Dick

Dick is a professor and aspiring experimental poet whose help gives Jenny a temporary hiding place in his household, but whose curiosity and intimate intrusion turn that refuge into another place she must escape. His cultivated politics of openness and anti-commercialism sit uneasily beside the carefully managed secrecy of Jenny’s life and his failure to respect the distance she needs.

Academic Identity and Social World

Dick teaches at the small, famously incendiary college where he met Rob Frazer during Frazer’s brief career as athletic director. The college lies upriver between the Bronx and Wildmoor. Dick specializes in the nineteenth-century American novel, but considers himself an experimental poet; he has not published his poetry. A heated defense of one contemporary writer against a rival professor is appearing, letter by letter, in the journal of the Modern Language Association. He thinks he may eventually publish the letters as a book, and Jenny’s duties include archiving them.

His domestic and intellectual life is shared with Helen, his aspiring-writer wife. After their youngest child left for college, Helen began renting a small Greenwich Village apartment as a study and working there every day. The couple hired Jenny as a housekeeper and assistant to make that arrangement possible. Their household therefore presents itself as a literary, cultivated space, but its practical structure places Jenny in paid domestic work while she is also trying to remain unseen.

Jenny’s Cover and the Limits of Hospitality

Frazer told Dick and Helen that Jenny needed somewhere to lie low, while advising them not to ask for more. He left enough ambiguity for them to imagine either that she had an abusive boyfriend or that she was a fugitive from the law. In either case, refusing her would risk making them appear hard-hearted or conventional. The pair settled on a cover story: Jenny would be Sally Chen, the daughter of old family friends, staying with them to establish New York State residency before applying to a university; she planned to become a doctor.

Dick helped make the invented identity socially legible by invoking the academy’s supposed embrace of people of every race and nation. He reasoned that acquaintances would accept that he and Helen knew Chinese people, then stumbled over the alias and corrected himself. The exchange makes the cover story more than a private arrangement: Jenny’s safety depends on Dick and Helen performing an explanation of her presence to their social circle. Their readiness to help is real, but it is tied to the self-image of people willing to act daringly without knowing the full danger they are hosting.

The arrangement lasted barely six months. Dick told Jenny that he regarded her as a person of substance and could imagine her as a close friend under better circumstances. Yet he also pressed her to disclose the broad outlines of her history, asking whether she faced serious criminal charges or had merely wanted to get away. He framed the request as respect and offered to accept only a hint, but the request still asked Jenny to make a dangerous secret available for the household’s reassurance. Helen, who tended to assume the worst, found not knowing increasingly difficult; Dick’s polite insistence did not resolve that tension.

Hospitality, Performance, and Departure

Dick and Helen’s cultivated opposition to commercialism is expressed through the food they bring home from France: handmade cheeses, brandies, and wines smuggled back in two suitcases. At dinner Dick cuts the cheese into minute wedges and explains how commercial agriculture and corporate culture erase the knowledge involved in food. He connects taste to cultural loss, carefully pairing cheese and wine and raising a toast to freedom. The scene gives his politics a vivid material form, but also shows how readily he turns ordinary hospitality into an occasion for performance and instruction.

That performance does not make the household safe for Jenny. One night she wakes to find Dick leaning into her bed, his breath close to her neck. He asks quietly whether she is sleeping well. Jenny springs up, says that she is, and recoils until he returns to his room. The scene establishes the boundary violation through what happens and through her bodily response; it does not explain Dick’s intention. The following morning, after both hosts have gone to work, Jenny packs, puts on her cleaning gloves, and wipes the house for hours. She cleans drawers, utensils, spices, containers, framed art, and records, then returns to the bathroom and cleans the toilet she had previously scrubbed every week. She leaves after wiping it for the last time.

Later, Frazer recalls that he spoke with Dick and Helen on the night Jenny took off. Jenny tells Frazer that the couple had become suspicious and did not like having her there, while he disputes that they acted as if they disliked her. The disagreement preserves the gap between Jenny’s sense of being unwelcome and Frazer’s reading of the hosts’ behavior; it does not undo the bedroom encounter or her decision to leave.

Narrative Role

Dick’s brief household offers a contrast between shelter and exposure. He and Helen give Jenny a room and a workable alias, yet their need to understand her story presses against the secrecy that makes the arrangement useful. Dick’s academic letters, his elaborate talk over imported food, and his probing questions all show a man accustomed to shaping experience through language. Jenny, by contrast, finally answers the household’s uncertainty not with an explanation but with action: she cleans, erases traces, and goes.

The episode also qualifies the idea that political or intellectual daring is the same as care. Dick and Helen are willing to host a person whose circumstances may be dangerous, but their generosity exists alongside social curiosity and a failure of intimate boundaries. Dick is neither presented simply as a rescuer nor reduced to the moment at Jenny’s bedside: his assistance, self-fashioning, pressure for disclosure, and intrusion remain in tension. That tension makes his home a temporary refuge whose limits become visible only when Jenny has to leave it.