The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  The telephone rang with abrupt violence, and Mrs Appleby nodded toward it. ‘Almost as carefully,’ she said softly, ‘as Mr Gainsborough. Unless I call him every evening at nine to report I am well and happy, it seems he will jump to the most shocking conclusions.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mr Appleby. He lifted the telephone, and there was no mistaking the voice that spoke.

  ‘Hello,’ said the elder Gainsborough. ‘Hello, Mrs Appleby?’

  Mr Appleby essayed a cunning move. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid she can’t speak to you now. What is it?’

  The voice in his ear took on an unmistakable cold menace. ‘This is Gainsborough, Mr Appleby, and I wish to speak to your wife immediately. I will give you ten seconds to have her at this telephone, Mr Appleby. Do you understand?’

  Mr Appleby turned dully toward his wife and held out the telephone. ‘It’s for you,’ he said, and then saw with a start of terror that as she turned to set down the glass of water the rug skidded slightly under her feet. Her arms flailed the air as she fought for balance, the glass smashed at his feet drenching his neat trousers, and her face twisted into a silent scream. Then her body struck the floor and lay inertly in the position with which he was so familiar.

  Watching her, he was barely conscious of the voice emerging tinnily from the telephone in his hand.

  ‘The ten seconds are up, Mr Appleby,’ it said shrilly. ‘Do you understand? Your time is up!’

  Fool’s Mate

  When George Huneker came home from the office that evening he was obviously fired by a strange excitement. His ordinarily sallow cheeks were flushed, his eyes shone behind his rimless spectacles, and instead of carefully removing his rubbers and neatly placing them on the strip of mat laid for that purpose in a corner of the hallway, he pulled them off with reckless haste and tossed them aside. Then, still wearing his hat and overcoat, he undid the wrappings of the package he had brought with him and displayed a small, flat, leather case. When he opened the case Louise saw a bed of shabby green velvet in which rested the austere black and white forms of a set of chessmen.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ George said. He ran a finger lovingly over one of the pieces. ‘Look at the work on this: nothing fancy to stick away in a glass case, you understand, but everything neat and clean and ready for action the way it ought to be. All genuine ivory and ebony, and all handmade, every one of them.’

  Louise’s eyes narrowed. ‘And just how much did you pay out for this stuff?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ George said. ‘That is, I didn’t buy it. Mr Oelrichs gave it to me.’

  ‘Oelrichs?’ said Louise. ‘You mean that old crank you brought home to dinner that time? The one who just sat and watched us like the cat that ate the canary, and wouldn’t say a word unless you poked it out of him?’

  ‘Oh, Louise!’

  ‘Don’t you “Oh, Louise” me! I thought I made my feelings about him mighty clear to you long before this. And, may I ask, why should our fine Mr Oelrichs suddenly decide to give you this thing?’

  ‘Well,’ George said uneasily, ‘you know he’s been pretty sick, and what with him needing only a few months more for retirement I was carrying most of his work for him. Today was his last day, and he gave me this as a kind of thank-you present. Said it was his favorite set, too, but he wanted to give me the best thing he could, and this was it.’

  ‘How generous of Mr Oelrichs,’ Louise remarked frigidly. ‘Did it ever occur to him that if he wanted to pay you back for your time and trouble, something practical would be a lot more to the point?’

  ‘Why, I was just doing him a favor, Louise. Even if he did offer me money or anything like that, I wouldn’t take it.’

  ‘The more fool you,’ Louise sniffed. ‘All right, take off your things, put them away right, and get ready for supper. It’s just about ready.’

  She moved toward the kitchen, and George trailed after her placatingly. ‘You know, Louise, Mr Oelrichs said something that was very interesting.’

  ‘I’m sure he did.’

  ‘Well, he said there were some people in the world who needed chess – that when they learned to play it real well they’d see for themselves how much they needed it. And what I thought was that there’s no reason why you and I …’

  She stopped short and faced him with her hands on her hips. ‘You mean that after I’m done taking care of the house, and shopping, and cooking your hot meals, and mending and darning, then I’m supposed to sit down and learn how to play games with you! For a man going on fifty, George Huneker, you get some peculiar ideas.’

  Pulling off his overcoat in the hallway, he reflected that there was small chance of his losing track of his age, at least not as long as Louise doted so much on reminding him. He had first heard about it a few months after his marriage when he was going on thirty and had been offered a chance to go into business for himself. He had heard about it every year since, on some occasion or other, although as he learned more and more about Louise he had fallen into fewer traps.

  The only trouble was that Louise always managed to stay one jump ahead of him, and while in time he came to understand that she would naturally put her foot down at such things as his leaving a good steady job, or at their having a baby when times were hard (and in Louise’s opinion they always were), or at buying the house outright when they could rent it so cheap, it still came as a surprise that she so bitterly opposed the idea of having company to the house, or of reading some book he had just enjoyed, or of tuning in the radio to a symphony, or, as in this case, of taking up chess.

  Company, she made it clear, was a bother and expense, small print hurt her eyes, symphonies gave her a splitting headache, and chess, it seemed, was something for which she could not possibly find time. Before they had been married, George thought unhappily, it had all been different somehow. They were always in the midst of a crowd of his friends, and when books or music or anything like that were the topics of discussion, she followed the talk with bright and vivacious interest. Now she just wanted to sit with her knitting every night while she listened to comedians bellowing over the radio.

  Not being well, of course, could be one reason for this. She suffered from a host of aches and pains which she dwelt on in such vivid detail at times that George himself could feel sympathetic twinges go through him. Their medicine chest bulged with remedies, their diet had dwindled to a bland and tasteless series of concoctions, and it was a rare month which did not find Louise running up a sizable doctor’s bill for the treatment of what George vaguely came to think of as ‘women’s troubles.’

  Still, George would have been the first to point out that despite the handicaps she worked under, Louise had been as good a wife as a man could ask for. His salary over the years had hardly been luxurious, but penny by penny she had managed to put aside fifteen thousand dollars in their bank account. This was a fact known only to the two of them since Louise made it a point to dwell on their relative poverty in her conversations with anyone, and while George always felt some embarrassment when she did this, Louise pointed out that one of the best ways to save your money was not to let the world at large know you had any, and since a penny saved was a penny earned she was contributing as much to their income in her way as George was in his. This, while not reducing George’s embarrassment, did succeed in glossing it with increased respect for Louise’s wisdom and capability.

  And when added to this was the knowledge that his home was always neat as a pin, his clothing carefully mended, and his health fanatically ministered to, it was easy to see why George chose to count his blessings rather than make an issue of anything so trivial as his wife’s becoming his partner at chess. Which, as George himself might have admitted had you pinned him down to it, was a bit of a sacrifice, for in no time at all after receiving the set of chessmen he found himself a passionate devotee of the game. And chess, as he sometimes reflected while poring over his board of an evening with the radio booming in his ears and his wife’s knitting needl
es flickering away contentedly, would seem to be a game greatly enhanced by the presence of an opponent. He did not reflect this ironically; there was no irony in George’s nature.

  Mr Oelrichs, in giving him the set, had said he would be available for instruction at any time. But since Louise had already indicated that the gentleman would hardly be a welcome guest in her home, and since she had often expressed decided opinions on any man who would leave his hearth and home to go traipsing about for no reason, George did not even think the matter worth broaching. Instead, he turned to a little text aptly entitled Invitation to Chess, was led by the invitation to essay other and more difficult texts, and was thence led to a whole world of literature on chess, staggering in its magnitude and complexity.

  He ate chess, drank chess, and slept chess. He studied the masters and past masters until he could quote chapter and verse from even their minor triumphs. He learned the openings, the middle game, the end game. He learned to eschew the reckless foray which led nowhere in favor of the positional game where cunning strategy turned a side into a relentless force that inevitably broke and crushed the enemy before it. Strange names danced across his horizon: Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker, Nimzovich, and he pursued them, drunk with the joy of discovery, through the ebony and ivory mazes of their universe.

  But in all this there was still that one thing lacking: an opponent, a flesh-and-blood opponent against whom he could test himself. It was one thing, he sometimes thought disconsolately, to have a book at one’s elbow while pondering a move; it would be quite another to ponder even the identical move with a man waiting across the board to turn it to his own advantage and destroy you with it. It became a growing hunger, that desire to make a move and see a hand reach across the table to answer it; it became a curious obsession so that at times, when Louise’s shadow moved abruptly against the wall or a log settled in the fireplace, George would look up suddenly, half expecting to see the man seated in the empty chair opposite him.

  He came to visualize the man quite clearly after a while. A quiet contemplative man much like himself, in fact, with graying hair and rimless spectacles that tended to slide a bit when he bent over the board. A man who played just a shade better than himself; not so well that he could not be beaten, but well enough to force George to his utmost to gain an occasional victory.

  And there was one thing more he expected of this man: something a trifle unorthodox, perhaps, if one was a stickler for chess ritual. The man must prefer to play the white side all the time. It was the white side that moved first, that took the offensive until, perhaps, the tide could be turned against it. George himself infinitely preferred the black side, preferred to parry the thrusts and advances of white while he slowly built up a solid wall of defense against its climactic moves. That was the way to learn the game, George told himself: after a player learned how to make himself invulnerable on the defense, there was nothing he couldn’t do on attack.

  However, to practice one’s defense still required a hand to set the offense into motion, and eventually George struck on a solution which, he felt with mild pride, was rather ingenious. He would set up the board, seat himself behind the black side, and then make the opening move for white. This he would counter with a black piece, after which he would move again for white, and so on until some decision was reached.

  It was not long before the flaws in this system became distressingly obvious. Since he naturally favored the black side, and since he knew both plans of battle from their inception, black won game after game with ridiculous ease. And after the twentieth fiasco of this sort George sank back into his chair despairingly. If he could only put one side out of his mind completely while he was moving for the other, why, there would be no problem at all! Which, he realized cheerlessly, was a prospect about as logical as an ancient notion he had come across in his reading somewhere, the notion that if you cut a serpent in half, the separated halves would then turn on each other and fight themselves savagely to death.

  He set up the board again after this glum reflection, and then walked around the table and seated himself in white’s chair. Now, if he were playing the white side what would he do? A game depends not only on one’s skill, he told himself, but also on one’s knowledge of his opponent. And not only on the opponent’s style of play, but also on his character, his personality, his whole nature. George solemnly looked across the table at black’s now empty chair and brooded on this. Then slowly, deliberately, he made his opening move.

  After that, he quickly walked around the table and sat down on black’s side. The going, he found, was much easier here, and almost mechanically he answered white’s move. With a thrill of excitement chasing inside him, he left his seat and moved around to the other side of the board again, already straining hard to put black and its affairs far out of his mind.

  ‘For pity’s sake, George, what are you doing!’

  George started, and looked around dazedly. Louise was watching him, her lips compressed, her knitting dropped on her lap, and her manner charged with such disapproval that the whole room seemed to frown at him. He opened his mouth to explain, and hastily thought better of it.

  ‘Why, nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing at all.’

  ‘Nothing at all!’ Louise declared tartly. ‘The way you’re tramping around, somebody would think you can’t find a comfortable chair in the house. You know I …’

  Then her voice trailed off, her eyes became glassy, her body straightened and became rigid with devouring attention. The comedian on the radio had answered an insult with another evidently so devastating that the audience in the studio could do no more than roar in helpless laughter. Even Louise’s lips turned up ever so slightly at the corners as she reached for her knitting again, and George gratefully seized this opportunity to drop into the chair behind black’s side.

  He had been on the verge of a great discovery, he knew that; but what exactly had it been? Was it that changing places physically had allowed him to project himself into the forms of two players, each separate and distinct from the other? If so, he was at the end of the line, George knew, because he would never be able to explain all that getting up and moving around to Louise.

  But suppose the board itself were turned around after each move? Or, and George found himself charged with a growing excitement, since chess was completely a business of the mind anyhow – since, when one had mastered the game sufficiently it wasn’t even necessary to use a board at all – wasn’t the secret simply a matter of turning oneself into the other player when his move came?

  It was white’s move now, and George bent to his task. He was playing white’s side, he must do what white would do – more than that, he must feel white’s very emotions – but the harder he struggled and strained in his concentration, the more elusive became his goal. Again and again, at the instant he was about to reach his hand out, the thought of what black intended to do, of what black was surely going to do, slipped through his mind like a dot of quicksilver and made him writhe inwardly with a maddening sense of defeat.

  This now became the obsession, and evening after evening he exercised himself at it. He lost weight, his face drew into haggard lines so that Louise was always at his heels during mealtimes trying to make him take an interest in her wholly uninteresting recipes. His interest in his job dwindled until it was barely perfunctory, and his superior, who at first had evinced no more than a mild surprise and irritation, started to shake his head ominously.

  But with every game, every move, every effort he made, George felt with exultation he was coming nearer that goal. There would come a moment, he told himself with furious certainty, when he could view the side across the board with objectivity, with disinterest, with no more knowledge of its intentions and plans than he would have of any flesh-and-blood player who sat there; and when that day came, he would have achieved a triumph no other player before him could ever claim!

  He was so sure of himself, so confident that the triumph lay beyond the next move each tim
e he made a move, that when it came at last his immediate feeling was no more than a comfortable gratification and an expansive easing of all his nerves. Something like the feeling, he thought pleasurably, that a man gets after a hard day’s work when he sinks into bed at night. Exactly that sort of feeling, in fact.

  He had left the black position on the board perilously exposed through a bit of carelessness, and then in an effort to recover himself had moved the king’s bishop in a neat defensive gesture that could cost white dear. When he looked up to study white’s possible answer he saw White sitting there in the chair across the table, his fingertips gently touching each other, an ironic smile on his lips. ‘Good,’ said White pleasantly. ‘Surprisingly good for you, George.’

  At this, George’s sense of gratification vanished like a soap bubble flicked by a casual finger. It was not only the amiable insult conveyed by the words which nettled him; equally disturbing was the fact that White was utterly unlike the man that George had been prepared for. He had not expected White to resemble him as one twin resembles another, yet feature for feature the resemblance was so marked that White could have been the image that stared back at him from his shaving mirror each morning. An image, however, which, unlike George’s, seemed invested with a power and arrogance that were quite overwhelming. Here, George felt with a touch of resentment, was no man to hunch over a desk computing dreary rows of figures, but one who with dash and brilliance made great decisions at the head of a long committee table. A man who thought a little of tomorrow, but much more of today and the good things it offered. And one who would always find the price for those good things.

  That much was evident in the matchless cut of White’s clothing, in the grace and strength of the lean, well-manicured hands, in the merciless yet merry glint in the eyes that looked back into George’s. It was when he looked into those eyes that George found himself fumbling for some thought that seemed to lie just beyond him. The image of himself was reflected so dearly in those eyes; perhaps it was not an image. Perhaps …