Watergate scandal

The Watergate scandal reaches Jenny not as a detached account of national politics but as a signal whose meaning changes with her circumstances. At Wildmoor, she follows the hearings while painting; by late fall, reports of the crisis and a letter from William make her wonder whether the country has changed enough for her to come out of hiding. The scandal briefly seems to open a political door, but the possibility of surrender is bound up with the fact that William is imprisoned and she has no shared plan for what to do when only one of them is caught.

The hearings at Wildmoor

The Watergate hearings begin during Jenny’s first summer at Wildmoor. She listens while completing the upstairs bedrooms, work she had prepared for through the cold weather: moving furniture, clearing dust, choosing paint, scraping the moldings, and covering the many-paned windows. Her broadcast comes from a small transistor radio found in the stables. It can barely hold a signal. Static repeatedly drowns out the words, so Jenny climbs down from her ladder to adjust the antenna; eventually she powers the radio with an extension cord and tapes it to the ladder, continuing to work as she fine-tunes the reception. Paint settles on the radio, leaving it speckled with color as if the broadcast’s static had become visible.

The hearings draw Jenny into the life of the country again. She feels almost happy in the vigor of the work and in being absorbed by events beyond her immediate isolation. But Watergate’s revelations also sharpen her awareness of the people around her. When Nixon’s former secretary reveals that everything was on tape, Jenny rushes from the room in astonishment, only to stop at the head of the stairs when she hears Dolly’s untroubled voice from the porch, where a teatime visit is underway. The contrast is not simply between someone following the news and someone who is not: Jenny hears in that calm the security of a river society that seems to regard itself as enduring beyond political upheaval. She returns to painting with the impression that the people gathered there have no need to watch for change or feel the national shame that reaches others.

From broadcast to political possibility

The scandal’s practical meaning comes into focus in late fall, when yellow leaves have returned to the trees and brief snow flurries have begun. After going to Red Hook for newspapers, Jenny reads that the president has fired the special prosecutor and abolished the office, and that the attorney general and deputy attorney general have resigned. Congressional support for Nixon’s impeachment appears to be growing daily. Jenny already knows these developments from radio news, but a letter from William gives them a personal and political interpretation. He writes, “We’ve finally come back through the looking glass to the side that is sane.” He sees the public turning against Nixon as evidence of conditions for a general uprising that he and Jenny once feared would never come, and wonders how he or anyone like him would fare before judges in this altered climate.

William’s reading connects the scandal to the political education he and Jenny had tried to foster. In his view, the critical judgment they had worked to cultivate about the war has now reached the White House. Watergate therefore appears, to him, not merely as a crisis within government but as evidence that ordinary people may be prepared to recognize and oppose corruption at the highest level. The letter does not establish that Jenny shares his confidence. It places a hopeful political interpretation beside her uncertainty, forcing her to consider what the changed atmosphere might mean for a fugitive contemplating surrender.

The possibility of surrender

A note attached to William’s letter, sent by Dana, gives Jenny the name and phone number of a lawyer William thinks she should contact. Jenny recognizes William’s language in the recommendation and realizes that Dana and William have been corresponding independently about her fate. The discovery irritates her, partly because the decision concerns her and has been discussed without her, and partly because she is reluctant to confront what surrender would involve. She imagines visiting William in San Quentin, separated from him by Plexiglas, rather than facing the possibility that she might be imprisoned without him among her few visitors.

Their failure to discuss what would happen if only one of them were captured weighs on the choice. They had repeatedly planned for the possibility that both might be arrested, but had never planned for separation; their actions had always been carried out together. William’s arrest had seemed accidental: he had meant to stop at their rented workshop for a tool while Jenny was home preparing dinner and listening to the police band for his footsteps. The political argument in his letter cannot undo that rupture. Jenny understands his suggestion that she turn herself in as something like being cut loose, even though she knows that is not what he intended. Her response to Dana is deliberately noncommittal: “I’ll let you know when I reach our good friend.”

Political change and personal limits

Jenny glues the lawyer’s name and number beneath the insole of one of her shoes, a small act that keeps the decision physically close without making it. Calling, she tells herself, would not itself amount to surrender. Still, a week passes, then several more, and she does not call. Watergate has made a changed political climate imaginable; it has not made the personal cost of surrender easier to face. The newspaper reports and William’s optimism press against the loneliness of deciding alone, the absence of a plan for separation, and the fear of prison.

In winter, Jenny sits beside the river and watches the train that brought her to Wildmoor. She once took comfort in the property’s proximity to its tracks, as though remaining near them could let her resume her interrupted journey. Now she knows the train goes to Canada, but the prospect of escape is only a fantasy: she has neither the documents nor the money, and no friends there. The train’s brief passage cannot provide the way out that political change seemed to promise. Watergate matters to Jenny because it makes the question of return newly thinkable, while the events of her life leave her unable to act on that possibility.