Rita Decker
Rita Decker is the mother of Charles Decker and the wife of Carl Decker, a woman whose intellectual independence and fierce protectiveness of her son place her at the center of the family's destructive dynamics. She is a cultured, strong-willed woman who reads serious periodicals, plays the piano, and refuses to be dominated, yet her marriage is marked by coldness and her son's violence is partly a response to the world she and her husband created. Her role in the novel is that of a complex, often silent witness: she enables Charlie's rebellion even as she tries to control it, and her own history with her husband shadows every act of violence Charlie commits.
Identity and Background
Rita Decker is an intellectual woman who reads English mysteries by Victor Canning and Hammond Innes, as well as magazines like The Manchester Guardian, Monocle, and The New York Review of Books. She plays the piano, and her playing—even boogie-woogie—sounds like Bach. She met Carl Decker at a wedding reception; the bride, Jessie Decker Hannaford, was Rita's college roommate and Carl's sister, and she was burned to death less than a year later. Rita and Carl courted for six months and married; Charlie was conceived around the time of Jessie's death. Rita never wanted another child. She is described as humorous, literate, and pleasant, kind to animals and accordion-playing mendicants, but she carries a grudge when she does not get her way. She is capable of extraordinary persistence: when Carl's brother sent her a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle that was entirely white except for a single blueberry in the corner—a joke at her expense—she completed it in two days and took a Polaroid picture to prove it.
Relationship with Charlie
Rita is the parent to whom Charlie is closest, and he identifies himself as more his mother's child than his father's. She calls him "love" and "honey," wipes his tears, and gives him chocolate in her sewing room after traumatic events. When Charlie breaks all the storm windows at age four, Carl throws him to the ground; Rita intervenes, shouting at Carl to get out of her sight, and takes Charlie inside for cocoa. Charlie remembers the comfort of her silk slip and her sweet smell. She is the one who makes him wear a corduroy suit with a bow tie to Carol Granger's birthday party, insisting despite his protests, and she threatens him with grounding if he disobeys. When Charlie is suspended after attacking Mr. Carlson with a pipe wrench, Rita is hysterical and takes tranquilizers. She sleeps a lot, her breath sour with Librium. After the hostage crisis, she sends Charlie the yearbook, which he has not yet unwrapped.
Relationship with Carl Decker
Rita's marriage to Carl is a cold, antagonistic partnership. She calls him "Carl" with deliberate formality, and he calls her "Mother" when he feels a good one has been put over on her. She has her own bedroom and her own puzzle table. When Carl throws Charlie to the ground, she advances on him and shouts him down, telling him to go find his friends and have drinks. When Carl tries to whip Charlie with his belt after the Carlson incident, Rita is asleep on Librium. Charlie overheard Carl on a hunting trip say he would slit Rita's nose if he ever caught her with another man, a threat that haunts Charlie's sexual development. The marriage is characterized by mutual contempt and a power struggle that Rita often wins through sheer force of will.
Narrative Role and Thematic Significance
Rita Decker represents the intellectual, cultured alternative to Carl's rigid, violent masculinity, but she is not a purely positive figure. Her protectiveness of Charlie is genuine, yet she also enables his isolation by keeping him close and by failing to confront the deeper problems in the family. She is the one who insists on the corduroy suit that leads to Charlie's humiliating fight with Dicky Cable, and she is the one who, after the hostage crisis, sends the yearbook—a symbol of the normal life Charlie can never return to. Her presence in the novel underscores the theme that violence is not simply inherited from a brutal father but is also a response to a world in which even the most loving mother cannot protect her child from the consequences of his own rage. She is the last person Charlie thinks of before he is shot by the police, and her silence in the final chapters is as telling as her earlier interventions.
