Erich Segal - The Class

“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.

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, Cliffie 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.”