The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  ***

  Going to the high school was her first ride in a car since she came to Methuen. That was fourteen months ago. Nearly fifteen. Mother had died in a car, a black one like this, with a sharp piece of the steering wheel in her eye. The woman with the clipboard had told her, while Beth stared at the mole on the woman’s cheek and said nothing. Had felt nothing, either. Mother had passed on, the woman said. The funeral would be in three days. The coffin would be closed. Beth knew what a coffin was; Dracula slept in one. Daddy had passed on the year before, because of a “carefree life,” as Mother put it.

  Beth sat in the back of the car with a big, embarrassed girl named Shirley. Shirley was in the chess club. Mr. Ganz drove. There was a knot as tight as wire in Beth’s stomach. She kept her knees pressed together and looked straight ahead at the back of Mr. Ganz’s neck in its striped collar and at the cars and buses ahead of their car, moving back and forth outside the windshield.

  Shirley tried to make conversation. “Do you play the King’s Gambit?”

  Beth nodded, but was afraid to speak. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and very little for nights before that. Last night she had heard Fergussen talking and laughing with the lady at Reception; his heavy laughter had rolled down the corridor and under the doorway into the ward where she lay, stiff as steel, on her cot.

  But one thing had happened—something unexpected. As she was about to leave with Mr. Ganz, Jolene came running up, gave Mr. Ganz one of her sly looks and said, “Can we talk for just a second?” Mr. Ganz said it was okay, and Jolene took Beth hastily aside and handed her three green pills. “Here, honey,” she said, “I can tell you need these.” Then Jolene thanked Mr. Ganz and skipped off to class, her geography book under one thin arm.

  But there was no chance to take the pills. Beth had them in her pocket right now, but she was afraid. Her mouth was dry. She knew she could pop them down and probably no one would notice. But she was frightened. They would be there soon. Her head was spinning.

  The car stopped at a light. Across the intersection was a Pure Oil station with a big blue sign. Beth cleared her throat, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mr. Ganz said.

  Beth shook her head firmly. “I can’t wait.”

  Mr. Ganz shrugged. When the light changed, he drove across the intersection and into the gas station. Beth went in the room marked LADIES and locked the door behind her. It was a filthy place, with smear marks on the white tiles and a chipped basin. She ran the cold-water tap for a moment and put the pills in her mouth. Cupping her hand, she filled it with water and washed them down. Already she felt better.

  ***

  It was a big classroom with three blackboards across the far wall. Printed in large capitals on the center board was WELCOME BETH HARMON! in white chalk, and on the wall above this were color photographs of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Most of the regular desks had been taken out of the room and were lined along the hallway wall outside; the rest had been-pushed together at the far end. Three folding tables had been set up to make a U in the center of the room, and on each of these were four green-and-beige paper chessboards with plastic pieces. Metal chairs sat inside the U, facing the black pieces, but there were no chairs facing the white ones.

  It had been twenty minutes since the stop at the Pure Oil station and she was no longer trembling, but her eyes smarted and her joints felt sore. She was wearing her navy pleated skirt and a white blouse with red letters spelling Methuen over the pocket.

  There was no one in the room when they came in; Mr. Ganz had unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. After a minute a bell rang and there were the sounds of footsteps and some shouts in the hallway, and students began to come in. They were mostly boys. Big boys, as big as men; this was senior high. They wore sweaters and slouched with their hands in their pockets. Beth wondered for a moment where she was supposed to sit. But she couldn’t sit if she was going to play them all at once; she would have to walk from board to board to make the moves. “Hey, Allan. Watch out!” one boy shouted to another, jerking his thumb toward Beth. Abruptly she saw herself as a small unimportant person—a plain, brown-haired orphan girl in dull institutional clothes. She was half the size of these easy, insolent students with their loud voices and bright sweaters. She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again, with the pieces set in the familiar pattern, and the unpleasant feelings lessened. She might be out of place in this public high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.

  “Take your seats and be quiet, please.” Mr. Ganz spoke with surprising authority. “Charles Levy will take Board Number One, since he’s our top player. The rest can sit where they want to. There will be no talking during play.”

  Suddenly everyone was quiet, and they all began to look at Beth. She looked back at them, unblinking, and she felt rising in her a hatred as black as night.

  She turned to Mr. Ganz. “Do I start now?” she asked.

  “With Board Number One.”

  “And then I go to the next one?”

  “That’s right,” he said. She realized that he hadn’t even introduced her to the class. She stepped over to the first board, the one with Charles Levy sitting behind the black pieces. She reached out, picked up the king’s pawn and moved it to the fourth rank.

  The surprising thing was how badly they played. All of them. In the very first games of her life she had understood more than they did. They left backward pawns all over the place, and their pieces were wide open for forks. A few of them tried crude mating attacks. She brushed those aside like flies. She moved briskly from board to board, her stomach calm and her hand steady. At each board it took only a second’s glance to read the position and see what was called for. Her responses were quick, sure and deadly. Charles Levy was supposed to be the best of them; she had his pieces tied up beyond help in a dozen moves; in six more she mated him on the back rank with a knight-rook combination.

  Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and her shoes squeaked as she moved down the rows of players. The room was silent; she felt her own presence centered in it, small and solid and in command. Outside, birds sang, but she did not hear them. Inside, some of the students stared at her. Boys came in from the hallway and lined up along the back wall to watch the homely girl from the orphanage at the edge of town who moved from player to player with the determined energy of a Caesar in the field, a Pavlova under the lights. There were about a dozen people watching. Some smirked and yawned, but others could feel the energy in the room, the presence of something that had never, in the long history of this tired old schoolroom, been felt there before.

  What she did was at bottom shockingly trivial, but the energy of her amazing mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen. Her chess moves blazed with it. By the end of an hour and a half, she had beaten them all without a single false or wasted move.

  She stopped and looked around her. Captured pieces sat in clusters beside each board. A few students were staring at her, but most avoided her eyes. There was scattered applause. She felt her cheeks flush; something in her reached out desperately toward the boards, the dead positions on them. There was nothing left there now. She was just a little girl again, without power.

  Mr. Ganz presented her with a two-pound box of Whitman’s chocolates and took her out to the car. Shirley got in without a word, careful not to touch against Beth in the back seat. They drove in silence back to the Methuen Home.

  Five o’clock study hall was intolerable. She tried playing chess in her mind, but it seemed for once pale and meaningless after the afternoon at the high school. She tried reading Geography, since there was a test the next day, but the big book was practically all pictures, and the pictures meant little to her. Jolene was not in the room, and she was desperate to see Jolene, to see if there were any more pills. Every now and t
hen she touched her blouse pocket with the palm of her hand in a kind of superstitious hope that she would feel the little hard surface of a pill. But there was nothing there.

  Jolene was at supper, eating her Italian spaghetti, when Beth came in and picked up her tray. She went over to Jolene’s table before getting her food. There was another black girl with her. Samantha, a new one. Jolene and she were talking.

  Beth walked straight up to them and said to Jolene, “Have you got any more?”

  Jolene frowned and shook her head. Then she said, “How was the exhibit? You do okay?”

  “Okay,” Beth said. “Haven’t you got just one?”

  “Honey,” Jolene said, turning away, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  ***

  The Saturday afternoon movie in the library was The Robe. It had Victor Mature in it and was spiritual; all the staff was there, sitting attentive in a special row of chairs at the back, near the shuddering projector. Beth kept her eyes nearly shut during the first half-hour; they were red and sore. She had not slept at all on Thursday night and had dozed off for only an hour or so Friday. Her stomach was knotted, and there was the vinegar taste in her throat. She slouched in her folding chair with her hand in her skirt pocket, feeling the screwdriver she had put there in the morning. Walking into the boys’ woodworking shop after breakfast, she took it from a bench. No one saw her do it. Now she squeezed it in her hand until her fingers hurt, took a deep breath, stood up and edged her way to the door. Mr. Fergussen was sitting there, proctoring.

  “Bathroom,” Beth whispered.

  Mr. Fergussen nodded, his eyes on Victor Mature, bare-chested in the arena.

  She walked purposively down the narrow hallway, over the wavy places in the faded linoleum, past the girls’ room and down to the Multi-Purpose Room, with its Christian Endeavour magazines and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and, against the far wall, the padlocked window that said PHARMACY.

  There were some small wooden stools in the room; she picked up one of them. There was no one around. She could hear gladiatorial shouts from the movie in the library but nothing else except her footsteps. They sounded very loud.

  She set the stool in front of the window and climbed onto it. This put her face on a level with the hasp and padlock, at the top. The window itself, made of frosted glass with chicken wire in it, was framed in wood. The wood had been thickly painted with white enamel. Beth examined the screws that held the painted hasp. There was paint in their slots. She frowned, and her heart began to beat faster.

  During the rare times when Daddy had been home, and sober, he had liked to do little jobs around the house. The house was an old one, in a poorer part of town, and there was heavy paint on the woodwork. Beth, five and six years old, had helped Daddy take the old switch plates and outlet plates off the walls with his big screwdriver. She was good at it, and Daddy praised her for it. “You catch on real quick, sweetiepie,” he said. She had never been happier. But when there was paint in the screw slots he would say, “Let Daddy fix that for you,” and would do something to get the screw head ready so that all she had to do was put the blade in the slot and turn. But what did he do to get that paint away? And which way should you turn the screwdriver? For a moment she almost choked in a sudden flush of inadequacy. The shouts from the film arena rose to a roar, and the volume of the frenetic music rose with it. She could get down off the stool and go back and take her seat.

  But if she did that, she would go on feeling the way she felt now. She would have to lie in bed at night with the light from under the door in her face and the sounds from the corridor in her ears and the bad taste in her mouth, and there would be no relief, no ease in her body. She took the screwdriver handle and banged the two big screwheads with it. Nothing happened. She gritted her teeth and thought hard. Then she nodded grimly, took a fresh purchase on the screwdriver, and using the corner of its blade, began to chisel out the paint. That was what Daddy had done. She pressed with both hands, keeping her feet firmly on the stool, and pushed along the slot. Some paint chipped loose, exposing the brass of the screw. She kept pushing with the sharp corner and more came loose. Then a big flake of paint fell off, and the slot was exposed.

  She took the screwdriver in her right hand, put the blade carefully in the slot and turned—to the left, the way Daddy had taught her. She remembered it now. She was good at remembering. She twisted as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She took the screwdriver away from the slot, gripped it in both hands and put the blade back in. Then she hunched her shoulders together and twisted until her hands felt sharp pains in them. And suddenly something squeaked, and the screw loosened. She kept twisting until she could take it out the rest of the way with her finger and put it in her blouse pocket. Then she went to work on the other screw. The part of the hasp she was working on was supposed to be held by four screws—one at each corner—but only two had been put in. She had noticed this during the past several days, just as she had checked every day at Vitamin Time to see if the green pills were still there in the big jar.

  She put the other screw in her pocket, and the end of the hasp came loose by itself, with the big padlock still hanging there, the other end supported by the screws that held it to the window frame. It had not taken her long to understand that you would have to remove only half a hasp, not both halves, the way it had looked at first.

  She pulled open the window, leaning back so it could go by her, and put her head inside. The light bulb was off, but she could see the outline of the big jar. She put her arms inside the opening, and standing on tiptoe, pushed herself as far forward as she could. That put her belly on the sill of the window. She began to wriggle, and her feet came away from the stool. There was a slightly sharp edge along the window sill, and it felt as though it were cutting her. She ignored it and kept on wriggling, doing it methodically, inching forward. She both felt and heard her blouse ripping. She ignored it; she had another blouse in her locker and could change.

  Now her hands touched the cool, smooth surface of a metal table. That was the narrow white table Mr. Fergussen stood against when he gave them their medicine. She inched forward again, and her weight came down on her hands. There were some boxes there. She pushed them aside, clearing a place for herself. Now it was easier to move. She let her weight come forward with the sill under her hips until it scraped the tops of her legs and she was able to let herself flop onto the table, twisting herself at the last second so she wouldn’t fall off it. She was inside! She took a couple of deep breaths and climbed down. There was enough light for her to see all right. She walked over to the far wall of the tiny room and stopped, facing the dimly visible jar. It had a glass cover. She lifted this and set it silently on the table. Then she slowly reached inside with both hands. Her fingertips touched the smooth surface of tens of pills, hundreds of pills. She pushed her hands deeper, burying them up to the wrists. She breathed in deeply and held her breath for a long time. Finally she let it out in a sigh and removed her right hand with a fistful of pills. She did not count them, simply put them in her mouth and swallowed until they had all gone down.

  Then she stuffed three handfuls of pills in her skirt pocket. On the wall to the right of the window was a Dixie Cup dispenser. She was able to reach it by standing on tiptoe and stretching. She took four paper cups. She had decided on that number the night before. She carried them over, stacked, to the table that held the pill jar, set them down neatly, and filled them one at a time. Then she stood back and looked at the jar. The level had dropped to almost half what it had been. The problem seemed insoluble. She would have to wait and see what happened.

  Leaving the cups, she went to the door that Mr. Fergussen used when he went to do pharmacy duty. She would leave that way, unlocking it from the inside, and make two trips to carry the pills to the metal stand by her bed. She had a nearly empty Kleenex box to put them in. She would spread a few sheets of Kleenex on top and put the box in the bottom of her enameled nightstand, under her clean u
nderwear and socks.

  But the door would not open. It was locked in some serious way. She examined the knob and latch, feeling carefully with her hands. There was a thick, heavy sensation at the back of her throat as she did this, and her arms were numb, like the arms of a dead person. What she had suspected when the door wouldn’t open turned out to be true: you had to have a key even from the inside. And she could not climb back out the little window carrying four Dixie cups full of tranquilizers.

  She grew frantic. They would miss her at the movie. Fergussen would be looking for her. The projector would break down and all the children would be sent into the Multi-Purpose Room, with Fergussen monitoring them, and here she would be. But deeper than that, she felt trapped, the same wretched, heart-stopping sensation she had felt when she was taken from home and put in this institution and made to sleep in a ward with twenty strangers and hear noises all night long that were, in a way, as bad as the shouting at home, when Daddy and Mother were there—the shouting from the brightly lit kitchen. Beth had slept in the dining room on a folding cot. She felt trapped then, too, and her arms were numb. There was a big space under the door that separated dining room from kitchen; the light had streamed in under it, along with the shouted words.

  She gripped the doorknob and stood still for a long moment, breathing shallowly. Then her heart began beating almost normally again and feeling came back into her arms and hands. She could always get out by climbing through the window. She had a pocket full of pills. She could set the Dixie cups on the white table inside the window and then, when she was back on the stool outside, she could reach in and take them out, one at a time. She could visualize it all, like a chess position.