Lomita closed her eyes, clutching her heavy crystal tumbler, recalled the following words that became like an anthem for her.

‘With that ethereal beauty you should be in motion pictures, and if you are ever in the City of Angels, contact me.’

Bobby Layne had made this happen.

This was her dream.

She never forgot the word he used to qualify her beauty – ethereal – she had to make a special trip to the library to find out the meaning. No one she worked with knew what it meant either.

Lomita looked over at the cushion on the other side of the expanse of bed. The word ‘Ethereal’ was embroidered on it. Bold, flowing script, in red and green, with dashes of gold thread.

*

She still has the card that he gave her to this day.

Although she feels very differently about it now than she did then. Then, it represented a passport, a ticket, an escape from what she felt was grime and gloom.

Her childhood was coloured grey, she had been in a black and white movie; she always wanted it to be in Technicolor.

Her father would come back every day from the factory with the dirt on his face outlining where his goggles had been. He was grey, the eye protectors leaving a whiteness around his eyes like the area had never seen the sun. Clean and softer, almost baby-like, where the rest was cracked and lined. A mark and facial signature that was always there to her eye, however much he washed – she was embarrassed now at how much she made him wash. Wash and wash. So as not to give away, on their walks down the street to the newly opened department store, just to look around at all the expensive goods under one roof, never to buy, that he was a labourer. Just a welder.

She wanted him to be so much more. Something, at any rate, just a little bit special. He deserved it.

He welded metal beds for the military. His target was a hundred beds a day; his task was legs to frame; he prided himself that he never fell short.

But the work was hot, dull and dark; his spirit was as molten as the joints he welded hour after hour. An industrial boom time for the post-war economy, but the souls doing the work were only comforted by the food in their stomachs, and the football and the hockey and of course the baseball. Their brains were slowly softening, the steel taking all the strength.

‘The spirit is pouring out of us, dying on the factory floor.’

It was the most poetic thing she had ever heard her father say.

*