LITMIR.BIZ

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His friends at Reed threw a farewell party for him at the end of the month. By then, he and Fay had made impetuous plans to marry after he returned from his prison term. After the bittersweet festivities and emotional parting from Fay, Bob hitchhiked to Los Angeles and turned himself in. The prosecutor sympathized with Bob’s plight but felt she had no choice: the law was the law. She cried and kissed him on the cheek as she oversaw Bob’s delivery to the county sheriff’s deputies.

      Meanwhile, Fay continued to frequent the student coffee shop and to relay Bob’s travails to his former co-workers. He spent a brief time in poorly maintained Los Angeles and Maricopa County jails before reaching his final destination, a minimum security prison in Tucson, Arizona. There he would serve out his sentence with a dozen other conscientious objectors in an open barracks filled with illegal immigrants from Mexico, income tax evaders, a white murderer and a Navaho jailed for a violent felony.

      Because of Bob’s college education, the warden had originally assigned him to office duties. Bob complained about such preferential treatment in a letter to Fay. He had warned Fay that all his incoming mail was opened and stamped before he saw it. He learned the hard way that the warden read his outgoing mail, too. Bob spent the next several months on a logging crew paving roads for a former German prisoner-of-war camp. The camp had been newly renovated to house up to 100,000 Communists and subversives the FBI then expected to designate as too dangerous to remain at large in society. Bob assumed his own mother was among the potential internees.

      Though Fay still socialized on occasion with Rob Scott, she knew she was Bob Richter’s lifeline. She wrote him long letters twice a week entertaining him with her activities. That included an excursion with friends to a popular Negro night club in Portland, for Fay a novel and exhilarating experience. During spring break, Fay traveled 25 hours by bus from Portland to see her fiancé. The American Friends Service offered a place for her to stay near the Tucson prison. Visits with Bob would be supervised as they sat on chairs too far apart to touch each other, but close enough to whisper and recover a sense of intimacy.

      At 19, Fay felt she was becoming a mature woman of the world. As her sister’s sixteenth birthday approached, Fay shared her insights with Lisie in a lengthy heart-to-heart message beautifully printed by hand in two colors. Fay felt she was wandering in a maze, getting lost and then finding her way again. She told Lisie: “The real meaning of life is in three things, love, beauty and pain. And these three are all really one which is God or Truth. And you will only come to know and understand this by giving, and giving too much.”³ Lisie treasured the unexpected birthday letter from Fay, hid it in her drawer and kept it with her throughout her life.

      Fay had already made plans for the summer that upset her parents as much or more than learning about Fay visiting her boyfriend in prison. Bob had previously worked at the local office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). It advertised at Reed a Student Peace Service Program in Mexico in the summer of 1951 to inoculate villagers against typhoid. Fay felt compelled to go — to do something useful rather than sit on the sidelines. She asked her parents to pay for that trip and secretly planned to visit Bob in Arizona on the way down to Mexico and back. The Abrahams refused. Undaunted, Fay talked an older cousin who was a lawyer into providing her with the money she needed. Another volunteer from Reed agreed to detour through Arizona so Fay could visit Bob first.

      Her parents were stunned at their reckless daughter. Yet over the summer Fay corresponded with her parents and got their reluctant acceptance of her choices. Most appealing to them was her decision to leave Reed and go to Cal that fall. She had become quite depressed that spring at Reed, as well as broke. At Cal, her finances would not be so stretched. Though she worked hard to repair her relationship with her parents, Fay feared from past experience that she would precipitate another rift somehow before too long.

      The experience in Mexico that July and August marked a turning point for Fay. She exulted in becoming the best among the volunteers at giving shots and enjoyed learning enough Spanish to carry on meaningful conversations. She even took her turn cooking. Being paired with another volunteer helped her avoid anticipated fiascoes due to lack of kitchen skills. The villagers’ joy in simple pleasures impressed her, but their living conditions and poor health were appalling. Fay even considered quitting school to remain working in Mexico with toddlers whose lives could be easily improved. What struck her most was the villagers’ tolerance of invasive insects, not even batting an eyelash when flies flew in front of their faces.

      Yet, most of all, Fay gained insights into herself. Once she transferred to Cal and earned her degree, she was considering graduate school in sociology. She also wanted to resume piano lessons. While in Mexico, she had heard the Emperor Concerto on the radio and yearned to reconnect with her former piano teacher. She wanted an opportunity to play the concerto as she felt it should be played, improving on her debut at the San Francisco Symphony as a young teen. Ruby would be delighted.

      More troublingly, Fay had been feeling dishonest in all her cheery messages to Bob. He was hoping to win parole after one year in jail, and they talked about marrying on her next birthday. For some time she had harbored serious doubts about their future together. Fay revealed to Bob her history of alternating between wildly conflicting urges that could doom their relationship. She gave him a recent example. When Fay started working for AFSC in Portland, she had deliberately acted like a quiet, religious girl. Fay dutifully held hands before meals in silent prayer and shared weekly news from Bob in prison to reinforce acceptance into their circle. Most of all, she wanted the Quakers’ social pressure to keep herself on that virtuous path. But on arrival in Mexico, Fay veered in a different direction. She joined their mutual friend Steve from Reed every night, going out drinking until the wee hours, shocking all of their AFSC campmates and feeling no shame.

      Fay came to the realization she had never made decisions, but acted on uncontrollable impulses, lurching from one course to the next. She believed in predestination, not free will. She wondered aloud to Bob: “At what freakish moment will this force contort or twist my mind into doing what? It’s terrible…. I’m left with a feeling of being on a pattern, a track that I have to go on but I don’t know where it is going…. I am powerless to alter it or find out where it goes.”⁴

      On the way back from Mexico, during the third week of August 1951, Fay and Steve took several buses that connected ultimately to Tucson, a trek that left her quite ill. After visiting Bob again, Fay could not hide her unhappiness at the disparate treatment she observed in the prison camp. It bothered her that Bob had gained weight after he was reassigned to library work. Why did he and other conscientious objectors who shirked deadly combat in Korea all have easier work assignments than the Mexican “wetbacks,” as Bob and the others referred to them? Though Fay had been touched when Bob whispered at their visit, “You know I’m crazy about you,” she openly voiced misgivings about their marriage plans. Fay was grateful when Bob wrote back that they needed to know each other better. She wondered whether love was the deciding factor. “What do I actually want? Is it security?”⁵ That question would trouble her to her dying day.

      Fay’s parents still lived in Pennsylvania, but her mother flew to the Bay Area that August to visit family. Somewhat to her surprise, on reuniting with Ruby, Fay enjoyed being pampered with new clothes, a comfortable hotel room and luncheons at high class restaurants. The contrast with life among the Mexican villagers unsettled her. Fay had brought back silver earrings as souvenirs, which she distributed among friends and family as she shared stories of her summer experience with the Quakers, hoping to convince them of the program’s merit. She and her mother got along remarkably well on this visit, a welcome change.

      Despite her growing ambivalence toward a future with Bob, Fay arranged for another trip to Tucson from Berkeley in mid-September. She asked Bob’s parents to pay her way, $35 that Fay could not herself afford. Fay even arranged for a special treat. She knew that the prison had a piano. Although the barracks were off limits to visitors, an exception had been made for officials of the local evangelical church, which conducted regular Sunday services there. Fay asked the prison staff in advance if she could play the piano for the inmates. The unusual request from an attractive college coed persuaded the warden, who agreed to let her play on an upcoming Saturday afternoon.

      When Fay arrived on September 15th, the warden unlocked the

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