Dorsey Standish

Dorsey Standish is a husband and father whose wish to keep his family safe becomes a destructive attempt to govern their lives. In T. S. Garp’s account of The World According to Bensenhaver, Dorsey’s fear first takes the form of protection for his wife and children, then turns inward as jealousy and surveillance. His story exposes the cost of treating intimacy as a problem that can be managed through control: the household he means to defend is burdened by the very anxiety meant to secure it.

Identity and Background

Dorsey is married to Hope Standish and is the father of their children, including Nicky. After former policeman Arden Bensenhaver is forced to retire for repeatedly unorthodox methods of arrest, Dorsey hires him to live with the family as an armed protector. Bensenhaver becomes a kind of family bodyguard, but the arrangement also gives Dorsey an ally in his effort to watch over the household.

Dorsey’s protective impulse is shaped by the violence that has already reached Hope. Although she has endured the world’s brutality, the narrative makes Dorsey the person most afraid of what the world may do. His fear is not presented simply as a response to danger: it grows into an outlook that narrows family life around the possibility of harm.

Protection Becomes Control

Hope challenges Dorsey’s anxiety by insisting that they have a second child. The birth does not settle his fears. Instead, Dorsey begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair, and gradually recognizes that her infidelity would hurt him more than the possibility that she might again be assaulted. The realization makes him doubt both his love for Hope and his own feelings, but his response is not to accept uncertainty. Guiltily, he asks Bensenhaver to spy on her and establish whether she is faithful.

Bensenhaver refuses. He distinguishes protecting the family from restricting its members’ freedom to make their own choices: he was hired to guard against the outside world, not to police the family from within. Dorsey is left without the reassurance he has come to expect from the former policeman. In a panic, he leaves the house and children unprotected to spy on Hope himself. While he is away, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky’s chewing gum. The death makes Dorsey’s protective project tragically self-defeating: his pursuit of certainty has taken him away from the children he meant to safeguard.

A Household Under Surveillance

After the child’s death, guilt surrounds the family. Hope has been seeing someone, though the account does not treat her as the sole cause of the household’s suffering. Bensenhaver, burdened by responsibility, suffers a stroke and becomes partially paralyzed; Dorsey feels responsible for him. When Bensenhaver moves back in with the Standishes, the family’s arrangement with its protector continues, even as the old policeman’s condition changes.

Hope wants another child. Dorsey, made determinedly sterile by what has happened, agrees that she should encourage her lover, but construes the arrangement as a way to conceive rather than as a relationship she can conduct on her own terms. He tries to prescribe where the meetings occur and how many there are or how long they last. The plan turns intimacy into what he calls a control situation, closer to a laboratory experiment than to life. Hope cannot live within that clinical design: emotionally, she either has a lover or she does not.

Dorsey suspects that Hope is also meeting her lover outside the terms he has set. He alerts Bensenhaver to a supposed prowler and potential kidnapper and rapist in the neighborhood, folding his suspicion about Hope into the language of external danger. He also begins making sudden, unannounced visits home, choosing times when he is least expected and hoping to catch her. These visits never catch Hope doing anything, but they show how completely suspicion has reorganized his ordinary movements around the house.

Death and Aftermath

During one of these attempts to watch Hope, Dorsey hides in an upstairs cedar closet among her shoes, waiting to overhear a phone call from the bedroom. Bensenhaver, still armed and dangerously affected by senility, catches him instead. The former policeman shoots Dorsey with a twelve-gauge shotgun from less than six feet away. The wound is fatal. The episode reverses the household’s original arrangement: the man hired to protect the family becomes the agent of its patriarch’s death, and Dorsey’s own secret surveillance places him in the path of the violence he had tried to keep at bay.

Bensenhaver is taken away, thoroughly mad, while Hope is pregnant with her lover’s child. When the baby is born, Nicky is twelve and feels the family’s tension ease. Dorsey’s death removes the anxiety that had weighed on the household, allowing Hope and her children to live on with a measure of cheerfulness. They continue to visit Bensenhaver in an old-age home for the criminally insane, where his wild accounts of a nightmarish world become tolerable, and even comic, to Hope. The visits serve not only kindness but also a reminder of the family’s regained sense of sanity.

Narrative Role and Significance

Dorsey’s trajectory is the intimate counterweight to Bensenhaver’s extreme vision of danger. The narrative does not make Dorsey’s love for his wife and children false; it shows how vulnerability and fear can make that love destructive when he tries to replace trust with protection, then protection with surveillance. His need to control what cannot be controlled—Hope’s choices, the children’s safety, and the presence of danger—makes him, alongside Bensenhaver, poorly suited to the world as it is.

The ending gives Dorsey no recovery or reconciliation: the relief felt by Hope and Nicky follows his death. That consequence makes the novel-within-the-novel’s account of protection deliberately uneasy. The family survives not because Dorsey’s system succeeds, but because the tension his system imposed is finally lifted. His story turns the desire to make family life safe into a warning about the damage done when care cannot tolerate freedom or uncertainty.