The Class

on my behalf.”

“Well, I’ve already composed rather a panegyric for the Berkeley people. I wouldn’t mind saying the same sort of thing to Harvard. I won’t ask why you would choose to endure the cold Cambridge winters. In any case, it’s past my bedtime and I must be off. Please say good night to Sara for me. She’s chatting with a rather hirsute character and I wouldn’t want to catch his fleas.”

He turned and marched off.

Ted smiled with elation. Within his chest the fires of aspiration burned brightly.

“You were fantastic, Ted. This was the proudest day of my life. You snowed everybody.”

As they headed toward their room at the Faculty Club, Ted could hardly wait to tell her his good news. “Even old Cameron Wylie seemed pretty impressed,” he remarked casually.

“I know. I overheard him telling two or three people.”

He closed the door behind them and leaned against it. “Hey, Mrs. Lambros, what if I told you that we might not have to leave Cambridge?”

“I don’t get it,” Sara answered, a little off balance.

“Listen,” Ted confided with intensity, “Wylie’s going to write to Harvard for me. Don’t you think a letter from him would boost me up into tenure heaven?”

Sara hesitated. She had been so elated this evening, so enchanted by the whole Berkeley experience, that this “good” news actually came as a disappointment. A double disappointment, in fact. Because in her heart she sensed that Harvard had already made up its mind and nothing could change it.

“Ted,” she replied with difficulty, “I don’t know how to say this without hurting your feelings. But all Wylie’s letter can do is say you’re a good scholar and a great teacher.”

“Well, Jesus, isn’t that all there is to it? I mean, I don’t also have to run a four-minute mile, do I?”

Sara sighed. “Hey look, they don’t need a letter from Oxford to tell them what they already know. Face it, they’re not just judging you as a scholar. They’re voting to let you into their club for the next thirty-five years.”

“Are you trying to suggest they don’t like me?”

“Oh, they like you all right. The question is, do they like you enough?”

“Shit,” Ted said, half to himself, his euphoria suddenly tumbling into an abyss of desperation. “Now I don’t know what the hell to do.”

Sara put her arms around him. “Ted, if it’ll help any in this existential dilemma, I want you to know that you’ve always got tenure with me.”

They kissed.

“Ted,” Dean Rothschmidt began the next morning, “Berkeley’s got a tenured slot in Greek Lit. and you’re our unanimous first choice. We’d be willing to start you at ten thousand a year.”

Ted wondered if Rothschmidt knew that he was offering him nearly three thousand more than he was currently earning at Harvard. On second thought, of course he did. And that was enough to buy a hell of a nice new car.

“And naturally we’d pay all your moving costs from the East,” Bill Foster quickly added.

“I — I’m very flattered,” Ted replied.

The pitch was not over. Rothschmidt had further blandishment. “I don’t know if Sara will recall, with all that madness at Bill’s last night, but the gray-haired gentleman she spoke with briefly was Jed Roper, head of the U.C. Press. He’s prepared to offer her a junior editorship — salary to be negotiated.”

“Gosh,” Ted remarked, “she’ll be thrilled.” And then he added as casually as possible, “I assume I’ll be getting a formal offer in writing.”

“Naturally,” the dean replied, “but it’s just a bureaucratic formality. I can promise you this is a firm offer.”

This time he took Whitman to lunch at the Faculty Club.

“Cedric, if there still is any enthusiasm for my being kept at Harvard, I think I’ve got some new ammunition.”

His mentor seemed pleased at what Ted reported. “Well, I think this strengthens your case considerably. I’ll ask the chairman to call Wylie for his letter so we can bring up your tenure at the next departmental meeting.”

My tenure, thought Ted. I actually heard him say my tenure.

The formal vote took place twenty-four days later. The department had for their consideration Ted’s bibliography (four articles, five reviews), his book on Sophocles (and the critiques of it, which ranged from “solid” to “monumental”), and various letters of recommendation, some from experts in the field whose names Ted would never know. But one certainly from the Regius Professor at Oxford.

Ted and Sara waited nervously in the Huron Avenue apartment. It was nail-biting time. They knew the meeting had begun at four, and yet by five-thirty there was still no word.

“What do you think?” Ted asked. “Is it a good sign or a bad sign?”

“For the last time, Lambros,” Sara said firmly, “I don’t know what the hell is going on. But you have my fervent conviction both as wife and classicist that you truly deserve tenure at Harvard.”

“If the gods are just,” he quickly added.

“Right.” She nodded. “But remember, in academia there are no gods — just professors. Quirky, flawed, capricious human beings.”

The phone rang.

Ted grabbed it.

It was Whitman. His voice betrayed nothing.

“Cedric, please, put me out of my misery. How did they vote?”

“I can’t go into details, Ted, but I can tell you it was very, very close. I’m sorry, you didn’t make it.”

Ted Lambros lost the carefully polished Harvard veneer he had worked a decade to acquire, and repeated aloud what he had said ten years earlier when the college had denied him a full scholarship.

“Shit.”

Sara was immediately at her husband’s side, her arms around him consolingly.

He would not hang up till he asked one final burning question.

“Cedric,” he said as calmly as possible, “may I just know the pretext — uh — I mean the grounds — I mean, in general terms, what lost it for me?”

“It’s hard to pinpoint, but there was some talk about ‘waiting for a second Big Book.’ ”

“Oh,” Ted responded, thinking bitterly, there are one or two tenured guys who still haven’t written their first big book. But he said nothing more.

“Ted,” Whitman continued with compassion in his voice, “Anne and I want you to come to dinner tonight. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of anything, really. So will you come?”

“Dinner tonight?” Ted repeated distractedly.

Sara was strenuously nodding her head.

“Uh, thanks Cedric. What time would you like us?”

It was a warm spring night and Sara insisted that they walk the mile or so to the Whitmans’ house. She knew Ted needed time to gain some equilibrium.

“Ted,” Sara said as he shuffled dejectedly, “I know there are at least a dozen four-letter words going around in your head, and I think for the sake of sanity you ought to shout them right out here in the street. God knows, I want to scream too. I mean, you got screwed.”

“No. I got royally screwed. I mean, a bunch of uptight bastards just played lions and Christians with my career. I feel like kicking in their goddamn mahogany doors and beating the shit out of all of them.”

Sara smiled. “Not their wives too, I hope.”

“No, of course not,” he snapped.

And then, realizing the childishness of his outburst, he began to laugh.