Erich Segal - The Class

No one really bitched in earnest. Far, although not all of them admitted it, they were excited just to be there. The tasteless food gave every person in The Class an opportunity to be superior to something.

Nearly all of them were used to being number one in some domain. The Class contained no fewer than 287 high school valedictorians, each painfully aware that only one of them was good enough to match that achievement at Harvard.

By some uncanny instinct, the jocks had already started to discover one another.

At one round table in the outer circle, Clancy Roberts was subtly campaigning for the freshman hockey captaincy. At yet another, football linemen, who had met an hour earlier at Dillon Field House, savored what would be among the last meals they would be obliged to take with the plebs. For, once the pads were on, they’d be dining at the training table in the V–Club, where the meat, though no less gray, would be served twice as thick.

The huge, wood-paneled hall reverberated with the loud chatter of nervous freshmen. You could tell who had gone to high schools and who to prep schools. For the latter dressed in matching plumage — shetland jackets and rep ties — and ate in larger groups, whose conversation and laughter were homogenized. The would-be physicist from Omaha, the poet from Missouri, and the future lawyer-politician from Atlanta ate alone. Or, if after twenty-four hours they could still stand them, with their roommates.

Harvard did not choose your living companions without much deliberation and analysis. Indeed, some keen sadistic genius must have spent innumerable hours on this strange apportionment. And what a task it was — a smorgasbord containing eleven hundred wholly different dishes. What would you serve with what? What would go well and what give interpersonal dyspepsia? Someone in the administration knew. Or at least thought he did.

Of course, they asked you for your preferences. Nonsmoker, athlete, interested in art, et cetera. Preppies naturally requested and received accommodations with their buddies. But then, they were the few conformists in this monstrous colony of oddballs, where exceptions were the norm.

What, for example, could they do with Danny Rossi, whose singular request had been a dormitory as near as possible to Paine Hall, the music building? Put him with another music type? No, that might risk a clash of egos. And what Harvard wanted was harmonious tranquility among its freshmen, who that week were in the process of receiving the most agonizing lesson of their lives. They were about to learn that the world did not spin uniquely around them.

For reasons inexplicable to everyone except the college powers, Danny Rossi was assigned to share his rooms in Holworthy with Kingman Wu, a Chinese future architect from San Diego (perhaps the link was California), and Bernie Ackerman, a mathematics whiz and champion fencer from New Trier High School in a suburb of Chicago.

As they all ate dinner at the Union that evening, it was Bernie who tried to puzzle out why they three had been thrown together by the mandarins of Harvard roommate-ism.

“It’s the stick,” he offered as a solution. “That’s the only symbol that connects us three.”

“Is that supposed to be profound or just obscene?” asked Kingman Wu.

“Hell, don’t you see it?” Ackerman persisted. “Danny’s going to be a great conductor. What do those guys wave at an orchestra? Batons. Me, I’ve got the biggest stick, ’cause I’m a fencer. Get it now?”

“And me?” asked Wu.

“What do architects most often draw with? Pencils, pens. There’s the three sticks and the solution to the mystery of our being put together.”

The Chinaman was not impressed. “You’ve just awarded me the smallest one.” He frowned.

“Well, you know where to stick it, then,” Ackerman suggested with a self-congratulatory chuckle.

And thus the first eternal enmity among The Class of ’58 was born.

In spite of his outward self-assurance, Jason Gilbert was nervous about going to the Union on his own for that inaugural repast. So desperate was he that he actually sought out D. D. in order to propose they go together. Alas, his roommate was already back before Jason had even dressed.

“I was the third on line,” he boasted. “I had eleven ice creams. That’ll really please my mom.”

So Jason ventured out alone. As luck would have it, near the steps of Widener Library he ran into a guy he’d played (and beaten) in the quarter finals of the Greater Metropolitan Private Schools Tourney. The fellow proudly introduced his quondam rival to his current roommates as “the S.O. B. who’s going to knock me off for number one. Unless that guy from California beats us both.”

Jason was happy to join them, and the talk was mostly of the tennis court. And the wretched food. And doggy bowls, of course.

My roommates and I celebrated our first night at Harvard by not eating there. We elected instead to go into Boston, have a quick meal at the Union Oyster House, and then move on to Scollay Square, the sole oasis of sleaze in the city’s desert of puritanical decency.

Here we attended the edifying spectacle at the Old Howard. This venerable burlesque theater has housed the legendary strippers of the age, not least of whom was tonight’s attraction, Irma the Body.

After the performance (if that’s the word for it), we all dared one another to go backstage and invite the leading lady to join us sophisticates for a drop of champagne. First we thought of composing an elegant epistle (“Dear Miss Body …”), but then decided a live emissary would be more effective.

At this point there were huge piles of braggadocio being hurled back and forth. Each of us showed our tremendous latent courage by pretending to be on our way in. Yet no one took more than two steps toward that stage door.

I then came up with a brilliant solution: “Hey, why don’t we all go?”

We all eyed one another to see who’d be first to respond. But no one did.

Then, in a sudden, inexplicable fit of conscientiousness, we unanimously decided that discretion bade us get some sleep to prepare us for the rigors of a Harvard education. The spirit, we reasoned, must take precedence over the flesh.

Alas, poor Irma, you don’t know what you missed.

Twelve freshmen stood in a straight line, stark naked. They were of varying somatotypes, ranging from corpulent to frail (Danny Rossi was among them.) Their physiques were as disparate as Mickey Mouse and Adonis (Jason Gilbert was also among the dozen). Before them stretched a wooden bench some three feet off the ground, and behind it an imperious gymnasium official who had menacingly introduced himself as “Colonel” Jackson.

“Awright,” he barked. “You freshmen are about to take the famous Harvard Step Test. Which, as you don’t have to be a Harvard man to figger out, involves the stepping up and stepping down on this here step. Clear so far? Now, this here test was devised during the war so’s we could check our G.I.s’ fitness. And it must have worked, ’cause we beat Hitler, didn’t we?”

He paused to await some expression of patriotic enthusiasm on the part of his charges. But, losing patience, he continued laying down the rules.

“Okay, when I blow my whistle, you start climbing on and off the bench. We’ll be playing an L.P. and also I’ll be beating time with this here stick. Now this procedure will continue for five entire minutes. And I’m watching all of you, so don’t goof off or miss a step or you’ll be majoring in P.T. exercises the whole darn year.”

Danny trembled inwardly as this officious ogre rambled on.