The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  “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.

  When she had finished half her sandwich Beth looked across the table at her. “Is there a school chess club?” she asked.

  The other girl looked up, startled. “What?”

  “Do they have a chess club? I want to join.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “I don’t think they have anything like that. You can try out for junior cheerleader.”

  Beth finished her sandwich.

  ***

  “You certainly spend a lot of time at your studies,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Don’t you have any hobbies?” Actually, Beth was not studying; she was reading a novel from the school library. She was sitting in the armchair in her room, by the window. Mrs. Wheatley had knocked and then come in, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and pink satin slippers. She walked over and sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, smiling at her distractedly, as though she were thinking about something else. Beth had lived with her a week now and she noticed that Mrs. Wheatley was often that way.

  “I used to play chess,” Beth said.

  Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “Chess?”

  “I like it a lot.”

  Mrs. Wheatley shook her head as though shaking something out of her hair. “Oh, chess!” she said. “The royal game. How nice.”

  “Do you play?” Beth said.

  “Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it. But my father used to play. My father was a surgeon and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.”

  “Could I play chess with him?”

  “Hardly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “My father passed on years ago.”

  “Is there anyone I could play with?”

  “Play chess? I have no idea.” Mrs. Wheatley peered at her for a moment. “Isn’t it primarily a game for boys?”

  “Girls play,” she said.

  “How nice!” But Mrs. Wheatley was clearly miles away.

  ***

  Mrs. Wheatley spent two days getting the house cleaned for Miss Farley, and she sent Beth to brush her hair three times on the morning of the visit.

  When Miss Farley came in the door she was followed by a tall man wearing a football jacket. Beth was shocked to see it was Fergussen. He looked mildly embarrassed. “Hi there, Harmon,” he said. “I invited myself along.” He walked into Mrs. Wheatley’s living room and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

  Miss Farley had a set of forms and a check list. She wanted to know about Beth’s diet and her schoolwork and what plans she had for the summer. Mrs. Wheatley did most of the talking. Beth could see her become more expansive with each question. “You can have no idea,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “of how marvelously well Beth has adjusted to the school environment. Her teachers have been immensely impressed with her work…”

  Beth could not remember any conversations between Mrs. Wheatley and the teachers at school, but she said nothing.

  “I had hoped to see Mr. Wheatley, too,” Miss Farley said. “Will he be here soon?”

  Mrs. Wheatley smiled at her. “Allston called earlier to say he was terribly sorry, but he couldn’t come. He’s really been working so hard.” She looked over at Beth, still smiling. “Allston is a marvelous provider.”

  “Is he able to spend much time with Beth?” Miss Farley said.

  “Why, of course!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Allston is a wonderful father to her.”

  Shocked, Beth looked down at her hands. Not even Jolene could lie so well. For a moment she had believed it herself, had seen an image of a helpful, fatherly Allston Wheatley—an Allston Wheatley who did not exist outside of Mrs. Wheatley’s words. But then she remembered the real one, grim, distant and silent. And there had been no call from him.

  During the hour they were there, Fergussen said almost nothing. When they got up to leave, he held out his hand to Beth and her heart sank. “Good to see you, Harmon,” he said. She took his hand to shake it, wishing that he could stay behind somehow, to be with her.

  ***

  A few days later Mrs. Wheatley took her downtown to shop for clothes. When the bus stopped at their corner, Beth stepped into it without hesitation, even though it was the first time she’d ever been on a bus. It was a warm fall Saturday, and Beth was uncomfortable in her Methuen wool skirt and could hardly wait to get a new one. She began to count the blocks to downtown.

  They got off at the seventeenth corner. Mrs. Wheatley took her hand, although it was hardly necessary, and ushered her across a few yards of busy sidewalks into the revolving doors of Ben Snyder’s Department Store. It was ten in the morning and the aisles were full of women carrying big dark purses and shopping bags. Mrs. Wheatley walked through the crowd with the sureness of an expert. Beth followed.

  Before they looked at anything to wear, Mrs. Wheatley took her down the broad stairs to the basement, where she spent twenty minutes at a counter with what a card said were “Dinner Napkin Irregulars,” putting together six blue ones from the multicolored pile, rejecting dozens in the process. She waited while Mrs. Wheatley assembled her set in a kind of mesmerized trial and error and then decided she didn’t really need napkins. They went to another counter with “Book Bargains” on it. Mrs. Wheatley read out the titles of a great many thirty-nine-cent books, picked up several and leafed through them but didn’t buy any.

  Finally they took the escalator back to the main floor. There they stopped at a perfume counter so Mrs. Wheatley could spray one wrist with Evening in Paris and the other with Emeraude. “All right, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said finally, “we’ll go up to four.” She smiled at Beth. “Young Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.”

  Between the third and fourth floors Beth looked back and saw a sign on a counter that said BOOKS AND GAMES, and right near the sign, on a glass-topped counter, were three chess sets. “Chess!” she said, tugging Mrs. Wheatley’s sleeve.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Wheatley said, clearly annoyed.

  “They sell chess sets,” Beth said. “Can we go back?”

  “Not so loud,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We’ll go by on the way back down.”

  But they didn’t. Mrs. Wheatley spent the rest of the morning having Beth try on coats from marked-down racks and turn around to show her the hemline and go over near the window so she could see the fabric by “natural light,” and finally buying one and insisting they go down by elevator.

  “Aren’t we going to look at the chess sets?” Beth said, but Mrs. Wheatley didn’t answer. Beth’s feet hurt, and she was perspiring. She did not like the coat she was carrying in a cardboard box. It was the same robin’s-egg blue as Mrs. Wheatley’s omnipresent sweater, and it didn’t fit. Beth did not know much about clothes, but she could tell that this store sold cheap ones.

  When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Beth started to remind her about the chess sets, but the door closed and they went down to the main floor. Mrs. Wheatley took Beth’s hand and led her across the street to the bus stop, complaining about the difficulty of finding anything these days. “But after all,” she said philosophically as the bus drew up to the corner, “we got what we came for.”

  The next week in English class some girls behind Beth were talking before the teacher came in. “Did you get those shoes at Ben Snyder’s or something?” one of them said.

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in Ben Snyder’s,” the other girl said, laughing.

  ***

  Beth walked to school every morning, along shady streets of quiet houses with trees on their law
ns. Other students went the same way, and Beth recognized some of them, but she always walked alone. She had enrolled two weeks late in the fall term, and after her fourth week, mid-term exams began. On Tuesday she had no tests in the morning and was supposed to go to her home room. Instead she took the bus downtown, carrying her notebook and the forty cents she had saved from her quarter-a-week allowance. She had her change ready when she got on the bus.

  The chess sets were still on the counter, but up close she could see that they weren’t very good. When she picked up the white queen she was surprised at how light it was. She turned it over. It was hollow inside and made of plastic. She put it back as the saleswoman came up and said, “May I help you?”

  “Do you have Modern Chess Openings?”

  “We have chess and checkers and backgammon,” the woman said, “and a variety of children’s games.”

  “It’s a book,” Beth said, “about chess.”

  “The book department is across the aisle.”

  Beth went to the bookshelves and began looking through them. There was nothing about chess. There was no clerk to ask, either. She went back to the woman at the counter and had to wait a long time to get her attention. “I’m trying to find a book about chess,” Beth told her.

  “We don’t handle books in this department,” the woman said and started to turn away again.

  “Is there a bookstore near here?” Beth asked quickly.

  “Try Morris’s.” She went over to a stack of boxes and began straightening them.

  “Where is it?”

  The woman said nothing.

  “Where’s Morris, ma’am?” Beth said loudly.

  The woman turned and looked at her furiously. “On Upper Street,” she said.

  “Where’s Upper Street?”

  The woman looked for a moment as if she would scream. Then her face relaxed and she said, “Two blocks up Main.”

  Beth took the escalators down.

  ***

  Morris’s was on a corner, next to a drugstore. Beth pushed open the door and found herself in a big room full of more books than she had ever seen in her life. There was a bald man sitting on a stool behind a counter, smoking a cigarette and reading. Beth walked up to him and said, “Do you have Modem Chess Openings?”