Erich Segal - The Class

Anyway, after basic I was assigned to the destroyer tender St. Clare as an ordinary swabbie. Our task is to escort the USS Hamilton as a kind of oceangoing nanny. My initial duties were twofold. First, keeping the St. Clare shipshape. In other words, scrubbing decks. And second, acting as a football for our chief petty officer, who somehow took an instant dislike to me. I couldn’t figure out why. I never said I was from Harvard or even went to college. (Someone later told me that he thought I was “obnoxiously polite” — whatever that means.)

But the guy was fixated on giving me grief. And when I wasn’t doing the many extra tasks he set for me, or standing watch, he would storm into our bunkroom and confiscate as “trash” whatever the hell I was reading.

Once I thought I’d try to get my own back at him.

I indicated at evening mess that I felt like turning in early to read, and hurried back to settle in with… the Holy Bible. Sure enough, he barged in a few minutes later and, without even looking, ripped the book from my hands, bellowing, “Sailor, you are polluting your mind!”

And it was then that I indicated, in front of two other guys, that I had been merely enriching my soul with the Scriptures.

All he could manage was, “Oh,” replaced the book on my bunk, and marched out.

I had won that battle all right. But unfortunately I lost the war.

After that, the guy rode me day and night. At one point I was so desperate that I thought of going AWOL. But then, of course, we were a thousand miles from the nearest landfall. There are, after all, some advantages to being in the army.

If this was real life, I’d had enough of it. And if I was to survive the navy, I had to get my hands and knees off the deck.

When I was certain that this guy was on another part of the ship, I went to see the first lieutenant to plead for a transfer of duty. I didn’t give the real reason, I just said that I felt I might have some other talents that could better serve the navy.

Like what? he inquired.

Like what, indeed? I thought to myself. But off the top of my head I suggested that I had a kind of yen to write. And that seemed to impress him. So, much to my chief petty officer’s disappointment at not being able to drive me into leaping off the ship, I’ve been transferred to our information office.

Here I’m kind of an editor and journalist, writing for the various internal navy newspapers, as well as forwarding the more interesting stories to Washington for wider dissemination.

This has turned out to be a pretty neat job. Except my one chance for a wire-service break was censored by the captain. I thought it was a good story. I mean, it had excitement, thrills, surprise, and so forth — even a touch of humor. But somehow the upper echelons didn’t see it that way.

Last week when we were just entering the Mediterranean, it was a terribly dark foggy night. (Dramatic start, huh?) And in the perilous obscurity we collided with another ship. No hands were lost, though some repairs would have to be done at the next port of call.

What I found so fascinating was that we had actually collided with our own destroyer. I mean, I thought the story had a certain human interest value.

But the captain felt otherwise. He argued that American ships never did that sort of thing.

Assuming it was a journalist’s task to report the truth, I pointed out that we bad in fact just done so.

At this he blew his top and hurled at me a veritable thesaurus of synonyms for lack of intelligence. His essential message was that the U.S. Navy may make an occasional error, but they sure as hell don’t send out a press release.

I will be discharged in one year, three months, eleven days. With any luck it will be honorably.

In any case, it cannot be too soon.

Sara had finished at the top of her class.

Actually, nothing in her previous educational experience gave any hint that she would excel her fellow Radcliffe graduates in the arts of shorthand and typing. But sure enough, at the end of that first summer, she could take down dictation at an admirable 110 words per minute and could type an amazing 75.

“I don’t think any further courses could possibly improve your chances in the job market, Sara,” counseled Mrs. Holmes, head of the summer course. “With your speeds and educational background, you’re more than ready for an executive secretarial position. I suggest you start following up the want ads.”

Buoyed by this encouragement, Sara and Ted set about checking the newspapers. There seemed to be so many open ings in Cambridge that she could probably find something within walking distance of their apartment on Huron Avenue.

Her first two interviews resulted in firm offers and a real dilemma. The job with the vice-president of the Harvard Trust paid a lavish seventy-eight bucks a week, whereas the University Press had an opening with longer hours offering a mere fifty-five. Yet, it was clear which attracted both husband and wife.

First of all, the Press was closer (you could even slide there in a snowstorm). Secondly, it offered the possibility of advancement (“With your languages, you might move into copy editing fairly soon,” Mrs. Norton, the personnel director, had remarked when she saw Sara’s initial reaction to the proposed salary).

Perhaps the most attractive dimension, as they both realized, was that it could be a rich source of top-level information about the Classics world. They would be among the first to know who was writing a book on what, and whether it was going to be accepted or rejected. This sort of intelligence might prove invaluable at Ted’s job-seeking time.

Graduate school was much more rigorous than he had ever anticipated. To earn a Ph.D., you had to take some brutally difficult seminars in Linguistics, Comparative Grammar, Metrics, Greek and Latin Stylistics, and so forth. Fortunately, he was blessed with a nightly dinner partner with whom he could discuss such esoterica.

From as early as the summer they first lived together, Ted had always insisted on cooking the evening meals. But now, since he believed the chef should have his classical studying finished before entering the kitchen, Sara had the uncomfortable prospect of having to wait till nearly ten o’clock before her husband would begin to prepare their deipno (dinner).

This posed some delicate problems of diplomacy. For what sane woman could object to a delicious meal accompanied by choice Greek wine, served with music and soft candlelight by a highly professional waiter — who would then sit down and tell you how much he loved you. And after dinner would join you in bed.

How could a woman tell such a husband that, though the evenings were enchanted, the mornings after she could barely stay awake at her typewriter? Sara therefore concluded that the only way to solve this predicament was to learn the secrets of Lambros cuisine from Mama herself. This way, while Ted was still struggling with Indo-European etymologies, she could be starting dinner.

Thalassa Lambros was flattered by her daughter-in-law’s interest and did everything she could to accelerate her culinary education. This included detailed memos, which Sara diligently studied.

By January she was confident enough to arrogate the task of cooking dinner. And none too soon. For Ted would be facing a battery of language exams at the end of the spring semester.

The German requirement was killing him. Dammit, he had often thought, why does so much important classical scholarship have to be written in this preposterously difficult language? Here again, Sara, who had taken three years of German in school, was able to help him acquire a feeling for its periodic sentence structure. And by plowing through several articles with him, showed how he could intuit the general meaning of a passage from the classical citations in the text.