Rhoda Penmark—Leroy Jessup

The relationship between Rhoda Penmark and Leroy Jessup turns on an unusual mutual recognition: Leroy sees through some of Rhoda’s practiced innocence, while Rhoda reads his spite and manipulation with unsettling precision. Their exchanges begin as teasing and appraisal, but deepen into a struggle over Claude Daigle’s death and the evidence Leroy claims to possess. The connection that Leroy imagines as a kind of likeness becomes, instead, a fatal mismatch: he threatens and fantasizes, while Rhoda acts.

First Encounters and Mutual Appraisal

Leroy’s antagonism toward Rhoda is established through small provocations. When he deliberately sprays water on Christine Penmark and Monica Breedlove, Christine treats the act as an accident, but Rhoda insists that Leroy intended it. She describes how she watched him decide to do it, and her certainty unsettles him. Leroy recognizes that his usual tactics—misleading people and making them feel at fault—do not work on Rhoda. He turns away from her appraisal, privately deciding that she is dangerous.

Rhoda also notices the pattern behind Leroy’s conduct. She explains that he sometimes claims to have lost the key to the park gate so that children will have to wait and beg him to open it. Her judgment is calm rather than indignant: she considers him mean, and speaks as if his motives are plain to her. In contrast, Monica Breedlove takes Rhoda’s comments about Leroy lightly and responds affectionately to the child. The gap between the adults’ easier interpretations and Rhoda’s clear-eyed assessment establishes an early feature of their relationship: Rhoda understands Leroy more accurately than those around her do.

Leroy, for his part, believes the two share a quality of being difficult to fool. He concludes that he and Rhoda are alike, a judgment the narration explicitly qualifies. Rhoda can put into action what Leroy only entertains as fantasy. That distinction foreshadows how their apparent kinship will become a source of danger rather than solidarity.

Claude Daigle and the Strain of Teasing

After Claude Daigle’s drowning, Leroy uses the death to provoke Rhoda. When he sees her preparing to go skating, he challenges her apparent lack of grief and suggests that she should be mourning her schoolmate. Rhoda answers that Claude was the one who drowned, not her. Leroy repeats her response to himself later, treating it as evidence that she is as hard-hearted as he is. His fixation goes beyond ordinary teasing: he pays close attention to her actions and repeatedly returns to the question of what she feels about Claude.

The narration describes Leroy’s persistent persecution as a perverse, frightened courtship. He tells Thelma Jessup that he only plagues and teases Rhoda, while the account makes clear that he is preoccupied with her. His attention combines mockery, suspicion, and a desire for recognition. Rhoda, however, does not meet it as affection. She dismisses his talk as foolish and, when he tries to draw her into conversation, treats his claims as lies.

As Leroy’s suspicion grows, he confronts Rhoda with what he has heard about the events surrounding Claude’s death. He alleges that Rhoda attacked Claude, forced him from the wharf, and took the penmanship medal. He then specifies that she struck Claude with a stick and pushed him from the wharf among its pilings. Rhoda denies his accusations and tells him that no one believes him. Leroy takes her attention as proof that his taunts are working, but the exchange also marks a change: his teasing has become an attempt to use his suspicions against her.

The Shoes as Leverage

Leroy’s most consequential threat concerns the shoes Rhoda wore when Claude died. He asks whether she found the bloody stick she had supposedly washed, linking his earlier accusation to a search for physical evidence. Later he tells her that he entered the Penmark apartment with a key he had found and took the shoes. He claims to have hidden them where only he can find them and threatens to give them to the police, presenting the shoes as proof connecting Rhoda to Claude’s death.

Rhoda initially answers that Leroy is lying and that she burned the shoes in the apartment building incinerator. Leroy counters that he heard them fall down the incinerator chute, opened it, and found them scorched but still useful as evidence. When Rhoda recognizes that he is telling the truth about possessing them, she asks him to return them. He refuses and makes their return conditional on her behaving as he wishes. The power between them appears briefly to shift: Leroy holds something Rhoda needs kept from the authorities, and he believes that possession gives him control.

The threat is especially charged because Leroy has moved from guessing about Rhoda’s actions to claiming that he can expose them. Rhoda’s composure gives way only enough for her to demand the shoes. Leroy interprets his discovery as a victory, but he misjudges the kind of response his coercive leverage will produce. His belief that he can keep Rhoda under control repeats the earlier mistake of assuming that their similarities make them equals.

The Fatal Break

With Christine Penmark watching from the kitchen window, Rhoda takes kitchen matches, returns one to the box, and goes down to the basement, where Leroy is asleep. She lights the excelsior and papers of his makeshift bed, then quietly leaves and closes the basement door. Rhoda returns to her place on the steps with an ice-cream stick. Her measured actions contrast with the emergency unfolding inside the basement and with Christine’s dawning realization of what has happened.

Leroy calls for Rhoda to unlock the door and then insists that he never had the shoes and was only teasing her. Rhoda responds that he knows where they are. The appeal does not change her course. Leroy escapes into the courtyard, but reaches the gate and dies there. Rhoda disposes of the ice-cream stick and its wrapper and remains composed as he runs toward the lily pond. Christine, who has witnessed the fire from the window, loses consciousness and later calls Rhoda’s name in a panic.

Leroy’s death resolves the immediate contest over the shoes by removing the person who claimed to hold them, but it does not erase the danger of what Rhoda has done. His effort to frighten her has ended in his death, and Christine has now seen Rhoda act with the same calm purpose that characterized her earlier responses to Leroy. The relationship’s final reversal is stark: the man who believed he had uncovered Rhoda’s secret and could command her becomes the victim of the threat he failed to understand.

Narrative Significance

Leroy functions as both Rhoda’s antagonist and an imperfect interpreter of her character. He correctly recognizes that conventional appeals to sympathy and ordinary social performance do not readily reach her. Yet his conviction that she is simply like him obscures the difference between his fantasies and her capacity to carry out a plan. The narration makes that distinction before their conflict reaches its end, turning Leroy’s claim of likeness into foreshadowing rather than an accurate account of their shared nature.

Their exchanges also trace how Rhoda’s apparent innocence operates in relation to suspicion. Leroy sees past the explanations accepted by other adults, but his insight does not make him safe: he uses what he suspects to taunt and threaten her. Rhoda, meanwhile, remains difficult for him to read even when she is listening closely. Their relationship therefore moves from mutual appraisal, through Leroy’s attempted blackmail, to irreversible violence, exposing the peril in mistaking recognition for control.