McTeague

McTeague

McTeague is an unlicensed dentist in a Polk Street flat, a man of enormous hands and small horizons whose pleasures are his concertina, his canary, and his beer. When he falls for Trina Sieppe, the feeling arrives like weather he cannot name or stop, and he confesses it to Marcus with the helplessness of a trapped animal. His slow, brute sincerity is exactly what makes his undoing feel inevitable rather than cruel.

Trina Sieppe

Trina enters the flat as a patient with a broken tooth and becomes the still point around which two friends rearrange their lives. Her early married days swing between revulsion at her husband's coarseness and fierce, clinging affection, and she quietly resolves to lift him to her level rather than sink to his. What she does with the money that comes her way will prove the more dangerous transformation.

Marcus Schouler

Marcus is the dentist's pal and Trina's acknowledged suitor, a restless type who keeps company with many girls and settles on none. When he sees that McTeague's passion outruns his own, he stages a grand renunciation, weeping at his own magnanimity and believing every tear. That performance of friendship, and the resentment it will breed, sets the whole tragedy in motion.

Maria Macapa

Maria cleans McTeague's rooms, gossips across the building, and thrills at dogfights and small scandals with equal appetite. Her recurring tale of a lost golden service is half memory, half mania, and it lodges in the mind of at least one listener with ruinous effect. She is the flat's chorus, and its most dangerous storyteller.

Old Grannis

Old Grannis keeps to his tiny room, tending a little dog hospital and avoiding the conversation he most wants to have. He and Miss Baker share a wall, a wallpaper pattern, and a mutual, unspoken devotion that neither can bring themselves to name. Their gentle, stalled courtship is the flat's quiet countermelody to the louder hungers around them.

Zerkow

Zerkow trades in other people's discards, hoarding and scheming in a shop thick with refuse, and he listens to Maria's tale of the gold service with a greed that borders on worship. He wants the story to be true and wants Maria to be the proof of it, which makes his interest in her something between courtship and appetite. His fixation turns a piece of flat gossip into a slow fuse.