Christine Penmark’s attempted killing of Rhoda Penmark is the culmination of Christine’s fear that her daughter will repeat Bessie Denker’s crimes and of her belief that she herself passed that inheritance on. Rather than expose Rhoda to public discovery and punishment, Christine plans to make the child die without knowing what is happening, then takes her own life. The episode joins a private act of maternal protection to a fatal certainty about heredity, while leaving Rhoda’s immediate fate unresolved in the supplied account.

Discovery and the logic of inheritance

Christine’s plan follows her discovery that she is Bessie Denker’s daughter. Her reading about Bessie has supplied a grim family history: Bessie’s younger brother died after, at seven, she mistakenly put arsenic on his bread and butter believing it was sugar; her younger sister drowned after falling into a well; and neighbors later recalled that Bessie’s grandfather had been shot while she was alone with him at eleven. The account does not establish Bessie’s responsibility for every death, but it presents the suspicion and uncertainty surrounding her childhood as part of the pattern Christine is trying to interpret.

Earlier, Christine had asked Reginald Tasker how a criminal disposition might arise. Tasker proposed that persistent criminality could stem from an inborn lack rather than something acquired, and that benign surroundings might fail to change it. His explanation is a character’s theory, not independent proof of heredity. Once Christine learns of her parentage, however, she turns that theory against herself: she regards Rhoda as not responsible for what she has done and herself as guilty for transmitting Bessie’s inheritance. Her repeated shame does not relieve her of the burden; it makes her feel that she has no right to blame her daughter.

Christine’s reading of the account of Bessie’s electrocution sharpens this fear into a forecast. Seeing how Bessie’s life ended, she imagines Rhoda escaping detection for a time, harming others, and eventually being caught and publicly executed. This is Christine’s fearful projection, not an established future for Rhoda. But it changes the decision before her: she comes to see death as a way to prevent both further harm and the public exposure she associates with Bessie’s end.

From a proposed ending to a private decision

Miss Glass tells Christine that a literary group has discussed possible endings for Christine’s book. The group considered psychiatric treatment, reform school, and trust in the future, but voted unanimously for an ending in which the mother keeps the secret, kills the child, and then commits suicide. Christine says this possibility had occurred to her too. The conversation does not itself make the decision for her; it places her private dilemma beside a fictional problem of how to end a story, making the planned action seem at once imaginable and disturbingly complete.

That night Christine writes and signs a holograph will dated August 3, 1952. She leaves her jewelry and a 1912 Utrillo landscape to Monica Breedlove, returns a Modigliani drawing to Kenneth Penmark with a request for forgiveness and the hope that he will marry again, and leaves her remaining property to Thelma Jessup, identified as the widow of Leroy Jessup. She locks the will in her desk and understands it as the only atonement still available to her. The bequests make the plan concrete: even as she prepares to die, she assigns what she owns to people connected to her life and tries to address the husband she will leave behind.

Christine then approaches the plan as a sequence of practical steps. She wants Rhoda neither to suffer nor to know what is coming. She believes she cannot use physical violence against her daughter, and settles on Sleeping Pills prescribed for Christine’s own discomfort by Monica Breedlove and a doctor, but never taken. Christine anticipates that Rhoda may recognize danger, so she rejects several possible methods of persuading her to take the pills without suspicion. Her efforts to conceal her purpose are part of the event’s central contradiction: she treats a lethal act as something that must be made to appear ordinary and reassuring.

The tablets and the final night

To give the plan a plausible pretext, Christine takes Rhoda to a doctor, saying that the child has been listless and pale and has a poor appetite. The doctor finds Rhoda healthy. On the way home, Christine tells her that the doctor recommends vitamin tablets, then buys them in Rhoda’s presence. Later, she removes the tablets from their container and substitutes Sleeping Pills. The doctor’s examination and the visible purchase are not incidental details: Christine uses them to build a credible explanation for the tablets and to keep Rhoda from questioning why her mother is offering them.

At bedtime, Christine presents the pills as the recommended vitamins and measures out several at once. Rhoda questions the number and asks to see the bottle. Christine gives it to her. Rhoda examines the label and checks that the tablets in Christine’s hand look like those in the container before agreeing to take one. Her inspection briefly exposes the fragility of Christine’s deception: Rhoda does not simply accept the explanation but tests it against the object in front of her. Once satisfied, she takes the tablets one by one, swallowing each with water, while Christine urges her to finish them.

After Rhoda has taken the last tablet, Christine offers to read to her. Rhoda is midway through The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and Christine finds the place and reads softly until the child’s eyes close. The familiar bedtime activity lets Christine remain beside her daughter in the manner of an ordinary night, even as she waits for the pills to take effect. Looking at Rhoda asleep, Christine wavers: the child appears innocent, and Christine momentarily doubts the reality of the crimes she attributes to her. She then firmly reaffirms her belief that they happened. The scene makes clear that the act rests not on certainty about Rhoda’s future but on Christine’s conviction that the danger and inherited pattern are real.

Suicide and the unresolved outcome

Before killing herself, Christine looks at Kenneth’s photograph and tells him that Rhoda will not destroy him or meet a public end like Bessie’s. She hopes that he would eventually forgive her, though she does not contact him to explain her decision. The photograph brings their shared life into the room at the moment Christine is about to sever her daughter from its future; her appeal to Kenneth remains private and unanswered in this scene.

Christine kisses Rhoda on the brow, takes Christine’s Pistol from her desk, and shoots herself. The account confirms Christine’s suicide but does not show Rhoda waking, being rescued, or dying, so the outcome of the attempted killing remains unstated here. Almost immediately, Monica Breedlove expresses concern that Christine has not answered her calls. The shift from Christine’s carefully managed solitude to another person’s alarm marks the beginning of a possible discovery, without yet supplying its result.

The event’s force lies in the difference between intention and knowledge. Christine intends to prevent Rhoda’s future crimes and public destruction, but the evidence presents that future as her prediction, formed through family history and a theory of inherited criminality. Her final actions therefore do not resolve the conflict between maternal protection and responsibility for harm: they enact Christine’s attempt to control an outcome she fears, while leaving the child’s fate—and the consequences of that attempt—open.