The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

McCarron is meticulously attended to by two waiters at the New York restaurant.

Allanovna is the Russian immigrant proprietor of an upscale New York store where she sells the neckties she designs. She is described by Ratliff as "a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn't a fitted nobody," but he adds that she has "the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they popped a little" (186). (Faulkner almost certainly bases this character on Lucilla Mara de Vescovi, an Italian immigrant who opened Countess Mara, a men's neckwear company, in New York in the early 1930s; Countess Mara ties are still sold today.)

In The Mansion as Gavin and Ratliff walk through Allanovna's store on their way to her office, they see "two ladies in black dresses and a man dressed like a congressman or at least a preacher"; that this well-dressed group are clerks becomes clear when they recognize Gavin as a former customer (186).

The grandson of the Russian-born Vladimir Kyrilytch and Nelly Ratcliffe is the first family member to move "to Missippi," as his descendant calls it (184). "By that time" the family's last name is "Ratliff" (184).

The child of Vladimir Kyrilytch and Nelly Ratcliffe (and ancestor of V.K. Ratliff) who moves from Virginia to Tennessee in the early 19th century.

According to The Mansion's account of how a Russian fighting for the British as a German missionary became the founder of the Ratliff family in Yoknapatawpha, the name first belonged to a farm family in Virginia. Some time after Nelly Ratcliffe begins secretly feeding Vladimir Kyrilytch, she "brings him out where her folks could see him" (184). Some time after that, her "ma or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor," noticed that she was pregnant, "and so" Nelly and this first V.K. were married, using her last name (184). Their child is the first V.K.

British General in the Revolutionary War who surrendered his "army" at Saratoga (184).

Ratliff's reference to "them two mad skeered Negro firemen" and to the brass fixtures from the "powerhouse" (183) refer to the events Faulkner told first in the early short story "Centaur in Brass" (1931) and then retold in The Town (1957), the Snopes novel that was published two years before The Mansion. There they are given names: Tom-Tom (or Tom Tom Bird) and Turl (or Tomey's Turl Beauchamp). Here they are merely referred to. The title "firemen" in this case means they keep a fire going, not that they put fires out.

In his fantasies about how Gavin could be freed from his obsession with Eula's daughter, Ratliff speculates that "maybe" Kohl could catch Linda "unawares" and be married to her by a "j.p." (J.P, short for Justice of the Peace, is usually capitalized.)

The daughter of a Virginia farmer who married Ratliff's Russian-born ancestor a few years after the American Revolutionary War. He took her last name when they married.