‘You,” she decided, ‘I like!’ Sabrina had exclaimed even before she and Judy had exchanged a single word.
Since that day in late February the two women had become true sisters. Back then Gretsky’s was a falling down shambles, nobody took responsibility for anything, and many of the rooms in the big house and most of the out buildings were neglected and uninhabitable. Things were slowly getting better now Judy was the official ‘house mother’; and Sabrina had been transported into the next best thing to seventh heaven, finally able at last to concentrate entirely on her ‘art’, her painting and pottery, and on bedding the exotic and often bewildered young men, and sometimes women, who briefly swooped through her orbit.
The ‘free love’ thing, Sam had confided a little sheepishly, once he and Judy had settled in the long back bedroom on the first floor of the big half-house, ‘gets old after a while’, as evinced by the fact that Sabrina presently shared Gretsky’s with three other ‘settled’ couples; Judy and Sam, Paul and Rosa, and Lorreta and Suzi, and an otherwise transient collection of visitors and guests, including musicians passing through and other freewheeling artists like Sabrina. There was always music in Gretsky’s, guitars mainly but also flutes and recorders. One day a stand up piano had been left overnight in the courtyard around which the outhouses backed onto the main building. Paul and Rosa had two small kids, a boy and a girl both under five years old. Suzi had a six year old son. Judy pinched herself now and then because it was all too idyllic, too good to be true. The World might be horribly messed up but the last few months had been the happiest of her life; living in a friendly commune beneath the California sun with a man she loved and adored, surrounded by new friends and the baby…
Of course, that first night had been truly weird.
‘It’s too early in the season for there to be many snakes,’ Sabrina had explained matter-of-factly, “but make sure you know where you are putting your feet around the outhouses and the scrub. The place is a bit overgrown this year. I’ve been meaning to do something about it but,’ the older woman had shrugged her bony shoulders and grinned broadly, ‘Sam will look after you.’
That first night they had spread blankets on bare boards and slept through most of the next day…
The sunshine was pouring into the living room that morning.
“Oh, there you are!” Sabrina declared, flopping melodramatically onto the threadbare sofa beside her friend. Today she had her hair drawn back into a severe pigtail flecked with orange and green paint. She was wearing one of the massively over-sized men’s shirts — and very little else — that she favoured when she was working in her studio. The older woman leant over towards Judy and rested the palm of her right hand on her friend’s swollen belly.
As if on cue Judy’s unborn baby kicked.
“That is just so spooky!” Sabrina exclaimed, purring like a proud mountain lioness.
“He’s getting impatient,” Judy giggled. Sam had taken her to see a doctor on Mulholland Avenue a couple of times early in her pregnancy; and a month ago to a clinic in LA. According to the experts the baby was not due for another month but what did they know?
Sabrina was arching both her eyebrows at the writing pad Judy had put down when she came in.
“I thought I’d write Sam’s Mom a proper letter,” Judy explained, feeling a little uneasy. Joanne Brenckmann’s week old letter — it had actually been posted in Boston nearly three weeks ago — had arrived like a bolt from the blue. Ten closely written pages in a clear, strong hand, very businesslike in a fond, folksy sort of way; the concise story of the Brenckmann family in war and peace in the last year. Sam had guessed about his kid sister the moment he heard about what had happened to Buffalo, so that had not come as a complete shock but deep down, he had not yet accepted the awfulness of it. “I thought I’d write her a letter now and send it when the baby is born.”
“My mothers-in-law all hated me,” Sabrina confessed proudly, and was then momentarily distracted by the tiny kicking pressure on her hand, still gently pressed to her friend’s belly. “That does it every time,” she murmured.
“Sam’s Mom seems like a nice lady.”
“That’s why Sam dropped out of college and came to California!”
“No, seriously. You and I both know that Sam would have done that anyway,” Judy retorted. “It wasn’t as if he had some kind of huge fight with his folks. Heck, his folks were wiring him money to Western Union every month before the war and it isn’t like they’re millionaires.”
Sabrina stopped teasing, and fixed her friend with her tawny stare. Sam and Judy had been bags of bones when they got to Gretsky’s, the dirt and grime of the road was deeply etched into their faces and hands and their eyes were hollow, a haunted by the sights they had seen in the weeks since the war. She had never taken Sam Brenckmann for a one girl, life us do part, sort of guy but him and Judy were so solid she defied anybody to find a chink of light between them. Not that Sam had suddenly turned over a new leaf, he was still the dreamy, out of it kid he was before it was just that now he had Judy; and she just happened to be everything he wanted or needed.
“Stay there,” she commanded. Right from day one Sabrina had documented ‘the history’ of Gretsky’s in pictures. In her paintings and more prosaically, in photographs week in and week out with her trusty Kodak. The morning light in the Canyon was God’s gift to photography and she exploited it whenever the mood took her. In the big, main downstairs room — the ‘living room’ or ‘’party room’ according to mood — of the cut in half mansion old, dog-eared photo albums were stacked on shelves, on the floor, and under tables. Sabrina swept back into the room and circled Judy. Judy hated having her picture taken and pouted. Sometimes, Sabrina respected her feelings, others not. This morning Sabrina gave in, returned huffily to the sofa.
“I found some pictures of Miranda the other day,” Judy said flatly. “Pretty girl.”
“Bitch!” Sabrina snorted.
Judy was more generous. Miranda Sullivan had persuaded an agent in San Francisco to send Sam on a tour of the American North-West with a combo called the Limonville Brothers Strummers Band just before the October War. It was fairly clear that Miranda had done this out of spite, knowing that sooner or later Sam would have a major falling out with the ‘talentless rednecks’ the agent — a man universally despised in Gretsky’s and elsewhere called Johnny Seiffert — and that Sam would therefore soon be joining the ‘untouchables’ black list that every club owner on the West Coast kept behind his bar. However, on the up side, if Miranda, a blond vision of grace and beauty in Sabrina’s photo albums beside whom Judy felt like a middle-aged, dumpy frump, had not attempted to wreak her retribution on Sam by exiling him to ‘the boondocks of the Western World’, she would never have met him, she would almost certainly be dead now, and she certainly would not be heavily pregnant. Therefore, although she probably ought to spit every time she heard the name ‘Miranda’, as was Sabrina’s habit, she simply could not bring herself to do it.
“My husband left me because he thought I couldn’t give him children,” Judy confessed, her brow furrowing as she recollected the unhappy years of her doomed marriage. “Funny, he was the one who couldn’t have kids, not me.” Catching herself growing introspective she brightened. “It’s weird how things turn out, don’t you think?”
Sabrina said nothing.
Judy had written to the local military district in the summer requesting information about the whereabouts and status of her estranged husband. A month ago a letter had come back from the Office of Army Personnel at the Pentagon in Washington DC confirming that ‘acting Master Sergeant Miles Michael Dorfmann, 2nd Armoured Division, United States Forces, Germany, is listed as missing in action and no further information as to his situation or his whereabouts is available at this time.’ The letter had gone on to explain that while it was known that a small number of survivors of US Forces, Germany, had made their way to undamaged areas of France and that a handful had subsequently travelled onwards by land to Spain, or in isolated cases, by boat across the English Channel to the United Kingdom, Judy’s ‘husband’s’ name did not appear on any lists in possession of the Department of Defence. ‘You should not give up hope. The Secretary of Defence wishes his personal thoughts and prayers for the wellbeing of your husband to be communicated to you at this time…’