Barbara was between semesters of college and living in New York City, in an apartment on West Fifty-sixth Street, getting involved in leftist political causes and dating an activist named Hank. “Hank is beautiful,” she wrote to William, “but we’re so utterly different. He lived in the slums and led a gang (because he was the tallest and the biggest) and hated cops and swam in the East River. . . . And now we go to bars and stand at the rail with the workmen and talk about Leninism.”
