The Queen's Gambit (32 page)

While she was signing one of the magazines, she looked for a moment at the black-and-white photograph of herself holding the big trophy in Ohio, with Benny and Barnes and a few others out of focus in the background. Her face looked tired and plain, and she recalled with a sudden remembered shame that the magazine had sat with its tan mailing cover in a stack on the cobbler’s bench for a month before she had opened it and found her picture. Someone thrust another copy at her to sign, and she shook off the memory. She autographed her way out of the crowded room and through yet another crowd that was waiting outside the door, filling the space between her playing area and the ballroom where the rest of the tournament was still in progress. Two directors were trying to hush the crowd to avoid disturbing the other games as she came through. Some of the players looked up from their boards angrily and frowned in her direction. It was exhilarating and frightening, having all these people pressed near her, pushing up to her with admiration. One of the women who had got her autograph said, “I don’t know a thing about chess, dear, but I’m thrilled for you,” and a middle-aged man insisted on shaking her hand, saying, “You’re the best thing for the game since Capablanca.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I wish it were as easy for me.” Maybe it is, she thought. Her brain seemed to be all right. Maybe she hadn’t ruined it.

She walked confidently down the street to her hotel in bright sunshine. She would be going to Russia in six months. Christian Crusade had agreed to buy tickets on Aeroflot for her and Benny and a woman from the USCF and would pay their hotel bills. The Moscow tournament would provide the meals. She had been studying chess for six hours a day, and she could keep it up. She stopped to buy more flowers—carnations this time. The woman at the desk had asked for her autograph last night when she came in from dinner; she would be glad to get her another vase. Before leaving for California, Beth had mailed off checks for subscriptions to all the magazines Benny took. She would be getting
Deutsche Schachzeitung
, the oldest chess magazine, and
British Chess Magazine
and, from Russia,
Shakhmatni v USSR
. There would be
Échecs Europe
and
American Chess Bulletin
. She planned to play through every grandmaster game in them, and when she found games that were important she would memorize them and analyze every move that had consequence or developed any idea that she was not familiar with. In early spring she might go to New York and play the U.S. Open and get in a few weeks with Benny. The flowers in her hand glowed crimson, her new jeans and cotton sweater felt fresh on her skin in the cool San Francisco air, at the bottom of the street the blue ocean lay like a dream of possibility. Her soul sang silently with it, reaching out toward the Pacific.

***

When she came home with her trophy and the first-prize check, she found in the pile of mail two business envelopes: one was from the USCF and contained a check for four hundred dollars and a brief apology that they couldn’t send more. The second was from Christian Crusade. It had a three-page letter that spoke of the need to promote international understanding through Christian principles and to annihilate Communism for the advancement of those same principles. The word “His” was capitalized in a way that made Beth uneasy. The letter was signed “Yours in Christ” by four people. Folded up in it was a check for four thousand dollars. She held the check in her hand for a long time. Her prize money at San Francisco was two thousand, and she had to take her travel expenses out of it. Her bank account had been dwindling for the past six months. She had hoped to get at most two thousand dollars from the people in Texas. Whatever crazy ideas they might have, the money was a gift from heaven. She called Benny to tell him the good news.

***

When she came in from her Wednesday morning squash game the phone was ringing. She got her raincoat off in a hurry, threw it on the sofa and picked up the phone. It was a woman’s voice. “Is this Elizabeth Harmon?”

“Yes.”

“This is Helen Deardorff, at Methuen.” She was too astonished to speak. “I have something to tell you, Elizabeth. Mr. Shaibel died last night. I thought you might want to know.”

She had a sudden image of the fat old janitor bent over his chess set in the basement, with the bare light bulb over his head, and herself standing by him, watching the deliberateness, the
oddness
of him there alone by the furnace.

“Last night?” she said.

“A heart attack. He was in his sixties.”

What Beth said next surprised her. It came out almost without conscious thought. “I’d like to come to the funeral.”

“The funeral?” Mrs. Deardorff said. “I’m not sure when—There’s an unmarried sister, Hilda Shaibel. You could call her.”

***

When the Wheatleys drove her to Lexington six years before, they had gone on narrow asphalt roads through towns where she had stared out the car windows at stoplights while brightly dressed people crossed the streets and walked on crowded sidewalks in front of shops. Now, driving back with Jolene, it was four-lane concrete most of the way and the towns were visible only as names printed on green signs.

“He looked like a mean son of a bitch,” Jolene said.

“He wasn’t easy to play chess with, either. I think I was terrified of him.”

“I was scared of all of ’em,” Jolene said. “Motherfuckers.”

That surprised Beth. She had imagined Jolene as fearless. “What about Fergussen?”

“Fergussen was an oasis in the desert,” Jolene said, “but he frightened me when he first came. He turned out to be okay.” She smiled. “Old Fergussen.”

Beth hesitated a moment. “Was there ever anything between you two?” She remembered those extra green pills.

Jolene laughed. “Wishful thinking.”

“How old were you when you came?”

“Six.”

“Do you know anything about your parents?”

“Just my grandmother, and she’s dead. Somewhere near Louisville. I don’t want to know anything about them. I don’t care whether I’m a bastard or why it was they wanted to put me with my grandmother or why she wanted to shove me off on Methuen. I’m just glad to be free of it all. I’ll have my master’s in August, and I’m leaving this state for good.”

“I still remember my mother,” Beth said. “Daddy’s not so clear.”

“Best to forget it,” Jolene said. “If you can.”

She pulled into the left lane and passed a coal truck and two campers. Up ahead a green sign gave the mileage to Mount Sterling. It was spring, almost exactly a year since Beth’s last trip in a car, with Benny. She thought of the griminess of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This white concrete road was fresh and new, with Kentucky fields and white fences and farmhouses on either side of it.

After a while Jolene lit up a cigarette, and Beth said, “Where will you go when you graduate?”

She was beginning to think that Jolene hadn’t heard her when Jolene spoke. “I’ve got an offer from a white law firm in Atlanta that looks promising.” She fell silent again. “What they want is an imported nigger to stay even with the times.”

Beth looked at her. “I don’t think I’d go any farther south if I was black.”

“Well, you sure ain’t,” Jolene said. “These people in Atlanta will pay me twice what I could get in New York. I’d be doing public relations, which is the kind of shuck I understand right to my fingertips, and they’ll start me out with two windows in my office and a white girl to type my letters.”

“But you haven’t studied law.”

Jolene laughed. “I expect they like it that way. Fine, Slocum and Livingston don’t want any black female reviewing torts. What they want is a clean black woman with a nice ass and a good vocabulary. When I did the interview I dropped a lot of words like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘dichotomy,’ and they picked right up.”

“Jolene,” Beth said, “you’re too smart for that. You could teach at the University. And you’re a fine athlete…”

“I know what I’m doing,” Jolene said. “I play good tennis and golf and I’m ambitious.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “You may have no idea just how ambitious I am. I worked hard at sports, and I had coaches promising I’d be a pro if I kept at it.”

“That doesn’t sound bad.”

Jolene let the smoke out slowly. “Beth,” she said, “what I want is what
you’ve
got. I don’t want to work on my backhand for two years so I can be a bush league pro. You’ve been the best at what you do for so long you don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”

“I’d like to be half as good-looking as you are…”

“Quit giving me that,” Jolene said. “Can’t spend your life in front of a mirror. You ain’t ugly anymore anyhow. What I’m talking about is your talent. I’d give my ass to play tennis the way you play chess.”

The conviction in Jolene’s voice was overwhelming. Beth looked at her face in profile, with its Afro grazing at the top of the car interior, at her smooth brown arms out to where her steady hands held the wheel, at the anger clouding her face, and said nothing.

A minute later Jolene said, “Well, now. There it is.”

About a mile ahead to the right of the road stood three dark brick buildings with black roofs and black window shutters. The Methuen Home for Orphaned Children.

***

A yellow-painted wooden stairway at the end of a concrete path led to the building. Once the steps had looked broad and imposing to her, and the tarnished brass plaque had seemed a stern warning. Now it looked like only the entrance to a shabby provincial institution. The paint on the steps was peeling. The bushes that flanked them were grubby, and their leaves were covered with dust. Jolene was in the playground, looking over the rusty swings and the old slide that they had not been allowed to use except when Fergussen was there to supervise. Beth stood on the path in the sunlight, studying the wooden doors. Inside was Mrs. Deardorff’s big office and the other offices and, filling one whole wing, the library and the chapel. There were two classrooms in the other wing, and past them was the door at the end of the hallway that led to the basement.

She had come to accept the Sunday-morning chess games as her prerogative. Until that day. It still constricted her throat to remember the silent tableau following Mrs. Deardorff’s voice shouting “Elizabeth!” and the cascade of pills and fragmented glass. Then no more chess. Instead it had been the full hour and a half of chapel and Beth helping Mrs. Lonsdale with the chairs and listening to her give her Talks. It took another hour after putting the chairs away to write the précis Mrs. Deardorff had assigned. She did it every Sunday for a year, and Mrs. Deardorff returned it every Monday with red marks and some grim exhortation like “Rewrite. Faulty organization.” She’d had to look up “Communism” in the library for the first précis. Beth had felt somewhere in her that Christianity ought to have something more to it.

Jolene had come over and was standing beside her, squinting in the sunlight. “That’s where you learned to play?”

“In the basement.”

“Shit,” Jolene said. “They should have encouraged you. Sent you on more exhibitions after that one. They like publicity, just like anybody else.”

“Publicity?” She was feeling dazed.

“It brings in money.”

She had never thought of anyone there encouraging her. It began to enter her mind now, standing in front of the building. She could have played in tournaments at nine or ten, like Benny. She had been bright and eager, and her mind was voracious in its appetite for chess. She could have been playing grandmasters and learning things that people like Shaibel and Ganz could never teach her. Girev was planning at thirteen to be World Champion. If she had had half his chances, she would have been as good at ten. For a moment the whole autocratic institution of Russian chess merged in her mind with the autocracy of the place where she was now standing. Institutions. There was no violation of Christianity in chess, any more than there was a violation of Marxism. It was nonideological. It wouldn’t have hurt Deardorff to let her play—to
encourage
her to play. It would have been something for Methuen to boast about. She could see Deardorff’s face in her mind—the thin, rouged cheeks, the tight, reproving smile, the little sadistic glint in her eyes. It had pleased her to cut Beth off from the game she loved. It had
pleased
her.

“You want to go in?” Jolene asked.

“No. Let’s find that motel.”

The motel had a small pool only a few yards from the road, with some weary-looking maples beside it. The evening was warm enough for a quick swim after dinner. Jolene turned out to be a superb swimmer, going back and forth the length of the pool with hardly a ripple, while Beth treaded water under the diving board. Jolene pulled up near her. “We were chicken,” she said. “We should have gone in the Administration Building. We should have gone in her office.”

The funeral was in the morning at the Lutheran Church. There were a dozen people and a closed casket. It was an ordinary-sized coffin, and Beth wondered briefly how they could fit a man of Shaibel’s girth into it. Although the church was smaller, it was much like Mrs. Wheatley’s funeral in Lexington. After the first five minutes of it, she was bored and restless, and Jolene was dozing. After the ceremony they followed the small procession to the grave. “I remember,” Jolene said, “he scared shit out of me once, hollering to keep off the library floor. He just mopped it, and Mr. Schell sent me in to get a book. Son of a bitch hated kids.”

“Mrs. Deardorff wasn’t at the church.”

“None of them were.”

The graveside service was an anticlimax. They lowered the coffin, and the minister said a prayer. Nobody cried. They looked like people waiting in line at a teller’s window at the bank. Beth and Jolene were the only young ones there, and none of the others spoke to them. They left immediately after it was over, walking along a narrow path in the old cemetery, past faded gravestones and patches of dandelions. Beth felt no grief for the dead man, no sadness that he was gone. The only thing she felt was guilt that she had never sent him his ten dollars—she should have mailed him a check years ago.