The Queen's Gambit (7 page)

***

Jolene said there were always adoptions around Christmas. The year after they stopped Beth from playing chess there were two in early December. Both pretty ones, Beth thought to herself. “Both white,” Jolene said aloud.

The two beds stayed empty for a while. Then one morning before breakfast Fergussen came into the Girls’ Ward. Some of the girls giggled to see him there with the heavy bunch of keys at his belt. He came up to Beth, who was putting on her socks. It was near her tenth birthday. She got her second sock on and looked up at him.

He frowned. “We got a new place for you, Harmon. Follow me.”

She went with him across the ward, over to the far wall. One of the empty beds was there, under the window. It was a bit larger than the others and had more space around it.

“You can put your things in the nightstand,” Fergussen said. He looked at her for a minute. “It’ll be nicer over here.”

She stood there, amazed. It was the best bed in the ward. Fergussen was making a note on a clipboard. She reached out and touched his forearm with her fingertips, where the dark hairs grew, above his wristwatch. “Thank you,” she said.

THREE

“I see that you will be thirteen in two months, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Beth was seated in the straight-backed chair in front of Mrs. Deardorff’s desk. Fergussen had come and taken her from study hall. It was eleven in the morning. She had not been in this office for over three years.

The lady on the sofa suddenly spoke up, with strained cheerfulness. “Twelve is such a wonderful age!” she said.

The lady wore a blue cardigan over a silky dress. She would have been pretty except for all the rouge and lipstick and for the nervous way she worked her mouth when she talked. The man sitting next to her wore a gray salt-and-pepper tweed suit with a vest.

“Elizabeth has performed well in all of her schoolwork,” Mrs. Deardorff went on. “She is at the top of her class in Reading and Arithmetic.”

“That’s so nice!” the lady said. “I was such a scatterbrain at Arithmetic.” She smiled at Beth brightly. “I’m Mrs. Wheatley,” she added in a confidential tone.

The man cleared his throat and said nothing. He looked as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

Beth nodded at the lady’s remark but could think of nothing to say. Why had they brought her here?

Mrs. Deardorff went on about Beth’s school work while the lady in the blue cardigan paid rapt attention. Mrs. Deardorff said nothing about the green pills or about Beth’s chess playing; her voice seemed filled with a distant approval of Beth. When she had finished there was an embarrassed silence for a while. Then the man cleared his throat again, shifted his weight uneasily and looked toward Beth as though he were looking over the top of her head. “Do they call you Elizabeth?” He sounded as if there were a bubble of air in his throat. “Or is it Betty?”

She looked at him. “Beth,” she said. “I’m called Beth.”

During the next few weeks she forgot about the visit in Mrs. Deardorff’s office and absorbed herself in schoolwork and in reading. She had found a set of girls’ books and was reading through them whenever she had a chance—in study halls, at night in bed, on Sunday afternoons. They were about the adventures of the oldest daughter in a big, haphazard family. Six months before, Methuen had gotten a TV set for the lounge, and it was played for an hour every evening. But Beth found that she preferred Ellen Forbes’s adventures to
I Love Lucy
and
Gunsmoke
. She would sit up in bed, alone in the dormitory, and read until lights out. No one bothered her.

One evening in mid-September she was alone reading when Fergussen came in. “Shouldn’t you be packing?” he asked.

She closed her book, using her thumb to keep her place. “Why?”

“They haven’t told you?”

“Told me what?”

“You’ve been adopted. You’re being picked up after breakfast.”

She just sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at Fergussen’s broad white T-shirt.

***

“Jolene,” she said. “I can’t find my book.”

“What book?” Jolene said sleepily. It was just before lights out.

“
Modern Chess Openings
, with a red cover. I keep it in my nightstand.”

Jolene shook her head. “Beats the shit out of me.”

Beth hadn’t looked at the book for weeks, but she clearly remembered putting it at the bottom of the second drawer. She had a brown nylon valise beside her on the bed; it was packed with her three dresses and four sets of underwear, her toothbrush, comb, a bar of Dial soap, two barrettes and some plain cotton handkerchiefs. Her nightstand was now completely empty. She had looked in the library for her book, but it wasn’t there. There was nowhere else to look. She had not played a game of chess in three years except in her mind, but
Modern Chess Openings
was the only thing she owned that she cared about.

She squinted at Jolene. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

Jolene looked angry for a moment. “Watch who you go accusing,” she said. “I got no use for a book like that.” Then her voice softened. “I hear you’re leaving.”

“That’s right.”

Jolene laughed. “What’s the matter? Don’t want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

Jolene slipped under the bedsheet and pulled it up over her shoulders. “Just say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, ma’am’ and you’ll do all right. Tell ’em you’re grateful to have a Christian home like theirs and maybe they’ll give you a TV in your room.”

There was something odd about the way Jolene was talking.

“Jolene,” Beth said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get adopted.”

Jolene snorted. “Shit,” she said, “I make out fine right here.” She rolled over away from Beth and curled up in bed. Beth started to reach out toward her, but just then Miss Furth stepped in the doorway and said, “Lights out, girls!” Beth went back to her bed, for the last time.

The next day Mrs. Deardorff went with them out to the parking lot and stood by the car while Mr. Wheatley got into the driver’s seat and Mrs. Wheatley and Beth got into the back. “Be a good girl, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said.

Beth nodded and as she did so saw that someone was standing behind Mrs. Deardorff on the porch of the Administration Building. It was Mr. Shaibel. He had his hands stuffed in his coverall pockets and was looking toward the car. She wanted to get out and go over to him, but Mrs. Deardorff was in the way, so she leaned back in her seat. Mrs. Wheatley began talking, and Mr. Wheatley started the car.

As they pulled out, Beth twisted around in her seat and waved out the back window at him, but he made no response. She could not tell for sure if he had seen her or not.

***

“You should have seen their faces,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She was wearing the same blue cardigan, but this time she had a faded gray dress under it, and her nylons were rolled down to her ankles. “They looked in all my closets and even inspected the refrigerator. I could see immediately that they were impressed with my provisions. Have some more of the tuna casserole. I certainly enjoy watching a young child eat.”

Beth put a little more on her plate. The problem was that it was too salty, but she hadn’t said anything about that. It was her first meal at the Wheatleys’. Mr. Wheatley had already left for Denver on business and would be away for several weeks. A photograph of him sat on the upright piano by the heavily draped dining-room window. In the living room the TV was playing unattended; a deep male voice was declaiming about Anacin.

Mr. Wheatley had driven them to Lexington in silence and then gone immediately upstairs. He came down after a few minutes with a suitcase, kissed Mrs. Wheatley distractedly on the cheek, nodded a goodbye to Beth and left.

“They wanted to know everything about us. How much money Allston makes a month. Why we have no children of our own. They even inquired”—Mrs. Wheatley bent forward over the Pyrex dish and spoke in a stage whisper—“they even inquired if I had been in psychiatric care.” She leaned back and let out her breath. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?”

“No, ma’am,” Beth said, filling in the sudden silence. She took another forkful of tuna and followed it with a drink of water.

“They are
thorough
,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “But, you know, I suppose they have to be.” She had not touched anything on her plate. During the two hours since they arrived, Mrs. Wheatley had spent the time jumping up from whatever chair she was sitting in and going to check the oven or adjust one of the Rosa Bonheur prints on the walls, or empty her ashtray. She chattered almost constantly while Beth put in an occasional “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am.” Beth had not yet been shown her room; her brown nylon bag still sat by the front door next to the overflowing magazine rack where she had left it at ten-thirty that morning.

“God knows,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “God knows they have to be meticulous about whom they turn their charges over to. You can’t have scoundrels taking the responsibility for a growing child.”

Beth set her fork down carefully. “May I go to the bathroom, please?”

“Why, certainly.” She pointed to the living room with her fork. Mrs. Wheatley had been holding the fork all during lunch, even though she had eaten nothing. “The white door to the left of the sofa.”

Beth got up, squeezed past the piano that practically filled the small dining room and went into the living room and through its clutter of coffee table and lamp tables and huge rosewood TV, now showing an afternoon drama. She walked carefully across the Orion shag carpet and into the bathroom. The bathroom was tiny and completely done in robin’s-egg blue—the same shade as Mrs. Wheatley’s cardigan. It had a blue carpet and little blue guest towels and a blue toilet seat. Even the toilet paper was blue. Beth lifted the toilet seat, vomited the tunafish into the bowl and flushed it.

***

When they got to the top of the stairs Mrs. Wheatley rested for a moment, leaning her hip against the banister and breathing heavily. Then she took a few steps along the carpeted hallway and dramatically pushed a door open. “This,” she said, “will be your room.” Since it was a small house, Beth had visualized something tiny for herself, but when she walked in she caught her breath. It looked enormous to her. The floor was bare and painted gray, with a pink oval rug at the side of the double bed. She had never had a room of her own before. She stood, holding her valise, and looked around her. There was a dresser, and a desk whose orange-looking wood matched it, with a pink glass lamp on it, and a pink chenille bedspread on the enormous bed. “You have no
idea
how difficult it is to find good maple furniture,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “but I think I did very well, if I do say so myself.” Beth hardly heard her. This room was
hers
. She looked at the heavily painted white door; there was a key in it, under the knob. She could lock the door and no one could come in.

Mrs. Wheatley showed her where the bathroom was down the hall and then left her alone to unpack, closing the door behind her. Beth set down her bag and walked around, stopping only briefly to look out each of the windows at the tree-lined street below. There was a closet, bigger than Mother’s had been, and a nightstand by the bed, with a little reading lamp. It was a beautiful room. If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.

In the car Mrs. Wheatley had said how glad they were to have an older child. Then why not adopt Jolene? Beth had thought. But she said nothing. She looked at Mr. Wheatley with his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel and then at Mrs. Wheatley and she knew they would never have adopted Jolene.

Beth sat on the bed and shook off the memory. It was a wonderfully soft bed, and it smelled clean and fresh. She bent over and pulled off her shoes and lay back, stretching out on its great, comforting expanse, turning her head happily to look over at the tightly closed door that gave her this room entirely to herself.

She lay awake for several hours that night, not wanting to go to sleep right away. There was a streetlight outside her windows, but they had good, heavy shades that she could pull down to block it out. Before saying goodnight, Mrs. Wheatley had shown Beth her own room. It was on the other side of the hall and exactly the same size as Beth’s, but it had a television set in it and chairs with slipcovers and a blue coverlet on the bed. “It’s really a remodeled attic,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Lying in bed, Beth could hear the distant sound of Mrs. Wheatley coughing and later she heard her bare feet padding down the hallway to the bathroom. But she didn’t mind. Her own door was closed and locked. No one could push it open and let the light fall on her face. Mrs. Wheatley was alone in her own room, and there would be no sounds of talking or quarreling—only music and low synthetic voices from the television set. It would be wonderful to have Jolene there, but then she wouldn’t have the room to herself, wouldn’t be able to lie alone in this huge bed, stretched out in the middle of it, having the cool sheets and now the silence to herself.

***

On Monday she went to school. Mrs. Wheatley took her in a taxi, even though it was less than a mile. Beth went into seventh grade. It was a lot like the public high school in that other town where she had done the chess exhibition, and she knew her clothes weren’t right, but no one paid much attention to her. A few of the other students stared for a minute when the teacher introduced her to the class, but that was it. She was given books and assigned to a home room. From the books and what the teachers said in class she knew it would be easy. She recoiled a bit at the loud noises in the hallways between classes, and felt self-conscious a few times when other students looked at her, but it was not difficult. She felt she could deal with anything that might come up in this sunny, noisy public school.

At lunchtime she tried to sit alone in the cafeteria with her ham sandwich and carton of milk, but another girl came and sat across from her. Neither of them spoke for a while. The other girl was plain, like Beth.