Rhoda Penmark

Rhoda Penmark’s account of Claude Daigle’s death turns a child’s coveted award into the motive for deliberate violence, while her composure and self-exculpation reveal how little her confession resembles remorse.

The confession and the medal

When Christine Penmark confronts her, Rhoda first tries to present herself as upset, but then calmly admits that she hit Claude with her shoe. She explains that she wanted the penmanship medal and had warned him to give it to her. After he refused, she struck him; when he finally handed over the medal and tried to get away, she hit him again. She says she continued because his crying might attract attention, and later because he threatened to tell on her. As Claude tried to hold on to the wharf, Rhoda struck him until he let go and fell into the water. Throughout her explanation, she insists that Claude brought the outcome on himself. The confession is therefore both a disclosure of what she did and a demonstration of how she reframes each decision as something forced on her by another person.

Inherited explanations and their limits

Christine’s growing suspicion about Rhoda Penmark is shaped by the criminal case files she has been reading with Reginald Tasker. Tasker argues that environment may alter how an inborn criminal disposition appears, but has little power over its persistence. In his account, most people develop conscience through example and instruction, while some do not acquire a comparable moral understanding. The argument gives Christine a possible explanation for Rhoda’s apparent lack of remorse, but it remains a theory advanced by characters, not an independently established scientific conclusion.

The case that arrests Christine’s attention is Bessie Denker’s. Bessie was born Bessie Schober in Iowa in 1882. Accounts of her childhood recount the deaths of her younger brother and sister, and an earlier, unresolved shooting in the family: Bessie had been alone with her grandfather, but no one knew who was responsible. The distinction between known circumstance and suspicion matters. Christine reads a record in which a pattern seems to reach back into childhood, yet the record itself does not prove that Bessie caused every family tragedy attributed to her.

After discovering that Bessie is her own birth mother, Christine interprets the resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter as an inheritance passed through herself to Rhoda. She consequently shifts blame away from her daughter and onto herself, reasoning that Rhoda did not choose the disposition she received. Her conviction deepens into shame, even as she considers whether the apparent link might be coincidence and whether she might be blameless after all.

Christine asks Tasker whether such a disposition could be transmitted between generations. He answers by comparing it to other traits understood in his period as arising from an absence or deficiency, and argues that a lack of some moral capacity could be inherited. His response does not settle Christine’s question: his discussion of disagreement among psychiatrists underscores how uncertain the explanatory framework is. For Rhoda’s characterization, however, the theory supplies a chilling contrast between outward innocence and an apparent inability to feel the guilt that Christine associates with conscience.

The killing of Leroy and the aftermath

After seeing Rhoda take matches into the basement, Christine watches from the kitchen window as her daughter starts a fire in the papers and excelsior that make up Leroy’s makeshift bed, then quietly closes and bolts the basement door. Rhoda returns to her ice cream as Leroy calls for help from inside. Even when he escapes, she does not approach him; she throws away the treat and its wrapper and remains beside the steps while he dies in the courtyard. The scene repeats the contrast between a child’s untroubled manner and the consequences of her deliberate acts, now with Christine watching rather than piecing events together afterward.

Christine loses consciousness after the killing. When she is found, Rhoda is still alive, and Mrs. Forsythe takes her to the hospital. After Christine’s funeral, Rhoda has left the hospital and is staying with Mrs. Forsythe while Kenneth considers what will happen next. Her survival brings her back into her father’s care at a moment when he is still trying to understand Christine’s death and asks Monica whether Christine had given any reason for it.

Rhoda goes to Kenneth and embraces him, then turns the reunion into a familiar display of girlish charm: “What will you give me, if I give you a basket of kisses?” When he answers that he will give her a basket of hugs, he breaks down in tears. Mrs. Forsythe says Rhoda is not yet strong and is too young to understand what has happened, then leads her away to cut out paper dolls while Kenneth rests. The ending places Rhoda’s apparent innocence beside the adults’ grief, without resolving what she understands or what her future will be.

Fear, Performance, and Remorse

Before Rhoda Penmark gives Christine Penmark a full account of Claude Daigle’s death, she tries to appear distressed, throwing herself onto a sofa and peering at her mother through her fingers. Christine judges the display unconvincing, yet notices that Rhoda is improving at performing emotion. The moment makes her outward distress part of the uncertainty surrounding her: gestures that might signal genuine feeling can also be read as an act consciously shaped for an audience.

Rhoda’s alarm becomes explicit when she asks whether she will be put in the electric chair, a threat she has heard about from Leroy Jessup. She clings to Christine and seeks assurance that her mother will keep the authorities from hurting her. Her fear concerns what may happen to her, while her account of Claude’s death continues to assign responsibility to Claude himself. The juxtaposition distinguishes fear of punishment from an acknowledgment of harm to another person.

The next morning, Rhoda sits down to breakfast looking rested and untroubled. Christine interprets her calm as evidence that she has no capacity for remorse or guilt. This observation sits uneasily beside Rhoda’s earlier tears and terror: the narrative presents emotion as visible and forceful, but not as proof that she understands her actions morally. That gap—between the appearance of feeling and the responsibility Christine believes it should express—deepens the contrast at the center of Rhoda’s characterization.