Christine Penmark

Christine Penmark is Rhoda Penmark’s mother and the novel’s central witness to the conflict between parental protection and responsibility to others. Her composed, conscientious manner initially helps her maintain an ordinary family life, but it cannot reconcile her with what she learns about Rhoda or with the violent history of her own birth family. As she moves from suspicion to knowledge, her silence becomes a choice with consequences, and her final suicide leaves Rhoda alive in the care of others.

Identity and Background

Christine is married to Kenneth Penmark and lives with their daughter, Rhoda. At the opening of the story, Kenneth is away in South America surveying port facilities, and Christine expects him to remain gone through the summer. His absence leaves her to manage the household and confront the developing crisis without his immediate support. On the morning of the Fern School picnic, she sets her clock for six because she dislikes being late or making others wait, an early instance of the orderliness and consideration that shape her public manner.

Christine has long found Rhoda difficult to understand. She describes her daughter as possessing a strangely mature quality that both she and Kenneth found disturbing from almost infancy. They hoped that the Fern School, with its emphasis on discipline and traditional virtues, might moderate the troubling aspects of Rhoda’s temperament. The school’s account initially seems to support that hope: Rhoda has a perfect record for attendance and punctuality and earns the highest marks in deportment, self-reliance, and conservation. Christine’s unease therefore exists beside strong evidence of outwardly exemplary behavior, rather than replacing it.

Christine’s own family history is concealed from her until late in the story. While reading an account of Bessie Denker, a serial murderer whose crimes extended across her family, Christine discovers that she is the surviving child mentioned in the case file. Richard Bravo and his wife took her in after the Denker case, and she had grown up without knowing who her birth mother was or what had happened to the family from which she escaped. The discovery transforms her understanding of her past: adoption had separated her from Bessie, but it could not erase the connection or the knowledge that her own daughter’s actions now seemed to echo a history she had not known was hers.

Suspicion and the Discovery of Rhoda’s Crimes

The death of Claude Daigle at the Fern School picnic first forces Christine to consider that Rhoda’s apparent composure may conceal something more serious. When the child returns home, Christine finds her calm and unruffled, asking for milk and a peanut-butter sandwich. Rhoda says she knows what happened and had suggested that the guards search among the pilings; she had also been present when Claude’s body was brought from the water. Christine tries to comfort her, but Rhoda’s detachment sharpens rather than settles her uncertainty.

The memory of an earlier death gives that uncertainty a personal and disturbing precedent. Christine recalls the family’s terrier falling from a window ledge while Rhoda watched from the room. Rhoda had offered only that the dog fell, and neither Christine nor Kenneth had obtained another explanation. Now Christine senses a connection between the two incidents. She asks the Fern sisters directly whether they suspect Rhoda, but they react with horror and deny having considered that an eight-year-old could be involved. Their denial does not resolve Christine’s private doubts; it instead leaves her holding a suspicion that the adults around her will not share.

After Rhoda returns from the park, Christine begins questioning her directly about what she has said concerning Claude. Rhoda insists that she has told the truth, using Christine’s earlier instruction against lying as reassurance. Christine asks whether Rhoda had anything to do with Claude’s drowning. In a later conversation, Rhoda confirms Christine’s worst fear and also admits that, in the death of an old woman in Baltimore, she had shoved the woman. Christine’s questions have carried her from interpreting clues to hearing the acts acknowledged by her own child.

The aftermath brings further confirmation and consequence. The Fern School will not accept Rhoda for the next school year. Christine writes Kenneth a long letter dated June 16, 1952, telling him about Claude’s death, the lost penmanship medal, Rhoda’s exclusion from school, and the death of the Baltimore woman. She describes feeling caught in a trap she cannot explain. The letter is an attempt to reach her absent husband, but it does not yet become a full disclosure of what she knows.

Concealment and the Question of Responsibility

Once Christine knows what Rhoda has done, she asks her daughter not to tell anyone else. Rhoda’s tolerant, contemptuous expression makes Christine recognize how weak this warning is: she believes Rhoda has no need to reveal the acts voluntarily. The exchange captures the imbalance between them. Christine still speaks as a mother setting terms, yet she understands that her daughter’s silence does not depend on maternal authority.

Christine considers whether Rhoda might be insane and therefore require treatment, and whether an institution could prevent further harm. She rejects the idea that Rhoda is insane, while admitting that she does not know how such an institutional decision would be made or whether Kenneth’s family would have to be told. Later, while listening to Monica Breedlove, Christine continues to weigh whether she should go to the police. She imagines that authorities might remove Rhoda to an institution, and fears the publicity, newspaper stories, and exposure of the family that would follow. These are Christine’s anxious projections, not a legal outcome established by the story; their importance is that they show how fear of public judgment competes with her recognition that others may be at risk.

The dilemma is also expressed in an unsent letter to Kenneth. Christine frames their problem as a duty owed both to their child and to society, while wishing he were present to advise and sustain her. She wonders whether Rhoda is too young to understand what she has done and whether she might have learned not to do it again, but cannot make those hopes fit comfortably with the evidence. She continues to withhold the full truth from Kenneth, partly because of shame and partly because she does not know how to live with what she has discovered. Her concealment protects Rhoda from immediate exposure, but it also isolates Christine and postpones a decision she believes cannot be avoided forever.

Bessie Denker and the Reinterpretation of Christine’s Past

Christine’s reading about Bessie Denker gives her crisis a second, deeply personal dimension. The case describes Bessie’s calculated killings of family members over ten years and directs readers to a detailed volume about the crimes. At the end, it identifies a little girl named Christine as the sole surviving child, taken, it was believed, for adoption by a respectable family. Christine recognizes herself in that account and understands that Richard Bravo had been associated with the case before he and his wife took her in. She wonders whether they hoped to protect her from what she had witnessed as a child.

The discovery changes the meaning Christine assigns to her marriage and to her own capacity for concealment. In another long letter, she tells Kenneth who her mother was and how she found out. She reflects that his mother had objected to their marriage, although Christine now believes the grounds for that suspicion were mistaken. At the same time, she judges her own silence about Rhoda’s actions as another form of concealment and is unsure whether she can ever bring herself to tell Kenneth. The two family histories—Bessie’s crimes and Rhoda’s—converge in Christine’s fear that violence may persist across generations, while the novel leaves her unable to determine what that connection means for responsibility or fate.

Christine also approaches Reginald Tasker indirectly, describing a novel about a criminal child rather than plainly confessing what she knows about Rhoda. She continues to think through her daughter’s future afterward, but the imagined novel becomes entangled with the real crisis. Natalie Glass later apologizes for describing Christine’s plot to a literary group. The group debated possible endings, including psychiatric treatment, reform school, or faith in the future, and voted for an ending in which the mother keeps the secret, kills the child, and then dies by suicide. This episode makes the difference between Christine’s situation and a plot discussed as literary material explicit: the group can treat an ending as a solution, while Christine must face the consequences of any choice herself.

Final Crisis and Narrative Significance

After Leroy Jessup’s death, Christine believes she should have acted against Rhoda weeks earlier. Rhoda tells her that Leroy knew about the shoes and intended to expose her; the adults around them treat his death as an accident. Christine’s reaction reveals the cost of her earlier hesitation: she now sees that her private knowledge did not prevent another death, even though she had recognized the danger. Her guilt grows alongside her fear that Rhoda will destroy Kenneth and that the family’s story will become a public spectacle like Bessie Denker’s.

Christine ultimately kisses Rhoda on the brow, takes a pistol from her desk, and shoots herself. Rhoda is found alive and taken urgently to hospital. After the funeral, Kenneth asks why Christine did it. Monica Breedlove believes Christine had encountered something too terrible to endure during a hotel stay, and insists that she was not insane; Emory Breedlove likewise describes her as desperately worried. Kenneth remains unable to identify the reason, and the account does not supply a single explanation that resolves the act. His uncertainty preserves the difference between Christine’s private knowledge and the understanding available to those left behind.

Christine’s role is more than that of a parent who discovers a child’s crimes. The narrative follows how her habitual composure—seen in her careful preparation, her efforts to speak gently, and her outward attentiveness to friends—coexists with escalating fear and guilt. Her letters, reading, and indirect conversation with Reginald Tasker show repeated attempts to turn private knowledge into something she can examine, but they do not free her from the decision she faces. By keeping Rhoda’s crimes from the authorities and from Kenneth, she tries to protect her daughter and preserve the family; by the ending, she believes those efforts have failed to protect others. Rhoda survives, while Christine’s death leaves the conflict between maternal protection and social responsibility unresolved.