The Queen's Gambit (15 page)

Mrs. Wheatley had brought the magazine with her, and they spent part of the time on the plane marking the tournaments Beth would play over the next several months. They settled on one a month; Mrs. Wheatley was afraid they would run out of diseases and, as she said, “credibility” if she wrote more excuses than that. Beth wondered to herself if they shouldn’t just ask for permission in a straightforward way—after all, boys were allowed to miss classes for basketball and football—but she was wise enough to say nothing. Mrs. Wheatley seemed to take immense enjoyment in doing it this way. It was like a conspiracy.

She won in Houston without any trouble. She was, as Mrs. Wheatley said, really “getting the hang of it.” She was forced to draw her third game but took the final one by a dazzling combination, beating the forty-year-old Southwest Champion as though he were a beginner. They stayed over two days “for the sun” and visited the Museum of Fine Arts and the Zoological Gardens. On the day after the tournament Beth’s picture was in the paper, and this time it made her feel good to see it. The article called her a “
Wunderkind
.” Mrs. Wheatley bought three copies, saying, “I just might start a scrapbook.”

***

In January, Mrs. Wheatley called the school to say that Beth had a relapse of mono, and they went to Charleston. In February it was Atlanta and a cold; in March, Miami and the flu. Sometimes Mrs. Wheatley talked to the Assistant Principal and sometimes to the Dean of Girls. No one questioned the excuses. It seemed likely that some of the students knew about her from out-of-town papers or something, but no one in authority said anything. Beth worked on her chess for three hours every evening between tournaments. She lost one game in Atlanta but still came in first, and she stayed undefeated in the other two cities. She enjoyed flying with Mrs. Wheatley, who sometimes became comfortably buzzed by martinis on the planes. They talked and giggled together. Mrs. Wheatley said funny things about the stewardesses and their beautifully pressed jackets and bright, artificial make-up, or talked about how silly some of her neighbors in Lexington were. She was high-spirited and confidential and amusing, and Beth would laugh a long time and look out the window at the clouds below them and feel better than she had ever felt, even during those times at Methuen when she had saved up her green pills and taken five or six at once.

She grew to love hotels and restaurants and the excitement of being in a tournament and winning it, moving up gradually game by game and having the crowd around her table increase with each win. People at tournaments knew who she was now. She was always the youngest there, and sometimes the only female. Back at school afterward things seemed more and more drab. Some of the other students talked about going to college after high school, and some had professions in mind. Two girls she knew wanted to be nurses. Beth never participated in these conversations; she already was what she wanted to be. But she talked to no one about her traveling or about the reputation she was building in tournament chess.

When they came back from Miami in March, there was an envelope from the Chess Federation in the mail. In it was a new membership card with her rating: 1881. She had been told it would take time for the rating to reflect her real strength; she was satisfied for now to be, finally, a rated player. She would push the figure up soon enough. The next big step was Master, at 2200. After 2000 they called you an Expert, but that didn’t mean much. The one she liked was International Grandmaster; that had weight to it.

***

That summer they went to New York to play at the Henry Hudson Hotel. They had developed a taste for fine food, though at home it was mostly TV dinners, and in New York they ate at French restaurants, taking buses crosstown to Le Bistro and Cafe Argenteuil. Mrs. Wheatley had gone to a gas station in Lexington and bought a
Mobil Travel Guide;
she picked places with three or more stars, and then they found them with the little map. It was terribly expensive, but neither of them said a word about the cost. Beth would eat smoked trout but never fresh fish; she remembered the fish she’d had to eat on Fridays at Methuen. She decided that next year at school she would take French.

The only problem was that, on the road, she took the pills from Mrs. Wheatley’s prescription to help her sleep at night, and sometimes it required an hour or so to get her head clear in the morning. But tournament games never started before nine, and she made a point of getting up in time to have several cups of coffee from room service. Mrs. Wheatley did not know about the pills and showed no concern over Beth’s appetite for coffee; she treated her in every way like an adult. Sometimes it seemed as though Beth were the older of the two.

Beth loved New York. She liked riding on the bus, and she liked taking the IRT subway with its grit and rattle. She liked window shopping when she had a chance, and she enjoyed hearing people on the street talking Yiddish or Spanish. She did not mind the sense of danger in the city or the arrogant way the taxis drove or the dirty glitter of Times Square. They went to Radio City Music Hall on their last night and saw
West Side Story
and the Rockettes. Sitting high in the cavernous theater in a velvet seat, Beth was thrilled.

***

She had expected a reporter from
Life
to be someone who chain-smoked and looked like Lloyd Nolan, but the person who came to the door of the house was a small woman with steel-gray hair and a dark dress. The man with her was carrying a camera. She introduced herself as Jean Balke. She looked older than Mrs. Wheatley, and she walked around the living room with quick little movements, hastily checking out the books in the bookcase and studying some of the prints on the walls. Then she began asking questions. Her manner was pleasant and direct. “I’ve really been impressed,” she said, “even though I don’t play chess myself.” She smiled. “They say you’re the real thing.”

Beth was a little embarrassed.

“How does it feel? Being a girl among all those men?”

“I don’t mind it.”

“Isn’t it frightening?” They were sitting facing each other. Miss Balke leaned forward, looking intently at Beth.

Beth shook her head. The photographer came over to the sofa and began taking readings with a meter.

“When I was a girl,” the reporter said, “I was never allowed to be competitive. I used to play with dolls.”

The photographer backed off and began to study Beth through his camera. She remembered the doll Mr. Ganz had given her. “Chess isn’t always ‘competitive,’” she said.

“But you play to win.”

Beth wanted to say something about how beautiful chess was sometimes, but she looked at Miss Balke’s sharp, inquiring face and couldn’t find the words for it.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No. I’m fourteen.” The photographer began snapping pictures.

Miss Balke had lighted a cigarette. She leaned forward now and tapped the ashes into one of Mrs. Wheatley’s ashtrays. “Are you interested in boys?” she asked.

Beth was feeling more and more uneasy. She wanted to talk about learning chess and about the tournaments she had won and about people like Morphy and Capablanca. She did not like this woman and did not like her questions. “I’m interested in chess mostly.”

Miss Balke smiled brightly. “Tell me about it,” she said. “Tell me how you learned to play and how old you were.”

Beth told her and Miss Balke took notes, but Beth felt that she wasn’t really interested in any of it. She found as she went on talking that she really had very little to say.

The next week at school, during algebra class, Beth saw the boy in front of her pass a copy of
Life
to the girl next to him, and they both turned and looked back at her as though they had never seen her before. After class the boy, who had never spoken to her before, stopped her and asked if she would autograph the magazine. Beth was stunned. She took it from him and there it was, filling a full page. There was a picture of her looking serious at her chessboard, and there was another picture of the main building at Methuen. Across the top of the page a headline read: A G
IRL
M
OZART
S
TARTLES THE
W
ORLD OF
C
HESS
. She signed her name with the boy’s ball-point pen, setting the magazine on an empty desk.

When she got home, Mrs. Wheatley had the magazine in her lap. She began reading aloud:

“‘With some people chess is a pastime, with others it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl—a young, unsmiling girl with brown eyes, brown hair and a dark-blue dress?

“‘It has never happened before, but it happened recently. In Lexington, Kentucky, and in Cincinnati. In Charleston, Atlanta, Miami, and lately in New York City. Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments strolls a fourteen-year-old with bright, intense eyes, from eighth grade at Fairfield Junior High in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet and well-mannered. And she is out for blood…’ It’s
marvelous
!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Shall I read on?”

“It talks about the orphanage.” Beth had bought her own copy. “And it gives one of my games. But it’s mostly about my being a girl.”

“Well, you are one.”

“It shouldn’t be that important,” Beth said. “They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian.”

“But, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “it makes you a
celebrity
!”

Beth looked at her thoughtfully, “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.

***

The next day Margaret stopped her in the hall. Margaret was wearing a camel’s-hair coat and her blond hair fell just to her shoulders; she was even more beautiful than she had been a year before, when Beth had taken the ten dollars from her purse. “The other Apple Pi’s asked me to invite you,” Margaret said respectfully. “We’re having a pledge party Friday night at my house.”

The Apple Pi’s. It was very strange. When Beth accepted and asked for the address she realized it was the first time she had ever actually spoken to Margaret.

She spent over an hour that afternoon trying on dresses at Purcell’s before picking a navy-blue with a simple white collar from the store’s most expensive line. When she showed it to Mrs. Wheatley that evening and told her she was going to the Apple Pi Club, Mrs. Wheatley was clearly pleased. “You look just like a debutante!” she said when Beth tried on the dress for her.

***

The white woodwork of Margaret’s living room glistened beautifully and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings—mostly of horses. Even though it was a mild evening in March, a big fire burned under the white mantel. Fourteen girls were sitting on the white sofas and colored wingback chairs when Beth arrived in her new dress. Most of the others were wearing sweaters and skirts. “It was really something,” one of them said, “to find a face from Fairfield Junior High in
Life
. I nearly flipped!” but when Beth started to talk about the tournaments, the girls interrupted her to ask about the boys at them. Were they good-looking? Did she date any of them? When Beth said, “There’s not much time for that,” the girls changed the subject.

For an hour or more they talked about boys and dating and clothes, veering erratically from cool sophistication to giggles, while Beth sat uneasily at one end of a sofa holding a crystal glass of Coca-Cola, unable to think of anything to say. Then, at nine o’clock, Margaret turned on the huge television set by the fireplace and they were all quiet, except for an occasional giggle, while the “Movie of the Week” came on.

Beth sat through it, not participating in the gossip and laughter during the commercials, until it ended at eleven. She was astounded at the dullness of the evening. This was the elite Apple Pi Club that had seemed so important when she first went to school in Lexington, and this was what they did at their sophisticated parties: they watched a Charles Bronson movie. The only break in the dullness was when a girl named Felicia said, “I wonder if he’s as well-hung as he looks.” Beth laughed at that, but it was the only thing she laughed at.

When she left after eleven no one urged her to stay, and no one said anything about her joining. She was relieved to get into the taxi and go home, and when she got there she spent an hour in her room with
The Middle Game in Chess
, translated from the Russian of D. Luchenko.

***

The school knew about her, well enough, by the next tournament, and this time she hadn’t claimed illness as an excuse. Mrs. Wheatley talked to the principal, and Beth was excused from her classes. Nothing was said about the illnesses she had lied about. They wrote her up in the school paper, and people pointed her out in the hallways. The tournament was in Kansas City, and after she won it the director took her and Mrs. Wheatley to a steakhouse for dinner and told her they were honored to have her participate. He was a serious young man, and he treated both of them politely.

“I’d like to play in the U.S. Open,” Beth said over dessert and coffee.

“Sure,” he said. “You might win it.”

“Would that lead to playing abroad?” Mrs. Wheatley asked. “In Europe, I mean?”

“No reason why not,” the young man said. His name was Nobile. He wore thick glasses and kept drinking ice water. “They have to know about you before they invite you.”

“Would winning the Open make them know about me?”

“Sure. Benny Watts plays in Europe all the time, now that he’s got his international title.”

“How’s the prize money?” Mrs. Wheatley asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Pretty good, I think.”

“What about Russia?” Beth said.

Nobile stared at her a minute, as though she had suggested something illicit. “Russia’s murder,” he said finally. “They eat Americans for breakfast over there.”

“Now,
really
…” Mrs. Wheatley said.