Peekskill

Peekskill is presented through a railway station and its exposed riverfront, a place Jenny chooses for a consequential meeting and returns to for a carefully controlled act of communication. Its role is modest but precise: it lets her approach the lawyer in person, then limit the trace she leaves behind when she declines his proposal.

Setting and Approach

On a freezing morning, Jenny boards a train at Rhinecliff at an unusual hour so she will not encounter conductors she knows. She rides south toward the city, farther than she has traveled since leaving, and gets off at Peekskill. There, the Hudson River opens out from the highlands to the width of a lake. A small station stands beside scarred benches facing the water; across the river, a cement plant sits about half a mile away.

The waterfront is not a sheltered meeting place. Jenny has arranged to wait on a bench if it is not raining, with the station as an alternative if it is. The wind off the river is severe. She has already waited almost half an hour when the lawyer arrives, dressed for the cold in thin jeans, an old leather jacket missing two buttons, and a sweatshirt rolled up as a scarf. She cannot feel her hands or toes, and has not bought winter clothes because she has not had enough money.

The Meeting

Jenny has come to meet a lawyer after the kidnapping in Berkeley has sharpened her fear that public outrage will close the opening for radical politics she had hoped Watergate might create. The meeting brings her into direct contact with someone outside the life she has been leading: she expects an older socialist with a history of difficult times, but finds a much younger, smooth-cheeked man whose city-edged voice seems discordant with his appearance. The cold, exposed setting frames an encounter that is both practical and personally unsettling.

Return and Narrative Significance

A few weeks later, Jenny takes the train back to Peekskill to mail the lawyer a letter declining his proposal. She chooses to send it from there so that he will associate her with that place, rather than with another location. The return gives Peekskill a second, sharply different function: first the site of a face-to-face meeting, then the point from which Jenny preserves distance while ending the possibility of further contact.

The location’s significance rests on this controlled repetition. Jenny travels to Peekskill because it is reachable by train and offers a meeting place apart from her usual routine; she returns there not to renew the encounter but to manage what the lawyer can connect to her. The riverfront’s exposure contrasts with the discretion she seeks, making the station and bench a temporary point of contact rather than a new home or lasting refuge.