Nicky Standish

Nicky Standish is the older child of Hope Standish and Dorsey Standish in T. S. Garp’s embedded novel, The World According to Bensenhaver. Nicky’s chewing gum becomes the immediate cause of a younger sibling’s death during a night when Dorsey abandons his family’s protection to spy on Hope; years later, Nicky’s sense of relief marks the end of the anxiety that had shaped the household.

Identity and Family

Nicky lives in a family organized around Dorsey’s fear of danger. Dorsey hires Arden Bensenhaver, a retired policeman, to live with the family as an armed protector, and has him watch over Nicky. Bensenhaver’s role is meant to guard the children from the outside world, but his presence also makes the household an extension of Dorsey’s anxious attempts to control risk.

The Younger Child’s Death

Dorsey’s fears shift from imagined dangers outside the family to suspicion that Hope is having an affair. After Bensenhaver refuses to spy on Hope’s fidelity, Dorsey leaves the house and children unprotected to watch her himself. While he is away, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky’s chewing gum. The account gives this concrete accident a place within the family’s wider pattern of guilt and fear, without suggesting that Nicky intended harm.

Aftermath and Relief

Hope is pregnant with her lover’s child when Dorsey is fatally shot by Bensenhaver, who has been alerted to a supposed prowler. When the baby is born, Nicky is twelve. With Dorsey’s consuming anxiety no longer governing the family, Nicky feels unburdened by the easing tension. Hope and her children continue to visit Bensenhaver, now living in an institution for the criminally insane; his disturbing accounts of the world become tolerable, and even comic, against the family’s restored sense of sanity.

Narrative Role

Nicky’s story is part of T. S. Garp’s fictional account of a family damaged by the attempt to make life completely safe. Nicky is not presented as the source of the household’s crisis: the death involving Nicky’s gum happens while Dorsey is away pursuing his suspicions, and the later relief comes when Dorsey’s fear no longer dominates family life. That contrast gives Nicky’s perspective a quiet significance in the embedded novel’s movement from catastrophe toward survival.