Warday

I gave her hard copy this morning, and she turned all red and said she would keep it forever. Her dad and mine were brokers together when, as my mom says, America was still young.

But we are young now, Stacy and me.

A Wanderer

East of Pittsburgh there are mountains, then there are farms, then there are fields full of wild growth, and a tumbledown look to the towns. Not many people are aboard the Empire State, the train that runs from Pittsburgh to Albany via Scranton. We are carsick and uncomfortable. This was not a passenger line before the war, and the roadbed is brutal. I doubt that we’re going much more than forty.

We reach Scranton after midnight. There is a cold, wet wind blowing out of the northwest The air is fresh, with a tang of woodsmoke. We are leaving the train here, shifting to Trailways.

To pare some hours off our journey, we’ll take the bus across 84 to Poughkeepsie, then catch a midmorning train down to the end of the line in White Plains, the headquarters of the New York Military Area.

The terminal is empty, lit by a single light There are no streetlights in this neighborhood, and we are forced to rely on a map, reading street signs as best we can.

The Trailways station is more active. People camp here and there in the waiting room. Somebody is playing a dulcimer quite well, but I do not recognize the tune.

The restaurant is open, selling cheese sandwiches, cherry pie, and a local brand of yogurt I eat a slice of the pie, which is far less sweet than what used to be sold in bus stations. We get coffee, which is generally made from toasted grain these days, and this is no exception. But it’s hot.

There is one other passenger on the Poughkeepsie bus, a small woman of delicate beauty. Her eyes are large and dark, her lips full, her brown hair framing her soft face, which is as pale as a shadow.

She tells us she is on her way back to Boston. Her family lives in Scranton, but she is in school at Harvard. She is studying twentieth-century English literature. I am delighted. It was a discipline I thought might have been abandoned in the rush to prepare people for practical careers. “I’ve applied to read at Oxford or Cambridge, but I doubt I’ll make it. There are a thousand American applications a semester, just for my field. They take six in modern literature.”

“What’s it like at Harvard?” Jim asks.

“Difficult, in the sense of physical survival. I’m a senior. I arrived there in the fall of ’88, right? I was just starting my freshman year when the war happened. I stayed there because it was obviously mad to try to get back to Scranton. I couldn’t even make a phone call home for months. I wrote, but the letters never got through. Harvard was in total chaos. People were leaving—students, professors, administrators. Trying to get home, wherever their homes were. Northeastern University, which is in the Fenway in Boston, officially closed. There were all kinds of problems there. The students rioted when they couldn’t get food. I heard that there were shootings in the Fenway. In any case, one can now get a former student apartment there for next to nothing.

“Harvard was a bit better off than Northeastern. We thought of the war as an awful sort of irony, because there had actually been a joint U.S.-Soviet physics conclave in session on campus when the war was fought, the first such conclave in years. The Russians tried to leave the next day. They set out for Logan Airport on foot, finally, even though it was obviously hopeless. Nobody ever saw them again.

“The famine caused riots in Boston, which grew so serious that the campus had to be sealed off. I found myself in the peculiar position of studying for my finals while doing guard duty in the Yard. I was lucky to fall only a semester behind. Despite everything, Harvard was still dutifully failing people at the usual alarming rate.

“Those times were very dramatic and dangerous. The worst problem was food. We ate odd things. The various kitchens kept coming up with jointly prepared meals. Pickles, corned beef, Wheaties. and Tang was the sort of thing we might get for dinner. Everybody was always babbling about how various unlikely things would make complete proteins when they were put together. To make a long story short, we all but starved.”

“What do you study?”