A Summary and Analysis of O. Henry’s ‘While the Auto Waits’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘While the Auto Waits’ is a short story by O. Henry (1862-1910), the American author known for his twist endings. The story focuses on an encounter between a man and a woman on a park bench, with the story’s major themes being social class and the gulf between appearance and reality.

Summary

At dusk, a young woman in a grey dress and wearing a hat and veil visits the same quiet corner of a small park two evenings in a row. She sits on a bench and reads a book. When she drops her book, a young man, who has noticed her before, takes this opportunity to approach her. He picks up the book and returns it to her, striking up a conversation with her. She invites him to sit down next to her.

During their conversation, the mysterious woman reveals to him that she is weary of her life. Being rich and hanging out with fellow members of upper-class society has come to bore her.  She tells him she is being courted by a German Grand Duke and an English Marquis. Yet she confesses a romantic longing for a man of more ‘lowly’ or humble origins.

When asked about his occupation, the young man tells her he is a cashier in a restaurant across the street. He introduces himself as Mr Parkenstacker: a name the lady proceeds to misremember several times when she subsequently addresses him.

As the evening proceeds, she rises and leaves, instructing him to remain at the bench for ten minutes after she has departed. This is because her automobile, which is waiting for her (hence the story’s title) with her chauffeur at the wheel, has markings on it which would reveal her identity to him.

And then we come to the customary O. Henry twist. Going against her wishes, Mr Parkenstacker follows her discreetly, watching as she walks right past a white automobile, enters the restaurant across from the park, and replaces a red‑haired cashier who leaves her post. In doing so, she sheds her veil and hat, revealing she is the girl working behind the cashier’s desk.

Meanwhile, Mr Parkenstacker finds the book she dropped, thinks about its significance, and then leaves it behind. Then he steps into the waiting automobile and quietly tells the chauffeur: ‘Club, Henri.’ This final move indicates that he, too, is not the “humble cashier” he claimed to be: he is a man of wealth and means.

In summary, both protagonists have been hiding their true social status: the woman, rather than Parkenstacker, is the humble restaurant cashier, and Parkenstacker, rather than being a cashier, is actually a man of wealth and high social class.

Analysis

‘While the Auto Waits’ is one of O. Henry’s stories about class, and although many readers – particularly those familiar with the rhythm and structure of an O. Henry tale – may see its twist ending coming, the story’s denouement neatly embodies the story’s focus on the idea of stripping off one’s class trappings and living as the other half lives (or presenting oneself as such, leastways).

The woman’s desire for a man of ‘lowly’ or modest means is a nice piece of play-acting. Ostensibly, it suggests that a high-class lady wishes to be financially independent and doesn’t seek a wealthy man to ‘support’ or ‘keep’ her. But given the story’s eventual twist, her longing emerges as a more realistic wish to marry someone of her own status. Ironically, the very man she is talking to, Parkenstacker, doesn’t fit the bill because (in the story’s other twist) we discover he is anything but ‘lowly’, with a chauffeur and membership of a private club among (we assume) numerous other trappings of wealth and success.

Of course, the joke is not so much on us the readers as on the woman herself. Seeing the nearby car or ‘auto’ which clearly belongs to someone of wealth and importance, she decided to tease a young man who approached her in the park by pretending the car belonged to her, little suspecting that he would see through her lie right away because he owns the car in question. But he seems to be good-humoured about her deception, and both characters appear to gain something from their carnivalesque reversal of roles: a reversal which can only last, as the story’s title has it, as long as ‘the auto waits’.

The book that the unnamed woman is reading on the park bench is, of course, loaded with significance. It’s a copy of the New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson, who’s better-known for writing Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. Fittingly, the latter novel is also about disguise, or a man who can become his alter ego, Mr Hyde, when he takes a ‘draught’ and leaves behind his respectable self, Dr Jekyll.

But the New Arabian Nights is itself concerned with disguise. Many of the individual tales within Stevenson’s collection – which are set in modern Europe rather than medieval Asia, but otherwise bear the influence of the Arabian Nights or 1,001 Nights tales – are about disguises, and things not being as they seem. As Jorge Luis Borges noted, in Stevenson’s collection we find Prince Florizel of Bohemia, who wanders through the streets of London in disguise: much as Mr Parkenstacker is a wealthy man disguising himself as a humble cashier in O. Henry’s story.

Had the cashier girl got the idea to pose as a high-class lady from reading Stevenson’s tales of princes and noblemen assuming disguises? Perhaps. But then what are we to make of the fact that she so carelessly discards the book at the story’s close? Parkenstacker – if that is, indeed, his real name – finds the book on the ground after she has headed into the restaurant to begin her shift as cashier. It’s ‘paper-covered’, so a cheap edition, designed to read and then, perhaps, thrown out. But nevertheless, the throwing-away of the book implies that the woman has acknowledged her little ruse is up, and the fun is over.