of their time: Joan Sutherland.

  “An opera singer in a Broadway show?” Edgar Waldorf cringed. “Besides, she’d never do it.”

  “First of all,” said Danny, “I got to know her when I conducted Lucia at La Scala. She’s a terrific lady. And she’s got the courage to take on new challenges.”

  “Look,” reasoned the ever-reasonable Edgar Waldorf, “I would be the last person to knock Miss Sutherland’s talent, but opera and Broadway don’t seem to mix.”

  “What about Ezio Pinza in South Pacific?” asked Stuart.

  “A fluke, a fluke,” said Waldorf. “Besides, what made that show was Mary Martin. And anyway we can’t afford Sutherland. No, I say we’ve got to go with someone used to doing eight shows a week. Someone who’s a proven draw—magnetic, vibrant, exciting—”

  “And also big tits, maybe?” Danny asked facetiously.

  “That wouldn’t hurt either,” said the producer, trying to act ingenuous.

  Danny Rossi stopped walking, put his hands on his hips, and stood like a small colossus in the sand of Martha’s Vineyard.

  “Listen, Edgar, I would rather die than have Theora Hamilton in a show of mine. I have my principles.”

  “That goes for me as well,” Stuart added.

  “Easy, boys, easy. Nobody’s going to compromise anybody’s principles here,” mediated Harvey Madison. “There are a million talented ladies in the American theater and I’m sure we can come up with someone who meets everyone’s specifications. Now, why don’t we all start back? It’s already a half-hour past cocktail time.”