Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Luck Be a Lady Tonight - Part 1

This is a short story set in the 1950s, about an intense young college girl at Harvard/Radcliffe whose heartbreak and a subsequent blind date set the stage for her to discover she may be mentally ill, have magical powers, or both. I wrote it years ago and have never tried to publish it before. I am a pretty tough editor, and re-reading this after many years...I thought it was okay. Now I want to know what Wattpad readers think! It's my first post ever on Wattpad and my first experience with direct reader feedback. Set on the East Coast in the fifties, I apparently researched some interesting historical details about Broadway musicals, early co-ed education, and Harry Truman's secret Chinese coup over FDR. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

Luck Be A Lady Tonight

1959.

The maid says televisions are in color now, but I’ve never seen one. I walk to the window. I walk to the door. I don’t even look out the peephole, I know no one’s there. Sometimes I gently touch the door as if it were a child’s hair. Check the chain lock. Walk back to the bedroom. To the kitchen. It’s Tuesday. I think. The maid comes on Wednesdays.

I never really understood myself, and I always hated everyone’s favorite thing about me: that I went to Radcliffe. So what, Radcliffe, what does that mean now, here in my tiny apartment all these years later? I wish I had never gone. I would rather have sat alone like this during those years, and remained unmolested by that moronic, great unwashed student body in Cambridge. I spent just three years at college, not four, because I disappeared after my junior year. I never took to the stage as a senior and smiled for the cameras, never completed the story. No one ever asks if I finished, just where I went. There’s never any reason for anyone to check my credentials, so it has occurred to me that I could just as easily be lying as telling the truth. It seems like such a long time ago, seems even to me like I’m making it up when I say, “Radcliffe.” In fact, as far as the maid knows, I could be making up the university entirely.

But it does exist and I did go. Well, it sort of exists. Actually, Harvard is making it up. Making up that Radcliffe exists. To get more money out of the families, or to appease the suffragists of an earlier era, I’m not sure which, maybe both. Radcliffe is a strange thing. During the war, things started to change. Radcliffe girls started to attend classes over at Harvard because half the men were off learning to shoot instead of listen, and so when I arrived in ‘46, the undergraduate program at Radcliffe was illusory. There were no classes, just a name. I asked about this once and was told simply that my diploma would say Radcliffe, although all my classes were at Harvard. A funny game of paper. It’s still that way. Maybe the boys are afraid they’ll get an infection from their diploma if it comes from a school that allows girls. Diplomacy with women is known to be infectious, but somehow I doubt Harvard men will catch it.

They let girls into the law school the year after I left, but we’re still not allowed in the main library. I’m not sure who is winning, building by building, or what’s at stake exactly, and I don’t care anymore. That was years ago.

Yet people still love to introduce me and say, “Penelope went to Radcliffe,” and I always think it sounds like, “Penelope is a pedigreed bitch, isn’t that nice?”

“Art history,” the malicious introducer will add, handing his or her victims drinks. The other victim, that is, whomever I am introduced to then says, “Really, how interesting,” even though it isn’t. I don’t know why I go to cocktail parties, why I go to family affairs, why I go to anything. Lately I don’t, I guess. It’s been years now, since I’ve gone to one. It was really just that first year, after leaving school, but before I left the East Coast entirely. Now, I go from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen to the window to the door and then back to bed. There is nothing in the apartment to look at—no art, no history—so I stand by the window a lot.

I do not know anything about art and I cannot make art. I do not know anything about history, except that it could all be made up for all I know. The victors write it, the publishers publish it, the schools buy it, and we read it. Who cares. Art history is the study of how people want their crazy interior world to be splattered across the exterior world they live in.  The most audacious will do this, and do it with whatever means they have at their disposal, given their station in life and society at the time. More often throughout history, however, we find the amoral gigolos who gain favor with wealthy, self-aggrandizing patrons and create art that glorifies the patron. And thus the numbing drug habits and bourgeois laziness of the obsequious gigolos survive. Young, handsome men who claim to be artists but who are really just shining the shoes of older, richer men, will always endure.

Bobby left me junior year for my faculty advisor, Robert. Yes, Bob and Bob. The scandal sent them packing for Wellesley, where the elder Bob now teaches a course based on his radical book, Magnificent Epiphany: Towards a Unified Theory of Public Art, Religious Expression, and the Punctuated Equilibrium of Societal Transformation. The younger Bob is an artist. That is, he pretends to be Robert’s nephew, shops, attends gallery openings, claims to be working on something, and probably is so happy not to be working at the student automat serving coffee anymore, that he makes coffee for the elder Bob every morning.

I imagine Bobby cheerfully making my professor coffee, at least, as I make my own coffee in the morning. I use the term “morning” loosely. I get up around two in the afternoon. The grocer delivers the same order once a week. The mail comes through the slot. I have a maid, whom I mentioned, she comes once a week. Before she comes, I always think I’ll do the dishes and laundry myself, but I never do. There isn’t much, since I barely eat and just wear a faded slip and underwear every day. I bought the slip on my birthday, in 1953, I remember that because I kept the receipt sitting on the dresser for an entire year, considering returning it. It’s pretty new, the slip, it shouldn’t be so faded already. Well, maybe not so new. Years have passed, I guess. The years escape me like slippery fish, I grasp at each year, but they swim through my fingers and off to sea, leaving me standing in shallow water. Anyway, I always apologize to the maid for not doing those things—the laundry and dishes—but she doesn’t really care either way. She comes and works for three hours, silently for the most part, and everything is always done in that time. Her name is Harriet.

I don’t think I’ve been out of the house in almost four months. It’s like a game. I know Harriet thinks I’m on a war widow’s stipend, and my old friends probably think I’m an heiress who happily absconded to Europe. The truth is that I went to Atlantic City once, and could not lose. I absolutely could not lose.