William Weeks

William Weeks is Jenny’s first lover, political companion, and the absent presence around which much of her emotional life is organized. Their relationship begins as she leaves her father’s world and enters political life; after William’s arrest, it persists through coded, censored letters. Those letters preserve their attachment but cannot reproduce the intimacy of their shared home, making the distance between them one of the book’s central measures of Jenny’s loss.

Identity and Background

William is a senior at Berkeley when Jenny meets him. He has been thrown out shortly before completing his degree after taking over the dean’s office. He teaches a modern political science night class at a community center, which Jenny attends after moving to Berkeley at eighteen. She has left school without finishing high school, despite doing well on tests; a psychologist in Stockton had placed her three grades behind, perhaps to assert the superiority of American over Japanese schools. The class gives her a route toward further education, but it also brings her into a life she had not imagined.

Before William, Jenny has never had a lover or even been kissed. Their relationship therefore marks both a romantic beginning and a sharp break with her earlier life. William’s political language becomes hers, and their intimacy grows alongside her involvement in radical politics. Jenny remembers the joy of being drawn, through his way of speaking, toward a different future. Their bond is not simply one influence among others: in her recollection, it becomes the world that replaces the increasingly damaged relationship with her father.

Political Formation and Family Rupture

Jenny’s discovery of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans begins with a lesson at school in Japan. She had not learned about it in California or from her father, who had himself endured it; when she asks him about it, he dismisses it as long past. For Jenny, the history becomes a key to understanding her father and to recognizing power, oppression, racism, and political struggle. Yet this understanding does not reconcile them. As she becomes more involved in the antiwar movement, their arguments grow more furious without becoming more substantive: her father attacks her arrogance, stupidity, or naivete rather than debating the war itself.

The break becomes final after Jenny moves in with William. During a catastrophic visit, her father and William exchange insults, confirming the conflict she had feared. She and her father then end contact in what is, for both, the least hostile position they can reach. William becomes her world, and the severed family tie gives their partnership an unusually complete place in her life. The relationship offers Jenny a form of belonging, but the recollection also makes clear its cost: her connection to her father, already tenuous, is destroyed.

Love, Work, and the Image of William

Jenny remembers William as exacting in his political work. Before choosing a target, he researches it exhaustively: its directors and officials, its funding, and the full range of its actions, including evidence that might support its defenders. His standards shape Jenny’s own understanding of purposeful action. She had been content to let him take most of the credit among their close circle, but later wonders whether their shared pursuit of moral seriousness also contained vanity. Her recollection complicates idealization without erasing her admiration: William’s rigor is both an example she loved and a standard by which she must reconsider herself.

After his arrest, Jenny studies his newspaper photograph, but the public image does not match the man she knew. The photograph seems to show a handsome former teen idol, while she remembers a more complicated person whose expression could be restless and calculating. She learns, after they have been together for more than two years and even while they share a home, that she is not his only partner. Still, she understands herself as central to him, though she cannot explain why. This mixture of intimacy, uncertainty, and discovery prevents the relationship from resolving into a simple portrait of perfect devotion.

Letters Across Imprisonment

The correspondence begins after William’s arrest, when the two have to communicate under constraints they never faced before. Their first notes use a code that is obvious but safe: Jenny signs as his sister, and he answers as her brother. For a moment, the shared understanding reassures her. But the arrangement restricts what they can say, and the letters gradually feel less like direct contact than faint signals sent across a distance. William writes that zealots can taint the ideas they draw on and the people who might otherwise share them. Jenny initially resents the elevated phrasing, then feels guilty when she finds herself living among the very comrades he has in mind while concealing that fact from him.

The danger of disclosure shapes what Jenny can write. She wants to tell William the truth about her circumstances without giving prison censors a clue they could understand, so she repeatedly abandons drafts and begins again. In one attempt, she writes instead about searching for a yellow croquet ball, presenting the story as if she were still at Wildmoor. She recognizes that this is, in effect, a lie, even as she wants to believe that her letter remains honest. The mismatch between what she feels and what she can safely communicate turns each letter into an act of concealment as well as an expression of attachment.

Dana reseals William’s letters in new envelopes, and Jenny feels that the process alters them. Dana’s regular handwriting replaces Jenny’s pointed block letters, emphatic underlining, and exclamations when Jenny’s own words are transcribed. Jenny wonders whether something of her love is lost in that transfer. William’s letters retain his distinctive upright handwriting, but their measured statements cannot give her the physical closeness she seeks. She keeps them in a battered brown accordion file taken from Dick and Helen’s apartment; marked with the words Tax Yr ’64, it is so full that she worries its ribbon will break. The file is a practical container for the correspondence and a fragile material stand-in for a relationship that distance has made difficult to inhabit.

Reunion, Separation, and Aftermath

When Jenny and William finally meet again at Tom Milner’s apartment, his recognition that she has completed her task precedes any explanation. The bag is gone; before the waiting group can speak, Jenny and William go straight to one another. Their reunion briefly releases some of the tension in the room, although the moment does not erase the danger surrounding their political lives. The scene recalls the immediacy of their earlier intimacy, in stark contrast to the indirect, carefully managed connection of their letters.

The novel also shows William’s place in Jenny’s life through the obligations others take on in his absence. A person helping Jenny insists that William is a friend and explains that William had once asked for Jenny to be kept safe if anything happened to him. The promise makes William’s attachment consequential beyond his own presence: another person’s willingness to risk his livelihood and safety is grounded in a commitment William entrusted to him. For Jenny, however, such care cannot restore the lost everyday life of their home or overcome the limits of prison correspondence. William remains at once the origin of her adult love, a formative political influence, and someone whose actual thoughts she can no longer fully reach.