The Class

Class, The - Segal, Erich

May 112, 1983

My Harvard Twenty-fifth Reunion is next month and I am scared to death.

Scared to face all my successful classmates, walking back

on paths of glory, while I have nothing to show for my life except a few gray hairs.

Today a heavy, red-bound book arrived that chronicles all the achievements of The Class of '58. It really brought home my own sense of failure.

I stayed up half the night just staring at the faces of

the guys who once were undergraduates with me, and now are senators and governors, world-famous scientists and pioneering doctors. Who knows which of them will end up on a podium in Stockholm? Or the White House lawn?

And what's amazing is that some are still married to their first wives.

A few of the most glittering successes were close friends

of mine. The roommate I once thought of as a fruitcake is the candidate likeliest to be our next Secretary of State. The future President of Harvard is a guy I used to lend my

clothes to. Another, whom we barely noticed, has become the musical sensation of our age.

The bravest of them all laid down his life for something he believed in. His heroism humbles me.

And I return, resplendent in my disappointment.

I am the last Eliot of a great line to enter Harvard. My ancestors were all distinguished men. In war, in peace, in church, in science, and in education. As recently as 1948, my cousin Tom received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But the brilliance of the family tradition has grown

dim with me. I don't even hold a candle to Jared Eliot

(Class of 1703), the man who introduced rhubarb to America. - Yet I do have one tenuous connection with my noble

forebears. They were diarists. My namesake, Reverend Andrew Eliot, '37, while bravely tending his parishioners, kept a daily record-still extant-describing what the Revolutionary War was like during the siege of Boston in 1776.

The moment the city was liberated, he hurried to a meeting

of the Harvard Board of Overseers to move that General George

Washington be given an honorary doctorate.

His son inherited his pulpit and his pen, leaving a vivid account of America's first days as a republic.

Naturally, there's no comparison, but I've been keeping notebooks all my life as well. Maybe that's the single

remnant of my heritage. I've observed history around me, even if I didn't make any of it.

Meanwhile, I'm still scared as hell.

COLLEGE YEARS

We took the world as given. Cigarettes Were twenty-several cents a pack, and gas As much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber

And veiled in supernatural scruples-call Them chivalry. . Psychology was in the mind; abstract Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life

Worth living was the private life, and-last, Worst scandal in this characterization- We did not know we were a generation.

JOHN UPDIKE

- CLASS OF 1954

They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked.

It was Monday, September 20, 1954. Eleven hundred

sixty-two of the best and brightest young men in the world were lined up outside that monstrous Victorian Gothic structure known as Memorial Hall. To register as members of the future Harvard Class of '58.

Running the sartorial spectrum from Brooks Brothers to hand-me-downs, they were variously impatient, terrified,

blasé, and numb. Some had traveled thousands of miles, others a few blocks. Yet all knew that they were now merely at the beginning of the greatest journey of their lives.

Shadrach Tubman, son of the president of Liberia, flew from Monrovia via Paris to New York's Idlewild Airport,

whence he was driven to Boston in his Embassy's limousine. John D. Rockefeller, IV, unpretentiously took the train up from Manhattan and splurged on a taxi from South Station to the Yard;

Apparently the Aga Khan simply epiphanized. (Other rumors had it that he'd flown there on a magic carpet-or a private jet.) In any case, he stood in line waiting to register just like any mortal.

These freshmen had arrived already luminaries. They had been born directly into the limelight.

But on this last day of summer 1954,- more than a thousand other potential comets were waiting to burst from dark anonymity to light up the sky.

Among them were Daniel Rossi, Jason Gilbert, Theodore Lambros, and Andrew Eliot. They-and a fifth, still half a world away-are the heroes of this story.

DANIEL ROSSI

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even;

- He sings the song, but it cheers not now,

- For I did not bring home the river and the sky. -

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

CLASS OF 1821

From earliest childhood Danny Rossi had a single, desperate ambition-to please his father.

And one single haunting nightmare-that he never could.

At first he believed there was a legitimate reason for Dr. Rossi's indifference. After all, Danny was the slender, unathletic brother of the toughest fullback in the history of Orange County, California. And all the time that Frank Rossi was scoring touchdowns and attracting college scouts, Dad was too involved with him to pay attention to his younger son.

The fact that Danny got good grades-which Frank never

did-made no impression whatsoever. After all, his brother stood a mighty six feet two (a head taller than Danny), and

his mere entrance on the field could bring a stadium of cheering people to their feet.

What could little bespectacled red-haired Danny do that earned applause? He was, or so his mother constantly

reported, a gifted pianist. Almost a prodigy. This would have made most parents proud. And yet Dr. Rossi never once had

come to hear him play in public. -

Understandably, Danny felt enormous pangs of envy. And a resentment growing slowly into hatred. Frank is not a god, a person, too. Sooner or later you're going to notice.

But then in 1950, Frank, a fighter pilot, was shot down in Korea. Now Danny's pent-up jealousy transformed, in painful stages, first to grief and then to guilt. He somehow felt responsible. As if he'd wished his brother's death.

At the ceremony in which they named the school athletic

field for Frank, his father wept uncontrollably. Danny looked with anguish at the man he so admired. And he vowed to bring him consolation. Yet, how could he give his father joy?

Even hearing Danny practice annoyed Arthur Rossi. After all, a dentist's busy day was orchestrated to the grating

noise of drills. And so he had a cork-lined studio built in the cellar for his sole surviving son.

Danny understood this was no act of generosity, that his father wished to be freed from the sight as well as the sound of him.

Yet, Danny was determined to keep fighting for his

father's love. And he sensed sport was the only way for him to rise from the cellar of paternal disapproval.

There was just one possibility for a boy of his

size-running. He went to see the track coach and asked shyly for advice.

He now got up at six each morning, slipped on sneakers,

and left the house to train. His excessive zeal during those early weeks made his legs sore and heavy. But he persevered. And kept it all a secret. Till he had something worth telling Dad.

On the first day of spring, the coach made the entire

-squad run a mile to gauge their fitness. Danny was surprised that he could actually stay near the real runners for the first three quarters. -

But suddenly his mouth was parched, his chest aflame. He started to slow down. - From the center of the field - he

heard the coach call out, "Hang in there, Rossi. Don't give up."

Fearing the displeasure of this surrogate father, Danny drove his weary body through the final lap. And threw

himself, exhausted, onto the grass. Before he could catch his breath, the coach was standing above him with a stopwatch.

"Not bad, Danny. You sure surprised me-five minutes

forty-eight seconds. If you stick with it, you can go a heck of a lot faster. In fact, five minutes can sonietimes cop third place in our dual meets. Go to the supply desk and get a uniform and spikes." -

Sensing the proximity of his goal, Danny temporarily

abandoned afternoon piano practice to work out with the team. And that usually- meant ten or twelve grueling quarter-miles. He threw up after nearly every session.

Several weeks later, the coach announced that, as a reward for his tenacity, Danny would be their third-miler against Valley High.

Thatnight he told his father. Despite his son's warning that he'd probably get badly beaten, Dr. Rossi insisted on attending.

That Saturday afternoon, Danny savored the three happiest minutes of his childhood.

As the fidgety runners lined up at the middle of the

cinder track, Danny saw his parents sitting in the first row.

"Let's go, son," his father said warmly. "Show 'em the good old Rossi stuff." -

These words so ignited Danny that he forgot the coach's instructions to take it easy and pace himself. instead, as the gun went off, he bolted to the front- and led the pack around the first turn.

Christ, thought Dr. Rossi, the kid's a champion. Shit, thought the coach, the kid's crazy. He'll burn himself out. As they completed the first lap, Danny glanced up at his father and saw what he had always thought impossible-a smile of pride for him. -

"Seventy-one seconds," called the coach. "Too fast, Rossi. Much too fast."

"Looking good, son!" called Dr. Rossi.

Danny soared through the next four hundred yards on wings of paternal approval. -

He passed the halfway mark still in the lead. But now his lungs were starting to burn. By the next curve, he had gone

into oxygen debt. And was experiencing what runners not inaccurately call rigor mortis. He was dying.

The opposition sped past him and opened a long lead. From across the field he heard his father shout, "Come on, Danny, show some guts!"

They clapped when he finally finished. The sympathetic applause that greets the hopelessly outclassed competitor. Dizzy with fatigue, he looked toward the stands. His

mother was smiling reassuringly. His father was gone, it was like a bad dream.

Inexplicably, the coach was pleased. "Rossi, I've never seen a guy with more guts. I caught you in five minutes fifteen seconds. You've got real potential."

"Not on the track," Danny replied, limping away. "I quit." He knew, to his chagrin, that all his efforts had only made matters worse. For his embarrassing performance had been on the track of Frank Rossi Field.

Humiliated, Danny returned to his previous life. The keyboard became an outlet for all his frustrations. He

practiced day and night, to the exclusion of everything else. He had been studying since he was six with a local

teacher. But now this honorable gray-haired matron told his mother candidly that she had nothing more to give the boy. And suggested to Gisela Rossi that her son audition for Gustave Landau-a former soloist in Vienna, now spending his

autumnal years as music director of nearby San. Angelo Junior

College.

The old man was impressed by what he heard and accepted

Danny as a pupil.

"Dr. Landau says be's very good for his age," Gisela reported to her husband at dinner. "He thinks that he could even play professionally."

To which Dr. Rossi responded with a monosyllabic, "Oh." Which meant that he'd reserve all judgment.

Dr. Landau was a gentle if demanding mentor. And Danny was the ideal pupil. He was not only talented but actually eager to be driven. If Landau said go through an hour of Czerny's keyboard exercises every day, Danny would do three or four.

"Am I improving fast enough?" he'd ask anxiously.

"Ach, Daniel, you could even work yourself a little less.