The Class

by Erich Segal

  He rose, walked over, and kissed her on the cheek. “See you on the floor in fifteen.”

  Danny showered, changed clothes, redid his makeup, and walked down to appear punctually at 8:30 P.M. for his third and final taping of the day.

  The first half-hour went with metronomic perfection. Danny sketched Liszt’s childhood in Hungary; his father’s early pressure on the boy; his debut at the age of nine; his lessons with, among others, Salieri—Mozart’s nemesis—and Czerny—Beethoven’s greatest pupil—who so admired the young boy’s talent that he refused any fee for his lessons.

  Watching his face on the monitor in the control room, Maria could not help but feel that at this moment her husband was thinking of his own teacher, Dr. Landau.

  And so it continued, with colorful accounts of the great pianist’s conquests first of Paris, then of London—all before he was sixteen.

  “It was at this point,” Danny commented, “that the young musician began to feel the strain of his endless schedule of travel and concertizing. He was, one may say, a jet-setter before the invention of jets. In fact, it was scarcely yet the age of the railroad. And it took its toll.

  “When he went with his father to the seashore to recuperate, the elder Liszt, also weakened by their travels, contracted typhoid and passed away. His final words to his son were, ‘Je crains pour toi les femmes,’ roughly translated, ‘I’m worried about what women might do to your music.…’ ”

  Staring intently at the monitor, Maria suddenly felt her heart beat faster. Could he possibly be talking to her? Could he be saying in public what he was afraid to say in private? That he had wasted his youth on empty promiscuity. But at last was changing … growing up? She now realized why he had left this program till last. For he knew that—perhaps for the first time in his life—he would be speaking from the heart.

  They stopped for technical reasons, tape changes, and even one or two muffed lines. Thus, it was well after ten by the time they reached the most difficult part of the broadcast.

  Danny was explaining how Liszt deliberately created music so difficult that only he himself could play it. And in fact, when his pieces were published, he had to revise and simplify the music for the hands of normal mortals.

  It had been Danny’s devilish inspiration that, at this point in the program, he would play from the original manuscripts to show how the great man himself might have sounded.

  Knowing what a challenge lay ahead for her husband, Maria called a ten-minute break, during which she made the crew double-check everything. She wanted no mechanical foul-ups, lest a perfect performance by Danny require a retake because of some technical failure. She also wanted to give him a breather to gather strength at this late hour of the evening.

  At last they resumed.

  “Rolling, Danny. Anytime you’re ready,” came his wife’s voice through the loudspeaker in the studio.

  They began the sequence with a relaxed medium shot of the pianist explaining what he was about to do. The camera then reverse-zoomed slowly into a long shot of him sitting down at the keyboard. Then, at the most dramatic moment, they would move in over his shoulder for a close-up of his hands.

  At 10:45 P.M., Daniel Rossi attacked Franz Liszt. And was beaten back.

  He had chosen as his first example the soloist’s entry in the E-flat concerto. But for some reason—which he ascribed to fatigue—his left hand kept slipping in tempo as he raced the length of the keyboard.

  After three unsuccessful retakes, Maria called through the mike, “Hey, Danny, it’s after eleven. Why don’t you knock off and finish it first thing in the morning when you’re fresh?”

  “No, no,” he protested, “I want to wrap this damn series tonight. Just give me a short break.”

  “Take five, everyone.”

  Danny returned to his dressing room and immediately reached into his makeup kit for one of Dr. Whitney’s “megavitamins.” He then sat down, looked at his reflection framed by a dozen light bulbs, and tried to take deep breaths to relax.

  And then he saw it. The thumb and forefinger of his left hand were trembling involuntarily.

  At first he thought it was a mere reflex, a compulsion to drum the damn Liszt fingering into his system. But no, even with a conscious effort, he couldn’t stop the shaking—except by covering it with his right hand.

  He tried to reassure himself that this was merely tiredness. He had, after all, been working for nearly ten hours. But it was not with any real sense of confidence in his own explanation that he once again appeared on the studio floor.

  On the way from his dressing room, he had hit upon a subterfuge that would at least get him through this night’s ordeal. For if he indeed had a problem (which he kept telling himself he did not), he wasn’t about to share it with the taping crew of the Philadelphia Public Television station.

  “Hey, Maria,” he called, “can I see you for a second?”

  She hurried to him.

  “Listen,” he whispered to her, “could you have the director change his shot plan a little?”

  “Sure. What do you want?”

  Danny then motioned with his right hand. “What if, when he pulls back as I start to play, he pans around and shoots me from the top of the piano? That would be a pretty dramatic shot.”

  “Maybe,” said Maria. “But I don’t think he’d be able to get your hands in from that angle. Isn’t the whole point the fact that you’re doing these really difficult fingerings that only Liszt could manage?”

  Danny sighed wearily.

  “Of course. Yes. You’re right. But between you and me, I’m exhausted. I’m not so sure I can get through the stuff without having to stop a million times. This way, if I mess up, we can always overlay the sound with some of the practice cassettes I’ve made.”

  “But, Danny,” she pleaded, “that seems like such a shame. I mean, I know you can do it. I’ve heard you in the studio at home. Why don’t we just wait until tomorrow?”

  “Maria,” he said sternly, “this is the way I want to do it. Now help me, please.”

  To the consternation of the director, the taping was completed with the camera shooting down on Danny’s face.

  And so it did not take in Danny’s hands, as once again his left failed to keep pace with the right. None of the crew noticed this subtle discrepancy. But Danny did.

  ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY

  January 9, 1978

  I don’t know how I could have dreamed it was a good sign.

  When Andy got back east from spending Christmas with his mom and her tycoon in San Francisco, he called my office and asked if we could meet for lunch. I thought, Hallelujah the millennium, my son wants to make friends with me. This was especially encouraging since next September he’ll be starting college. And I’m hoping to persuade him to choose Harvard.

  Gauchely I suppose, I asked him if he wanted to eat at the Harvard Club. He turned thumbs down on that because it was “bourgeois.” I should have known then that bad news was in the offing.

  I met him at a health-food place in Greenwich Village, where, as we ate a lot of sprouts and leaves, I tried to bridge the chasm separating us with all the loving words I could think of. But, as ever, it was he who was the one conveying truth to me.

  He brought up next year. I quickly assured him that if he didn’t want to go to Harvard I honestly wouldn’t mind. He could go to any college in the world and I would gladly pay the tuition.

  He looked at me as if I were a man from Mars. And then patiently explained that American education wasn’t relevant to anything. In his view, the whole Western world was decadent. And the only solution was to cultivate our spirits.

  I told him I’d back him up in whatever he’d decided.

  To which he replied that he strongly doubted it, since his decision was to drop out of the whole family.

  I then said something like, “I don’t get it, Andy.”

  He then revealed that his name was no longer Andrew, but Gyanananda (I had to ask him to
spell it), which is Hindi for “seeker of happiness and knowledge.” I tried to take this all with good humor and offered that he would be the first Eliot of that name.

  He explained that he was no longer an Eliot. That he was opting out of everything my rotten generation stood for. And was going to spend his life in meditation. For this he did not want, nor did he need, any of the so-called Eliot money.

  When I asked him how he planned to live, he replied simply that I wouldn’t understand. I then explained that my question was not philosophical, but practical. For example, where would he be living?

  In the footsteps of his guru, he replied. At the moment this prophet was presiding over an ashram in San Francisco, but was getting intimations from his karma to return to India. I then asked him what he was going to use for money. He replied that he had no use for it. I asked, still more specifically, how he planned to eat. He said that he would beg like the rest of the swami’s followers.

  I proposed that, since I was a generous soul, he start his begging with me. He refused. Because he sensed I would use it as a string to tie him and he wanted to “fly untrammeled.”

  He then got up, wished me peace, and started to go. I pleaded with him to give me some sort of address, somewhere to get in touch with him. He said that I could never be capable of being in touch with him unless I divested myself of all material things and learned to meditate. All of which he knew I would never consider.

  Before he left, he offered me some parting words of wisdom—a kind of benediction.

  He said that he forgave me for everything. For being an unenlightened, bourgeois, and insensitive father. He bore me no malice since he understood that I was a victim of my own upbringing.

  He then walked away, stopped, lifted his hand in valediction, and repeated, “Peace.”

  I know that he’s a minor and I possibly could call the cops and have him grabbed for psychiatric observation. But I know he’d wriggle out and only hate me more (if that’s possible).

  And so I sat there looking at my plate of foliage and thought, How did I screw up like this?

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Mr. Rossi.” I Danny was sitting in the Park Avenue office of Dr. Brice Weisman, a world-renowned neurologist. Having taken enormous pains to ensure confidentiality, he had arranged a thorough examination. Though the doctor was about to put a name—and perhaps a fate—to it, Danny had known there was something physically wrong with him from that horrible moment in the studio when his left hand suddenly rebelled, refusing to obey the brain that had been its absolute master for forty years.

  The following day he had returned to the television studio with the rehearsal tapes he had made at home. Then he, Maria, and a single engineer superimposed them at the crucial moment in the previous night’s taping when his hand had failed him.

  Though Maria was his accomplice in this bit of deception so uncharacteristic of Danny, he had not confided in her completely. He had simply pleaded a busy schedule, impatience, and even television economy for this bit of electronic trickery.

  “After all,” he had joked, “I’m dubbing myself. It’s not as if I had to sneak in Vladimir Horowitz.”

  The only thing that made Maria suspect something more serious was Danny’s persistent questioning about whether the engineer was “a trustworthy guy.” Did he realize how many times he asked her? What was bothering him?

  Indeed, that was what had brought Danny to Dr. Weisman’s office.

  At first the neurologist merely listened impassively as Danny offered his own explanation as to why his left hand occasionally trembled. And that night, as well as in practice sessions thereafter, had seemed to be disobeying his mind.

  “I mean, clearly it’s fatigue, Doctor. I suppose it could be nerves, too. I drive myself very hard. But obviously, as you can see from all those little movements you asked me to do—touching my fingers and all that—there’s nothing wrong with me physically.”

  “I’m afraid there is, Mr. Rossi.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can detect a peripheral tremor in your left hand. There’s also some discernible bradykinesia—meaning it moves slightly slower than your right. All of this indicates basal ganglia dysfunction. In other words, some kind of damage to the motor area of your brain.”

  “You mean a tumor?” Danny asked, his fear exacerbating the tremor in his hand.

  “No,” the doctor said calmly, “your CT scan shows no evidence of one.”

  “God, that’s a relief,” Danny sighed. “Then how can we fix this damn thing so I can get back to work?”

  Weisman paused and then answered softly, “Mr. Rossi, I would be less than honest if I told you we could ‘fix’ your condition. In fact, we can only hope that it progresses very gently.”

  “You mean it might spread to my other hand as well?”

  “Theoretically, that’s possible. But when someone as young as you presents this sort of unilateral tremor, it usually remains on that one side. And, you may be relieved to know, the loss of function is very, very gradual.”

  “But you’re a doctor, dammit. Why the hell can’t you cure this sort of thing?”

  “Mr. Rossi, much of the working of the brain is still a mystery to us. At this stage of our knowledge, the best we can offer are medications that mask the symptoms. But I assure you, we can hide a tremor as small as yours for many years.”

  “Will these drugs let me play the piano?” he asked.

  Dr. Weisman took off his glasses and began wiping them with his tie. Not that they really needed cleaning. But this way Daniel Rossi’s face would be out of focus when he told him the worst.

  And he began with a kind of verbal anesthetic.

  “Mr. Rossi, may I tell you, I’ve always admired you as an artist. And what I find most remarkable about your talent—and what will help you in what I know is going to be a difficult situation—is your versatility.”

  He paused and then consigned Danny Rossi to a living death.

  “I’m afraid you won’t be able to play concerts anymore, Mr. Rossi.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. But your right hand is fine and very likely to remain so. You’ll be able to continue conducting with no problem.”

  Danny did not reply.

  “And the best consolation I can offer is something I learned from one of your own TV programs. Giants like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all started as performers, but are remembered today only because of what they wrote. You can throw the energy you once spent at the keyboard into composition.”

  Danny hid his face with his hands and began to sob more intensely than he had at any time in his life.

  Dr. Weisman could not offer any further comfort. For he had no inkling of what his words would elicit from his patient’s psyche.

  Danny suddenly leapt to his feet and began to pace the room. Then he shouted from the depths of his grief, addressing the neurologist almost as if his diagnosis had been an act of hostility. “You don’t understand, Doctor. I’m a great pianist. I’m a truly great pianist.…”

  “I’m aware of that,” Weisman replied softly.

  “But you don’t get my point,” Danny retorted. “I’m not that brilliant a conductor. And at best my composing is second-rate, derivative. I know myself. I can’t do any better.”

  “Mr. Rossi, I think you’re being much too harsh on yourself.”

  “No, goddammit, I’m being honest. The only thing I’m any good at is playing the piano. You’re taking away from me the one thing in the world that I can really do well.”

  “Please understand,” the doctor responded, “I’m not taking it away from you. You have a physical disorder.”

  “But what the hell caused it?” Danny demanded furiously.

  “It could be any one of a number of things. You could have been born with this condition, which has only now surfaced. It can also be the result of diseases like encephalitis. It’s even been known to be induced by certain medications.…”

  “Wh
at sort of medications?”

  “I don’t think that would apply in your case, Mr. Rossi. I’ve looked very carefully at the list of drugs you gave me.”

  “But I lied, Dr. Weisman. I omitted a few. I mean, with my schedule I’ve come to rely on all sorts of stimulants to get me up for performances. Can they have caused this?”

  “Conceivably. Is there anything else that you’ve neglected to mention?”

  Danny now let out a feral roar. “Jesus—I’m going to murder that fucking Dr. Whitney!”

  “Not the notorious Beverly Hills ‘Dr. Feelgood’?”

  “You mean you know him?” Danny asked.

  “Only from the damage I’ve seen in the patients his ‘cocktails’ have brought to my office. Tell me, did his ‘vitamins’ make it difficult for you to sleep?”

  “Yes. But he prescribed—”

  “Phenothiazine?”

  Danny nodded mutely.

  “And how long has this been going on?”

  “Two-three years. Could that have—”

  The neurologist shook his head in frustration. “That man should really have had his license revoked. But I’m afraid he’s got too many powerful patients protecting him.”

  “Why did he do this to me?” Danny shouted again in frantic despair.

  Dr. Weisman’s answer was somewhat sterner than his previous remarks.

  “In honesty, I don’t think you can blame it all on the wretched Dr. Whitney. In my experience, his clients have been at least marginally aware of what they were getting into. And you are a highly intelligent man.”

  Daniel Rossi walked the twenty blocks to the Hurok office in a kind of trance. He had not learned anything he hadn’t already known subconsciously. For long before he’d heard the dread pronouncement he had sensed the catastrophe the doctor had confirmed.

  But at this moment he was shocked beyond feeling. And he would take advantage of this temporary numbness to perform the painful act the doctor’s diagnosis now required.

  His abdication from the keyboard.