Warday

“Washington, D.C., the seat of government of the United States of America since 1800, has been destroyed by a surprise nuclear air tack. Reports from the area indicate catastrophic destruction on a scale previously unknown in human affairs. The city was swept away in a sea of Are. Not a building remains standing, not a monument intact. Observers are unable even to approach within ten miles of the city. Baltimore, Maryland, is also burning, as are the majority of smaller communities surrounding the District of Columbia.” It went on, but I find that my memory does not serve me to quote the rest.

The paper recommended that people stay indoors, reported the flooding of the subway system, and announced that the police department had opened Madison Square Garden, the Armory, and the Convention Center as protected public shelters.

I would say that the appearance of that newspaper was one of the few good things that happened in those terrible days. It served first notice that humanity still existed, that we had been hurt but we were not going to give in just yet. I know that people lost their lives doing the reporting that went into it, not to mention transporting and delivering it. Not only Times people were involved in the edition, but also news crews from the television networks and the staff of the Daily News, which was without power to run its own presses.

Still, reading in black and white that Washington was gone made me frantic.

Until that moment I hadn’t thought beyond the immediate situation: how to live through the next few hours, and would I come down with radiation sickness? Every passing moment of queasiness or faint chill was terrifying. We had set up a hospital in the parents’ lounge, which was also an interior room, and there we attended the sick and dying as best we could. The school’s science teacher, Mrs. Dannay, had managed to rig up a thing called a Kearney Fallout Meter, and was engaged in dividing the school into safe and unsafe areas.

The KFM was made in a Folger’s coffee can and consisted of two leaves of aluminum foil hung side by side on strings inside the can. It was covered by the clear plastic top from a Tupperware container in which the fourth grade had been hatching frog eggs. The bottom of the can held crushed gypsum, used as a drying agent because humidity can affect the ability of the foil strips to respond to the presence of radiation. Mrs. Dannay had dug the gypsum out of the wall in the lab. It was just ordinary wallboard.

She could tell by the way the leaves of foil spread apart or came together how much gamma radiation was present in a given area.

It wasn’t accurate enough to measure hot spots on people, but it did help us to confirm that our water was not highly contaminated and that our top two floors and the area of the church closest to the main doors were, as well as all areas on the main floor of the school near doors and windows, and the whole central foyer.

That Kearney Fallout Meter probably saved the lives of most of the people in our School. It also enabled Mrs. Dannay to develop a rough estimate of ambient radiation outside. She told us that trips out were safe only for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that no individual should make more than one trip.

It was on the third day that I began to have symptoms. My head had become infected despite copious applications of Betadine and plenty of soap and water. Of course, I had been exposed to radiation and that had lowered my resistance to disease. (Lowered resistance caused by the combination of radiation and starvation is undoubtedly the reason that the Cincinnati Flu took so many lives the year before last.) In any case, I began to get symptoms of radiation poisoning and infection. My head hurt terribly.

When I started vomiting, Anne and Andrew took me off to a corner of the hall and tended me there. They did not want to put me in the parents’ lounge, which had become a virtual dying room.

Just about everybody who went in there died within a few hours.

Of course, people had no notion of how to protect themselves from radiation, and many of them had gotten very severe doses. I hoped that my dose wasn’t too terrible, but I also suspected that, combined with the head wound and the rough conditions, it might weaken me enough to threaten my life.

We prayed a good deal. Over the past few years we had gone from being agnostics to becoming Christians again. We had been parishioners at Grace for about six months. I am a Roman Catholic by birth, and have had a stormy relationship with my Church. During the early eighties I went through a period of what could be described as confused neutrality. By Warday, I was temporarily uninterested in religion, though I felt comfortable with my son in an Episcopal school. Since the Reunion of ’90, I have been a Catholic worshiping in the Episcopal rite.