Death in The Life by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

you know, from the west of Ireland. It’s the very devil to get to burn.”
    That of the peat, Julie assumed. If you couldn’t get the peat to burn, you could certainly get burned by Pete.
    The house lights went out leaving a wall of light downstage that slowly dimmed and revealed a small forest of tree trunks over which hung a dark green scrim of foliage with tiny remote lights flickering above. Pete’s sea of stars in an Irish heaven.
    “Will you look at that,” Mrs. Ryan said and clapped her hands in delight.
    They would have called the Actors Forum looking for him, Julie thought, and the Peter Mallory listed at 741 Ninth Avenue. But his work was done, actually. He had left them a show they could handle. Kiss-and-Run Pete…
    The actors all but sang their lines and the audience to whom the words meant Ireland rocked to and fro in their seats with pleasure. Julie thought of her father whom she knew only from a handsome face in a photograph. Which made her think of The Glass Menagerie, from which she had once done a scene, playing Laura… Blow out your candles, Laura… She returned to The Land of Hearts Desire:
    …Until she came into the land of the Faery
    Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
    Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
    Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
    And she is still there, busy with a dance
    Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
    Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top…
    It was Yeats all right, Pete’s nice noise. Damn him.
    The fairy child stole the bride’s soul and left the old priest helpless with the corpse of the woman. Too late, he blamed himself: “For pride comes knocking with thin knuckles on the heart.” Oh, boy.
    The house lights came up at the end of the curtain-raiser.
    Mrs. Ryan gave a deep sigh of contentment. “I’m so glad I met you out there, Julie. I don’t mind going to church alone, but I do like someone to talk to at the theater. Not that I go that often, the prices nowadays, and the things they’re calling plays. Graffiti is more interesting.” She gave a little pinch to her mouth, and then folded her program to point out a name to Julie. “I see Mr. Bourke has a credit for lights.”
    Julie was about to mention her lamp. To hell with it.
    “You’re very quiet,” Mrs. Ryan said.
    “I’m letting the play sink in.”
    “Is Peter here?”
    “No.”
    “Saturday nights are the worst, aren’t they? There used to be a song, Saturday night is the lonesomest night in the week.”
    “You bet.”
    “I wonder if Peter had anything to do with selecting the plays. He was the stage manager with Laura Gibson when they did street theater a few years ago. She played Cathleen ni Houlihan in Chelsea and the Bronx. The longshoremen coming home from the docks stopped and cheered her… and somebody took up a collection. Bernadette Devlin—I wonder what’s happened to her.”
    Julie had missed the connection if there was one.
    “We had such grand times in those days, such grand times.”
    “Did she live at the Willoughby?” Julie asked to hold up her end of the conversation. She had seen Laura Gibson in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and felt that she was pretty awful.
    “Well, at the end, she did, but when I first knew her she lived at the Algonquin, no less.”
    Mercifully, the second play was about to start.
    It seemed a variation on the same theme as the first. Julie decided she much preferred Yeats a dirty old man to the hung-up young one. Pete in the pulpit, the whore singing hymns. Goldie, Mack, Rita… Rita-Juanita. Julie thought she would suffocate if she did not get out soon.
    After the final curtain calls, everyone was invited to stay for coffee.
    “How nice,” Mrs. Ryan said.
    Julie proposed to escape. “I’m going on if you don’t mind, Mrs. Ryan.”
    “I’ll go with you. Let me buy you a nice glass of lager at McGowan’s. It’s a cheerful place on a Saturday night.”
    “Another time?” Julie said and put on her best