Death in The Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

stinks?”
    “It just happens the grande dame of theater said those very words to me last week.”
    “And what did you say to her?”
    “Fuck you, ma’am.”
    “Even I know you got to pay for a trip like that, Pete.”
    “But I was right.”
    “Then especially.”
    He looked at her darkly, but the frown had no foundation. He grinned and it disappeared. “Who’s complaining?” Then half-seriously: “What are you going to charge a session, Sister Julie?”
    “Friend Julie. Five bucks a reading. Strike the word session. Five bucks till I get started.”
    “What do you mean, till you get started? You’re already started. You must have been a con artist at sixteen.”
    “You bet,” Julie said, but the remark hurt, no matter how Pete had intended it. Which had to mean it was something to think about. On her own. No more, “Doctor, this friend of mine said…”
    “So? What about this friend?”
    Pete measured the walls and said that he was going to Dazian’s that afternoon in any case. He would see what he could pick up in the way of material, something light that wasn’t quite see-through.
    “Do you want some money?”
    “Read my horoscope for me.”
    “Okay.” As though she could. Until she read the book. She was a con artist.
    “Sagittarius,” he said from the door. “In case you want to look it up.”
    Julie pulled on her rubber gloves and set to scrubbing the floor. A real con artist would have somebody doing it for her. From the age of sixteen. At sixteen she was a junior at Miss Page’s School, getting ready to come out. Ready plus one. She had taken off that spring without telling Mother or Miss Page on a peace march to Washington and in one weekend had experienced pot, sex, and politics. After which coming out didn’t mean even the little it had meant before. She chose her college and Mother decided on a different kind of husband for her little girl than she had had in mind till then. Everybody’s little girl. Except Father’s. Father was the con of cons, an Irish diplomat who conned the pope into annulling his American marriage. Look, Papa Paul, the child doesn’t count, an immaculate conception. Or a Magdalene’s daughter… Hey! What a title for a book, Magdalene’s Daughter.
    She got up and removed the gloves and went into the back room where she had set up the card table and the two director’s chairs she had been on the verge of giving to the Salvation Army, they were so rarely used on Seventeenth Street. She turned on the gooseneck lamp and opened a new notebook where she made a first entry, the beginning of… What?
    Pete returned with several bolts of shimmery green material and then went on to the Forum to get scissors, needles and thread, hammer and nails. Julie got a can of spackle and patched the major wounds. By late afternoon the walls were hung with a limpid camouflage.
    “It’s going to work marvelously,” Julie said.
    “I like the way you put that—it’s going to work. Something that always riles hell out of me, and also scares me, is when people applaud a set before the play starts. How do they know if it’s any good until they see the play in it?” To heighten the drama, Pete proposed to borrow a couple of floor spotlights. He demonstrated the effect he wanted using the gooseneck lamp, an illusion of movement.
    Julie said, “No belly dancing in the aisle, please.”
    “Oh, how nice,” Mrs. Ryan said from the doorway. “I’ve brought you a thermos of tea. You don’t mind Fritzie, do you?”
    “Do you know Pete Mallory, Mrs. Ryan?”
    Pete remained on his haunches, but saluted the older woman. “How are you, Mrs. Ryan?”
    “What a grand surprise, Peter. I don’t suppose I’ve seen you since Laura Gibson’s funeral. We do miss her so, poor soul… I dare say you do, too.”
    “Yup.” Pete got up and put the lamp back on the table in the back room.
    “That’s a lovely shade of green,” Mrs. Ryan said of the walls. “As soft as an Irish