New York City serves as a home, a political and logistical hub, and a destination whose meaning changes with the characters’ circumstances. For Rob Frazer, Manhattan is where public notoriety becomes a working life with Carol; for the fugitives, it is linked to the support network that helps them leave California and to a safe house outside the city. Later, as Jenny and Pauline travel east, naming New York becomes a small but exhilarating declaration that they have escaped their pursuers’ trail.

Frazer’s East Coast Base

After Berkeley, Rob Frazer was hired as athletic director at a small East Coast college, then fired before working a day and given a full year’s salary as severance. Carol wanted to move to Manhattan, and the severance made that possible. In New York City, Frazer set up an office, restarted his newsletter with a senator’s denunciation incorporated into its masthead, and began writing another book. His earlier rise—from a mimeographed newsletter and a book sold out of his car to national attention—had made him recognizable to academics, athletes, and sportswriters. Manhattan gave that reputation a base from which to continue.

The city also became the setting for another turn in Frazer’s public career. A dispute over a university gymnasium had already lasted three semesters and included two student strikes before he became involved. The university hired him as athletic director and as a conciliatory figure in negotiations with the student insurgency, hoping his left-leaning reputation and relationships with Black people would help. Frazer relished the authority and gave about a hundred local media interviews. He then hired a Black Muslim runner as co-director; the university fired him again, this time buying out nearly twice as much of his contract. Frazer shared some of the money with the runner and continued giving interviews. The episode shows how readily he could turn institutional conflict into public standing and financial leverage.

Home, Marriage, and Private Space

The Manhattan life Frazer built with Carol was not only an office and a platform. They settled into a university-owned apartment they had decided to keep by whatever legal or illegal means necessary. It had high ceilings, creaking French doors, and a claw-footed bathtub. When Frazer called Carol from a motel room in Rhinebeck, he thought happily of the apartment’s sprawling, slightly shabby comfort and asked whether she had picked up milk.

That ordinary domestic question carries the city’s private life into a story otherwise shaped by political conflict and flight. Carol had once objected fiercely to the lack of privacy in their home; Frazer had responded by buying her a fifty-foot phone cord. She could drag the phone down the hall and shut herself in the bathroom, which she had made into a private office with feminist books and scenting equipment. The apartment offered a refuge, but not an uncomplicated one: its rooms held both the habits of a marriage and Carol’s insistence on having a space of her own.

Connections, Refuge, and the City’s Edge

New York City also figures as the center of Frazer’s effort to help the fugitives. After discussing the plan with them, he offered to support Yvonne until money came through, explaining that he was on her side. The arrangements that followed depended on a network of people and resources: Carol rented a new safe house, an old farm about an hour’s drive from Manhattan; fugitives were moved there one by one; and Tom was put in charge of storing their guns with Frazer’s old friends. The guns were eventually presumed to be scattered around the Bay Area, leaving their owners’ former world mapped by a hidden set of coordinates.

This arrangement makes the city a point of connection rather than the fugitives’ lasting shelter. Frazer and Carol could organize transport, lodging, and the dispersal of weapons, but the safe house itself lay beyond Manhattan. The support network was also fragile. Frazer wondered whether his old circle remained loyal and admitted that he had been away from California too long to know what its members felt about him or one another. Sandy had contacted him when the fugitives arrived at her door, and Dana later supplied Jenny’s post-office box number. His help gave the group options, but dependence on intermediaries also exposed the limits of his knowledge and control.

New York as a Destination

For Jenny, New York first appears as an answer to a question about where she comes from. When a boy presses her for a place of origin, she has forgotten to prepare a cover story and can no longer claim to be Iris Wong from San Francisco. After a pause, she says she is from New York City. The answer is a moment of improvisation under pressure: the city becomes an identity she can use when her previous disguise fails.

Later, while Jenny is living with the fugitives, she speaks by telephone with Frazer, who is on a Manhattan street corner. He tells her that the group matters politically and promises to visit in two weeks, though his crowded schedule prevents an earlier trip. The call connects the isolated household to the city and to Frazer’s continuing belief in the group’s significance. It also exposes the strain in that connection: Jenny wants him to come and speak to them, while the visit remains postponed.

When Jenny and Pauline are traveling east, Jenny tells a bartender that New York is their destination. She feels a surge of excitement at having said it, as if the declaration itself has erased their tracks. The city is not shown as the endpoint of a confirmed arrival; in this moment it is a direction, a chosen future, and a cover story that Jenny can inhabit. Her changing relationship to New York—from a claimed origin, to a distant point of contact, to a destination spoken aloud—echoes the fugitives’ unstable efforts to make a place theirs without being found.