Fox

Zwender, who is about 50 years old, is considered handsome with silver hair, dark gray eyes, and a “kindly creased face” (210). He is very observant and sees small things within the larger landscape, as when he finds Fox’s toe bone long after the crash site has been cleared. Zwender is divorced, and his adult children have their own lives. Zwender doesn’t believe in Christianity, but he is interested in Zen Buddhist philosophy. He acts as a foil to the deceased Fox and is very protective of the Wieland community.

Zwender could be described as middle class. He is equally repulsed by the crassness of Blake Healy and the elitism of Martin Pfenning. He’s deeply disturbed to learn about Fox’s sexual abuse of minors, and while determined to find his killer, he thinks that Fox deserved to die. He has a protective streak that comes out when talking to women and girls. He hates those who enabled Fox and turned a blind eye to the abuse of Mary Ann and Genevieve. He may be unaware that Eunice was a target of Fox’s as well. Zwender’s weakness is that he likes to be correct and finds it difficult when others offer unsolicited advice and opinions. His tendency to go it alone sometimes make him unaware of his own failures. In the murder case, he mistakes the identity of the killer more than once, which rattles him. Like Fox, his arrogance allows him to be caught off guard and brutally knocked to the ground by Blake.

Zwender is a foil to Fox in that while Fox’s outward charm hides a monstrous interior, Zwender’s gruff persona hides his inner kindness. He wants to protect the survivors and other members of his community. He lets his jealousy of Odom be transformed into respect, concern, and friendship, and he forgives P. Cady her ineffectual leadership. Most importantly, he takes action to ensure Demetrius’s future. He’d rather offer Demetrius a better path and save him from needless sacrifice than gloat about being right about the homicide.

Eunice, 13, is the daughter of Martin and Kathryn Pfenning. She is in Fox’s eighth-grade English class. Intellectually mature for her age, Eunice is also on the autism spectrum, which makes reading social cues hard for her. Her appearance and demeanor do not align with social expectations in her community, marking her as an outsider. To her dismay, her parents have recently separated, and she feels abandoned, particularly by her father.

Fox thinks that Eunice willfully disregards his authority, but in her later memoir, Eunice remembers being intimidated and shy. Determined to hurt her self-esteem, Fox uses bad grades to terrorize and manipulate Eunice, who values order. As Eunice’s meetings with Fox turn increasingly sexual, Eunice becomes addicted to being wanted. Neither of her parents fully grasps what is happening to her.

When Fox decides to end their relationship, disrupting the routine, Eunice’s fear of further abandonment is triggered, and she kills Fox—an act of self-defense that she will not fully understand until years later. After the killing, she experiences nightmares, weight loss, and panic attacks. Nine years later, she attends graduate school and writes a creative text that exposes Fox while reckoning with her own confused feelings.

Demetrius, 20, is the younger brother of Marcus Healy, the child of Lemuel and Ida Healy (deceased), and the grandson of Romulus Healy, who local legend says helped bring down the Hindenburg in 1937. Demetrius was Ida’s primary caretaker when she was dying from cancer. He worries over his father’s increasing arthritis and alcoholism. Demetrius did not graduate high school but works diligently at the Kroger grocery store in Wieland. He also assists his father at his job as the custodian at Langhorne Academy.

While cleaning Langhorne’s Haven Hall after school hours, Demetrius deduces what Fox is doing with his students and desperately wishes he could stop him. However, he fears that any intervention would cause his father to lose his job. Demetrius participates in two fights during the book, interceding to defend a younger girl with a disability and his cousin Mary Ann. This proves what his mother always said about him: that he always tries to do the right thing. Despite his confession, Zwender is able to ascertain that Demetrius is no killer. Eunice’s memoir reveals that Demetrius helped cover up her crime because he recognized her as a child and an unprotected survivor of Fox’s abuse. It is implied that Demetrius will become a private driver for Langhorne and that Cady will pay for him to go to college.

P. Cady, 51, is the headmistress of Langhorne Academy. She is the one who hires Fox, despite initially recognizing everything he does as a performance to win favor. An academic, she has worked hard to earn the respect of her male colleagues and her judgmental father. Her chosen profession puts her in an elite world, but Cady is often lonely. Her dog, Princess Di, is her main companion. Cady has difficulty seeing the truth once she’s decided to be loyal. She fails to understand her dog’s animal instincts, ordering it to behave while letting it off its leash and attempting to reason with it as if it were a human. She is horrified when Princess Di returns from her walk carrying a human tongue—which turns out to be Fox’s. After this incident, the dog develops a habit of trying to get at Cady’s tongue while she is sleeping. She recognizes this and is horrified, but she continues to love the dog. 

Cady’s relationship with Princess Di mirrors her relationship with Fox. She suspects he’s lying, but once he flatters her, she cannot help but accept the distasteful things he brings to Langhorne. Cady likes to think that she is a strong leader, but Princess Di and Fox prove she isn’t. Zwender brings her own weaknesses to light and forces her to accept that she is not as perfect as she pretends. He makes her aware of the very real harm she has brought her students, her school, and herself by hiring Fox. Having recognized her mistakes, she begins to engage more with the outside community, and she offers to pay for Demetrius’s education as a way of making amends.

Though Miranda is not the first target of Fox’s abuse, she is the pivotal one in Fox’s mind. He remembers her as willing, compliant, adventurous, and seductive. In reality, Miranda took her own life after Fox started to distance himself. Still, when Fox meets Genevieve, his attraction to her is based on her resemblance to Miranda. His actions with Miranda are also significant because they expose him to authorities. Miranda’s suicide is the reason Fox loses his first private school job and changes his name from Frank Farrell. This is in part because she disobeyed his orders for secrecy and wrote a telling account of what happened in a diary he didn’t know about (a foreshadowing of Eunice’s memoir). In this way, Miranda subversively undermines him even though it’s only posthumously. It appears that Fox’s motivation to control girls at Langhorne stems in part from his inability to control this prior incident.

Of the survivors of Fox’s abuse at Langhorne, Genevieve, 12, is described as pretty, with silky hair and pale skin. Upset because her father has a new family in California, Genevieve likes the attention she gets from Fox. She seems more compliant and passive than the other targets, but descriptions often focus on her desire “to struggle to free herself” (60), which she resists acting upon out of fear of displeasing Fox. She fulfills Fox’s requests and acts out the shame this causes her by cutting herself. As meetings with Fox continue, she grows thinner and more despondent. Fox is dissatisfied with her distance toward him, noticing that he finds himself more attracted to the frozen images of her than her actual being. He callously thinks of replacing her. When Fox dies, Genevieve attempts suicide to be like Annabel Lee, the subject of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem. Even after she comes home from the hospital, she proclaims that she is just waiting to die to join Fox. Zwender notes that Fox “infected a healthy young girl leaving a peevish, sickly-sallow-skinned convalescent” (500). Unlike Miranda or Eunice, her struggle turns to acquiescence, and she never reveals what Fox did to her.

Mary Ann, 13, is a girl from a low-income family in Wieland who has received a scholarship to go to Langhorne because of her intellectual talent. Mary Ann has precocious puberty: She developed breasts at age four, menstruated at nine, and now looks like a high school student. She has been subject to brutal teasing and harassment from boys at school who grab at her body and disdainful girls who refuse to include her. Her own father and brothers look away from her in shame. Until she meets Fox, only her cousin Demetrius has defended her from these kinds of harassments. Influenced by Imogene, Mary Ann would like to be a librarian.

Fox claims that Mary Ann isn’t his type, but Zwender has evidence that she was a target. She has one of the journals that Fox gave only to his targets, and she was observed going into his office. Mary Ann’s irrational love of Fox proves to Demetrius that Fox is a predator. Mary Ann violates Fox’s rules when she shows up to his residence unannounced. Like Eunice, Mary Ann realizes that Fox doesn’t love her when he rejects her with little regard for her feelings. The last time he rejects her, her love for Fox turns to hate. Ultimately, she runs away from Wieland rather than face him again. Mary Ann’s future is unclear, but her mother does renew her efforts to protect her from violence, and Demetrius still cares for her. At the end of the novel, she is staying in what she describes as a safe, undisclosed location. Unlike Genevieve and Eunice, Mary Ann does not renew her love of Fox within the text.

Katy is Fox’s oldest friend, having met him in graduate school at Columbia when he was Frank Farrell. Katy is small in stature, smart, single, and independently wealthy. She has always supported Fox and won’t hear anything against him. She doesn’t believe the accusations of plagiarism against Fox in graduate school, and she is sure that Fox is being unfairly maligned when he loses his several jobs. Fox has stayed with her in New York, where she pays for them to attend the theater, museums, and fancy restaurants. She also has given Fox monetary loans that she does not expect him to repay. She naively believes that Fox will settle down with her in the future, and Fox considers marrying her at times. Katy never believes that Fox was a pedophile and deeply mourns him after his death. Later, at Langhorne, she develops awards for students in his name.

Imogene is Langhorne’s new librarian. She is a shy and sweet introvert who is especially kind to Mary Ann. Fox begins a relationship with Imogene early in the term so that they are quickly perceived as a couple within the community. Imogene believes that Fox is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and feels protective of him. Fox convinces Imogene that he is a moral person who hates anyone who would harm a child. Because she would like to believe in Fox as a romantic ideal, Imogene actively ignores her feeling that she “is affiancing herself to a hooded figure, a face without features, a dybbuk” (239). A dybbuk is a type of malicious spirit that leaves its host after achieving its goal. Fox, in this capacity, distances himself from Imogene after she offers him a social shield. After Fox dies, Imogene leaves Langhorne. Zwender has little patience for her and her chosen ignorance.

Eunice’s parents, Martin and Kathryn, have recently separated. Eunice and Kathryn live in a nice home in a wealthy area of Wieland, while Martin has moved to an apartment. He commutes to his executive job at a pharmaceutical company. While they try to be good parents, Martin and Kathryn have problems communicating and setting boundaries. In the past, due to Eunice’s autism and rare form of anemia, they have allowed her to have her way in most incidents. Often, in these arguments, the parents didn’t work as a unit. Although Kathryn initiated the separation, the marriage was not working for either partner. Kathryn feels like she has lost her sexual attractiveness, while Martin is unsure if the role of husband/father is right for him.

Both try to understand Eunice, but they repeatedly choose not to remark on things they’ve noticed, and in doing so, they fail her. For example, Kathryn stops asking probing questions about her daughter’s grades when Fox meets her with flattery and charm. Wanting validation for herself, Kathryn misses Eunice’s own susceptibility to praise. Martin is savvy enough to realize that Fox has been playing games and to see that Eunice is in love with him, but he dismisses these ideas as improbable. His sense of entitlement and class prejudice stops him from working with the police, as he holds himself above them. Neither parent puts together that Eunice’s panicked response to the doll, her false accusation of sexual assault against her father, and the tearing of the journal are traumatic responses to Fox’s genuine abuse.

Parents to two older boys and Mary Ann, Blake and Pauline are a local working-class couple who divorced due to Blake’s criminal record, alcoholism, and tendency toward violence. Mary Ann lives with her mother and has little to do with Blake. Before Mary Ann was even 10, Blake retreated entirely from giving her affection, and Pauline inadvertently criticized her for things she could not control due to her precocious puberty. Later, Pauline comes to regret this and genuinely wants to protect Mary Ann, as is shown when she reveals to Zwender that she’s keeping Mary Ann’s whereabouts a secret to protect her from Blake. Pauline does notices Mary Ann’s love of books, her friendship with Imogene, and her closeness to Demetrius. She is aware that something has gone amiss at school. Unlike the Pfennings, Pauline’s inability to protect her daughter has more to do with limited resources, the alien quality of Langhorne’s prestigious environment, and her long hours at her job. In her conversation with Zwender, Pauline comes off as regretful, fearful, and lonely. Blake is brought in for questioning by Zwender but can barely carry on a conversation coherently. When Zwender reveals that Mary Ann has been in Fox’s car and apartment, Blake attacks Zwender, knocking him unconscious. Officer Odom has to forcefully subdue him. As the novel ends, Blake is awaiting incarceration.