Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories Characters

Here Come The FreaksHere's our Miss Amelia. McCullers doesn't mince words when describing her, no sirree Bob:She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and...

We'll never be absolutely sure whether this hunchback is "twelve years old, still a child," (Ballad.207) or "well past forty." We'll also never know if he's actually related to Miss Amelia, or if h...

Like Cousin Lymon, Marvin Macy can be seen from two different sides. Sure, both behave like a spoiled child with a pathological need for the pain of others, (think Macaulay Culkin's early turn in T...

Frances (from the story Wunderkind) is called Bienchen—German for "little bee"—by her teacher. She's been taking piano lessons since she was a small child. But now, becoming an adolescent, she...

Bilderbach, a master pianist raised by a Dutch father and Czech mother in Germany, is Frances's glamorously foreign teacher in "Wunderkind." Dude's a bit severe, but also very invested in his pupil...

Mister Lafkowitz is the friendly and petite Jewish violin teacher, one of Mister Bilderbach's colleagues. Frances sees him as sweet and well meaning, though "without meaning to, Mister Lafkowitz al...

Taught by Lafkowitz and increasingly getting all the praise, Heime is the violinist who is outpacing Frances's own playing: he's the titular (tee hee) Wunderkind. Though he only appears in the stor...

As the jockey (as in "The Jockey") waits and watches the revelry in a hotel dining room during racing season, his hands go into fists, "the fingers curled inward like gray days" (Jockey.1). This gu...

As the narrator of "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland" tells us, Mr. Brook is "a somewhat pastel person" preferring solo vacays to summer trips with the whole music department gang. His curio...

While we don't know much for sure about Madame Zilensky, we do know two things: that she's a dedicated composer/music professor, and that she's given to telling tales… like the whopper about "Mad...

Ferris, a classy globetrotting newspaper type (or should we call him "The Sojourner"?) has spent his life apart from conventional American ideals of family. Now, mourning the death of his father, h...

First spied by Ferris through a drugstore window, Elizabeth is the kind of sweet-hearted ex who lets bygones be bygones, and even remembers your birthday… no matter how long it's been since you'v...

Bill Bailey, Elizabeth's new husband, is "a lumbering red-haired man with a deliberate manner," seemingly un-bothered by his wife's ex visiting for dinner. She's chill, he's chill, everybody's chil...

Compared to open-faced little Billy, Valentin is dark and independent, the quiet son of Ferris's nightclub singer girlfriend. He seems satisfied with drawing, home alone, when desperate Ferris retu...

Hardworking, long-suffering Martin seems fed up when we meet him in "A Domestic Dilemma." He's been dealing with his wife's alcoholism for a while. As a result, he's become neurotic, figuring out w...

Emily wasn't always stashing "empty créme de menthe bottles" (Domestic.38) in her hatboxes. Martin has his own suspicions about where her drinking problem began, when they moved from Alabama to Ne...

New on the job, this twelve-year-old chap in "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud" is happy to fasten up his hat's ear-flap in case someone want to make some conversation. Even still, he's not entirely sold on...

Though it's clear the old man likes his drink—he's nursing a beer at dawn in an all-night café —what's unclear is whether he's full of it, or insane. Whether or not you believe in his theories...

The narrator wastes no time in calling this all-night café proprietor "bitter and stingy" (Tree.1). But as we watch him listen to the old man tell his tales, he begins to seem weary, teasing the o...