Still, he might have taken comfort had he known that his adoring father’s speech had been echoed several hundred times that day by several hundred other parents who were also sending their uniquely gifted progeny off to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Five hours later, Jason stood outside his assigned freshman dormitory, Straus A-32, on which a scrap of torn yellow paper was taped.
To my roommate: I always nap in the afternoon, so please be quiet.
It was signed simply “D. D.”
Jason quietly unlocked the door and carried his baggage practically on tiptoe into the one free bedroom. After placing his suitcases on the metal bed (it creaked slightly), he glanced out the window.
He had a view — and all the noise — of hectic Harvard Square. But Jason didn’t mind.
He was actually in a buoyant mood, since there was still enough time left to stroll to Soldier’s Field and find a pickup game of tennis. Already dressed in white, he merely grabbed his Wilson and a can of Spauldings.
Luckily, he recognized a varsity player who had defeated him in a summer tournament two years earlier. The guy was happy to see Jason again, agreed to hit a few, and then quickly learned how much the new arrival had improved.
When he got back to Straus Hall, there was another yellow note on the door, announcing that D. D. had gone to dinner and would then proceed to the library (the library — they hadn’t even registered!) to study, and would be back just before 10:00 P.M. If his roommate planned on coming in after that, would he be kind enough to be as quiet as possible.
Jason showered, put on a fresh Haspel cord jacket, grabbed a quick bite at a cafeteria in the Square, then tooled up to Radcliffe to scout the freshman girls. He returned about ten-thirty and was duly respectful of his unseen roommate’s need for rest.
The next morning he woke to find yet another note.
I have gone to register.
If my mother calls, tell her I had a good dinner last night.
Jason crumpled up this latest communiqué and marched off to join the line that now stretched well around the block outside Memorial Hall.
The high intentions of his message notwithstanding, the elusive D. D. was not by any means the first member of The Class to register. For at the very stroke of nine, the large portals of Memorial Hall had opened to admit Theodore Lambros.
Three minutes earlier, Ted had left his home on Prescott Street to stride over and claim a tiny but indelible place in the history of the oldest college in America.
To his mind, he had entered Paradise.
Andrew Eliot’s father drove him down from Maine in the family’s vintage station wagon, laden with carefully packed trunks containing tweed and shetland jackets, white buck shoes, assorted moccasins, rep ties, and a term’s supply of button-down and tab-collar shirts. In short, his school uniforms.
As usual, father and son did not speak much to each other. Too many centuries of Eliots had gone through this same rite of passage to make conversation necessary.
They parked by the gate closest to Massachusetts Hall (some of whose earlier occupants had been George Washington’s soldiers). Andrew ran into the Yard and rushed up to Wig G-21 to enlist the aid of his former prep school buddies in hauling his gear. Then, as they were toting barge and lifting bale, he found himself momentarily standing alone with his father. Mr.
Eliot took the occasion to impart a bit of worldly advice.
“Son,” he began, “I would be very grateful if you did your best not to flunk out of here. For though there are innumerable secondary schools in this great land of ours, there is only one Harvard.”
Andrew gratefully acknowledged this astute paternal counsel, shook his father’s hand, and raced off to the dorm. His two roommates had already begun to help him unpack. Unpack his liquor, that is. They were toasting their reunion after a summer of self-styled debauchery in Europe.
“Hey, you guys,” he protested, “you could at least have asked me. Besides, we’ve got to go register.”
“Come off it, Eliot,” said Dickie Newall as he took another swig. “We walked past there just a while ago and there’s a line around the goddamn block.”
“Yeah,” Michael Wigglesworth — affirmed, “all the weenies want to get there first. The race, as we well know, is not always to the swift.”
“I think it is at Harvard,” Andrew politely suggested. “But in any case, it isn’t to the smashed. I’m going over.”
“I knew it.” Newall sniggered. “Old Eliot, my man, you’ve got the makings of a first-class wonk.”
Andrew persisted, undaunted by this preppie persiflage. “I’m going, guys.”
“Go on,” Newall said, dismissing him with a haughty wave. “If you hurry back we’ll save you some of your Haig & Haig. By the way, where’s the rest of it?”
And so Andrew Eliot marched through Harvard Yard to join the long, winding thread of humanity — and ultimately to be woven into the multicolored fabric called The Class of ’58.
By now The Class was all in Cambridge, though it would take several hours more for the last of them to be officially enrolled.
Inside the cavernous hail, beneath a giant stained-glass window, stood the future leaders of the world. Nobel Prize winners, tycoons of industry, brain surgeons, and a few dozen insurance salesmen.
First they were handed large manila envelopes with all the forms to be signed (in quadruplicate for the Financial Office, quintuplicate for the Registrar, and, inexplicably, sextuplicate for the Health Department). For all this paperwork they sat side by side at narrow tables that stretched forever and seemed to meet only in infinity.
Among the questionnaires to be completed was one for Phillips Brooks House, part of which asked for religious affiliation (response was optional).
Though none of them was particularly pious, Andrew Eliot, Danny Rossi, and Ted Lambros marked the boxes next to Episcopal, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox, respectively. Jason Gilbert, on the other hand, indicated that he had no religious affiliation whatsoever.
After the official registration, they had to run an endless gauntlet — of wild, paper-waving proselytizers, all vociferously urging Harvard’s now — official freshmen to join the Young Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, mountain climbers, scuba divers, and so on.
Countless irrepressible student hucksters noisily cajoled them to subscribe to the Crimson (“Cambridge’s only breakfast-table daily”), the Advocate (“so you can say you read these guys before they got their Pulitzers”), and the Lampoon (“if you work it out, it comes to about a penny a laugh”). In short, none but the most determined misers or abject paupers emerged with wallets unscathed.
Ted Lambros could sign up for nothing as his schedule was already fully committed to courses academic — by day and culinary by night.
Danny Rossi put his name down for the Catholic Club, assuming that religious girls would be a little shyer and therefore easier to meet. Maybe they would even be as inexperienced as he.
Andrew Eliot made his way through all this welter like a seasoned explorer routinely hacking through dense foliage. The kind of social clubs that he’d be joining did their recruitment in a more sedate and far less public fashion.
And Jason Gilbert, except for buying a quick subscription to the Crimson (so he could send the chronicles of his achievements home to Dad and Mom), strode calmly through the phalanx of barkers, much like his ancestors had traversed the Red Sea, and returned to Straus.