Ellgee Williams is a private working in the stables on the Army base. A solitary, ostensibly pious man who is a preacher’s son, he is conflicted between his behavior—eschewing drinking and smoking, and sexual activity, for example—and his sexual desires as he was raised to believe that women are diseased. After seeing Leonora Penderton naked, his obsession leads to voyeuristic stalking, including entering her room to watch her sleep.

Weldon Penderton, a thirty-five-year-old captain, is married to Leonora but has latent bisexual desires. Aware of his wife’s infidelities, he finds himself attracted to her lovers more than to her. Penderton’s military career aspirations are contradicted by his introverted, non-confrontational nature. His violent behavior toward animals and Private Williams foreshadows the greater violence to come, when he murders Williams in his wife’s bedroom.

Leonora Penderton, age thirty-one, is Weldon’s glamorous wife. She justifies taking lovers because she is by life on the base and sexually unsatisfied became her husband is impotent. Her affair with Major Langdon provides an inciting event that ultimately leads to Williams’s death.

Major Morris Langdon is married to Alison. He not only verbally bullies her but has her diagnosed as mentally ill and committed to an institution so she cannot divorce him. Morris has an affair with Leonora Penderton.

Alison Langdon’s mental illness has already manifested with physical self-mutilation before the novel’s action begins. Aware of the dangers of her co-dependent relationship with her husband, she decides to leave him for a life with their houseboy, a Filipino man. Alison suffers from untreated depression and grief over her baby’s death three years earlier. Because of her mental instability, others do not believe her story of Williams’s voyeurism. After entering the psychiatric facility, she dies of a heart attack at age twenty-nine.

Anacleto, the Langdon’s houseboy, has worked for the family since he was a teenager. His sexuality is ambiguous. Devoted to Alison, he disappears after she is institutionalized.