The Queen's Gambit (8 page)

When she had finished half her sandwich Beth looked across the table at her. “Is there a school chess club?” she asked.

The other girl looked up, startled. “What?”

“Do they have a chess club? I want to join.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “I don’t think they have anything like that. You can try out for junior cheerleader.”

Beth finished her sandwich.

***

“You certainly spend a lot of time at your studies,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Don’t you have any hobbies?” Actually, Beth was not studying; she was reading a novel from the school library. She was sitting in the armchair in her room, by the window. Mrs. Wheatley had knocked and then come in, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and pink satin slippers. She walked over and sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, smiling at her distractedly, as though she were thinking about something else. Beth had lived with her a week now and she noticed that Mrs. Wheatley was often that way.

“I used to play chess,” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “Chess?”

“I like it a lot.”

Mrs. Wheatley shook her head as though shaking something out of her hair. “Oh,
chess
!” she said. “The royal game. How nice.”

“Do you play?” Beth said.

“Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it. But my father used to play. My father was a surgeon and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.”

“Could I play chess with him?”

“Hardly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “My father passed on years ago.”

“Is there anyone I could play with?”

“Play chess? I have no idea.” Mrs. Wheatley peered at her for a moment. “Isn’t it primarily a game for boys?”

“Girls play,” she said.

“How nice!” But Mrs. Wheatley was clearly miles away.

***

Mrs. Wheatley spent two days getting the house cleaned for Miss Farley, and she sent Beth to brush her hair three times on the morning of the visit.

When Miss Farley came in the door she was followed by a tall man wearing a football jacket. Beth was shocked to see it was Fergussen. He looked mildly embarrassed. “Hi there, Harmon,” he said. “I invited myself along.” He walked into Mrs. Wheatley’s living room and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

Miss Farley had a set of forms and a check list. She wanted to know about Beth’s diet and her schoolwork and what plans she had for the summer. Mrs. Wheatley did most of the talking. Beth could see her become more expansive with each question. “You can have no idea,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “of how marvelously well Beth has adjusted to the school environment. Her teachers have been immensely impressed with her work…”

Beth could not remember any conversations between Mrs. Wheatley and the teachers at school, but she said nothing.

“I had hoped to see Mr. Wheatley, too,” Miss Farley said. “Will he be here soon?”

Mrs. Wheatley smiled at her. “Allston called earlier to say he was terribly sorry, but he couldn’t come. He’s really been working so hard.” She looked over at Beth, still smiling. “Allston is a marvelous provider.”

“Is he able to spend much time with Beth?” Miss Farley said.

“Why, of
course
!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Allston is a wonderful father to her.”

Shocked, Beth looked down at her hands. Not even Jolene could lie so well. For a moment she had believed it herself, had seen an image of a helpful, fatherly Allston Wheatley—an Allston Wheatley who did not exist outside of Mrs. Wheatley’s words. But then she remembered the real one, grim, distant and silent. And there had been no call from him.

During the hour they were there, Fergussen said almost nothing. When they got up to leave, he held out his hand to Beth and her heart sank. “Good to see you, Harmon,” he said. She took his hand to shake it, wishing that he could stay behind somehow, to be with her.

***

A few days later Mrs. Wheatley took her downtown to shop for clothes. When the bus stopped at their corner, Beth stepped into it without hesitation, even though it was the first time she’d ever been on a bus. It was a warm fall Saturday, and Beth was uncomfortable in her Methuen wool skirt and could hardly wait to get a new one. She began to count the blocks to downtown.

They got off at the seventeenth corner. Mrs. Wheatley took her hand, although it was hardly necessary, and ushered her across a few yards of busy sidewalks into the revolving doors of Ben Snyder’s Department Store. It was ten in the morning and the aisles were full of women carrying big dark purses and shopping bags. Mrs. Wheatley walked through the crowd with the sureness of an expert. Beth followed.

Before they looked at anything to wear, Mrs. Wheatley took her down the broad stairs to the basement, where she spent twenty minutes at a counter with what a card said were “Dinner Napkin Irregulars,” putting together six blue ones from the multicolored pile, rejecting dozens in the process. She waited while Mrs. Wheatley assembled her set in a kind of mesmerized trial and error and then decided she didn’t really need napkins. They went to another counter with “Book Bargains” on it. Mrs. Wheatley read out the titles of a great many thirty-nine-cent books, picked up several and leafed through them but didn’t buy any.

Finally they took the escalator back to the main floor. There they stopped at a perfume counter so Mrs. Wheatley could spray one wrist with Evening in Paris and the other with Emeraude. “All right, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said finally, “we’ll go up to four.” She smiled at Beth. “Young Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.”

Between the third and fourth floors Beth looked back and saw a sign on a counter that said
BOOKS AND GAMES
, and right near the sign, on a glass-topped counter, were three chess sets. “Chess!” she said, tugging Mrs. Wheatley’s sleeve.

“What is it?” Mrs. Wheatley said, clearly annoyed.

“They sell chess sets,” Beth said. “Can we go back?”

“Not so
loud
,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We’ll go by on the way back down.”

But they didn’t. Mrs. Wheatley spent the rest of the morning having Beth try on coats from marked-down racks and turn around to show her the hemline and go over near the window so she could see the fabric by “natural light,” and finally buying one and insisting they go down by elevator.

“Aren’t we going to look at the chess sets?” Beth said, but Mrs. Wheatley didn’t answer. Beth’s feet hurt, and she was perspiring. She did not like the coat she was carrying in a cardboard box. It was the same robin’s-egg blue as Mrs. Wheatley’s omnipresent sweater, and it didn’t fit. Beth did not know much about clothes, but she could tell that this store sold cheap ones.

When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Beth started to remind her about the chess sets, but the door closed and they went down to the main floor. Mrs. Wheatley took Beth’s hand and led her across the street to the bus stop, complaining about the difficulty of finding anything these days. “But after all,” she said philosophically as the bus drew up to the corner, “we got what we came for.”

The next week in English class some girls behind Beth were talking before the teacher came in. “Did you get those shoes at Ben Snyder’s or something?” one of them said.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in Ben Snyder’s,” the other girl said, laughing.

***

Beth walked to school every morning, along shady streets of quiet houses with trees on their lawns. Other students went the same way, and Beth recognized some of them, but she always walked alone. She had enrolled two weeks late in the fall term, and after her fourth week, mid-term exams began. On Tuesday she had no tests in the morning and was supposed to go to her home room. Instead she took the bus downtown, carrying her notebook and the forty cents she had saved from her quarter-a-week allowance. She had her change ready when she got on the bus.

The chess sets were still on the counter, but up close she could see that they weren’t very good. When she picked up the white queen she was surprised at how light it was. She turned it over. It was hollow inside and made of plastic. She put it back as the saleswoman came up and said, “May I help you?”

“Do you have
Modern Chess Openings
?”

“We have chess and checkers and backgammon,” the woman said, “and a variety of children’s games.”

“It’s a book,” Beth said, “about chess.”

“The book department is across the aisle.”

Beth went to the bookshelves and began looking through them. There was nothing about chess. There was no clerk to ask, either. She went back to the woman at the counter and had to wait a long time to get her attention. “I’m trying to find a book about chess,” Beth told her.

“We don’t handle books in this department,” the woman said and started to turn away again.

“Is there a bookstore near here?” Beth asked quickly.

“Try Morris’s.” She went over to a stack of boxes and began straightening them.

“Where is it?”

The woman said nothing.

“Where’s Morris, ma’am?” Beth said loudly.

The woman turned and looked at her furiously. “On Upper Street,” she said.

“Where’s Upper Street?”

The woman looked for a moment as if she would scream. Then her face relaxed and she said, “Two blocks up Main.”

Beth took the escalators down.

***

Morris’s was on a corner, next to a drugstore. Beth pushed open the door and found herself in a big room full of more books than she had ever seen in her life. There was a bald man sitting on a stool behind a counter, smoking a cigarette and reading. Beth walked up to him and said, “Do you have
Modem Chess Openings
?”

The man turned from his book and peered at her over his glasses. “That’s an odd one,” he said in a pleasant voice.

“Do you have it?”

“I think so.” He got up from the stool and walked to the rear of the store. A minute later he came back to Beth, carrying it in his hand. It was the same fat book with the same red cover. She caught her breath when she saw it.

“Here you go,” the man said, handing it to her. She took it and opened it to the part on the Sicilian Defense. It was good to see the names of the variations again; the Levenfish, the Dragon, the Najdorf. They were like incantations in her head, or the names of saints.

After a while she heard the man speaking to her. “Are you that serious about chess?”

“Yes,” she said.

He smiled. “I thought that book was only for grandmasters.”

Beth hesitated. “What’s a grandmaster?”

“A genius player,” the man said. “Like Capablanca, except that was a long time ago. There are others nowadays, but I don’t know their names.”

She had never seen anyone quite like this man before. He was very relaxed, and he talked to her as though she were another adult. Fergussen was the closest thing to him, but Fergussen was sometimes very official. “How much is the book?” Beth asked.

“Pretty much. Five ninety-five.”

She had been afraid it would be something like that. After today’s two bus fares she would have ten cents left. She held the book out to him and said, “Thank you. I can’t afford it.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Just put it on the counter.”

She set it down. “Do you have other books about chess?”

“Sure. Under Games and Sports. Go take a look.”

At the back of the store was a whole shelf of them with titles like
Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess; Winning Chess Traps; How to Improve Your Chess; Improved Chess Strategy
. She took down one called
Attack and Counterattack in Chess
and began reading the games, picturing them in her mind without reading the diagrams. She stood there for a long time while a few customers went in and out of the store. No one bothered her. She read through game after game and was surprised in some of them by dazzling moves—queen sacrifices and smothered males. There were sixty games, and each had a title at the top of the page, like “V. Smyslov—I. Rudakavsky: Moscow 1945” or “A. Rubinstein—O. Duras: Vienna 1908.” In that one, White queened a pawn on the thirty-sixth move by threatening a discovered check.

Beth looked at the cover of the book. It was smaller than
Modem Chess Openings
and there was a sticker on it that said $2.95. She began going through it systematically. The clock on the bookstore wall read ten-thirty. She would have to leave in an hour to get to school for the History exam. Up front the clerk was paying no attention to her, absorbed in his own reading. She began concentrating, and by eleven-thirty she had twelve of the games memorized.

On the bus back to school she began playing them over in her head. Behind some of the moves—not the glamorous ones like the queen sacrifices but sometimes only in the one-square advance of a pawn—she could see subtleties that made the small hairs on the back of her neck tingle.

She was five minutes late for the test, but no one seemed to care and she finished before everyone else anyway. In the twenty minutes until the end of the period she played “P. Keres—A. Tarnowski: Helsinki 1952.” It was the Ruy Lopez Opening where White brought the bishop out in a way that Beth could see meant an indirect attack on Black’s king pawn. On the thirty-fifth move White brought his rook down to the knight seven square in a shocking way that made Beth almost cry out in her seat.

***

Fairfield Junior High had social clubs that met for an hour after school and sometimes during home-room period on Fridays. There was the Apple Pi Club and the Sub Debs and Girls Around Town. They were like sororities at a college, and you had to be pledged. The girls in Apple Pi were eighth and ninth graders; most of them wore bright cashmere sweaters and fashionably scuffed saddle oxfords with argyle socks. Some of them lived in the country and owned horses. Thoroughbreds. Girls like that never looked at you in the hallways; they were always smiling at someone else. Their sweaters were bright yellow and deep blue and pastel green. Their socks came up to just below the knees and were made of 100 percent virgin wool from England.

Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, with her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth. The girls who belonged to the clubs wore lipstick and eye shadow; Beth wore no make-up and her hair still fell over her forehead in bangs. It did not occur to her that she would be pledged to a club, nor did it to anyone else.