Ellen now seems eager to start building bridges in her marriage rather than contemplate those she has already burned. Desperate to be the housewife, she greets her husband at the door with a kiss, mixes him a drink and teases him about his bald spot. For her the story is at an end ("Well, it's over now."). She remains unaware of how close she came to being busted, and no doubt at the back of her mind there is the thought that - with Hooper dead - there are unlikely to be further temptations or complications.
The anger Ellen displays when Brody announces his intention to go back out on the Orca is more a symptom of her own selfishness than a sign of any concern for her husband. Having re-established her role as the good wife/mother, she is now faced with the possibility of being made a widow. When she levels the charge of egotism against him ("Can't you think about anybody but yourself?"), Brody is forced to confront the idea that he might be motivated by "a personal need for expiation."
The mixture of overwrought emotion and bland cliche allows the casual reader to dismiss the Brodys' final argument as another example of the book's soap-opera quality - the element of Peyton Place, which Spielberg complained of. Coming at the end of the book's penultimate chapter, the dialogue in fact serves to restate the novel's main theme of responsibility to the community and responsibility to oneself.
This is made explicit in the two editorials due to appear in the next day's Amity Leader, which Harry Meadows delivers to Brody's front door after Ellen has gone to bed. Written in the same style as the report on Morris Cater's death from Chapter Four, the first mourns Hooper. It reports that he has been "struck down by a savage menace" and bestows upon him an epitaph of empty rhetoric ("He was a friend, and he gave his life so that we, his friends, might live."). The second praises the "extraordinary fortitude and integrity" of Police Chief Martin Brody, who "has spent his every waking minute trying to protect his fellow citizens." It glosses over Brody's initial complicity in the cover-up, and (though Harry Meadows could never have known it) ignores the fact that Brody spent as much time needling and bating "the young oceanographer [sic] from Woods Hole."
The public declaration of support allows Brody some sense of resolution, and the chapter ends quietly. Brody plays master of the house, checking the doors and windows as a gale blows outside, and then falls asleep in front of a movie on TV. The film - Weekend at the Waldorf - is not a random choice by Benchley, but a sly tip of the hat to his grandfather Robert, who appeared in the comedy-drama alongside Ginger Rogers in one of her non-dancing roles. Brody wakes up to white noise at five a.m. and, before he leaves for the dock, he plays out the part of loving husband and father by kissing his sleeping wife's brow (furrowed in a frown even in her sleep) and looking in on his sons.
