Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

Beth bent over, reading the paper:

The world of Kentucky Chess was astonished this weekend by the playing of a local girl, who triumphed over hardened players to win the Kentucky State Championship. Elizabeth Harmon, a seventh-grade student at Fairfield Junior, showed “a mastery of the game unequaled by any female” according to Harry Beltik, whom Miss Harmon defeated for the state crown.

Beth grimaced; she hated the picture of herself. It showed her freckles and her small nose all too clearly.

“I want to open a bank account,” she said.

“A bank account?”

“You’ll have to go with me.”

“But, my dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “what would you open a bank account with ?”

Beth reached into her blouse pocket, took out the check and handed it to her. Mrs. Wheatley sat up in her chair and held the check in her hand as though it were a Dead Sea Scroll. She was silent for a moment, reading it. Then she said softly, “One hundred dollars.”

“I need a parent or guardian. At the bank.”

“One hundred dollars.” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Then you won it?”

“Yes. It says ‘First Place’ on the check.”

“I see ,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I hadn’t the foggiest idea people made money playing chess.”

“Some tournaments have bigger prizes than that.”

“Goodness!” Mrs. Wheatley was still staring at the check.

“We can go to the bank after school tomorrow.”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

The next day, when they came into the living room after the bank, there was a copy of Chess Review on the cobbler’s bench in front of the sofa. Mrs. Wheatley hung her coat in the hall closet and picked up the magazine. “While you were at school,” she said, “I was leafing through this. I see there’s a major tournament in Cincinnati the second week in December. First prize is five hundred dollars.”

Beth studied her for a long moment. “I have to be in school then,” she said. “And Cincinnati’s pretty far from here.”

“The Greyhound bus requires only two hours for the trip,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I took the liberty of calling.”

“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 De fense,” 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.