Dana

Dana is the quiet intermediary through whom Jenny and William sustain a relationship across separation, concealment, and danger. She recopies and forwards their letters, carries William’s advice to Jenny, and later helps Jenny transmit material that puts Dana herself at risk. Her role is practical rather than public: the correspondence and brief calls she handles preserve connection, but each act of mediation also exposes how vulnerable that connection is.

Identity and Role

Dana lives in Boulder and serves as a trusted point of contact for both Jenny and William. Their correspondence runs through her in both directions: Jenny sends letters addressed to William to Dana, who recopies and forwards them; William sends his replies to Dana, who then sends them on to Jenny. The arrangement depends on Dana’s work as a human relay, not on direct communication between the separated pair. Its quiet repetition allows the relationship to continue while withholding their respective addresses from one another.

The system is sufficiently established that its existence is known beyond the three correspondents. Sandy tells Rob Frazer that Jenny’s letters go to Dana for forwarding, and reports that Dana last described Jenny as doing well. The exchange conveys both the practical value and the emotional limits of the arrangement: information about Jenny reaches people around William, but Frazer is not in touch with her directly. Dana’s reports therefore carry more than mail; they become a narrow, carefully mediated channel through which others learn how Jenny is faring.

Correspondence and Jenny’s Separation

Dana’s role becomes especially consequential when Jenny considers what surrender might mean after reading William’s account of the Watergate scandal. Attached to his letter is a note from Dana directing Jenny to contact a very good friend at an address and arrange a phone call. The recommendation originates with William, but Dana is the one who conveys it. Jenny recognizes that William and Dana have been corresponding independently about her future, a private deliberation she had not known was taking place.

That discovery unsettles Jenny because she and William had previously imagined what they would do if both were arrested, but had never planned for the separation that actually occurred. Dana’s participation makes visible a new arrangement: other people now help manage choices the couple once made together. Jenny later writes to the young lawyer and refuses to proceed, explaining that she is not ready. She also informs William that the political conditions he had hoped might make surrender safer do not, according to her source, seem favorable. Dana’s note thus opens a possible route toward legal advice without determining Jenny’s decision; the choice remains Jenny’s, while Dana and William have already begun to coordinate around it.

A Courier Network Under Strain

In a later phase of Jenny’s fugitive life, Dana is part of a separate, tightly controlled exchange. Jenny makes brief calls from a phone booth near a boarded-up diner in Liberty after mailing a tape. Their established signal is deliberately minimal: Jenny asks whether Dana has received something, and if the answer is no, they end the call. When Dana confirms receipt and asks what the package is, Jenny does not explain. Instead, she gives handling instructions: Dana should use dishwashing gloves for the outer envelope and leave a second envelope untouched for delivery.

The procedure shows how the earlier letter network has changed. What had once been the repeated forwarding of personal correspondence now involves an object whose contents Jenny will not disclose and whose onward delivery she treats as especially sensitive. Dana is trusted with the task, but the limits of that trust are also clear: Jenny tells her what to do without telling her why. The phone booth’s routine calls provide confirmation while keeping the conversation short, an arrangement that protects information at the cost of leaving Dana to act without understanding the full risk.

Exposure and Rupture

The exchange ends in harm and a break in communication. After waiting for a reply from William, Jenny finds her own densely written letter returned to her, accompanied by Dana’s note saying not to write or send anything more because Dana has moved. Jenny tries repeatedly to reach Dana by phone before finally getting through. In their conversation, Dana says the material Jenny sent made her very sick. She explains that people at the place where she left it had been examined several times, and that they eventually found her.

Dana’s account makes the danger of the delivery concrete without resolving every detail of what happened at the location. Jenny responds by suggesting Dana must have been careless; Dana hears this as blame and challenges her. She also says she does not understand why Jenny became involved. The exchange shifts their relationship from coordinated secrecy toward accusation and incomprehension. Dana had been willing to forward letters, relay advice, and carry out Jenny’s instructions; now she identifies the consequences as personal, and the calls no longer restore their earlier confidence.

Narrative Significance

Dana’s appearances reveal the infrastructure beneath Jenny and William’s separation: letters have to be copied, routed, and entrusted to someone who can connect people without bringing them into direct contact. That infrastructure makes intimacy possible at a distance, but it also creates intermediaries who bear risks they may not fully understand. Dana’s note about William’s friend shows her facilitating decisions about Jenny; the later phone calls show her performing a more dangerous service for Jenny herself.

The contrast between these roles gives Dana’s trajectory its force. At first, her reliability is measured by the smooth passage of messages in both directions. Later, the same willingness to serve as a channel places her in jeopardy, and her instruction to stop sending anything marks a boundary the correspondence cannot safely cross. Dana is not shown resolving Jenny’s larger predicament. Instead, her changing position—from unseen facilitator to endangered participant who withdraws—registers the fragility of the communication network on which the separated characters depend.