San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area functions as more than the place the fugitives left behind: it is the political landscape they once tried to change and the scattered geography of relationships that can still sustain them. Its significance lies in the contrast between Jenny and William’s former confidence that violence would persuade an audience and the practical, uncertain loyalties on which survivors later depend.

Political Landscape and Public Memory

Before going underground, Jenny and William bombed government targets, mostly draft offices, choosing nighttime operations and believing their actions would draw attention while saving lives. The Bay Area had seemed to them a persuasive audience: Jenny later recognized that even conservatives there often held views not so different from their own. Their certainty had grown within a circle of people who already shared much of their outlook. Living far from that familiar milieu at Wildmoor exposed her, for the first time, to the people she and William had imagined themselves addressing. The distance between a political audience as an idea and a region of actual people unsettles the confidence with which they had acted.

The region also appears through the public memory of The cadre. After the group’s dramatic end in Los Angeles, Sandy spoke at a memorial rally for its members. She had once been too shy to shout slogans at an antiwar demonstration; now she gave a fiery speech and was cheered. The public response to the cadre’s deaths had, in the novel’s account, altered how their doubtful actions were regarded. In the wake of the rally, a survivor approached Sandy and asked for help. The Bay Area’s political gatherings thus become a point where public commemoration crosses into the private work of keeping fugitives alive.

A Network of Friends, Weapons, and Uncertain Loyalties

The old circle around Frazer and Jenny is mapped not only by personal memory but by the practical distribution of resources. When The cadre’s surviving members needed to move, Frazer arranged for their guns to be stored with his old friends. He put Tom Milner in charge of that task; Tom accepted it as an improvement over having to store the fugitives themselves. The guns were later presumed to be scattered across the Bay Area, a concealed set of coordinates marking the world Frazer and Jenny had once shared.

That map does not prove the circle remains loyal. Frazer has been in New York too long to know what his former friends feel about him or one another. Sandy’s call when the fugitives reached her door and Dana’s later provision of Jenny’s post-office box number show that help still travels through acquaintances, but both women had been at the edges of his awareness. The region therefore holds a network that is useful precisely because it persists, yet difficult to measure: past closeness supplies contacts and hiding resources without guaranteeing present allegiance.

Jenny’s Return to Bay Area Support

As the fugitives’ available money ran out, Jenny turned again toward people connected to the region. She asked Tom to contact Mike Sorsa, then left Pauline alone and took a bus to Golden Gate Park to meet him. Mike recognized Jenny despite her hat and glasses, embraced her, and pressed an envelope of five hundred dollars into her hand. He was angry that she had not contacted him sooner and had already suspected that something was happening because Tom Milner appeared to know more than he was saying. His immediate financial help converted old acquaintance into tangible support at a point when the fugitives could not rely indefinitely on their earlier sources.

Mike also offered Jenny a ride back in a truck Tom had said still ran. Her delight at seeing it—she laughed and cried as she hugged Mike again—makes the vehicle more than a convenient way to travel: it is another recovered resource from a former life, supplied through the same human connections that make the Bay Area both refuge and risk. The meeting does not establish that the entire old circle will help; it shows instead how survival depends on particular people choosing to act.

Geography as a Record of Shared History

Frazer’s image of the hidden weapons as coordinates captures the Bay Area’s double role. The region is a physical place where money, vehicles, and firearms can be found, but it is also an archive of relationships that have outlasted separation. Some links remain active, as Sandy’s call and Mike’s assistance demonstrate; others are uncertain, and Frazer cannot tell whether the broad circle he remembers still holds together. Jenny’s return to that network is therefore not a simple homecoming. The Bay Area preserves the resources of her former political world while revealing how little its old loyalties can be taken for granted.