The Commander A gray-haired former market researcher and semiretired top military official of the Eyes, his sober posture and stooped shoulders give away his age. Mild-mannered, but cynical and acquisitive, he rules over Wife and Handmaid as though they are chattel and interprets the ban on pre-Gilead decadence as it suits his needs and desires. After the Commander gets to know Offred, he treats her like a precocious child or lap dog and takes pride in her skill at Scrabble. She sees him as "daddyish" and recognizes his loneliness and need for heavy nighttime drinking. Tentatively identified by historians as either Frederick R. Waterford or B. Frederick Judd, Professor Pieixoto's descriptionseemingly pinpoints the former as Offred's mate. Waterford was the designer of the Handmaids' uniforms and originator of the term "Particicution." He succumbed to a political purge as a direct result of his "liberal tendencies" for retaining banned pictures and books and for "harboring a subversive."
Nick A trusted, over-confident chauffeur for the Commander, he bears messages that summon Offred to the office and supplies black market cigarettes to Serena Joy. When Offred first enters the Commander's household, she notices Nick, who is polishing the staff car; soon afterward, he regularly stares at her, shows off his muscles, whistles, and displays an insouciant cockiness that belies his later importance in her life. As Offred's lover, Nick listens dispassionately to her recital of past history and emotional outpourings during their fervid lovernaking. On the day that Serena confronts Offred with evidence of adultery and calls her a slut, Nick, purportedly an operative for the Eyes and double agent for Mayday, sets up a phony arrest and has her spirited away in an Eyes van, possibly to an Underground Fernaleroad way station in Bangor, Maine.
Aunt Lydia Caught up in her fervency as a vigilant matron at the Rachel and Leah Re-Education Center, Lydia, with her uplifted face, protruding yellow teeth, and steel-rimmed spectacles, spouts a tedious line of platitudes and truisms, warnings against immodesty, materialism, and a lack of interest in the traditional maternal role, especially motherhood. She seems sincere in her belief that the "Republic of Gilead . . . knows no bounds. Gilead is within you." Like a glory-struck drill sergeant, Aunt Lydia, armed with pointer, whistle, and cattle prod, stalks the gymnasium/barracks and administers mild, authoritative taps, a demonstration that "a little pain cleans out the mind." In class, she inculcates Gilead's future Handmaids with simplistic dogma: "It's a risk you're taking . . . but you are the shock troops, you will march out in advance, into dangerous territory. The greater the risk the greater the glory."
