The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  “What about school?” Beth said.

  “I can write a medical excuse, claiming mono.”

  “Mono?”

  “Mononucleosis. It’s quite the thing in your age group, according to the Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  Beth kept looking at her, trying not to let the astonishment show in her face. Mrs. Wheatley’s dishonesty seemed in every way to match her own. Then she said, “Where would we stay?”

  “At the Gibson Hotel, in a double room at twenty-two dollars a night. The Greyhound tickets will be eleven-eighty apiece, and there will, of course, be the cost of food. I have calculated all of it. Even if you win second or third prize, there will be a profit.”

  Beth had twenty dollars in cash and a packet of ten checks in her plastic purse. “I need to buy some chess books,” she said.

  “By all means,” Mrs. Wheatley said, smiling. “And if you’ll make out a check for twenty-three dollars and sixty cents, I’ll get the bus tickets tomorrow.”

  ***

  After buying Modem Chess Openings and a book on the endgame at Morris’s, Beth walked across the street to Purcell’s Department Store. She knew from the way girls talked at school that Purcell’s was better than Ben Snyder’s. She found what she wanted on the fourth floor: a wooden set almost identical to the one Mr. Ganz owned, with hand-carved knights and big, substantial pawns, and rooks that were fat and solid. She was undecided for a while over the board and almost bought a wooden one before settling on a folding linen board with green and beige squares. It would be more portable than the other.

  Back home she cleared off her desk, put the board on it and set up the pieces. She piled her new chessbooks on one side and placed the tall silver trophy in the shape of a chess king on the other. She turned on her student lamp and sat at the desk, just looking at the pieces, at the way their curves picked up the light. She sat for what seemed like a long time, her mind quiet. Then she picked up Modern Chess Openings. This time she began at the beginning.

  ***

  She had never seen anything like the Gibson Hotel before. Its size and bustle, the bright chandeliers in its lobby, the heavy red carpeting, the flowers, even the three revolving doors and the uniformed doorman who stood beside them were overwhelming. She and Mrs. Wheatley walked up to the front of the hotel from the bus station, carrying their new luggage. Mrs. Wheatley refused to hand it over to the doorman. She lugged her suitcase up to the front desk and registered for them both, unperturbed by the look the room clerk gave them.

  In the room afterward, Beth began to relax. There were two big windows overlooking Fourth Street with its rush hour traffic. It was a crisp, cold day outside. Inside they had this thick-carpeted room with the big white bathroom and fluffy red towels and a huge plate-glass mirror covering one wall. There was a color TV on the dresser and a bright-red bedspread on each of the beds.

  Mrs. Wheatley was inspecting the room, checking the dresser drawers, clicking the TV on and off, patting away a wrinkle on the bedspread. “Well,” she said, “I asked them for a pleasant room, and I believe they gave it to me.” She seated herself in the high-backed Victorian chair by her bed as though she had lived in the Gibson Hotel all her life.

  The tournament was on the mezzanine in the Taft Room; all Beth had to do was take the elevator. Mrs. Wheatley found them a diner down the street where they had bacon and eggs for breakfast, then she went back to bed with a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer and a pack of Chesterfields while Beth went down to the tournament and registered. She still did not have a rating, but this time one of the men at the desk knew who she was; they didn’t try to put her in the Beginners Section. There would be two games a day, and the time control would be 120/40, which meant you had two hours to make forty moves.

  While she was signing in, she could hear a deep voice coming through one of the double doors that stood open to the Taft Room, where the games would be. She looked that way and saw part of the big ballroom, with a long row of empty tables and a few men walking around.

  When she walked in, she saw a strange man slouched on a sofa with black-booted feet resting on a coffee table. “…and the rook comes to the seventh rank,” he was saying. “Bone in the throat, man, that rook there. He took one look at it and paid up.” He leaned his head against the back of the sofa and laughed loudly in a deep baritone. “Twenty bucks.”

  Since it was early, there were only half a dozen people in the room, and no one was at the long rows of tables with paper chessboards on them. Everyone was listening to the man talking. He was about twenty-five and looked like a pirate. He wore dirty jeans, a black turtleneck and a black wool cap pulled down to his heavy eyebrows. He had a thick black mustache and clearly needed a shave; the backs of his hands were tanned and scraped-looking. “The Caro-Kann Defense,” he said, laughing. “A genuine bummer.”

  “What’s wrong with the Caro-Kann?” someone asked. A neat young man in a camel’s hair sweater.

  “All pawns and no hope.” He lowered his legs to the floor and sat up. On the table was a soiled old beige-and-green chessboard with battered wooden pieces on it. The head had fallen off the black king at some time or other; it was held on with a piece of gritty adhesive tape. “I’ll show you,” the man said, sliding the board over. Beth was now standing next to him. She was the only girl in the room. The man reached down to the board and with surprising delicacy picked up the white king pawn with his fingertips and dropped it lightly on king four. Then he picked up the black queen bishop pawn and dropped it on queen’s bishop three, put White’s queen pawn on the fourth rank and did the same with Black’s. He looked up at the people around him, who were by now all paying close attention.

  “The Caro-Kann. Right?”

  Beth was familiar with these moves, but she had never seen them played. She expected the man to move the white queen’s knight next, and he did. Then he had the black pawn capture the white, and took the capturing pawn with the white knight. He played Black’s king knight to bishop three and brought White’s other knight out. Beth remembered the move. Looking at it now, it seemed tame. She found herself speaking up. “I’d take the knight,” she said quietly.

  The man looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you that kid from Kentucky—the one who wiped out Harry Beltik?”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “If you take the knight, it doubles his pawns…”

  “Big deal,” the man said. “All pawns and no hope. Here’s how to win with Black.” He left the knight in the center of the board and played Black’s pawn to king four. Then he continued laying out the moves of a game, shuffling the pieces around on the board with casual dexterity, occasionally pointing out a potential trap. The game built to a balanced fugue in the center. It was like time-lapse photography on TV where a pale-green stalk humps itself from dirt, heightens, swells and explodes into a peony or a rose.

  Some other people had come into the room and were watching. Beth was feeling a new kind of excitement with this display, with the knowingness, the clarity and nerve of the man in the black cap. He began trading pieces in the center, lifting the captured ones off the board with his fingertips as though they were dead flies, keeping up a soft-voiced patter that pointed out necessities and weaknesses, pitfalls and strengths. Once, when he had to reach across the board to the back rank and move a rook from its home square, she was astonished to see as he stretched his body that he was carrying a knife at his waist. The leather-and-metal handle protruded above his belt. He looked so much like someone out of Treasure Island that the knife did not seem at all out of place. Just then he paused in his moving and said, “Now watch this,” and brought the black rook up to its king five square, setting it down with a muted flourish. He folded his arms across his chest. “What does White do here?” he asked, looking around him.

  Beth considered the board. There were pitfalls all over for white. One of the men watching spoke up. “Queen takes pawn?”

  The man in the cap shook his head, smiling. “Rook to king eight check
. And the queen falls.”

  Beth had seen that. It looked to be all over for the white pieces and she started to say so when another man spoke up. “That’s Mieses-Reshevsky. From the thirties.”

  The man looked up at him. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Margate. Nineteen thirty-five.”

  “White played rook to queen one,” the first man said.

  “Right,” said the other. “What else has he got?” He made the move and continued. It was clear now that White was losing. There were some fast trades and then an endgame that looked for a moment as though it might be slow, but Black made a striking sacrifice of a passed pawn and abruptly the topology of pawn-queening made it clear that Black would have a queen two moves before White. It was a dazzling game, like some of the best ones Beth had learned from books.

  The man stood up, took off his cap and stretched. He looked down at Beth for a moment. “Reshevsky was playing like that when he was your age, little girl. Younger.”

  ***

  Back in the room Mrs. Wheatley was still reading the Enquirer. She looked over her reading glasses at Beth as she came in the door. “Finished already?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you do?”

  “I won.”

  Mrs. Wheatley smiled warmly. “Honey,” she said, “you are a treasure.”

  ***

  Mrs. Wheatley had seen an ad about a sale at Shillito’s—a department store a few blocks from the Gibson. Since there were four hours before Beth’s next game, they went over, through lightly falling snow, and Mrs. Wheatley rummaged in the basement awhile until Beth said, “I’d like to look at their sweaters.”

  “What kind of sweaters, dear?”

  “Cashmere.”

  Mrs. Wheatley’s eyebrows went up. “Cashmere? Are you sure we can afford it?”

  “Yes.”

  Beth found a pale-gray sweater on sale for twenty-four dollars, and it fit her perfectly. Looking in the tall mirror, she tried to imagine herself as a member of the Apple Pi Club, like Margaret; but the face was still Beth’s face, round and freckled, with straight brown hair. She shrugged and bought the sweater with a traveler’s check. They had passed an elegant little shoe store with saddle oxfords in the window on the way to Shillito’s and she took Mrs. Wheatley there and bought herself a pair. Then she bought argyle socks to go with them. The tag said: “100% wool. Made in England.” Going back to the hotel through a wind that whipped tiny snowflakes against her, Beth kept looking down at her new shoes and high plaid socks. She liked the way her feet felt, liked the tightness of the warm socks against her calves, and liked the way they looked—bright expensive socks above bright brown-and-white shoes. She kept looking down.

  ***

  That afternoon she was matched with a middle-aged Ohioan with a rating of 1910. She played the Sicilian and forced him to resign after an hour and a half. Her mind was as clear as it had ever been, and she was able to use some of the things she had learned over the past weeks from studying her new book by the Russian Master Boleslavski.

  When she turned in her score sheet Sizemore was standing near the desk. She saw a few other familiar faces from that tournament, and it felt good to see them, but she really wanted to see only one player from before—Townes. She looked several times but didn’t find him.

  Back in their room that evening, Mrs. Wheatley watched The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dick Van Dyke Show, while Beth set up and went over her two games, looking for weaknesses in her play. There weren’t any. Then she got out the book by Reuben Fine on end-games and began studying. The endgame in chess had its own feeling; it was like an altogether different contest, once you got down to a piece or two on each side and the question became one of queening a pawn. It could be agonizingly subtle; there was no chance for the kind of violent attack Beth loved.

  But she was bored with Reuben Fine, and after a while she closed the book and went to bed. She had two of the little green pills in her pajama pocket, and she took them after the lights were off. She didn’t want to risk not sleeping.

  The second day was as easy as the first, even though Beth was matched against stronger players. It had taken her a while to clear her head from the effect of the pills, but by the time she started playing her mind was sharp. She even handled the pieces themselves with confidence, picking them up and setting them down with aplomb.

  There was no “Top Boards” room at this tournament. Board One was merely the first board at the first table. For the second game Beth was at Board Six, and people were gathered around her as she forced the master to resign after taking one of his rooks. When she looked up during the applause, there stood Alma Wheatley at the back of the room smiling broadly.

  In her final game, at Board One, Beth was playing a master named Rudolph. He managed to start trading pieces in the center during the middle game, and Beth was alarmed to find herself crowded into an ending with a rook, a knight and three pawns. Rudolph had the same thing, except for a bishop where she had a knight. She didn’t like it, and his bishop was a distinct advantage. But she managed to pin it and trade her knight for it and then play with great care for an hour and a half until Rudolph made a blunder and she zeroed in on it. She checked with a pawn, traded rooks and got one of her pawns passed with the king protecting. Rudolph looked furious at himself and resigned.

  There was strong applause. Beth looked at the crowd around the table. Near the back, in her blue dress, was Mrs. Wheatley, clapping her hands enthusiastically.

  Going back to the room, Mrs. Wheatley carried the heavy trophy and Beth had the check in her blouse pocket. Mrs. Wheatley had written it all out on a sheet of hotel stationery that sat on top of the TV: sixty-six dollars for three days at the Gibson, plus three-thirty tax; twenty-three sixty for the bus, and the price of each meal, including tip. “I’ve allowed twelve dollars for our celebration supper tonight and two dollars for a small breakfast tomorrow. That makes our total expenses equal one seventy-two thirty.”

  “It leaves over three hundred dollars,” Beth said.

  There was a silence for a while. Beth looked at the sheet of paper, although she understood it perfectly well. She was wondering if she should offer to split the money with Mrs. Wheatley. She did not want to do that. She had won it herself.

  Mrs. Wheatley broke the silence. “Perhaps you could give me ten percent,” she said pleasantly. “As an agent’s commission.”

  “Thirty-two dollars,” Beth said, “and seventy-seven cents.”

  “They told me at Methuen that you were marvelous at math.”

  Beth nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  ***

  They had something with veal in it at an Italian restaurant. Mrs. Wheatley ordered herself a carafe of red wine and drank it and smoked Chesterfields throughout the meal. Beth liked the bread and the cold, pale butter. She liked the little tree with oranges on it that sat on the bar, not far from their table.

  Mrs. Wheatley wiped her chin with her napkin when she finished the wine and lit a final cigarette. “Beth, dear,” she said, “there’s a tournament in Houston over the holidays, starting the twenty-sixth. I understand it’s very easy to travel on Christmas Day, since most people are eating plum pudding or whatever.”

  “I saw,” Beth said. She had read the ad in Chess Review and wanted very much to go. But Houston had seemed awfully far away for a six hundred-dollar prize.

  “I believe we could fly to Houston,” Mrs. Wheatley said brightly. “We could have a pleasant winter vacation in the sun.”

  Beth was finishing her spumoni. “Okay,” she said and then, looking down at the ice cream, “Okay, Mother.”

  ***

  Their Christmas dinner was microwave turkey served on an airplane, with a complimentary glass of champagne for Mrs. Wheatley and canned orange juice for Beth. It was the best Christmas she had ever had. The plane flew over a snow-covered Kentucky and, at the end of the trip, circled out above the Gulf of Mexico. They landed in warm air and sunshine. Driving in f
rom the airport, they passed one construction site after the other, the big yellow cranes and bulldozers standing idle near stacks of girders. Someone had hung a Christmas wreath on one of them.

  A week before they left Lexington a new copy of Chess Review had come in the mail. When Beth opened it she found a small picture of herself and Beltik at the back, and a banner headline: SCHOOLGIRL TAKES KENTUCKY CHAMPIONSHIP FROM MASTER. Their game was printed and the commentary said: “Onlookers were amazed at her youthful mastery of the fine points of strategy. She shows the assurance of players twice her age.” She read it twice before showing it to Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley was ecstatic; she had read the article in the Lexington paper aloud and then said, “Wonderful!” This time she read in silence before saying, “This is national recognition, dear,” in a hushed voice.

  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.