Summary
All of a sudden, the woman appears, saying his name. He remembers hers: Miss Dent. She sits down and thanks him timidly for allowing her to do so. He is reassured by her small voice and her cheap clothing. She begins to cry and reaches for her handkerchief, telling him that she has been very sick for the last two weeks. Blake asks her where she is working now, and she scoffs at the question, telling him, "You poisoned their minds."
Blake looks around at the train car to remind himself of the normalcy of the setting. When the next stop comes, he tries to switch cars, but Miss Dent puts her face very close to his and tells him that she has a pistol and she will shoot him if he moves. Blake sits back in his seat, heart pounding with fear. He thinks about how help must surely come. Someone would notice his predicament and intervene. He watches the brilliant sunset outside as the train speeds on until he calms down enough to ask Miss Dent what she wants.
She responds that she wants to talk to him, and tells him that she has a letter for him that she has been too sick to go out and mail. She likes the scenery and the train, she tells him, but she usually can't afford to travel. She quotes the Book of Job, asking, "Where shall wisdom be found... Where is the place of understanding?" She knows he must think she is crazy, she tells him, but she is going to be better soon. In the hospital before working for Blake, they tried to take away her self-respect. She hasn't had any work for the last three months. She is not afraid of killing him because they would only put her back in the hospital. She stops talking and they sit quietly.
As the train moves on and Blake desperately tries to imagine some way of escape, he feels regret—possibly for the first time in his adult life. Mr. Watkins is asleep and snoring, and Mrs. Compton is reading her newspaper. The train pulls up at a station and Blake observes the southbound platform: a few people waiting to go into the city with advertisements on a wall behind them. Everything looks lonely as the train pulls out of the station and speeds toward darkness.
Miss Dent tells Blake to read her letter. He picks it up and notices the crazed handwriting again. The letter addresses him as "Dear Husband," and says that she has a gift for dreams and is clairvoyant.
At the next platform, Miss Dent tells Blake he will not be able to escape her even in his home suburb of Shady Hill. She has been planning this for weeks, she tells him. She has been wondering if he stands between her and happiness, and if she should just kill him. She presses the pistol up against Blake's stomach, and visions of the unburied dead from his experience in war flash before his eyes. She releases the pistol from his flesh, and tells him that all she has ever wanted is a little love.
Blake is unable to find solace in the atmosphere of the train as the conductor announces the Shady Hill station. As they line up near the door, neither Mr. Watkins nor Mrs. Compton acknowledges him or Miss Dent. Blake watches the familiar scenery as the train pulls into the station. It is raining again, and the sound of the rain makes him think of the concept of shelter, which now feels like it belongs to a past life. Blake and Miss Dent go down the steps of the platform. Blake sees a few more people he knows get into cars waiting to pick them up; none offer him a ride. It is time to go home. One by one, the platform empties. Miss Dent says that she expected the platform to look less shabby than it does. She tells him to start moving away from the light. They begin walking towards the freight house until Miss Dent tells Blake to stop.
Miss Dent says that he does not know what she has been through; she is afraid to go out in the daytime. All the same, she is better off than him, she says. She still has good dreams sometimes. The noise of an incoming train briefly drowns out her words, and it reminds Blake of summers past. When the noise passes, she is yelling at him to kneel in the dirt. Blake gets to his knees and bows his head. She says that she wants to help him but can't, that even if she was kind and loving and sane and beautiful he still wouldn't listen to her. She tells him to put his face in the dirt, and he stretches out fully on the ground. He begins to weep. Miss Dent tells him that she feels better now, and she can wash her hands of all this. She walks off, back to the platform. He is wary at first, slowly raising his head, but then he sees by her attitude on the platform that she has forgotten about him. Safe again, he stands up, picks up his hat, and walks home.
Analysis
At this point in the story, the familiar becomes dangerous: the five-forty-eight commuter train, once a symbol of routine normalcy, becomes a prison. Forced to reckon with a life that may be about to end, Blake is horrified by how isolated and alone he is. He longs for Mrs. Compton or Mr. Watkins to notice his discomfort. In a damning critique of the level of community within his suburb and of Blake's wretched life, they do not. For the rest of the story, it is as if Blake and Miss Dent are alone in their own world.
Alone, except for regular interruptions from Blake's memories. The theme of memory first surfaces early on in the story: when Blake notices Miss Dent is following him, he tries to recall her name but cannot. Blake is surprised by what he considers to be an unusual lapse in an otherwise sound memory, and his error hints at the fact that his life is not what it seems. The concept of memory is also important in terms of the story's formal elements. Throughout the text, Cheever presents crucial information from the past and details of character development through a series of memories. We learn about Blake's mistreatment of his wife and of Miss Dent, as well as his neighborly resentments, through his recollections. In this second half of the story, we also learn details about Blake through his memories. "The unburied dead" that suddenly come to mind when Miss Dent threatens him, for example, provide insight into his veteran status.
But here Blake's memories also take on a different, more reflective quality as they become intertwined with a series of observations about the suburbs that flash by outside the train windows. Threatened with a pistol, Blake sits quietly and watches the rain clouds and a "brilliant" orange streak in the sky. In this way, Cheever presents the ugliness of Blake's memories and the beauty of the suburban landscape side by side. This adds nuance to the otherwise damning critique of suburban malaise that Blake's life so forcefully presents. As Adrienne Brown writes in We Wear the White Mask: John Cheever Writes Race, over the last few decades, "Readers and critics disagree[d] about the degree to which Cheever valorized or critiqued these spaces." A careful reading of this text suggests that he does both, even within the very same story.
The ending of the story can also be read both positively and negatively. Lying in the dust, afraid for his life, Blake is seemingly at his lowest point. But it is at this final moment that another memory surfaces: the "clear, sweet memories of gone summers and gone pleasures." This memory, although sweet, is also described as a "burden," suggesting that for Blake it is a painful reminder of his humanity. Perhaps it also signals redemption under threat of death. In this sense, there is hope for Blake to be changed or reformed by Miss Dent's act of revenge. On the other hand, it is also possible to read this ending pessimistically. When Miss Dent leaves Blake alone in the final moments of the story, he seems to pick himself right back up and"raise[s] his head" to watch her figure recede. "Warily at first," his uncertainty is resolved once he realizes he is no longer under threat of physical danger. In fact, he seems right away to revert back to a condescending view of Miss Dent: watching her on the train platform, he considers her "small, common, and harmless." Now that he is safe, he picks himself up and "walk[s] home." In this reading, his weeping in the dirt does not indicate any profound regret, but simply fear for his life. When that fear is removed, there is no lasting impact; everything reverts to how it was.
Although Cheever does not resolve the question of the impact on Blake, he makes clear that Miss Dent has realized what she intended to achieve. According to Miss Dent, she is motivated to pursue Blake by a sense of striving to be better, to be more complete. As she tells him in the final moments of the text, there is "some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find again and use" now. Following Blake home on the train, escorting him out, and forcing him into the dirt—all these acts restore Miss Dent's power. Filled by this sense of accomplishment, she makes herself whole again.
