Judge Drake

Temple Drake's father makes two brief appearances at the end of Sanctuary, but her frequent evocations of him as "a judge" - first smugly, but then when her world collapses as a kind of desperate prayer - occur throughout that novel. When he arrives as a kind of belated savior in the courtroom scene, he has "neat white hair and a clipped moustache like a bar of hammered silver against his dark skin," and is wearing an "immaculate linen suit" (288). Temple Drake Stevens' father does not appear in Requiem for a Nun, but Temple recalls his standards of morality against which she rebelled eight years ago: Then she had "unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing she knew they would forbid her to do if they had the chance. And they were right about the evil, and so of course she was right too" (108).