Dorsey Standish and Arden Bensenhaver

Dorsey Standish and Arden Bensenhaver are joined by an arrangement that begins as family protection and becomes an instrument of Dorsey’s anxiety. Dorsey hires the retired policeman to guard his wife and children from a brutal outside world. But when Dorsey tries to extend that guardianship into surveillance of Hope’s private choices, Bensenhaver refuses; their alliance breaks down, and Bensenhaver ultimately shoots Dorsey while mistaking him for a prowler. The relationship’s reversal exposes how a protector recruited to keep danger out can become implicated in the fear consuming the household.

Protection as Employment

Dorsey hires Bensenhaver after the former policeman has been forced to retire because of repeated unorthodox methods of arrest. He is to live with the Standishes as an armed guardian, protecting Hope and the children from the dangers Dorsey imagines in the world beyond their home. Bensenhaver also takes on the task of watching Nicky, though he is described as aloof and troubled by memories of his own. His presence is meant to reassure Dorsey, but it does not settle the household: the supposed watchdog gradually appears more menacing than protective.

Hope eventually insists that Bensenhaver no longer live with the family. Dorsey continues to support the older man as a kind of hovering guardian, however, and pays him to follow Nicky. The arrangement thus outlasts Bensenhaver’s place in the home. Dorsey’s dependence on him is not simply a response to a particular threat; it reflects a broader attempt to manage danger by placing a watchful intermediary between his family and the world.

The Boundary Bensenhaver Enforces

After Hope insists on having a second child, Dorsey grows less focused on possible assaults and more suspicious that she is having an affair. He becomes anxious about what her independent choice might mean for their marriage and asks Bensenhaver to investigate whether she is faithful. Bensenhaver refuses. He distinguishes the assignment he accepted—protecting the family from outside danger—from the new demand that he restrict Hope’s freedom and monitor her private life.

That refusal marks the central change in their relationship. Bensenhaver had been hired to support Dorsey’s protective project, but he will not turn protection into control of a family member’s choices. Dorsey, deprived of the surveillance he wants, panics and leaves the children unprotected one night so that he can spy on Hope himself. While he is away, the younger child dies after choking on a piece of Nicky’s chewing gum. The tragedy follows Dorsey’s decision to pursue certainty about Hope rather than remain at home; it also deepens the burden of guilt surrounding the household and Bensenhaver’s role within it.

From Watchman to Threat

Bensenhaver later suffers a stroke and becomes partially paralyzed. Dorsey feels responsible for him, and the former policeman moves back in with the Standishes. The return restores Bensenhaver to the household but not to his former function: he is no longer a steady protector, and Dorsey increasingly tries to direct the family’s circumstances himself. After the child’s death, Dorsey agrees that Hope may meet her lover in order to become pregnant, yet tries to regulate when and how often those meetings occur. His effort to turn a relationship into a controlled arrangement leaves the underlying distrust intact.

Dorsey also tells the senile Bensenhaver that a prowler—described as a possible kidnapper and rapist—has been detected in the neighborhood. He makes sudden visits to the house, hoping to catch Hope doing something she has concealed, but never finds what he seeks. Instead, Bensenhaver, armed and increasingly affected by senility, mistakes Dorsey for the imagined intruder. Dorsey is hiding in an upstairs cedar closet, among Hope’s shoes, waiting to overhear a phone call from the bedroom when Bensenhaver shoots him with a twelve-gauge shotgun from less than six feet away. The fatal encounter converts the surveillance Dorsey had sought into the danger that kills him: the hired guardian acts against his employer because Dorsey has helped cast the household in the image of a threatened place.

Aftermath and Meaning

Bensenhaver is taken away, described as thoroughly mad. Hope is pregnant with her lover’s child, and after the birth Nicky, now twelve, feels the family’s tension ease. Dorsey’s fear had shaped the lives around him; his death lifts that pressure, though it does not erase the losses or the consequences of his attempts to control uncertainty.

Bensenhaver survives and continues to deliver his alarming accounts of a nightmarish world from a wheelchair in an institution for the criminally insane. Hope and her children visit him often, partly from kindness and partly as a way of reminding themselves of their own sanity. The former protector who once embodied Dorsey’s answer to danger has become an enduring figure of its distortion. His presence also makes the relationship’s final irony plain: Dorsey’s trust in Bensenhaver began as a bid to shield those he loved, but the assignment could not make the family safe from fear, grief, or the consequences of treating another person’s freedom as a threat.