The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  ***

  A yellow-painted wooden stairway at the end of a concrete path led to the building. Once the steps had looked broad and imposing to her, and the tarnished brass plaque had seemed a stern warning. Now it looked like only the entrance to a shabby provincial institution. The paint on the steps was peeling. The bushes that flanked them were grubby, and their leaves were covered with dust. Jolene was in the playground, looking over the rusty swings and the old slide that they had not been allowed to use except when Fergussen was there to supervise. Beth stood on the path in the sunlight, studying the wooden doors. Inside was Mrs. Deardorff’s big office and the other offices and, filling one whole wing, the library and the chapel. There were two classrooms in the other wing, and past them was the door at the end of the hallway that led to the basement.

  She had come to accept the Sunday-morning chess games as her prerogative. Until that day. It still constricted her throat to remember the silent tableau following Mrs. Deardorff’s voice shouting “Elizabeth!” and the cascade of pills and fragmented glass. Then no more chess. Instead it had been the full hour and a half of chapel and Beth helping Mrs. Lonsdale with the chairs and listening to her give her Talks. It took another hour after putting the chairs away to write the précis Mrs. Deardorff had assigned. She did it every Sunday for a year, and Mrs. Deardorff returned it every Monday with red marks and some grim exhortation like “Rewrite. Faulty organization.” She’d had to look up “Communism” in the library for the first précis. Beth had felt somewhere in her that Christianity ought to have something more to it.

  Jolene had come over and was standing beside her, squinting in the sunlight. “That’s where you learned to play?”

  “In the basement.”

  “Shit,” Jolene said. “They should have encouraged you. Sent you on more exhibitions after that one. They like publicity, just like anybody else.”

  “Publicity?” She was feeling dazed.

  “It brings in money.”

  She had never thought of anyone there encouraging her. It began to enter her mind now, standing in front of the building. She could have played in tournaments at nine or ten, like Benny. She had been bright and eager, and her mind was voracious in its appetite for chess. She could have been playing grandmasters and learning things that people like Shaibel and Ganz could never teach her. Girev was planning at thirteen to be World Champion. If she had had half his chances, she would have been as good at ten. For a moment the whole autocratic institution of Russian chess merged in her mind with the autocracy of the place where she was now standing. Institutions. There was no violation of Christianity in chess, any more than there was a violation of Marxism. It was nonideological. It wouldn’t have hurt Deardorff to let her play—to encourage her to play. It would have been something for Methuen to boast about. She could see Deardorff’s face in her mind—the thin, rouged cheeks, the tight, reproving smile, the little sadistic glint in her eyes. It had pleased her to cut Beth off from the game she loved. It had pleased her.

  “You want to go in?” Jolene asked.

  “No. Let’s find that motel.”

  The motel had a small pool only a few yards from the road, with some weary-looking maples beside it. The evening was warm enough for a quick swim after dinner. Jolene turned out to be a superb swimmer, going back and forth the length of the pool with hardly a ripple, while Beth treaded water under the diving board. Jolene pulled up near her. “We were chicken,” she said. “We should have gone in the Administration Building. We should have gone in her office.”

  The funeral was in the morning at the Lutheran Church. There were a dozen people and a closed casket. It was an ordinary-sized coffin, and Beth wondered briefly how they could fit a man of Shaibel’s girth into it. Although the church was smaller, it was much like Mrs. Wheatley’s funeral in Lexington. After the first five minutes of it, she was bored and restless, and Jolene was dozing. After the ceremony they followed the small procession to the grave. “I remember,” Jolene said, “he scared shit out of me once, hollering to keep off the library floor. He just mopped it, and Mr. Schell sent me in to get a book. Son of a bitch hated kids.”

  “Mrs. Deardorff wasn’t at the church.”

  “None of them were.”

  The graveside service was an anticlimax. They lowered the coffin, and the minister said a prayer. Nobody cried. They looked like people waiting in line at a teller’s window at the bank. Beth and Jolene were the only young ones there, and none of the others spoke to them. They left immediately after it was over, walking along a narrow path in the old cemetery, past faded gravestones and patches of dandelions. Beth felt no grief for the dead man, no sadness that he was gone. The only thing she felt was guilt that she had never sent him his ten dollars—she should have mailed him a check years ago.

  They had to pass Methuen on the way back to Lexington. Just before the turnoff, Beth said, “Let’s go in. There’s something I want to see,” and Jolene turned the car down the drive to the orphanage.

  Jolene stayed in the car. Beth got out and pushed her way into the side door of the Administration Building. It was dark and cool inside. Straight in front of her was a door that read HELEN DEAR-DORFF—SUPERINTENDENT. She walked down the empty hallway to the doorway at the end. When she pushed it open, there was a light on below. She went slowly down the steps.

  The chessboard and pieces weren’t there, but the table he had played on still sat by the furnace, and his unpainted chair was still in position. The bare bulb over it was on. She stood looking down at the table. Then she seated herself thoughtfully in Mr. Shaibel’s chair and looked up and saw something she had not seen before.

  Behind the place where she used to sit to play was a kind of rough partition made of unplanned wooden boards nailed to two-by-fours. A calendar used to hang there, with scenes from Bavaria above the sheets for the months. Now the calendar was gone and the entire partition was covered with photographs and clippings and covers from Chess Review, each of them neatly taped to the wood and covered with clear plastic to keep it clean and free of dust—the only thing in this dingy basement that was. They were pictures of her. There were printed games from Chess Review, and newspaper pieces from the Lexington Herald-Leader and the New York Times and from some magazines in German. The old Life piece was there, and next to it was the cover of Chess Review with her holding the U.S. Championship trophy. Filling in the smaller spaces were newspaper pictures, some of them duplicates. There must have been twenty photographs.

  ***

  “You find what you were looking for?” Jolene asked when she got back to the car.

  “More,” Beth said. She started to say something else but didn’t. Jolene backed the car up, drove out of the lot and turned back onto the road that led to the highway.

  When they drove up the ramp and pulled onto the interstate, Jolene gunned the VW and it shot ahead. Neither of them looked back. Beth had stopped crying by then and was wiping her face with a handkerchief.

  “Didn’t bite off more than you could chew, did you?” Jolene said.

  “No.” Beth blew her nose. “I’m fine.”

  ***

  The taller of the two women looked like Helen Deardorff. Or didn’t exactly look like her as much as display all indications of spiritual sisterhood. She wore a beige suit and pumps and smiled a good deal in a way totally devoid of feeling. Her name was Mrs. Blocker. The other was plump and slightly embarrassed and wore a dark floral print and no-nonsense shoes. She was Miss Dodge. They were on their way from Houston to Cincinnati and had stopped by for a chat. They sat side by side on Beth’s sofa and talked about the ballet in Houston and the way the city was growing in culture. Clearly they wanted Beth to know Christian Crusade was not merely a narrow, fundamentalist organization. And just as clearly they had come to look her over. They had written ahead.

  Beth listened politely while they talked about Houston and about the agency they were helping to set up in Cincinnati—an agency that had something to do with prote
cting the Christian environment. The conversation faltered for a moment, and Miss Dodge spoke. “What we would really like, Elizabeth, would be some kind of a statement.”

  “A statement?” Beth was sitting in Mrs. Wheatley’s armchair facing them on the sofa.

  Mrs. Blocker picked it up. “Christian Crusade would like you to make your position public. In a world where so many keep silent…” She didn’t finish.

  “What position?” Beth asked.

  “As we know,” Mrs. Dodge said, “the spread of Communism is also the spread of atheism.”

  “I suppose so,” Beth said.

  “It’s not a matter of supposing,” Mrs. Blocker said quickly. “It’s a matter of fact. Of Marxist-Leninist fact. The Holy Word is anathema to the Kremlin, and it is one of the major purposes of Christian Crusade to contest the Kremlin and the atheists who sit there.”

  “I have no quarrel with that,” Beth said.

  “Good. What we want is a statement.” The way Mrs. Blocker said it echoed something that Beth had recognized years before in Mrs. Deardorff’s voice. It was the tone of the practiced bully. She felt the way she did when a player brought out his queen too soon against her. “You want me to make a statement for the press?”

  “Exactly!” Mrs. Blocker said. “If Christian Crusade is going to—” She stopped and felt the manila envelope in her lap as though estimating its weight. “We had something prepared.”

  Beth looked at her, hating her and saying nothing.

  Mrs. Blocker opened the clasp on the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper filled with typing. She gave it to Beth.

  It was the same stationery the original letter had come on, with its list of names running down the side. Beth glanced down the list and saw “Telsa R. Blocker, Executive Secretary,” just above half a dozen men’s names with the abbreviation “Rev.” in front of them. Then she read the statement quickly. Some phrases in it were underlined, like “the atheist-communist nexus” and “a militant Christian Endeavor.” She looked up from the paper at Mrs. Blocker, who was sitting with her knees pressing together, looking around the room with a subdued dislike. “I’m a chess player,” Beth said quietly.

  “Of course you are, my dear,” Mrs. Blocker said. “And you’re a Christian.”

  “I’m not sure of that.”

  Mrs. Blocker stared at her.

  “Look,” Beth said, “I have no intention of saying things like this.”

  Mrs. Blocker leaned forward and took the statement. “Christian Crusade has already invested a good deal of money…” There was a glint in her eye that Beth had seen before.

  Beth stood up. “I’ll give it back.” She walked to the desk and found her checkbook. For a moment she felt like a prig and a fool. It was money for her air fare and Benny’s and for the woman from the Federation as an escort. It would pay her hotel bill and incidental expenses on the trip. But at the bottom of the check they had sent her a month ago, in the place where you normally wrote “rent” or “light bill” to say what the money was for, someone—probably Mrs. Blocker—had written “For Christian Service.” Beth made out a check for four thousand dollars to Christian Crusade, and in the space at the bottom she wrote “Full refund.”

  Miss Dodge’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “I hope you know what you’re doing, dear.” She looked genuinely concerned.

  “I hope so too,” Beth said. Her plane for Moscow left in five weeks.

  ***

  She got Benny on the phone at the first try. “You’re crazy,” he said when she told him.

  “Anyway, I did it,” Beth said. “It’s too late to undo it.”

  “Are the tickets paid for?”

  “No,” Beth said. “Nothing’s paid for.”

  “You have to pay Intourist for the hotel in advance.”

  “I know that.” Beth did not like Benny’s tone. “I’ve got two thousand in my bank account. It would be more, but I’ve been keeping up this house. It’s going to take three thousand more to do it. At least that.”

  “I don’t have it,” Benny said.

  “What do you mean? You’ve got money.”

  “I don’t have it.” There was a long silence. “You can call the Federation. Or the State Department.”

  “The Federation doesn’t like me,” Beth said. “They think I haven’t done as much for chess as I could have.”

  “You should have gone on Tonight and Phil Donahue.”

  “God damn it, Benny,” Beth said. “Come off it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Benny said. “What do you care what those dummies believe? What are you trying to prove?”

  “Benny. I don’t want to go to Russia alone.”

  Benny’s voice suddenly became loud. “You asshole,” he shouted. “You crazy fucking asshole!”

  “Benny…”

  “First you don’t come back to New York and then you pull this crap. You can fucking well go alone.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.” She was beginning to feel a chill inside. “Maybe I didn’t have to give them back the check.”

  “‘Maybe’ is a loser’s word.” Benny’s voice was like ice.

  “Benny, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m hanging up,” Benny said. “You were a pain in the ass when I first met you, and you’re a pain in the ass right now. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” The phone in her hand went click. She put it back in the cradle. She had blown it. She had lost Benny.

  She called the Federation and had to wait on hold for ten minutes before the director came on the line. He was pleasant with her and sympathetic and wished her well in Moscow but said there was no money to be had. “What we have comes mostly from the magazine. The four hundred dollars is all we can possibly spare.”

  It wasn’t until the next morning that she got her call returned from Washington. It was somebody named O’Malley, from Cultural Affairs. When she told him the problem, he went on about how excited they were, there at State, over her “giving the Russians a jolt at their own game.” He asked her how he could help.

  “I need three thousand dollars right away.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” O’Malley said. “I’ll get back to you in an hour.”

  But it was four hours later that he called back. She paced around the kitchen and the garden and made a quick call to Anne Reardon, who was to be the chaperone required by Christian Crusade. Anne Reardon had a woman’s rating of 1900 or so and at least knew the game. Beth had wiped her out once somewhere out West, practically blasting her pieces off the board. No one answered the phone. Beth made herself coffee and leafed through some copies of Deutsche Schachzeitung, waiting for the call. She felt almost nauseated at the way she had let the Christian Crusade money go. Four thousand dollars—for a gesture. Finally the phone rang.

  It was O’Malley again. No dice. He was terribly sorry, but there was no way government funds could be handed out to her without more time and approval. “We’ll be sending one of our men with you, though.”

  “Don’t you have petty cash or something?” Beth asked. “I don’t need funds to undermine the government in Moscow. I just need to take some people to help me.”

  “I’m sorry,” O’Malley said. “I’m really sorry.”

  After hanging up, she went back out into the garden. She would send the check to the Washington office of Intourist in the morning. She would go alone, or with whomever the State Department found to send with her. She had studied Russian, and she would not be totally at a loss. The Russian players would speak English, anyway. She could do her own training. She had been training alone for months. She finished off the last of her coffee. She had been training alone for most of her life.

  FOURTEEN

  They had to sit in a waiting room at Orly airport for seven hours, and when the time came to board the Aeroflot plane, a young woman in an olive-drab uniform had to stamp everybody’s ticket and study everybody’s passport while Beth and Mr. Booth waited at the back of the line for another hour.
But it cheered her a bit when she finally got to the head of the line and the woman said, “The chess champion!” and smiled broadly at her with a surprising lightening of her features. When Beth smiled back at her, the woman said, “Good luck!” as though she really meant it. The woman was, of course, Russian. No official in America would have recognized Beth’s name.

  Her seat was by a window near the back; it had heavy brown plastic upholstery and a little white antimacassar on each arm. She got in with Mr. Booth beside her. She looked out the window at the gray Paris sky with the water in broad sheets on the runways and the planes gleaming darkly in the evening wetness. It felt as if she were already in Moscow. After a few minutes a steward started handing out glasses of water. Mr. Booth drank about half of his and then fished in his jacket pocket. After some fumbling he produced a little silver flask and pulled the cap off with his teeth. He filled the glass with whiskey, put the cap back on and slipped the flask into his pocket. Then he held the glass toward Beth in a perfunctory way, and she shook her head. It wasn’t easy to do. She could have used a drink. She did not like this strange-looking airplane, and she didn’t like the man sitting beside her.

  She had disliked Mr. Booth from the moment he met her at Kennedy and introduced himself. Assistant to the Undersecretary. Cultural Affairs. He would show her the ropes in Moscow. She did not want to be shown any ropes—especially not by this gravelly voiced old man with his dark suit, arched eyebrows and frequent theatrical laughter. When he volunteered the information that he had played chess at Yale in the forties, she said nothing; he had spoken of it as though it were a shared perversion. What she wanted was to be traveling with Benny Watts. She hadn’t even been able to get hold of Benny the night before; his line was busy the first two times she dialed and then there was no answer. She had a letter from the director of the USCF wishing her well and that was all.

  She leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes and tried to relax, tuning out the voices, Russian, German and French, that surrounded her. In a pocket of her hand luggage was a bottle with thirty green pills; she had not taken one for over six months, but she would have one on this airplane if necessary. It would certainly be better than drinking. She needed to rest. The long wait at the airport had left her nerves jagged. She had tried twice to get Jolene on the phone, but there was no answer.