The Queen's Gambit (9 page)

***

“This week,” Mrs. MacArthur said, “we will begin to study the binomial theorem. Does anyone know what a binomial is?”

From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this.

“Yes?” Mrs. MacArthur said.

Beth stood, feeling suddenly awkward. “A binomial is a mathematical expression containing two terms.” They had studied this last year at Methuen. “X plus Y is a binomial.”

“Very
good
,” Mrs. MacArthur said.

The girl in front of Beth was named Margaret; she had glowing blond hair and wore a cashmere sweater of a pale, expensive lavender. As Beth sat down, the blond head turned slightly back toward her. “
Brain!
” Margaret hissed. “
Goddamn brain!
”

***

Beth was always alone in the halls; it hardly occurred to her that there was any other way to be. Most girls walked in pairs or in threes, but she walked with no one.

One afternoon when she was coming out of the library she was startled by the sound of distant laughter and looked down the hall to see, haloed by afternoon sunlight, the back of a tall black girl. Two shorter girls were standing near her, by the water fountain, looking up at her face as she laughed. None of their features was distinct, and the light from behind them made Beth squint. The taller girl turned slightly, and Beth’s heart almost stopped at the familiar tilt of her head. Beth took a quick dozen steps down the hallway toward them.

But it wasn’t Jolene. Beth stopped suddenly and turned away. The three girls left the fountain and pushed noisily out the front door of the building. Beth stood staring after them for a long time.

***

“Could you go to Bradley’s and get me some cigs?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I think I have a cold.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. It was Saturday afternoon and Beth was holding a novel in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it. She was playing over a game between P. Morphy and someone called simply “grandmaster.” There was something peculiar about Morphy’s eighteenth move, of knight to bishop five. It was a good attack, but Beth felt Morphy could have been more destructive with his queen’s rook.

“I’ll give you a note, since you’re a bit youthful for smoking yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said.

“Three packs of Chesterfields.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had been in Bradley’s only once before, with Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley gave her a penciled note and a dollar and twenty cents. Beth handed the note to Mr. Bradley at the counter. There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
: he was running for President and probably wouldn’t make it because he was a Catholic.

There was a row of women’s magazines that all had faces on their covers like the faces of Margaret and Sue Ann and the other Apple Pi’s. Their hair shone; their lips were full and red.

She had just decided to leave when something caught her eye. At the lower right-hand corner, where the magazines about photography and sunbathing and do-it-yourself were, was a magazine with a picture of a chess piece on its cover. She walked over and took it from the rack. On the cover was the title,
Chess Review
, and the price. She opened it. It was full of games and photographs of people playing chess. There was an article called “The King’s Gambit Reconsidered” and another one called “Morphy’s Brilliancies.” She had just been going over one of Morphy’s games! Her heart began beating faster. She kept going through the pages. There was an article about chess in Russia. And the thing that kept turning up was the word “tournament.” There was a whole section called “Tournament Life.” She had not known there was such a thing as a chess tournament. She thought chess was just something you did, the way Mrs. Wheatley hooked rugs and put together jigsaw puzzles.

“Young lady,” Mr. Bradley said, “you have to buy the magazine or put it back.”

She turned, startled. “Can’t I just…?”

“Read the sign,” Mr. Bradley said.

In front of her was a hand-lettered sign: I
F
Y
OU
W
ANT TO
R
EAD
I
T
—B
UY
I
T
. Beth had fifteen cents and that was all. Mrs. Wheatley had told her a few days before that she would have to do without an allowance for a while; they were rather short and Mr. Wheatley had been delayed out West. Beth put the magazine back and left the store.

Halfway back up the block she stopped, thought a moment and went back. There was a stack of newspapers on the counter, by Mr. Bradley’s elbow. She handed him a dime and took one. Mr. Bradley was busy with a lady who was paying for a prescription. Beth went over to the end of the magazine rack with her paper under her arm and waited.

After a few minutes Mr. Bradley said, “We have three sizes.” She heard him going to the back of the store with the lady following. Beth took the copy of
Chess Review
and slipped it into her newspaper.

Outside in the sunshine she walked a block with the paper under her arm. At the first corner she stopped, took out the magazine and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt, covering it with her robbin’s-egg-blue sweater, made of reprocessed wool and bought at Ben Snyder’s. She pulled the sweater down loosely over the magazine and dropped the newspaper into the corner trash can.

Walking home with the folded magazine tucked securely against her flat belly she thought again about that rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven, and Black had better not take it with his knight because… She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining rook could slide over, and if the black player took the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…

She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing itself with a check. If he
did
take it, the white pawn moved again, and then the bishop went the other way and there was nothing Black could do.
There it was.
One of the little boys across the street began crying.
There was nothing Black could do.
The game would be over in twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He hadn’t seen the move with the rook.
But she had.

Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.

***

“Allston should have returned weeks ago,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying. She was sitting up in bed, with a crossword-puzzle magazine beside her and a little TV set on the dresser with the sound turned down. Beth had just brought her a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen. Mrs. Wheatley was wearing her pink robe and her face was covered with powder.

“Will he be back soon?” Beth said. She didn’t really want to talk with Mrs. Wheatley; she wanted to get back to
Chess Review
.

“He has been unavoidably detained,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Beth nodded. Then she said, “I’d like to get a job for after school.”

Mrs. Wheatley blinked at her. “A job?”

“Maybe I could work in a store, or wash dishes somewhere.”

Mrs. Wheatley stared at her for a long time before speaking. “At thirteen years of age?” she said finally. She blew her nose quietly on a tissue and folded it. “I should think you are well provided for.”

“I’d like to make some money.”

“To buy clothes with, I suspect.”

Beth said nothing.

“The only girls of your age who work,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “are colored.” The way she said “colored” made Beth decide to say nothing further about it.

To join the United States Chess Federation cost six dollars. Another four dollars got you a subscription to the magazine. There was something even more interesting: in the section called “Tournament Life” there were numbered regions; including one for Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky, and in the listing under it was an item that read: “Kentucky State Championship, Thanksgiving weekend, Henry Clay High School Auditorium, Lexington, Fri., Sat. Sun.,” and under this it said: “$185 in prizes. Entry fee: $5.00. USCF members only.”

It would take six dollars to join and five dollars to get into the tournament. When you took the bus down Main you passed Henry Clay High; it was eleven blocks from Janwell Drive. And it was five weeks until Thanksgiving.

***

“Can anyone say it verbatim?” Mrs. MacArthur said.

Beth put up her hand.

“Beth?”

She stood. “In any right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” She sat down.

Margaret snickered and leaned toward Gordon, who sat beside her and sometimes held her hand. “That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt. Gordon laughed. Beth looked out the window at the autumn leaves.

***

“I do not know where the money goes!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.” She plopped into the chintz-covered armchair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wide-eyed, as if expecting a guillotine to fall. “I have paid electric bills and telephone bills and have bought simple, uncomplicated groceries. I have denied myself cream for my morning coffee, have bought nothing whatever for my person, have attended neither the cinema nor the rummage sales at First Methodist, and yet I have seven dollars left where I should have at least twenty.” She laid the crumpled one-dollar bills on the table beside her, having fished them from her purse a few moments before. “We have this for ourselves until the end of October. It will scarcely buy chicken necks and porridge.”

“Doesn’t Methuen send you a check?” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley brought her eyes down from the ceiling and stared at her. “For the first year,” she said evenly. “As if the expenses of keeping you didn’t exhaust it.”

Beth knew that wasn’t true. The check was seventy dollars, and Mrs. Wheatley didn’t spend that much on her.

“It requires twenty dollars for us to live passably until the first of the month,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I am thirteen dollars short of that.” She turned her gaze briefly ceilingward and then back to Beth again. “I shall have to keep better records.”

“Maybe it’s inflation,” Beth said, with some truth. She had taken only six, for the membership.

“Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified.

The problem was the five dollars for the entry fee. In home room, the day after Mrs. Wheatley’s oration about money, Beth took a sheet from her composition book and wrote a letter to Mr. Shaibel, Custodian, Methuen Home, Mount Sterling, Kentucky. It read:

The next morning she took an envelope and a stamp from the cluttered desk in the living room while Mrs. Wheatley was still in bed. She put the letter in the mailbox on her way to school.

In November she took another dollar from Mrs. Wheatley’s purse. It had been a week since she wrote Mr. Shaibel, and there had been no answer. This time, with part of the money, she bought the new issue of
Chess Review
. She found several games that she could improve upon—one by a young grandmaster named Benny Watts. Benny Watts was the United States Champion.

***

Mrs. Wheatley seemed to have a good many colds. “I have a proclivity for viruses,” she would say. “Or they for me.” She handed Beth a prescription to take to Bradley’s and a dime to buy herself a Coke.

Mr. Bradley gave her an odd look when she came in, but he said nothing. She gave him the prescription and he went to the back of the store. Beth carefully avoided standing near the magazines. When she took the
Chess Review
a month before, it had been the only copy. He might have noticed it right away.

Mr. Bradley brought back a plastic container with a typed label on it. He put it down on the counter while he got a white paper bag. Beth stared at the container. The pills in it were oblong and bright-green.

***

“This will be my tranquility medicine,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “McAndrews has decided I need tranquility.”

“Who’s McAndrews?” Beth said.

“Dr. McAndrews,” Mrs. Wheatley said, unscrewing the lid. “My physician.” She took out two of the pills. “Would you get me a glass of water, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. As she was going into the bathroom for the water, Mrs. Wheatley sighed and said, “Why do they only fill these bottles half full?”

***

In the November issue there were twenty-two games from an invitational tournament in Moscow. The players had names like Botvinnik and Petrosian and Laev; they sounded like people in a fairy tale. There was a photograph showing two of them hunched over a board, dark-haired and grim-lipped. They wore black suits. Out of focus, behind them, sat a huge audience.

In a game between Petrosian and someone named Benkowitz, in the semifinals, Beth saw a bad decision of Petrosian’s. He started an attack with pawns but shouldn’t have. There was a commentary on the game by an American grandmaster, who thought the pawn moves were good, but Beth saw deeper than that. How could Petrosian have misjudged it? Why hadn’t the American seen the weakness? They must have spent a long time studying it, since the magazine said the game took five hours.

***