The Class

by Erich Segal

  I sweated for two days waiting for them to post the cast list this afternoon.

  It contained two surprises.

  Neither Wig nor I got to be chambermaids. Mike—to his eternal glory—captured the coveted role of Fifi, Lady Godiva’s debutante daughter.

  And I—O shame!—was cast as Prince Macaroni, one of the suitors for his hand.

  “Great,” Mike enthused, “I’m actually rooming with one of my costars.”

  I was not amused. I was thinking that I’d failed again.

  I wasn’t even man enough to be a girl.

  It was the usual Friday night at The Marathon. Every table was packed with chattering Harvard men and their dates. Socrates urged his staff to hurry along since there was a vast crowd of people standing outside waiting their turn. Up front near the cashier’s desk there seemed to be some argument going on. Socrates called across to his elder son in Greek, “Theo, go and help your sister.”

  Ted hastened to the rescue. As he approached, he could hear Daphne protesting, “Look, I am terribly sorry but you must have misunderstood. We never take reservations on the weekends.”

  But the tall, supercilious preppie in the Chesterfield coat seemed quite adamant that he had booked a table for 8:00 P.M. and was not about to stand outside on Mass. Avenue with (in so many words) the hoi polloi. Daphne was relieved to see her brother arrive.

  “What’s going on, sis?” Ted asked.

  “This gentleman insists he had a reservation, Teddy. And you know our policy about weekends.”

  “Yes,” Ted responded, and turned immediately to the protesting client to explain, “we would never—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence when he noticed who was standing next to the irate, distinguished-looking man.

  “Hi, Ted,” said Sara Harrison, who was manifestly embarrassed at her escort’s rudeness. “I think Alan’s made a mistake. I’m terribly sorry.”

  Her date glared at her.

  “I don’t make such errors,” he stated emphatically, and immediately turned back to Ted. “I called yesterday evening and spoke to some woman. Her English wasn’t very good so I was quite explicit.”

  “That must have been Mama,” Daphne offered.

  “Well, ‘Mama’ should have written it down,” insisted the punctilious Alan.

  “She did,” said Ted, who now had a large reservations book in his hand. “Are you Mr. Davenport?”

  “I am,” said Alan. “Do you see my reservation for eight o’clock?”

  “Yes. It’s listed for last night, Thursday—when we do accept reservations. Look.” He offered the document.

  “How can I read that, man? It’s in Greek,” he protested.

  “Then ask Miss Harrison to read it to you.”

  “Don’t involve my date in your mess-up, waiter.”

  “Please, Alan, he’s a friend of mine. We’re both in classics. And he’s right.” Sara pointed to the approximation of “Davenport” scribbled by Mrs. Lambros for eight o’clock the previous night. “You must have forgotten to tell her it was for the next day.”

  “Sara, what on earth is the matter with you?” Alan snapped. “Are you taking some illiterate woman’s word against mine?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Ted, reining in his temper as best he could. “I’m sure my mother is no less literate than yours. She just happens to prefer writing in her native tongue.”

  Sara tried to end the increasingly bitter dispute.

  “Come on, Alan,” she said softly, “let’s go for a pizza. That’s all I wanted in the first place.”

  “No, Sara, there’s a matter of principle involved here.”

  “Mr. Davenport,” Ted said quietly, “if you’ll stop blustering I’ll give you the next available table. But if you persist in this obnoxious behavior, I’ll throw you the hell out.”

  “I beg your pardon, garçon,” Alan responded. “I happen to be a third-year law student, and since I am in no way inebriated, you have no right to eject me. If you try, I’ll sue the pants off you.”

  “Excuse me,” Ted replied. “You may have learned a lot of fancy concepts at Harvard Law, but I doubt if you studied the Cambridge city ordinances that allow a proprietor to kick out somebody—inebriated or not—if he’s making a disturbance.” By now Alan had sensed that this was turning into a jungle duel, with Sara as the prize.

  “I dare you to throw me out,” he snapped.

  For a second nobody moved. Clearly, the two antagonists were squaring off for a battle.

  Daphne sensed that her brother was about to imperil their whole livelihood and whispered, “Please, Teddie, don’t.”

  “Would you care to step outside, Alan?” said a voice.

  Alan was startled. For it was Sara who had spoken these words. He glared down at her.

  “No,” he retorted angrily. “I’m going to stay here and have dinner.”

  “Then you’ll eat it alone,” she replied, and marched out.

  As Daphne Lambros thanked God many times under her breath, Ted stormed into the kitchen, where he began to pound his fists against the wall.

  In an instant his father arrived. “Ti diabolo echeis, Theo? What’s this ridiculous behavior? The house is full, the customers are complaining. Do you want to ruin me?”

  “I want to die,” Ted shouted, continuing to attack the wall.

  “Theo, my son, my eldest, we have a living to earn. I beg you to go back and take care of tables twelve through twenty.”

  Just then Daphne stuck her head through the kitchen door.

  “The natives are getting restless,” she said. “What’s the matter with Teddie?”

  “Nothing!” Socrates growled. “Get back to the cash register, Daphne!”

  “But, Papa,” she replied timorously, “there’s a girl who wants to speak to Theo—the one who sort of refereed the fight.”

  “Omigod!” Ted gasped and took one step toward the men’s room.

  “Where the hell are you going now?” Socrates barked.

  “To comb my hair,” said Ted as he disappeared.

  Sara Harrison was standing shyly in a corner, shivering slightly in her coat, even though the place was overheated.

  Ted walked up to her. “Hi,” he said with the casual expression he had frantically rehearsed in front of the mirror.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she began.

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, let me explain,” she insisted. “He was an insufferable bore. He was like that from the minute he picked me up.”

  “Then why do you date a guy like that?”

  “Date? That creature was a fix-up. His-mother-knows-my-mother sort of thing.”

  “Oh,” said Ted.

  “I mean filial duty has its limits. If my mother ever tries that again, I’ll say I’m taking holy vows. He was the pits, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Ted Lambros smiled.

  Then there was an awkward pause.

  “Uh—I’m sorry,” Sara repeated, “I guess I’m keeping you from your work.”

  “They can all starve, for all I care. I’d rather talk to you.”

  Omigod, he thought to himself. How did that slip out?

  “Me too,” she said shyly.

  From the vortex of the busy restaurant his father called out in Greek, “Theo, get back to work or I’ll put my curse on you!”

  “I think you’d better go, Ted,” Sara murmured.

  “Can I ask just one question first?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where’s Alan now?”

  “In hell, I suppose,” Sara replied. “At least that’s where I told him to go.”

  “That means you haven’t got a date tonight,” Ted grinned.

  “Theo!” his father bellowed. “I will curse you and your children’s children.”

  Ignoring the increased paternal threat, Ted continued, “Sara, if you can wait another hour, I’d like to take you to dinner.”

  Her reply was a single syllable: “Fine.” />
  The cognoscenti knew that the Newtowne Grill, beyond Porter Square, served the best pizza in Cambridge. This is where, at eleven o’clock, Ted brought Sara (in the family’s beat-up Chevy Biscayne) for their first dinner date. He had finished his chores at The Marathon with extraordinary speed, for there were wings on his heart.

  They sat at a table by the window, where a red neon sign flashed periodically on their faces, giving the whole atmosphere the feeling of a dream—which Ted still half-believed it was. While waiting for their pizza they each sipped a beer.

  “I can’t understand why a girl like you would even dream of accepting a blind date,” said Ted.

  “Well, it’s better than sitting home studying on a Saturday night, isn’t it?”

  “But you must be besieged with offers. I mean, I always imagined you were booked up through 1958.”

  “That’s one of the great Harvard myths, Ted. Half of Radcliffe sits around feeling miserable on Saturday night because everybody at Harvard just assumes somebody else has asked them out. Meanwhile, all the girls at Wellesley have roaring social lives.”

  Ted was amazed. “I wish to hell I had known. I mean, you never mentioned.…”

  “Well, it’s not the sort of thing you bring up over Greek verbs and English muffins,” she replied, “although I sometimes wished I had.”

  Ted was nearly bowled over.

  “Do you know, Sara,” he confessed, “I’ve been dying to ask you out since the very first minute I saw you.”

  She looked at him with sudden brightness in her eyes.

  “Well, what the hell took you so long—am I that intimidating?” she asked.

  “Not anymore.”

  He parked the Chevy in front of Cabot Hall and walked her to the door. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and looked her straight in the eyes.

  “Sara,” he said firmly, “I’ve waded through a year of English muffins for this.”

  And he kissed her with the passion that he’d stored up in a million fantasies.

  She responded with an equal fervor.

  When at last he started home, he was so intoxicated that he barely felt his feet make contact with the ground. Then suddenly he stopped. Oh shit, he thought, I left the car in front of Cabot Hall! He dashed back to retrieve it, hoping Sara would not notice his idiotic error from her window.

  But at that moment, Sara Harrison’s eyes were not focused on anything. She was simply sitting motionless on her bed, staring into space.

  The final lyrics of Greek 2B were by an author not generally known for amorous verse—Plato.

  “It’s ironic,” Professor Havelock remarked, “but the philosopher who banished poetry from his Ideal Republic was himself the author of perhaps the most perfect lyric ever written.” And he then read out in Greek one of the famous Aster epigrams.

  Star of my life, to the stars your face is turned;

  Would I were the heavens, looking back at you with ten thousand eyes.

  Appropriately enough, the bells of Memorial Hall tolled the end of the class. As they walked out the door together, Ted whispered to Sara, “I wish I were the heavens.”

  “Nothing doing,” she replied. “I want you right nearby.”

  And they walked toward The Bick hand in hand.

  November is the cruelest month—at least for ten percent of the sophomore class. For it is then that the Final Clubs (so called because you can belong to only one) make their definitive selections. These eleven societies exist merely on the edge of Harvard life. But it is, one may say, the gilt edge.

  A Final Club is an elite, if homogeneous, institution where rich preppies can go and have drinks with other rich preppies. These gentlemanly sodalities do not intrude on college life. Indeed, the majority of Harvard men barely know they exist.

  But, needless to say, November was a busy month for Messrs. Eliot, Newall, and Wigglesworth. Their suite was a veritable mecca for tweedy pilgrims, flocking to implore them to join their order.

  Like modern musketeers, the three decided they’d stick together. Though they got invited to punches for most of the clubs, it was pretty clear that they’d go to either the Porcellian, the AD, or the Fly.

  In fact, if all got asked, they knew they’d join the Pore. If you’re going to bother with these things, it might as well be the undisputed number one, “the oldest men’s club in America.”

  Having been included in the P.C.’s last-cut dinner, they assumed they were in.

  Back at Eliot, they were still in their penguin suits, nursing a final digestif, when there was a sudden knock at the door.

  Newall quipped that it might be some desperate emissary from another club—perhaps the AD, which took Franklin D. Roosevelt when the Porcellian blackballed him.

  It turned out to be Jason Gilbert.

  “Am I disturbing you guys?” he asked somberly.

  “No, not at all,” Andrew responded. “Come in and join us for a brandy.”

  “Thanks, but I never touch the stuff,” he replied.

  His glance made them curiously self-conscious about their attire.

  “The final dinner, huh?” he inquired.

  “Yeah,” Wig replied casually.

  “The Porc?” he asked.

  “Right the first time,” Newall sang out.

  But neither Mike nor Dick sensed the tinge of bitterness in Jason’s voice.

  “Was it a tough decision, guys?” he asked.

  “Not really,” said Wig. “We had a couple of other options, but the P.C. seemed the most attractive.”

  “Oh,” said Jason. “It must feel great to be wanted.”

  “You ought to know,” Newall quipped. “Every lovely at The Cliffe burns incense to your picture.”

  Jason didn’t smile. “That’s probably because they don’t realize I’m a leper.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Gilbert?” Andrew asked.

  “I’m talking about the fact that while almost every guy I know got at least one invitation to the first punch of a club, I wasn’t even asked by the lowly BAT. I never realized I was such an asshole.”

  “Come on, Jason,” Newall said reassuringly. “Final Clubs are a bunch of crap.”

  “I’m sure they are,” he replied. “Which is why you guys are all thrilled to be joining one. I just thought that being tuned to the club mentality, you might have some notion as to what precisely they found so obnoxious about me.”

  Newall, Wig, and Andrew looked uncomfortably at one another, wondering who would have to explain to Jason what they had assumed was obvious. Andrew could see that his roommates weren’t up to it. So he made a stab at the not-so-commendable facts of Harvard life.

  “Hey, Jason,” he began. “Who are the guys that mostly get asked to the clubs? Preppies from St. Paul’s, Mark’s, Groton. It’s kind of a common bond. You know, birds of a feather flocking together and so forth. You can see what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Gilbert retorted ironically. “I just didn’t go to the right prep school, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Wig quickly agreed. “Right on target.”

  To which Jason replied, “Horseshit.”

  There was a deathly silence in the room. Finally Newall grew annoyed that Jason had broken their mellow mood.

  “For Christ’s sake, Gilbert, why the hell should a Final Club have to take Jews? I mean, would the Hillel Society want me?”

  “That’s a religious organization, dammit! And they wouldn’t want me. I mean, I’m not even—”

  He stopped, his sentence half-completed. For a moment, Andrew thought that Jason had been about to say he wasn’t Jewish. But that would be absurd. Could a Negro stand there and suggest he wasn’t black?

  “Hey, listen, Newall,” Wigglesworth piped up, “the guy’s our friend. Don’t piss him off more than he is.”

  “I’m not pissed off,” Jason said in a quiet fury. “Let’s just say I’m uncomfortably enlightened. Good night, birds, sorry to have interrupted your flocking together.”
r />   He turned and left the room.

  That called for another round of brandy and a philosophical observation from Michael Wigglesworth. “Why’s a neat guy like Jason that defensive about his background? I mean, there’s nothing so bad about being Jewish. Unless you really care about stupid things like Final Clubs.”

  “Or being President of the United States,” added Andrew Eliot.

  November 16, 1955

  Dear Dad,

  I didn’t get into a Final Club. I know in the scheme of things it’s not that important, and I really don’t care that much about having another place to go and drink.

  Still, what really bothers me is that I wasn’t even considered. And most of all the reason why.

  When I finally worked up the guts to ask some of my friends (at least I always thought they were my friends) for an explanation, they didn’t pussyfoot around. They just came straight out and told me that the Final Clubs never take Jews. Actually, they put it in such a genteel way that it hardly sounded like prejudice.

  Dad, this is the second time I’ve been rejected for something simply because people regard me as Jewish.

  How do you reconcile this with the fact that you’ve always told me we were Americans “just like everybody else”? I believed you—and I still want to. But somehow the world doesn’t seem to share your opinion.

  Perhaps being Jewish is not something you can remove like a change of clothing.

  Maybe that’s why we’re getting all of the prejudice and none of the pride.

  There are lots of really gifted people here at Harvard who think being Jewish is some kind of special honor. That confuses me as well. Because now more than ever I’m not sure exactly what a Jew is. I just know lots of people think I’m one.

  Dad, I’m terribly confused and so I’m turning for help to the person I respect most in the world. It’s important that I solve this mystery.

  Because until I find out what I am, I’ll never find out who I am.

  Your loving son,

  Jason

  His father did not answer this disturbing letter. Instead, he canceled a full day of business meetings and took the train straight up to Boston.

  When Jason walked out of squash practice he could hardly believe his eyes.