Zorrie
Zorrie is the title character and protagonist of the novel. Orphaned during later childhood, she is sent to live with a cold and distant aunt from whom she receives little but a hard work ethic. Generally considered a positive attribute to be passed down from one generation to the next, it will prove ironically tragic in this case when Zorrie makes off for her own and response to an advertisement by a company seeking hard-working girls. She takes the job which involves painting clocks with radium-laced paint to make them glow in the dark, thus transforming Zorrie temporarily into a member of a real-life group know as “ghost girls” because they themselves began to glow to in the dark.
Harold Underworld
Harold is the man that Zorrie marries after her time working for the radium dial company. Harold owns a hundred acres of farmland on which he grows beans and wheat and raises cows and pigs. The marriage results in a pregnancy, but by that point the radioactivity to which Zorrie has been exposed has done its damage. The loss of a child through miscarriage is compounded with the loss of Harold in the world war which was waiting just around the corner.
The Summers Family
A previous novel by the author titled Indiana, Indiana introduced readers to characters who also show up as significant characters here. Virgil is the husband and Ruby is his wife. Their developmentally disturbed son Noah has become pretty much a willful mute since his wife, Opal, was sent away to an asylum for attempting to burn down their home. Although important as a collective, it is really the specter of Opal’s mysterious “insanity” and Noah’s life inside the mind that lingers over the forward trek of Zorrie’s narrative from the point at which Harold exits the story.
Ellie Storms
Ellie is a middle-aged woman from Kansas City with kin in nearby Evansville, but it is on a plane flying out of Amsterdam which brings her into Zorrie’s orbit. As it turns out, they know some of the same people, but Zorrie also notes that of the many people they both know, the one she never mentions is Noah Summers.
