فصل 12

TWELVE

Mrs. Wheatley had always carried Beth’s adoption papers and birth certificate with her when they traveled, and Beth had continued the practice, though up to now they had never been needed. During her first week in New York, Benny took her to Rockefeller Center, and she used them in applying for her passport. Mexico had required only a tourist card, and Mrs. Wheatley had taken care of that. The little booklet with the green cover and her tight-lipped picture inside came two weeks later. Even though she wasn’t sure of going, she had sent the Paris acceptance in a few days before leaving Kentucky for Ohio.

When the time came, Benny drove her to Kennedy Airport and dropped her off at the Air France terminal. “He’s not impossible,” Benny said. “You can beat him.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “Thanks for the help.” She had gotten her suitcase out of the car and was standing by the driver’s window. They were in a no-parking zone, and he could not leave the car to see her off.

“See you next week,” Benny said.

For a moment she wanted to lean in the open window and kiss him, but she restrained herself. “See you then.” She picked up her suitcase and went into the terminal.

This time she was expecting to feel the dark hostility that even seeing him across a room could make her feel, but being prepared for it did not stop her from a sharp intake of breath. He was standing with his back to her, talking to reporters. She looked away nervously, as she had looked away the first time at the zoo in Mexico City. He was just another man in a dark suit, another Russian who played chess, she told herself. One of the men was taking his picture while the other was talking to him. Beth watched the three of them for a while, and her tension eased. She could beat him. She turned and went to the desk to register. Play would start in twenty minutes.

It was the smallest tournament she had ever seen, in this elegant old building near the École Militaire. There were six players and five rounds—one round a day for five days. If she or Borgov lost an early round, they would not play each other, and the competition was strong. Yet, strong as it was, she did not feel either of them would be beaten by anyone else. She walked through the doorway into the tournament room proper, feeling no anxiety about the game she would be playing this morning or about the ones over the next few days. She would not play Borgov until one of the final rounds. She would meet a Dutch grandmaster in ten minutes and play Black against him, but she felt no apprehension.

France was not known for its chess, but the room they played in was beautiful. Two crystal chandeliers hung from its high blue ceiling, and the blue flowered carpet on the floor was thick and rich. There were three tables of polished walnut, each with a pink carnation in a small vase at the side of the board. The antique chairs were upholstered in blue velvet that matched the floor and ceiling. It was like an expensive restaurant, and the tournament directors were like well-trained waiters in tuxedos. Everything was quiet and smooth. She had flown in from New York the night before, had seen almost nothing yet of Paris, but she felt at ease here. She had slept well on the plane and then slept again in her hotel; before that she had put in five solid weeks of practice. She had never felt more prepared.

The Dutchman played the Réti Opening, and she treated it the way she did when Benny played it, getting equality by the ninth move. She began attacking before he had a chance to castle, at first with a bishop sacrifice and then by forcing him to give up a knight and two pawns to defend his king. By the sixteenth move she was threatening combinations all over the board and although she was never able to bring one off, the threat was enough. He was forced to yield to her a bit at a time until, bottled up and irrecoverably behind, he gave up. She was walking happily along the Rue de Rivoli by noon, enjoying the sunshine. She looked at blouses and shoes in the shop windows, and while she bought nothing, it was a pleasure. Paris was a bit like New York but more civilized. The streets were clean and the shop windows bright; there were real sidewalk cafes and people sitting in them enjoying themselves, talking in French. She had been so wrapped up in chess that only now did she realize: she was actually in Paris! This was Paris, this avenue she was walking on; those beautifully dressed women walking toward her were Frenchwomen, Parisiennes, and she herself was eighteen years old and the United States Champion at chess. She felt for a moment a joyful pressure in her chest and slowed her walking. Two men were passing her, heads bent in conversation, and she heard one saying “…avec deux parties seulement.” Frenchmen, and she understood the words! She stopped walking and stood where she was for a moment, taking in the fine gray buildings across the avenue, the light on the trees, the odd smells of this humane city. She might have an apartment here someday, on the Boulevard Raspail or the Rue des Capucines. By the time she was in her twenties she could be World’s Champion and live wherever she wanted to live. She could have a pied à terre in Paris and go to concerts and plays, eat lunch every day in a different café, and dress like these women who walked by her, so sure of themselves, so smart in their well-made clothes, with their heads high and their hair impeccably cut and combed and shaped. She had something that none of them had, and it could give her a life that anyone might envy. Benny had been right to urge her to play here and then, next summer, in Moscow. There was nothing to hold her in Kentucky, in her house; she had possibilities that were endless.

She wandered the boulevards for hours, not stopping to buy anything, just looking at people and buildings and shops and restaurants and trees and flowers. Once she accidentally bumped into an old lady while crossing the Rue de la Paix and found herself saying, “Excusez-moi, madame” as easily as if she had been speaking French all her life.

There was to be a reception at the building the tournament was in at four-thirty; she had difficulty finding her way back and was ten minutes late and out of breath when she arrived. The playing tables had all been pushed to one side of the room, and the chairs placed around the walls. She was ushered to a seat near the door and handed a small cup of café filtre. A pastry cart was wheeled by with the most beautiful pastries she had ever seen. She felt a momentary sadness, wishing that Alma Wheatley could be there to see them. Just as she was taking a napoleon from the cart she heard loud laughter from across the room and looked up. There was Vasily Borgov, holding a coffee cup. The people on each side of him were bent toward him expectantly, taking in his amusement. His face was distorted with ponderous mirth. Beth felt her stomach turn to ice.

She walked back to her hotel that evening and grimly played a dozen of Borgov’s games—games that she already knew thoroughly from studying them with Benny—and went to bed at eleven; she took no pills and slept beautifully. Borgov had been an International Grandmaster for eleven years and World Champion for five, but she would not go passive against him this time. Whatever happened she would not be humiliated by him. And she would have one distinct advantage: he would not be as prepared for her as she was for him.

She went on winning, beating a Frenchman the next day and an Englishman on the day after. Borgov won his games also. On the next to the last day when she was playing another Dutchman—an older and more experienced one—she found herself at the table next to Borgov. Seeing him so close distracted her for a few moments, but she was able to shrug it off. The Dutchman was a strong player, and she concentrated on the game. When she finished, forcing a resignation after nearly four hours, she looked up and saw that the pieces were gone from the next table and Borgov had left.

Leaving, she stopped at the desk and asked whom she would be playing in the morning. The director shuffled through his papers and smiled faintly. “Grandmaster Borgov, mademoiselle.” She had expected it, but her breath caught when he said it.

That night she took three tranquilizers and went to bed early, uncertain if she could relax enough to sleep. But she slept beautifully and awoke refreshed at eight, feeling confident, smart and ready.

When she came in and saw him sitting at the table, he did not seem so formidable. He was wearing his usual dark suit, and his coarse black hair was combed neatly back from his forehead. His face was, as always, impassive, but it did not look threatening. He stood up politely, and when she offered her hand he shook it, but he did not smile. She would be playing the white pieces; when they seated themselves he pressed the button on her clock.

She had already decided what to do. Despite Benny’s advice, she would play pawn to king four and hope for the Sicilian. She had gone through all of Borgov’s published Sicilian games. She did it, picking up the pawn and setting it on the fourth rank, and when he played his queen bishop pawn she felt a pleasant thrill. She was ready for him. She played her knight to king bishop three; he brought his to queen bishop three, and by the sixth move they were in the Boleslavski. She knew, move by move, eight games in which Borgov had played this variation, had gone over each of them with Benny, analyzing each remorselessly. He started the variation with pawn to king four on the sixth move; she played knight to knight three with the certainty that came from knowing she was right, and then looked across the board at him. He was leaning a cheek against a fist, looking down at the board like any other chess player. Borgov was strong, imperturbable and wily, but there was no sorcery in his play. He put his bishop on king two without looking at her. She castled. He castled. She looked around herself at the bright, beautifully furnished room she was in with its two other games of chess quietly in progress.

By the fifteenth move she began to see combinations opening up on both sides, and by the twentieth she was startled by her own clarity. Her mind moved with ease, picking its way delicately among the combination of moves. She began to pressure him along the queen bishop file, threatening a double attack. He side-stepped this, and she strengthened her center pawns. Her position opened more and more, and the possibilities for attack increased, although Borgov seemed to side-step them just in time. She knew this might happen and it did not dismay her; she felt in herself an inexhaustible ability to find strong, threatening moves. She had never played better. She would force him by a series of threats to compromise his position, and then she would mount threats that were double and triple and that he would not be able to avoid. Already his queen bishop was locked in by moves she had forced, and his queen was tied down protecting a rook. Her pieces were freeing themselves more with every move. There seemed to be no end to her ability to find threats.

She looked around again. The other games were finished. That was a surprise. She looked at her watch. It was after one o’clock. They had been playing for over three hours. She turned her attention back to the board, studied it a few minutes and brought her queen to the center. It was time to apply more pressure. She looked across the table at Borgov.

He was as unruffled as ever. He did not meet her eyes but kept his on the board, studying her queen move. Then he shrugged almost imperceptibly and attacked the queen with a rook. She had known he might do that, and she had her response ready. She interposed a knight, threatening a check that would take the rook. He would have to move the king now and she would bring the queen over to the rook file. She could see half a dozen ways of threatening him from there, with threats more urgent than the ones she had been making.

Borgov moved immediately, and he did not move his king. He merely advanced a rook pawn. She had to study it for five minutes before seeing what he was up to. If she checked him, he would let her take the rook and then station his bishop ahead of the pawn he had just pushed, and she would have to move her queen. She held her breath, alarmed. Her rook on the back rank would fall, and with it two pawns. That would be disastrous. She had to back her queen off to a place where it could escape. She gritted her teeth and moved it.

Borgov brought the bishop out, anyway, where the pawn protected it. She stared at it a moment before the meaning of it dawned on her; any of the several moves she could make to dislodge it would cost her in some way, and if she left it there, it strengthened everything about his position. She looked up at his face. He was regarding her now with a hint of a smile. She looked quickly back at the board.

She tried countering with one of her own bishops, but he neutralized it with a pawn move that blocked the diagonal. She had played beautifully, was still playing beautifully, but he was outplaying her. She would have to bear down harder.

She did bear down harder and found excellent moves, as good as any she had ever found, but they were not enough. By the thirty-fifth her throat was dry, and what she saw in front of her on the board was the disarray of her position and the growing strength of Borgov’s. It was incredible. She was playing her best chess, and he was beating her.

On the thirty-eighth move he brought his rook crisply down to her second rank for the first threat of mate. She could see clearly enough how to parry that, but behind it were more and more threats that would either mate her or take her queen or give him a second queen. She felt sick. For a moment it dizzied her just to look at the board, at the visible manifestation of her own powerlessness.

She did not topple her king. She stood up, and looking at his emotionless face, said, “I resign.” Borgov nodded. She turned and walked out of the room, feeling physically ill.

The plane back to New York was like a trap; she sat in her window seat and could not escape the memory of the game, could not stop playing through it in her mind. Several times the stewardess offered her a drink, but she forced herself to decline. She wanted one only too badly; it was frightening. She took tranquilizers, but the knot would not leave her stomach. She had made no mistakes. She had played extraordinarily well. And at the end of it her position was a shambles, and Borgov looked as though it had been nothing.

She did not want to see Benny. She was supposed to call him to pick her up, but she did not want to go back to his apartment. It had been eight weeks since she left her house in Lexington; she would go back and lick her wounds for a while. Her third-prize money from Paris had been surprisingly good; she could afford a quick round trip to Lexington. And there were still papers to sign with her lawyer. She would stay a week and then come back and go on studying with Benny. But what else had she to learn from him? Remembering for a moment all the work she had done readying herself for Paris, she felt sick again. With an effort she shook it off. The main thing was to get ready for Moscow. There was still time.

She called Benny from Kennedy Airport and told him she had lost the final game, that Borgov had outplayed her. Benny was sympathetic but a little distant, and when she told him she was going to Kentucky for a while he sounded irritated.

“Don’t quit,” he said. “One lost game doesn’t prove anything.”

“I’m not quitting,” she said.

In the pile of mail waiting for her at home were several letters from Michael Chennault, the lawyer who had arranged for the deed to the house. It seemed there was some kind of problem; she did not yet have clear title or something. Allston Wheatley was creating difficulty. Without opening the rest of the mail she went to the phone and called Chennault’s office.

The first thing he said when he came on the line was “I tried to get you three times yesterday. Where’ve you been?”

“In Paris,” Beth said, “playing chess.”

“How sweet it must be.” He paused. “It’s Wheatley. He doesn’t want to sign.”

“Sign what?”

“Title,” Chennault said. “Can you get over here? We’ve got to work it out.”

“I don’t see why you need me,” Beth said. “You’re the lawyer. He told me he’d sign what was necessary.”

“He’s changed his mind. Maybe you could talk to him.”

“Is he there?”

“Not in the office. But he’s in town. I think if you could look him in the eye and remind him you’re his legal daughter…”

“Why won’t he sign?”

“Money,” the lawyer said. “He wants to sell the house.”

“Can the two of you come here tomorrow?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the lawyer said.

She looked around the living room after hanging up. The house still belonged to Wheatley. That was a shock. She had barely seen him in it, and yet it was in fact his. She did not want him to have it.

Although it was a hot July afternoon, Allston Wheatley was wearing a suit, a dark-gray salt-and-pepper tweed, and when he seated himself on the sofa he pulled up the creases in the pants legs, showing the whiteness of his thin shanks above the tops of his maroon socks. He had lived in the house for sixteen years, but he showed no interest in anything in it. He entered it like a stranger, with a look that could have been anger or apology, sat down at one end of the sofa, pulled his pants legs up an inch and said nothing.

Something about him made Beth feel sick. He looked exactly the way he had looked when she first saw him, when he came to Mrs. Deardorff’s office with Mrs. Wheatley to look her over.

“Mr. Wheatley has a proposal, Beth,” the lawyer was saying. She looked at Wheatley’s face, which was turned slightly away from them. “You can live here,” the lawyer said, “while you are finding something permanent.” Why wasn’t Wheatley telling her this?

Wheatley’s embarrassment made her somehow squirm for him, as though she were embarrassed herself. “I thought I could keep the house if I made the payments,” she said.

“Mr. Wheatley says you misconstrued him.”

Why was her lawyer speaking for him? Why couldn’t he get his own lawyer, for Christ’s sake? She looked over at him and saw he was lighting a cigarette, his face still inclined away from her, a pained look on his features. “He claims he was only permitting you to stay in the house until you got settled.” “That’s not true,” Beth said. “He said I could have it…” Suddenly something hit her with full force and she turned to Wheatley. “I’m your daughter,” she said. “You adopted me. Why don’t you talk to me?” He looked at her like a startled rabbit. “Alma,” he said, “Alma wanted a child…”

“You signed the papers,” Beth said. “You took on a responsibility. Can’t you even look at me?”

Allston Wheatley stood up and walked across the room to the window. When he turned around, he had somehow pulled himself together, and he looked furious. “Alma wanted to adopt you. Not me. You’re not entitled to everything I own just because I signed some damned papers to shut Alma up.” He turned back to the window. “Not that it worked.” “You adopted me,” Beth said. “I didn’t ask you to do it.” She felt a choking sensation in her throat. “You’re my legal father.”

When he turned and looked at her, she was shocked to see how contorted his face was. “The money in this house is mine, and no smart-assed orphan is going to take it away from me.” “I’m not an orphan,” Beth said. “I’m your daughter.”

“Not in my book you aren’t. I don’t give a shit what your god-damned lawyer says. I don’t give a shit what Alma said either. That woman could not keep her mouth shut.” No one spoke for a while. Finally Chennault asked quietly, “What do you want from Beth, Mr. Wheatley?”

“I want her out of here. I’m selling the house.”

Beth looked at him for a moment before speaking. “Then sell it to me,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Wheatley said.

“I’ll buy it. I’ll pay you whatever your equity is.”

“It’s worth more than that now.”

“How much more?”

“I’d need seven thousand.”

She knew his equity was less than five. “All right,” she said.

“You have that much?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m subtracting what I paid for burying my mother. I’ll show you the receipts.”

Allston Wheatley sighed like a martyr. “All right,” he said. “You two can draw up the papers. I’m going back to the hotel.” He walked over to the door. “It’s too hot in here.” “You could have taken off your coat,” Beth said.

It left her two thousand in the bank. She didn’t like having so little, but it was all right. In the mail there had been invitations to play in two strong tournaments, with good prize money. Fifteen hundred for one and two thousand for the other. And there was the heavy envelope from Russia, inviting her to Moscow in July.

When she got back with her copy of the signed papers she walked around the living room several times, passing her hand lightly over pieces of furniture. Wheatley hadn’t said anything about the furniture, but it was hers. She had asked the lawyer. Wheatley hadn’t even shown up, and Chennault took the papers over to the Phoenix Hotel for him to sign while she waited in the office and read a National Geographic. The house felt different, now that it was hers. She would get some new pieces—a good, low sofa and two small modern armchairs. She could visualize them, with pale-blue linen upholstery and darker blue piping. Not Mrs. Wheatley blue, but her own. Beth blue. She wanted things brighter in the living room, more cheerful. She wanted to erase Mrs. Wheatley’s half-real presence from the place. She would get a bright rug for the floor and have the windows washed. She would get a stereo and some records, a new bedspread and pillowcases for the bed upstairs. From Purcell’s. Mrs. Wheatley had been a good mother; she had not intended to die and leave her.

Beth slept well and awoke feeling angry. She put on the chenille robe and padded downstairs in slippers—Mrs. Wheatley’s slippers—and found herself thinking furiously of the seven thousand dollars she had paid Allston Wheatley. She loved her money; she and Mrs. Wheatley had both taken great pleasure in accumulating it from tournament to tournament, watching it gather interest. They had always opened Beth’s bank statements together to see how much new interest had been credited to the account. And after Mrs. Wheatley’s death it had consoled her to know that she could go on living in the house, buying her groceries at the supermarket and going to movies when she wanted to without feeling pinched for money or having to think about getting work or going to college or finding tournaments to win.

She had brought three of Benny’s chess pamphlets with her from New York; while her eggs were boiling she set up her board on the kitchen table and got out the booklet with games from the last Moscow Invitational. The Russian booklets were printed on expensive paper with good, clear type. She had not really mastered Russian from the night course at the university, but she could read the names and the notations easily enough. Yet the Cyrillic characters were irritating. It angered her that the Soviet government put so much money into chess, and that they even used a different alphabet from hers. When the eggs were done, she peeled them into a bowl with butter and began playing a game between Petrosian and Tal. Grünfeld Defense. Semi-Slav Variation. She got it to the black king knight on queen two for the eighth move and then became bored with it. She had been moving the pieces too fast for analysis, not stopping herself as Benny would have made her do to trace out everything that was going on. She finished the last spoonful of egg and went out the back door into the garden.

It was a hot morning. The grass in the yard was overgrown, it nearly covered the little brick pathway that went to where some shabby tea roses stood. She went back into the house and played the white rook to queen one and then stared at it. She did not want to study chess. That was frightening; a vast amount of study lay ahead of her if she wanted to avoid humiliation in Moscow. She pushed down the fear and went upstairs for a shower. As she dried her hair, she saw with a kind of relief that she needed to have it cut. That would be something to do today. Afterward she could go to Purcell’s and look at sofas for the living room. But it wouldn’t be wise to buy—not until she had more money. And how could she get the lawn mowed? A boy had done it for Mrs. Wheatley, but she didn’t know his telephone number or address.

She needed to clean up the place. There were cobwebs and messy-looking sheets and pillowcases. She could use some new ones. Some new clothes, too. Harry Beltik had left his razor in the bathroom; should she mail it back? The milk had gone sour and the butter was old. The freezer was full of ice crystals with a stack of old frozen chicken dinners stuck in the back. The bedroom rug was dusty, and the windows had fingerprints on the glass and grit on the sills.

Beth shook the confusion out of her head as well as she could and made an appointment with Roberta for a haircut at two. She would ask where to find a cleaning woman for a few weeks. She would go to Morris’s, order some chess books, and have lunch at Toby’s.

But her usual clerk wasn’t at Morris’s that day, and the woman who had replaced him knew nothing about ordering chess books. Beth managed to get her to find a catalogue and ordered three on the Sicilian Defense. She needed game books from grandmaster matches and Chess Informants. But she didn’t know which Yugoslav press published Chess Informant, and neither did the new clerk. It was infuriating. She needed a library as good as Benny’s. Better. Thinking of this, she finally realized angrily that she could go back to New York and forget all this confusion and continue with Benny from where she had left off. But what could Benny teach her now? What could any American teach her? She had moved past them all. She was on her own. She would have to bridge the gap herself that separated American chess from Russian.

At Toby’s the headwaiter knew her and put her at a good table near the front. She ordered asperges vinaigrette for an appetizer and told the waiter she would have that before ordering a main course. “Would you care for a cocktail?” he asked pleasantly. She looked around her at the quiet restaurant, at the people eating lunch, at the table with desserts near the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. “A Gibson,” she said. “On the rocks.” It came almost immediately. It was wonderful to look at. The tumbler was clear and clean; the gin inside was crystalline; the white onions were like two pearls. When she tasted it, it stung her upper lip, then stung her throat with a sweet tease as it went down. The effect on her tense stomach was remarkable; everything about it was rewarding. She finished it slowly, and the deep fury in her began to subside. She ordered another. Back in the shadows at the far end of the room someone was playing a piano. Beth looked at her watch. It was a quarter to twelve. It was good to be alive.

She never got around to ordering the main course. She came out of Toby’s at two, squinting into the sunshine, and jaywalked across Main to David Manly’s Wine Shop. Using two of her traveler’s checks from Ohio she bought a case of Paul Masson burgundy, four bottles of Gordon’s gin and a bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth and had Mr. Manly call her a taxi. Her speech was clear and sharp; her gait was steady. She had eaten six stalks of asparagus and drunk four Gibsons. She had flirted with alcohol for years. It was time to consummate the relationship.

The phone was ringing when she came in, but she did not answer it. The driver helped her with the case of wine, and she tipped him a dollar. When he had left, she got the bottles out one at a time and put them neatly into the cabinet over the toaster, in front of Mrs. Wheatley’s old cans of spaghetti and chili. Then she opened a bottle of gin and twisted the cap off the vermouth. She had never made a cocktail before. She poured gin into the tumbler and added a little vermouth, stirring it with one of Mrs. Wheatley’s spoons. She carried the drink carefully into the living room, sat down and took a long swallow.

The mornings were horrible, but she managed them. She went to Kroger’s on the third day and bought three dozen eggs and a supply of TV dinners. After that she always had two eggs before her first glass of wine. By noon she had usually passed out. She would awake on the sofa or in a chair with her limbs stiff and the back of her neck damp with hot sweat. Sometimes, her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as intense as the pain of a burst abscess in the jaw—a toothache so potent that nothing but drink could alleviate it. Sometimes the drink had to be forced against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.

On Saturday morning she spilled wine on her kitchen chessboard, and on Monday she bumped into the table by accident and sent some of the pieces falling to the floor. She left them there, picking them up only on Thursday, when finally the young man came by to mow the lawn. She lay on the sofa drinking from the last bottle in her case and listened to the roaring of his power mower, smelling the grass cuttings. When she had paid him, she went outside into the grass smell and looked at the lawn with its clumps of cuttings. It touched her to see it so altered, so changed from what it had been. She went back in, got her purse and called a cab. The law did not permit deliveries of wine or liquor. She would have to get another case on her own. Two would be smarter. And she would try Almadén. Someone had said Almadén burgundy was better than Paul Masson. She would try it. Maybe a few bottles of white wine, too. And she needed food.

Lunches came from a can. The chili was pretty good if you added pepper and ate it with a glass of burgundy. Almadén was better than Paul Masson, less astringent on the tongue. The Gibsons, though, could hit her like a club, and she became wary of them, saving them until just before passing out or, sometimes, for the first drink in the morning. By the third week she was taking a Gibson up to bed with her on the nights she made it upstairs to bed. She put it on the nightstand with a Chess Informant over it to keep the alcohol from evaporating, and drank it when she woke up in the middle of the night. Or if not then, in the morning, before going downstairs.

Sometimes the phone rang, but she answered it only when her head and voice were clear. She always spoke aloud to check her level of sobriety before picking up the receiver. She would say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” and if it came out all right, she would take up the phone. A woman called from New York, wanting her on the Tonight Show. She refused.

It wasn’t until her third week of drinking that she went through the pile of magazines that had come while she was in New York and found the Newsweek with her picture in it. They had given her a full page under “Sport.” The picture showed her playing Benny, and she remembered the moment it was taken, during the game’s opening. The position of the pieces on the display board was visible in the photograph, and she saw that her memory was right, she had just made her fourth move. Benny looked thoughtful and distant, as usual. The piece said she was the most talented woman since Vera Menchik. Beth, reading it half-drunk, was annoyed at the space given to Menchik, going on about her death in a 1944 bombing in London before pointing out that Beth was the better player. And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man’s world. To hell with her; it wouldn’t be a man’s world when she finished with it. It was noontime, and she put a pan of canned spaghetti on to heat before reading the rest of the article. The last paragraph was the strongest.

At eighteen, Beth Harmon has established herself as the queen of American chess. She may be the most gifted player since Morphy or Capablanca; no one knows just how gifted she is—how great a potential she holds in that young girl’s body with its dazzling brain. To find out, to show the world if America has outgrown its inferior status in world chess, she will have to go where the big boys are. She will have to go to the Soviet Union.

Beth closed the magazine and poured a glass of Almadén Mountain Chablis to drink with her spaghetti. It was three in the afternoon and hot as fury. And the wine was getting low; only two more bottles stood on the shelf above the toaster.

A week after reading the Newsweek article she awoke on a Thursday morning too sick to get out of bed. When she tried to sit up, she couldn’t. Her head and stomach were throbbing. She was still wearing her jeans and T-shirt from the night before, and she felt suffocated by them. But she could not get them off. The shirt was stuck to her upper body, and she was too weak to pull it over her head. There was a Gibson on the nightstand. She managed to roll over and take it with both hands, and she got half of it down before beginning to retch. For a moment she thought she was choking, but her breath came back eventually and she finished the drink.

She was terrified. She was alone in that furnace of a room and frightened of dying. Her stomach was raw and all of her organs hurt. Had she poisoned herself on wine and gin? She tried sitting up again, and with the gin in her she managed it. She sat there for a few moments calming herself before she went unsteadily into the bathroom and vomited. It seemed to cleanse her. She managed to get her clothes off, and afraid of slipping in the shower and breaking her hip the way unsteady old women did, she filled the tub with lukewarm water and took a bath. She should call McAndrews, Mrs. Wheatley’s old doctor, and make an appointment for sometime around noon. If she could make it to his office. This was more than a hangover; she was ill.

But downstairs, after her bath, she was steadier and got down two eggs with no difficulty. The thought of picking up the phone and calling someone seemed distant now. There was a barrier between herself and whatever world the phone would attach her to; she could not penetrate the barrier. She would be all right. She would drink less, taper off. Maybe she would feel like calling McAndrews after a drink. She poured herself a glass of chablis and began sipping it, and it healed her like the magic medicine it was.

The next morning while she was eating breakfast the phone rang and she picked it up without thinking. Someone named Ed Spencer was at the other end; it took a moment to remember that he was the local tournament director. “It’s about tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

“The tournament. We wondered if you could come an hour early. The Louisville paper is sending a photographer and we think WLEX will have somebody. Could you come in at nine?” Her heart sank. He was talking about the Kentucky State Championship, she had completely forgotten it. She was supposed to defend her title. She was supposed to go to Henry Clay High School tomorrow morning and begin a two-day tournament as defending champion. Her head was throbbing and her hand that held her coffee cup was unsteady. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you call back in an hour?” “Sure, Miss Harmon.”

“Thank you. I’ll tell you in an hour.”

She felt frightened, and she did not want to play chess. She had not looked at a chess book or touched her pieces since buying the house from Allston Wheatley. She did not want even to think about chess. Last night’s bottle was still sitting on the counter next to the toaster. She poured half a glass, but when she drank it, it stung her mouth and tasted foul. She set the unfinished glass in the sink and got orange juice from the refrigerator. If she didn’t clear her head and play the tournament, she would just be drunker tomorrow and sicker. She finished the orange juice and went upstairs, thinking of all the wine she had been drinking, remembering it in the pit of her stomach. Her insides felt fouled and abused. She needed a hot shower and fresh clothes.

It would be a waste. Beltik wouldn’t be in it, and there was no one else as good as he. Kentucky was nothing in chess. Standing naked in the bathroom, she started going through the Levenfish Variation of the Sicilian, squinting her eyes and picturing the pieces on an imaginary board. She did the first dozen moves without a mistake, although the pieces didn’t stand out as clearly as they had a year before. She hesitated after move eighteen, where Black played pawn to knight four and got equality. Smyslov-Botvinnik, 1958. She tried to play out the rest of it, but her head was aching, and after stopping to take two aspirin, she wasn’t sure where the pawns were supposed to be. But she had gotten the first eighteen moves right. She would stay sober today and play tomorrow. When she won the state championship for the second time two years before, it had been simple. After herself and maybe Harry, there weren’t any really strong players in Kentucky. Goldmann and Sizemore were no problem.

When the phone rang again she told Ed Spencer she’d be there at nine-thirty. A half-hour would be plenty of time for pictures.

In the back of her mind she had hoped Townes might show up with a camera, but there was no sign of him. The man from Louisville wasn’t there either. She posed at Board One for a woman photographer from the Herald-Leader, did a three-minute interview with a man from a local television station, and excused herself to go out for a walk around the block before the tournament began. She had managed to get through the day before without drinking and had slept soundly enough with the help of three green pills, but her stomach felt queasy. It was still morning but the sun was too bright; she found herself beginning to sweat after one turn around the block. Her feet hurt. Eighteen years old, and she felt like forty. She would have to stop drinking. Her first opponent was somebody named Foster with a rating in the 1800s. She would be playing Black, but it should be easy—especially if he tried pawn to king four and let her get into the Sicilian.

Foster seemed calm enough, considering that he was playing the U.S. Champion in his first round. He had the good sense not to open with the king pawn against her. He played pawn to queen four, and she decided to avoid the Queen’s Gambit and try to lead him into unfamiliar territory with the Dutch Defense. That meant pawn to king bishop four. They went through the book moves for a while until, somehow, she found herself getting into the Stonewall Formation. It was a position she did not particularly like, and after she started considering the way the board looked she began to feel annoyed with herself. The thing to do was break it open and go for Foster’s throat. She had just been diddling with him, and she wanted to get this over with. Her head was still aching, and she felt uncomfortable even in the good swivel chair. There were too many spectators in the room. Foster was a pale blond in his twenties; he made his moves with a prissy carefulness that was maddening. After the twelfth she looked at the tight position on the board and quickly pushed a center pawn up for sacrifice; she would open up the game and start threatening. She must have a good 600 rating points on this creep; she would wipe him out, get a good lunch and some coffee, and be ready for Goldmann or Sizemore in the afternoon.

Somehow the pawn sacrifice had been hasty. After Foster took with a knight instead of the pawn she had planned on, she found she had either to defend or to drop another pawn. She bit her lip, annoyed, and looked for something to terrorize him with. But she could find nothing. And her mind was working with damnable slowness. She retreated a bishop to protect the pawn.

Foster raised his eyebrows slightly at that and brought a rook over to the queen file, the one she had opened with her pawn sacrifice. She blinked. She did not like the way this was going. Her headache was getting worse. She got up from the board, went to the director and asked him for aspirin. He found some somewhere, and she took three, chasing them with water from a paper cup, before she went back to Foster. As she walked through the main tournament room people looked up from their games to stare at her. She was suddenly angry that she had agreed to play in this third-rate tournament, and angry that she had to go back and contend with Foster. She hated the situation: if she beat him, it was meaningless to her, and if he beat her, she would look terrible. But he wouldn’t beat her. Benny Watts couldn’t beat her, and some prissy graduate student from Louisville wasn’t about to drive her into a corner. She would find a combination somewhere and tear him apart with it.

But there was no combination to be found. She kept staring at the position as it changed gradually from move to move, and it did not open up for her. Foster was good—clearly better than his rating showed—but he wasn’t that good. The people who filled the little room watched in silence as she went more and more on the defensive, trying to keep her face from showing the alarm that was beginning to dominate her moves. And what was wrong with her mind? She hadn’t had a drink for a day and two nights. What was wrong? In the pit of her stomach she was beginning to feel terrified. If she had somehow damaged her talent… And then, on the twenty-third move, Foster began a series of trades in the center of the board, and she found herself unable to stop it, watching her pieces disappear with a sick feeling in her stomach, watching her position become more and more stark in its deterioration. She found herself playing out a lost game, overwhelmed by the two-pawn advantage of a player with a rating of 1800. There was nothing she could do about it. He would queen a pawn and humiliate her with it.

She lifted her king from the board before he could do it and left the room without looking at him, pushing her way through a crowd of people, avoiding their eyes, almost holding her breath, going out into the main room and up to the desk.

“I’m feeling ill,” she told the director. “I’m going to have to drop out.”

She walked up Main, heavy-footed and in turmoil, trying not to think about the game. It was horrible. She had allowed this tournament to be a test for her—the kind of rigged test an alcoholic makes for himself—and still she had failed it. She must not drink when she got home. She must read and play chess and get herself together. But the thought of going to the empty house was frightening. What else could she do? There was nothing she wanted to do and no one to call. The game she had lost was inconsequential and the tournament was nothing, but the humiliation was overwhelming. She did not want to hear discussions about how she had lost to Foster, did not want to see Foster himself again. She must not drink. She had a real tournament coming up in California in five months. What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo—and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away.

At home she tried a Russian game book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She started going through her game with Foster, setting the board up in the kitchen, but the moves of it were too painful. That damned Stonewall, and the hastily pushed pawn. A patzer’s move. Bad chess. Hungover chess. The telephone rang, but she didn’t answer. She sat at the board and wished for a moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess. Most people did.

When she awoke on the sofa the next morning, still wearing the Paris clothes she had worn when losing the game to Foster, she was frightened in a new way. She could sense her brain being physically blurred by alcohol, its positional grasp gone clumsy, its penetration clouded. But after breakfast she showered and changed and then poured herself a glass of wine. It was almost mechanical; she had learned to cut off thought as she did it. The main thing was to eat some toast first, so the wine wouldn’t burn her stomach.

She kept drinking for days, but the memory of the game she had lost and the fear of what she was doing to the sharp edge of her gift would not go away, except when she was so drunk that she could not even think. There was a piece in the Sunday paper about her, with one of the pictures taken that morning at the high school, and a headline reading CHESS CHAMP DROPS FROM TOURNEY. She threw the paper away without reading the article.

Then one morning after a night of dark and confusing dreams she awoke with an unaccustomed clarity: if she did not stop drinking immediately she would ruin what she had. She had allowed herself to sink into this frightening murk. She had to find a foothold somewhere to push herself free of it. She would have to get help. With a great sense of relief, she suddenly knew who it was she wanted to get help from.