Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

“Young lady,” Mr. Bradley said, “you have to buy the magazine or put it back.”

She turned, startled. “Can’t I just…?”

“Read the sign,” Mr. Bradley said.

In front of her was a hand-lettered sign: IF YOU WANT TO READ IT—BUY IT. Beth had fifteen cents and that was all. Mrs. Wheatley had told her a few days before that she would have to do without an allowance for a while; they were rather short and Mr. Wheatley had been delayed out West. Beth put the magazine back and left the store.

Halfway back up the block she stopped, thought a moment and went back. There was a stack of newspapers on the counter, by Mr. Bradley’s elbow. She handed him a dime and took one. Mr. Bradley was busy with a lady who was paying for a prescription. Beth went over to the end of the magazine rack with her paper under her arm and waited.

After a few minutes Mr. Bradley said, “We have three sizes.” She heard him going to the back of the store with the lady following. Beth took the copy of Chess Review and slipped it into her newspaper.

Outside in the sunshine she walked a block with the paper under her arm. At the first corner she stopped, took out the magazine and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt, covering it with her robbin’s-egg-blue sweater, made of reprocessed wool and bought at Ben Snyder’s. She pulled the sweater down loosely over the magazine and dropped the newspaper into the corner trash can.

Walking home with the folded magazine tucked securely against her flat belly she thought again about that rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven, and Black had better not take it with his knight because… She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining rook could slide over, and if the black player took the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…

She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn moved again, and then the bishop went the other way and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One of the little boys across the street began crying. There was nothing Black could do. The game would be over in twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.

Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.

“Allston should have returned weeks ago,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying. She was sitting up in bed, with a crossword-puzzle magazine beside her and a little TV set on the dresser with the sound turned down. Beth had just brought her a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen. Mrs. Wheatley was wearing her pink robe and her face was covered with powder.

“Will he be back soon?” Beth said. She didn’t really want to talk with Mrs. Wheatley; she wanted to get back to Chess Review .

“He has been unavoidably detained,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Beth nodded. Then she said, “I’d like to get a job for after school.”

Mrs. Wheatley blinked at her. “A job?”

“Maybe I could work in a store, or wash dishes somewhere.”

Mrs. Wheatley stared at her for a long time before speaking. “At thirteen years of age?” she said finally. She blew her nose quietly on a tissue and folded it. “I should think you are well provided for.”

“I’d like to make some money.”

“To buy clothes with, I suspect.”

Beth said nothing.

“The only girls of your age who work,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “are colored.” The way she said “colored” made Beth decide to say nothing further about it.

To join the United States Chess Federation cost six dollars. Another four dollars got you a subscription to the magazine. There was something even more interesting: in the section called “Tournament Life” there were numbered regions; including one for Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky, and in the listing under it was an item that read: “Kentucky State Championship, Thanksgiving weekend, Henry Clay High School Auditorium, Lexington, Fri., Sat. Sun.,” and under this it said: “$185 in prizes. Entry fee: $5.00. USCF members only.”

It would take six dollars to join and five dollars to get into the tournament. When you took the bus down Main you passed Henry Clay High; it was eleven blocks from Janwell Drive. And it was five weeks until Thanksgiving.

“Can anyone say it verbatim?” Mrs. MacArthur said.

Beth put up her hand.

“Beth?”

She stood. “In any right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” She sat down.

Margaret snickered and leaned toward Gordon, who sat beside her and sometimes held her hand. “That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt. Gordon laughed. Beth looked out the window at the autumn leaves.

“I do not know where the money goes!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.” She plopped into the chintz-covered armchair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wide-eyed, as if expecting a guillotine to fall. “I have paid electric bills and telephone bills and have bought simple, uncomplicated groceries. I have denied myself cream for my morning coffee, have bought nothing whatever for my person, have attended neither the cinema nor the rummage sales at First Methodist, and yet I have seven dollars left where I should have at least twenty.” She laid the crumpled one-dollar bills on the table beside her, having fished them from her purse a few moments before. “We have this for ourselves until the end of October. It will scarcely buy chicken necks and porridge.”

“Doesn’t Methuen send you a check?” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley brought her eyes down from the ceiling and stared at her. “For the first year,” she said evenly. “As if the expenses of keeping you didn’t exhaust it.”

Beth knew that wasn’t true. The check was seventy dollars, and Mrs. Wheatley didn’t spend that much on her.

“It requires twenty dollars for us to live passably until the first of the month,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I am thirteen dollars short of that.” She turned her gaze briefly ceilingward and then back to Beth again. “I shall have to keep better records.”

“Maybe it’s inflation,” Beth said, with some truth. She had taken only six, for the membership.

“Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified.

The problem was the five dollars for the entry fee. In home room, the day after Mrs. Wheatley’s oration about money, Beth took a sheet from her composition book and wrote a letter to Mr. Shaibel, Custodian, Methuen Home, Mount Sterling, Kentucky. It read:

Dear Mr. Shaibel:

There is a chess tournament here with a first prize of one hundred dollars and a second prize of fifty dollars. There are other prizes, too. It costs five dollars to enter it, and I don’t have that.

If you will send me the money I will pay you back ten dollars if I win any prize at all.

Very truly yours,

Elizabeth Harmon

The next morning she took an envelope and a stamp from the cluttered desk in the living room while Mrs. Wheatley was still in bed. She put the letter in the mailbox on her way to school.