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Luck

Jill E. Harris

        Alison Murray opened a new Word document and put the date, “May 14, 2011,” at the top before she dialed Mrs. Chamberlain‘s number, set the phone beside her computer, and pushed the speaker phone button. Her elderly patron picked up, exchanged pleasantries, and began her dictation while Alison typed the memoir she would later edit, have bound, and deliver to Mrs. Chamberlain to distribute as gifts to her family.

    Alison typed only slightly slower than Mrs. Chamberlain spoke. “Yes,” she said, “Go on.”
    “Evelyn spent a lot of time rubbing elbows with people,” Mrs. Chamberlain continued. Urged on by Alison‘s reminder of their timetable, her voice resonated with a new clarity. “For the longest time I didn‘t understand all this schmoozing she was doing. Evelyn was a humble sort. She liked company and attended parties, but she was never the kind of girl who made herself the center of attention. She was the sort of girl who made her friends look better than herself, who would even draw a boy‘s attention to a friend when she herself was infatuated with him. So what was she up to? Had she changed so much from the sister I‘d know when I was growing up? She lived in a poor neighborhood in a simple apartment, straining to pay her way through school, but it was clear she sought out the well-to-do, the up-and-coming, the hoity-toity crowd. Mother had inherited Father‘s money, of course, but in those days people believed in pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Parents felt they were doing right by their children to let them make their own way in life, financially and in every other respect. It wasn‘t the way it is today, when parents are expected to pay for their children‘s education. Back then, children paid for their own education or they went to work, no two ways about it.”
    Alison looked at the clutter on her desk beside her computer. The print out of her college loan payments was tacked to a cork board on the wall. She‘d folded the paper in half and tacked it so that she couldn‘t see the numbers – a reminder that wouldn‘t depress her. Not everyone‘s life had changed so much from the old days, she thought. If pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps was one of the keys to being lucky, she ought to have been a lot luckier than she was. But on the other hand, perhaps she had at least one thing going for her.
    “The mystery was solved only recently,” her patron continued, “twenty years after Evelyn passed on, when I read the biography of another medical doctor. In those days, he said, breakthroughs in science occurred with enormous velocity, and only wealthy families could afford to buy updated text books. Most of the new medical and musical text books at the time were published in Germany. As a hobby, wealthy people gathered the most recent information and invited medical students and sometimes music majors to their homes for informal discussions. Someone would translate the texts, and they would all discuss the new material together. This way, the medical students could get the most up to date information, and the wealthy people enjoyed their hobby. So apparently Evelyn was not trying to gain influence at these people‘s homes; she was studying.
    “The year before she graduated, Evelyn felt especially pressed for money and anxious about her studies.
    “One hundred and thirty five students hope to graduate from my class, she wrote to Mother, but we‘ve been told that at least thirty-five of us will be plucked. So you see, more than one in five of us will be plucked, and I am the only woman and the most likely to be singled out for plucking.
    Magic Flute. By this time, the soprano was an elderly woman, but she took an interest in Evelyn.
    “Can you hang on a minute?” Alison asked. A chill had come over her, and she crossed the room, found a sweater in the closet, and shrugged it on.
    “Okay,” she said, indicating she was ready to continue.
    “I‘m not sure what transpired between the two women, one a former opera star who was approaching her death and one a young woman on the verge of a medical career who had used the gift of her voice to acquire her education, but Evelyn was never the same. Her life took on a rosy glow. You could see the change in her eyes. They were brighter, bigger, and they seemed to emanate light, as though in her mind she saw a world no one else saw, a beautiful world. And indeed, suddenly, her own world changed, and everything came up roses for her. She seemed to have a Midas touch, but not one that changed life into metal, but somehow the opposite, as though even inanimate objects responded happily to her spell.
    “She was not, as she had feared, ‘plucked.‘ In fact, she graduated at the top of her class. She landed an internship that paid $400 a year right out of medical school, a great sum of money at the time, especially when most internships right out of medical school paid nothing. She became engaged to another doctor, a kind, soft spoken man who went on to become a successful surgeon. Together, they had five children, and they raised them on a beautiful farm in North Virginia. Evelyn was one of the first working mothers, and when she advertised for a nanny she interviewed a woman who carried herself like a princess and treated Evelyn‘s children as though they were her own. The family, like Evelyn, loved to bestow nicknames on people, and they took to calling her Princess out of affection, and she became more of an aunt to the children than I ever was, since it was her job to raise them. Only after Princess died of Tuberculosis did they find out the truth – that she had indeed been a Princess, forced to escape Europe during the Great War and to leave everything behind her and start anew in a new land.

    Alison felt that Mrs. Chamberlain was purposely portraying herself as similar to Alison in an effort to be reassuring. Nonetheless, it was effective, for Alison did indeed feel like the young woman whom Mrs. Chamberlain described herself as in her youth, and she was indeed encouraged by the comparison. The future might be brighter than the past after all, even if it turned out that there was no secret to luck to be gleaned from these stories, but only chaos, scientism, and an existentially random dispersal of luck and no luck.
    “But after the Queen of the Day entered Evelyn‘s life, I felt as though an invisible parachute lifted me up from the drudgery of life and took me sailing around the world to see every glorious sunrise. Suddenly, I had a beaux, and then a fiancé, and then a husband. Together, we started a small store, and before we knew it, it burgeoned into a successful retail chain. We hired a wonderful man to be our store manager, and we were able to spend plenty of time with our children and take them on long vacations camping in beautiful natural surroundings – the Finger Lakes, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, New Mexico.... We travelled all around the country together, enjoying each other and the beauty and variety of the landscape. As I tell my grandchildren, we had a lucky star shining over us.
    “Years later, just before she died, Evelyn said she had something she needed to tell me. She couldn‘t wait for me to fly out and visit, and she was too ill to make the trip herself. We scheduled a time to talk that night on the phone so she could tell me her story. In some ways, it was just like what you and I are doing now.”
    Goose bumps rose on Alison‘s skin.
    “On an impulse, I lit candles all around the house before the hour we‘d agreed to talk. When the phone rang, I picked it up, and I wondered if it was my own nostalgia or something about the process of dying that made Evelyn‘s voice sound so young, as though we were children again. She asked me if I remembered the Queen of the Day.
    Of course I do.
    I‘ve never told you this before, Evelyn said, but a long time ago, the Queen of the Day gave me a very valuable gift.
    “I could hardly contain my curiosity. My mind flew back to the long ago change in Evelyn and in myself, and I wondered if I was about to get to the bottom of things.
    What was it?
    A symbol.
    My heart sank. Surely there was no symbol in the world that could account for the changes I‘d felt all those years ago. But I knew I was on the verge of losing my sister, and I listened just as intently out of my love for my sister as I would have if she had been – as I had briefly hoped – about to reveal to me the secret of our mutual change in luck.
    You see, the Queen of the Day believed that singing is the key not only to the soul, but also to the body. She believed that we‘re really all made of vibrations, the way music is, and that if you strike the right note, all of your life comes into tune, and the lives of those around you also come into tune. She believed that we take our form from our vibration and not the other way around. To her, singing was a way of reshaping her whole life and the life of those around her.
    Colors, she reminded me, are an expression of vibrations. And according to her, gems are not precious because they are rare; gems are precious because they are of very high vibrations that attune all the life that comes in contact with them to be more beautiful. Angels, she believed, are not archaic mythical beings from the Bible. Angels are the people we love who have died before us, and death, she believed, was not an end to life but simply a change to a new octave of vibration. In the same way that some pitches are too high for us to hear, she believed that death shifts people to a vibration which we can no longer sense. The Queen of the Day believed that time is a vibration as well, and that in reality everything – past, present, and future – is a part of a whole in the same way that a symphony exists before the soprano sings her first note.
    She — the Queen of the Day — took all of these ideas, and she forged them into a symbol that would both remind her of them and would, itself, resonate with a very high vibration. While she was still a poor unknown singer living in a rat infested tenement on the lower East Side of Manhattan, she took out a large loan and commissioned a jeweler to create a pyramid of precious gems – rubies, amber nuggets, tourmalines, sapphires, amethysts, and diamonds.
    Once she collected her symbol from the jeweler, she didn‘t hide it away in a safety deposit box. She left the jeweler‘s and she walked. She walked and walked and walked, all over the island. Uptown, Downtown, safe neighborhoods, unsafe neighborhoods. She didn‘t know why. She just did. Finally, when she grew tired, she returned to her own apartment. As she mounted the last flight of stairs, she heard her phone ringing inside, and she hurried to unlock the door. It was her mother, asking if it would be possible for her to bring her a casserole because she wasn‘t feeling well. Without hesitation, the Queen of the Day made the casserole and brought it to her mother. While it was warming in the oven, her mother asked her to sing for her, and so she sat at an old upright piano and sang the piece which would soon make her world famous, never dreaming that in the apartment above her the director of the Met‘s new production of The Magic Flute was listening. That was her audition, and the next day she had the part without ever having known she‘d auditioned for it.
    Alison‘s fingers flew across the key pads, faster than Mrs. Chamberlain‘s voice. A great excitement fluttered through her body.
    “On the phone that night, Evelyn told me that when the Queen of the Day knew she was dying, she gave the symbol to her. And now that Evelyn was dying, she was giving it to me. She had already sent it by certified mail, she told me, and I received it the next day, on June 12^th.
    The old woman stopped talking for a moment.
    “The odd thing, though,” she said in a voice that was so soft Alison could barely make out the words, “was that on the very same day I received news from Evelyn‘s daughter that she had passed on. But she hadn‘t passed on the night after we spoke. She had passed on three days before we spoke in a hotel in New Jersey. She‘d been sightseeing even though she was ill, and it took the owners of the hotel where she was staying three days to track down her family. A doctor had confirmed the death the day she was found in her room.”
    Alison‘s fingers didn‘t type the last two sentences. She was too stunned. Was this all a hoax? It was incredible. She felt a sudden anger toward the old woman, who had either deliberately misled her or had simply lost her marbles.
    “Well then,” Mrs. Chamberlain said, the way she did when she was finished for the day. “What‘s the damage?” This was her way of asking Alison how much she owed her. Alison charged $15 an hour. She had worked twenty hours that week.
     “$300.”
    “I‘ll put the check in the mail this afternoon,” Mrs. Chamberlain said. “Same time tomorrow?”
    But the next day, the old woman didn‘t call. She didn‘t call the day after, or the day after that, and the check, which usually arrived in a day, didn‘t arrive either. Not knowing what to do, Alison googled the woman‘s name and hometown.
    “Cecile Chamberlain dies at age 105,” the first hit read. Alison clicked on it. Sure enough, there was Mrs. Chamberlain‘s picture beside her obituary.
    “Surrounded by her family and friends, Cecile Chamberlain died on May 11, 2011,” the article read.
    Alison stared at the words, but before she could think what to think, the doorbell rang. The UPS man held up a gadget for her to write her electronic signature, and she took the package he held out to her.
    Inside the box was another box, and inside the second box were two things: a check for three hundred dollars and a rainbow of jewels in the shape of a small pyramid.
    Alison held her hand out flat and placed the pyramid in the center of her palm. Then she closed her hand around the symbol.
    She didn‘t believe or not believe any of it – the Princess, the Queen of the Day, Evelyn, Mrs. Chamberlain. The impossibility of Mrs. Chamberlain‘s death, which her daughter would soon confirm to have taken place three days before her conversation with Alison, didn‘t matter. The beauty was that with or without believing, possible or impossible, Alison held the little pyramid in the palm of her hand, so breathtaking and iridescent that her heart swelled at the very sight of it.

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