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Ryan, and as a matter of fact, Jeff’s in Washington today.”
    “So you can have a bite with Sheila Brennan and me. We’re going over to the Actors Forum afterwards. They’re doing a play now with the public invited. I’m sure you could get in without a reservation.”
    There was no reason not to, really, and she did like to drop by the Forum now and then where she was still a member.
    At dinner the conversation of the three women dealt largely with the unfortunate event that had brought them together, or at least had brought together Julie and the nurse, Sheila Brennan. But you couldn’t talk long of Pete Mallory without mention of the New Irish Theatre where he had been working at the time of his death.
    “There’s another young man I’d love you to meet, Julie,” Mrs. Ryan said. “He reads beautifully…Wouldn’t she take to him, Sheila? The voice of a poet and the heart of a patriot.”
    Oh, boy.
    Miss Brennan wiped away a small white mustache of beer foam. “I don’t like his eyes,” she said.
    Mrs. Ryan gave her shoulders a shuffle. “You said that before. There’s some people can’t look at a person. He looks you straight in the eye.”
    “Oh, doesn’t he? He nails you to where he’s looking at you. I knew a priest like that once. He’d have you confessing sins you never committed just to get away from him.”
    Julie laughed.
    “It wasn’t a bit funny, let me tell you. I was a young girl then.” Miss Brennan’s pale blue eyes narrowed at the recollection. Her freckles had gone from red to brown with the summer sun. “And mind, it was through a screen where he shouldn’t have been looking at you at all. The way he’d say, ‘Ye-e-s?’ you’d start making up things for fear there were some you’d forgotten and you taking up his valuable time.”
    “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Ryan said.
    Julie understood perfectly what Miss Brennan was talking about. “He should have been a psychiatrist.”
    “Right on!” the nurse said, proud of herself for using a new phrase in her vocabulary that had gone out of Julie’s before she left college.
    “Isn’t it nice,” Mrs. Ryan said stiffly, “the two of you speak the same language.”
    To mollify her, Julie asked, “What’s the poet-patriot’s name, Mrs. Ryan?”
    “Sean O’Grady. It has a wonderful sound in Gaelic. Do you remember it in Gaelic, Sheila?” Julie knew now where Mrs. Ryan had freshened her Irish.
    “I wouldn’t remember it in English if it wasn’t for you. I’m not so taken with these I.R.A. people, Mary. If you worked in a hospital it’d chill your bones to see them come in as I have, even in this country, after a blast of some sort, with their eyes hanging out of the sockets, or their jaws blown off. There was a man walked into Emergency once and gave me his hand. He literally gave me his hand and then fell in a dead faint at my feet…”
    “Hush’t before you spoil our appetites,” Mrs. Ryan said.
    The play was terrible. It went off in all directions and never came back. Julie stuck it out to the end. Never, never would Mary Ryan walk out on a play. As she said, it would be like leaving the Mass before the consecration. The only thing that cheered Julie was that it had been produced at all. Even if the playwright hadn’t been able to pull it together, he’d laid it out. Right now she’d settle for that herself. You couldn’t get there without a here to go from.
    The next day Julie tried to get started on the story of Pete Mallory’s murder. Most of the characters were going to work out all right: Peter Mallory, scenic designer for the Actors Forum and the New Irish Theatre; Rita Morgan, who had come to Friend Julie for advice on how to get out of The Life, soul-poisoned Rita, who took Pete’s offer to marry her and take her home as the ultimate insult; Mack, Rita’s pimp, whose disappearance after Pete’s death was taken by Julie and the police to be the doing of Sweets Romano; Romano, “the king