But that wasn’t the only reason he couldn’t live there. His father had made it clear that he believed he wasn’t getting the whole story about what had gone wrong with Jack and Ellen. Good Catholic girls like Ellen from decent families don’t suddenly just decide to start fucking some lawyer; there are two sides to every story, and since he wasn’t getting Ellen’s that was because Ellen was too decent to tell anybody what Jack had done that made her do it.
The only time in ten years and four months of marriage that Jack had laid a hand on Ellen was that one time, after he’d knocked Howard Candless around, and then gone home to tell her, and ask her why, and she had screamed, so mad that she was spitting in his face, that because whenever he touched her, she wanted to puke.
He couldn’t be any sorrier about that than he was, sorry and ashamed, but it had happened, and there was no taking it back. And it had happened only once.
His mother had cried when she heard about it, which was even worse than having her yell at him, and his sisters, every damned one of them, had made it plain they believed the reason Ellen had done what she had done was because he had been regularly knocking Ellen around all the time, and she’d finally had enough.
That had really surprised him and made him wonder about his brothers-in-law. Was the reason his sisters were so quick to jump on the idea that he was regularly knocking Ellen around because they were regularly getting it from their husbands? It wasn’t such a far-out idea when he thought about it. If his sisters were getting slapped around, they would have kept it to themselves, knowing full well that their father and their brother would have kicked the living shit out of their husbands.
And if that was the case, Jack Malone reasoned, that would explain why they were almost happy to find out that Jack Malone was no better than their husbands.
And Ellen had jumped on that, and made it sing like a violin. When she had taken Little Jack to see Grandma, she had told Grandma she didn’t think it would do anyone any good, least of all Little Jack, to dwell on what had happened between them. All she thought was that Little Jack’s father needed help, and she really hoped he could get it.
In the eyes of Grandma and his sisters, that made Ellen just about as noble as the Virgin Mary.
So not only could he not move back into his parents’ house, he really hated to go over there at all.
So into the St. Charles Hotel. In some ways, it was like when he made sergeant in the Army and he had gotten his own room. The big differences were that he couldn’t get his laundry done for three bucks a month, and there was no mess hall passing out free “take all you want, but eat what you take” meals.
The one uniform Jack had bought when he made lieutenant came with two pair of pants, so he still had a freshly pressed pair to wear on the job tomorrow. Tomorrow night, depending on whether he spilled something on the jacket or not, he would have to have it at least pressed, but that wasn’t a problem for tonight.
What he would have liked to do tonight was go out and have a couple of beers, beers hell, drinks, and then a steak with a glass of red wine or two with that, and then maybe a nightcap or something afterward.
What he did was what he could afford to do. He went to Colonel Sanders’s and bought the special (a half breast, a leg, a couple of livers, a roll, and a little tub of cole slaw) for $1.69 and took it back to the St. Charles. There he took off his clothes and ate it in his underwear, watching the TV, washing it down with a glass of water from the tap.
He fell asleep watching a rerun of I Love Lucy and woke up to the trumpets and drum roll announcing Nine’s News at Nine.
He could taste all of the Colonel’s Seventeen Secret Herbs and Spices in his mouth, and his left leg had gone to sleep. He hobbled around the room flexing and shaking his left leg.
He put the remnants of the $1.69 Special in the wastebasket under the sink in the toilet, and then tested the water. It ran rusty red for a couple of seconds, burped, and then turned hot.
He took a hot shower, thinking that simply because there was hot water now there was no guarantee that there would be hot water in the morning.
He was now wide awake. He knew that even if he could force himself to go to sleep, he would almost certainly wake up at say half past four and, if that happened, never get back to sleep.
He put on a pair of blue jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of sneakers and left the room.
There was a tavern on the corner of 18th and Arch. He certainly could afford a beer.
He pushed open the door and looked inside and changed his mind. A bunch of losers sitting around staring into the stale, getting warm beer in their glasses. Nobody was having a good time.
He acted like he was looking for somebody who wasn’t there, and went back out onto 18
th Street.
He knew where he wanted to go, and what he wanted to do, and walked to where he had parked his car and got in it.
Am I doing this because I didn’t want to belly up to the bar with the other losers, or is this what I really wanted to do in the first place?
He drove up North Broad Street until he came to the Holland Pontiac-GMC showroom. The lights were on, but there was no one in the showroom. They closed at half past nine.
He turned left and made the next left, which put him behind the Pontiac-GMC showroom building and between it and a large concrete block building on which was lettered, HOLLAND MOTOR COMPANY BODY SHOP.
It was a factory-type building. The windows were of what he thought of as chicken wire reinforced glass. They passed light, but you couldn’t see through them.
The Holland Motor Company Body Shop was going full blast.
It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. Part of this was because they fixed the entire GM line of cars in this body shop, not just Pontiacs and GMCs. And part of it was because, to help the working man who needed his car to drive to work, you could bring your crumpled fender to the Holland Motor Car Body Shop in installments, leaving it there overnight and getting it back in the morning. They would straighten the fender one night, prime it the second, and paint it the third night, or over the weekends.