Boomsday

Chapter 2

Twelve Years Before…

“I got in! I got in!”

Cassandra Cohane, age seventeen, was exuberant, and why not? The thick envelope she was waving over her head like a winning lottery ticket bore the dark blue “Lux Et Veritas” stamp of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. All that work, SAT preparation, studying until her eyeballs burned, signing up for AP courses, all those summers spent tutoring inner-city kids, one working on the archaeological site from hell: helping to excavate a 1980s-era mass grave in Guatemala (“It will look very strong on your application,” her guidance counselor had said). The endless rewriting of the college essay, gearing up for the sweaty interview. The waiting. And now she was in. She said it one more time. “I got in!” She hardly believed it herself.

Her father wouldn’t be home until late. She waited for him in the kitchen. He arrived after ten. She sprang up to show him the letter.

“Honey, I’m so proud of you I could bust.” Frank Cohane had gone to an engineering college in California, one that needed to make no apology, but it was-he’d be the first to admit-no Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

“Yale!” he said. “Damn. Yale. How about that.”

Two days later via FedEx, a box arrived. It was full of Yale car decals, coffee mugs, T-shirts, sweatpants, cap, a bulldog-theme pencil sharpener, pens, pads, paperweights, a mouse pad, and a sweatshirt that read, YALE DAD. The card read, “So proud. Love, Dad.” He put so many YALE decals on the car windows, her mother complained she couldn’t see out the back. Neighbors stopped and congratulated her.

A few months later, she came home from school and saw an envelope with the familiar blue emblem lying open on the dining room table. It was from the registrar’s office, addressed to her parents:

“We still have not received the first installment for Cassandra’s tuition. Please contact us at your earliest convenience.”

Her mother wasn’t home yet. She called her father. He greeted her with his normal paternal exuberance, which, once she introduced the subject, changed to an awkward silence.

“Sug” (pronounced “Shug”), he said-an ominous start: It was a word he generally used, perhaps without realizing it, when sugarcoating was called for-“I really want to talk to you about that. But I can’t right now, sweetheart. I’ve got four people in my office. We’ll talk when I get home. Love you.”

She confronted her mother when she got home. Her mother read the letter with a puzzled look. “Dad said he’d take care of it.” She called him at the office. Cass listened in the doorway, mind racing.

They weren’t poor, the Cohanes. They lived in a comfortable subdivision in a respectable but hardly fancy neighborhood. Her mother taught economics at the public high school Cass attended. There were four children in the family. Her father was reasonably prosperous, as far as Cass knew. He’d been a systems engineer at Electric Boat, the company that built America ’s fleet of cold war-era submarines. He never talked much about his job, since much of it was technically classified and all of it, he assured them, was boring and dry. One day, Cass’s younger brother picked the lock on their father’s briefcase and examined the contents. He revealed to his siblings that as far as he could figure out, it had something to do with the launch and guidance systems for the subs’ ballistic missiles. Not boring, but definitely dry.

Frank and several of his colleagues had presciently quit Electric Boat the year before, assuming correctly that the end of the cold war would sooner or later reduce the demand for submarines that could simultaneously annihilate fifty cities, despite the Connecticut congressional delegation’s best efforts to perpetuate a felt need for them. They had a brainstorm for an Internet/software program. In the 1990s, Wall Street was dispensing money faster than an ATM to any start-up ending in “.com.” Frank’s idea had to do with tracking-not ballistic missiles, but shipping packages. If everything went according to plan, they’d take their company public within the year. They were already trying to figure out what kind of corporate jet to buy. He and his partners were working brutal hours, sometimes sleeping on cots at the old mill they’d rented for their office. He would arrive home looking wiped out, but with sparkly eyes. Once they did the IPO, he predicted, “we’ll be richer than King Tut.”

Cass listened to her mother on the phone.

“You what? You said you put that in her 529! Oh, Frank-how could you?”

Cass did not know what a “ 529” was, but the other words issuing from her mother were acquiring an unpleasant critical mass: “can’t believe”…“disgusted”…“unforgivable”…ending with, “No, you can tell her. You get in your forty-thousand-dollar Beemer right now-I don’t care how many people you have in your office-and come home and tell her yourself.” She hung up.

Cass waited for him in the kitchen, as she had the night she got the acceptance letter. When he finally got home, he wore a smile of the kind generally described as “brave.”

“What’s a 529?” Cass asked.

“Did Mom…explain?”

“No. She said you would. She just burst out crying and closed the door to her bedroom.”

“Oh. Uh, well, it’s an instrument, a college savings plan. You put money in it, and, uh, it’s tax-exempt.”

“So I have one?”

“Sug, I…had to put it into the company. These start-ups take seed capital, honey. But when we do the IPO, I’m telling you…Do you know what IPO is?”

“‘I’m pissed off’”

“Clever girl. Initial public offering. We’re going to be rolling in it. Rolling.”

“So, basically, Dad, what you’re trying to say is that you spent my college tuition money on your dot.com.”

“Our dot.com. Don’t worry, Sug, we’ll come up with the money. If I have to…I’ll come up with the dough. You’ll see.”

Her father spent most of the following nights at his office. Meanwhile, Cass’s mother drove to New Haven to try to sort things out. She returned looking defeated, with the news that the Cohanes did not qualify for tuition assistance, as they called it. They were above the thin red line dividing the truly needy from the truly well-enough-off. There was, her mother said, face darkening, her father’s BMW. It might not be a particularly recent model, but you would not find it being used in a remake of The Grapes of Wrath, driven by Tom Joad. Then there was-her face now vermilion-his part ownership in the twin-engine Cessna.

On the night her father finally reappeared for a family supper, Cass’s mother said, as she passed the mashed potatoes, “Frank, there was a question on the financial aid application: ‘How many aircraft do you own? If needed, list on separate sheet.’ How many do you have at this point?” That was the end of Mom and Dad’s conversation at that happy supper. Her father stormed off into the night, muttering on about how he was killing himself for the family and what thanks did he get? A few hours later, Cass got an e-mail from him, manfully explaining that he used the Cessna “exclusively” to fly to business meetings. In fact, it was deductible as a business expense. Indeed, he managed to make it sound as though selling his share in the plane would be tantamount to economic suicide. The family would be out on the street, eating potatoes that fell off trucks. Irish ancestry is a reliable provider of poverty metaphors.

A few days later, Frank Cohane was waiting for Cass outside her high school. In his Beemer. That, too, he explained sheepishly, was a “deductible business expense.” He took her to Starbucks, where, according to a recent survey, 92 percent of Americans now hold their significant conversations.

“Sug,” he said, “have you ever given any thought to, uh…”

“Religious orders? No, Dad.”

“The military.”

She stared. She had, as it happened, not given any thought to the military. She supposed that she was as patriotic as any seventeen-year-old American girl. She’d grown up in the backyard of one of the country’s biggest defense contractors. Everyone here was patriotic. But her adolescence had been focused intensely on AP French, AP English, AP history, 1585 SATs, and a 3.95 GPA so that she might actually get into-you know-Yale. Hello? Perhaps he’d noticed?

“Hear me out,” he said, suddenly animated, as if he had just had a category 5 brain hurricane. “I did some calling around. Turns out if you go into the officers training program-and hell, you’d be a cinch with your scores-and give ’em a few years, heck, they’ll pay for college.” He made it sound like the bargain of the century.

What was his deal? He’d done “some calling around”? On his fancy new cell phone? In the BMW? Or had he jumped into the “deductible” Cessna and flown down to the Pentagon in Washington to talk it over personally with the Deputy Undersecretary for Recruiting Kids Whose Dads Have Blown the Tuition Money? He couldn’t actually be serious.

“How many years?”

“Three. And get this-if you give ’em six years, they basically pay for everything. You get all kinds of bennies.” He leaned forward. “I called Yale. They said they were expecting you in the incoming class and started to give me some hoo-hah about it, until I said, ‘Whoa, whoa-you’re telling me you’re gonna renege on accepting a patriotic American woman who wants to serve her country?’” He grinned. He did have a winning grin, her father. “Did they ever back down fast. So you see, I fixed it. They’ll defer admission until you’re discharged from the army. Or navy. Whatever you-”

“You told them-as in Yale-that I wasn’t entering this fall? As in the place I have been working my butt off to get into the last four years? You told them that?”

“Well, seeing as how we don’t have the money…Geez, Sug, do you know it’s over thirty grand, and that’s without a dining plan.”

“I could always, like, not eat for four years.” Her head was spinning. “Did you…have you discussed this with-Mom?”

“No. No. I wanted to bounce it off you first. Naturally. Sug, when this IPO goes through, I’ll buy Yale University a whole new football stadium.”

Frank Cohane went on talking, but Cass had stopped listening. She was trying to calculate how many people she’d told about getting into Yale. Fifty? A hundred? Let’s see, everyone in her Yahoo! address book…plus everyone on her Hotmail address book…everyone in the senior class knew…relatives…plus she’d stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center where she spent that broiling summer as a tutor. They’d all hugged her, said how proud they were of her. Say, two hundred people?

Cass became aware that her father was still talking.

“…I never went into the military myself. And to be honest, I always kind of wished I had. Not that I wanted to go to Vietnam. Jesus, no one in my generation wanted to go to Vietnam. That was completely screwed up. Anyway, we’re not at war now. So really if you think about it, it could be kind of a good experience.”