Nemesis characters

Also known as Bucky

Appears from the start

A twenty-three-year-old physical-education teacher directing the Chancellor Avenue playground in Newark during the polio summer of 1944. Nearsightedness has kept him out of the armed forces, leaving him ashamed while his friends serve. Raised by his grandparents after his mother's death and his father's imprisonment, he has built his identity around strength, duty, and protecting the boys in his care.

Appears from the start

Bucky's fiancée, a teacher spending the summer as a counsellor at Indian Hill, a children's camp in the Poconos. She loves Bucky and urges him to leave the frightening Newark epidemic to join the camp's staff, imagining that the move will bring them closer to marriage.

Appears from the start

Marcia's father, a Newark physician who treats Bucky with warmth and practical good sense. He explains what medicine can and cannot yet say about polio and offers the steadiness of a prospective father-in-law when fear and guilt begin to dominate Bucky's judgment.

Appears from the start

One of the boys who spends the summer at Bucky's Chancellor Avenue playground. He admires Bucky's athletic ability and moral seriousness and belongs to the Newark community watching polio move from a distant threat into their own streets.

Appears from the start

A popular boy from the Chancellor Avenue playground and an early polio victim within Bucky's circle. His illness and death turn the epidemic from neighborhood rumor into a personal catastrophe for the children and their director.

Appears from the start

A poorly groomed, socially isolated boy who appears at the playground as panic about contagion rises. The other boys treat him as a possible source of infection, and Bucky must confront how quickly fear turns a vulnerable child into a scapegoat.