Death in The Life Read Online Free PDF

mist.”
    Pete said, “What’s the latest disaster at the Willoughby?”
    Mrs. Ryan lived at the Willoughby Apartments.
    “You wouldn’t believe the things that go on there nowadays. I don’t know if you’d remember Mr. Bourke, the quiet little man down the hall? He was asked to leave.” She laid a confiding hand on Pete’s arm. “Boys.”
    “Shocking,” Pete said solemnly.
    Mrs. Ryan picked up the mockery in his choice of words. “I forget. Was he a friend of yours?”
    “Is,” Pete said.
    “Well, you never know. Mind he’s a nice enough man when you meet him.” She sat at the table and poured tea into the two thermos cups. “I’ve had my cup. This is for the two of you.”
    “No thank you, Mrs. Ryan,” Pete said. “I’ve got to go. I’ll stop by in a day or so, Julie, if I can get the lights from Mr. Bourke.”
    Mrs. Ryan pursed her lips at the name.
    “Pete, I do thank you,” Julie said.
    “You owe me a horoscope. I’d leave the front windows clear, except for a sign, whatever you say on it. Let all the mystery hang back here. The reception room’s for the come-on. Stick a chair out there and see who turns up. I’ll be interested.”
    “Me too. Come back soon.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.
    A trigger response: “How about dinner tonight? Some come-in-as-you-are place?”
    “I’d love it.”
    He said he would come by for her at six. They would return the borrowed tools to the Forum and go on from there. Instead of having to say anything more to Mrs. Ryan—or so seemed his purpose to Julie—he stooped down to pet Fritzie. The dog scooted away. “See you,” Pete murmured to no one in particular.
    Mrs. Ryan sat back and sipped her tea. Julie put the second chair out front as Pete had suggested and herself sat cross-legged on a newspaper on the newly scrubbed floor, the thermos cup in both hands.
    “Now isn’t that interesting,” Mrs. Ryan said, “that he’d be a friend of Mr. Bourke’s?”
    “Is that bad?”
    “Just interesting. I’ve never properly understood Peter. He’s a very nice young man, but I do believe he’s doomed.”
    “What’s ‘doomed’?”
    “Well, he hasn’t got on very far, has he, for one of the most promising young designers in American theater? They used to call him that.”
    “Don’t they still call him that?”
    “I don’t know how long you can be promising, Julie, but I do know you can’t be young forever.”
    “Yeah.”
    Mrs. Ryan gave that little pinch to her lips that portended a confidence not altogether pleasant. “Did you know he studied for the priesthood?”
    The church was all around her. Universal. “It figures,” she said, more in response to her own thoughts than to Mrs. Ryan.
    “Did you notice? He didn’t want to talk about my friend Laura Gibson.”
    Julie didn’t especially either; she had only seen the actress perform once and she had thought her pretty awful.
    “They were very close,” Mrs. Ryan went on. “She would introduce him as her nephew sometimes, though I don’t think they were related at all. In any case, he had gone to school to the Jesuits, and I do believe he entered their novitiate somewhere out in the Midwest. All before he got into theater, of course.”
    “The church makes pretty good theater.”
    “Oh, my dear, not like it used to,” Mrs. Ryan said with melancholic fervor. She lifted her shopping bag from the floor to her lap. “I brought you something. I don’t know whether you can use it or not.” She dug out a cardboard sign: Beauty Consultant. “It belonged to my friend Mrs. Russo. She used to run a beauty parlor on Ninth Avenue. You could cut away the word Beauty.”
    “Or add Truth. Consultant in Truth and Beauty.”
    “There isn’t enough room to say all that.”
    Julie got Pete’s scissors and cut off the first word. It left a very naked Consultant. Ambiguous, to say the least. She punched holes in the top corners and suspended the sign on a length of heavy thread.