San Francisco

San Francisco is where Polly Chalmers tries to build a life for herself and her infant son, Kelton, after leaving home. The city’s imagined promise of freedom is sharply at odds with her precarious circumstances, and the apartment fire there turns a difficult beginning into an irreparable loss.

Arrival and Setting

By early summer 1971, Polly and Kelton had reached San Francisco after she worked a series of menial jobs. The city was associated with hippie culture, head shops, folk music, and the countercultural promise of a summertime love-in. But Polly, never much of a hippie, encountered a harsher neighborhood: jimmied mailboxes, junkies wearing peace signs alongside switchblades, and frequent visits from process servers, repossession agents, and police. The contrast makes the city’s ideal of freedom feel remote from the conditions in which she and Kelton were living.

Poverty and Exclusion

Polly applied for welfare but was told she had not lived in California long enough to qualify. She then applied for Aid to Dependent Children and waited for help. Kelton did not miss meals, but Polly lived hand to mouth, often hungry and afraid. Her difficulty was compounded by the stigma attached to unmarried motherhood: the period’s rhetoric of free love coexisted with the exclusion of women raising children outside marriage. Polly’s pride and refusal to ask for help deepened the hardship, and Kelton shared the consequences of her precarious life.

The Fire and Its Aftermath

In spring 1972, Polly’s situation had begun to improve. She had qualified for state assistance, expected her first Aid to Dependent Children check the following month, and was planning to move to a somewhat better home. Then a call reached her at the diner where she worked: the police wanted to speak with her. A young woman and a small child had been pulled from the smoky third floor of her apartment building, both burned beyond recognition. The authorities knew the child was Kelton; had Polly not been at work, they would also have known the woman was Polly. San Francisco thus remains bound in her memory to the brief prospect of stability and the sudden fire that ended her life with Kelton.