Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

There was strong applause. Beth looked at the crowd around the table. Near the back, in her blue dress, was Mrs. Wheatley, clapping her hands enthusiastically.

Going back to the room, Mrs. Wheatley carried the heavy trophy and Beth had the check in her blouse pocket. Mrs. Wheatley had written it all out on a sheet of hotel stationery that sat on top of the TV: sixty-six dollars for three days at the Gibson, plus three-thirty tax; twenty-three sixty for the bus, and the price of each meal, including tip. “I’ve allowed twelve dollars for our celebration supper tonight and two dollars for a small breakfast tomorrow. That makes our total expenses equal one seventy-two thirty.”

“It leaves over three hundred dollars,” Beth said.

There was a silence for a while. Beth looked at the sheet of paper, although she understood it perfectly well. She was wondering if she should offer to split the money with Mrs. Wheatley. She did not want to do that. She had won it herself.

Mrs. Wheatley broke the silence. “Perhaps you could give me ten percent,” she said pleasantly. “As an agent’s commission.”

“Thirty-two dollars,” Beth said, “and seventy-seven cents.”

“They told me at Methuen that you were marvelous at math.”

Beth nodded. “Okay,” she said.

They had something with veal in it at an Italian restaurant. Mrs. Wheatley ordered herself a carafe of red wine and drank it and smoked Chesterfields throughout the meal. Beth liked the bread and the cold, pale butter. She liked the little tree with oranges on it that sat on the bar, not far from their table.

Mrs. Wheatley wiped her chin with her napkin when she finished the wine and lit a final cigarette. “Beth, dear,” she said, “there’s a tournament in Houston over the holidays, starting the twenty-sixth. I understand it’s very easy to travel on Christmas Day, since most people are eating plum pudding or whatever.”

“I saw,” Beth said. She had read the ad in Chess Review and wanted very much to go. But Houston had seemed awfully far away for a six hundred-dollar prize.

“I believe we could fly to Houston,” Mrs. Wheatley said brightly. “We could have a pleasant winter vacation in the sun.”

Beth was finishing her spumoni. “Okay,” she said and then, looking down at the ice cream, “Okay, Mother.”

Their Christmas dinner was microwave turkey served on an airplane, with a complimentary glass of champagne for Mrs. Wheatley and canned orange juice for Beth. It was the best Christmas she had ever had. The plane flew over a snow-covered Kentucky and, at the end of the trip, circled out above the Gulf of Mexico. They landed in warm air and sunshine. Driving in from the airport, they passed one construction site after the other, the big yellow cranes and bulldozers standing idle near stacks of girders. Someone had hung a Christmas wreath on one of them.

A week before they left Lexington a new copy of Chess Review had come in the mail. When Beth opened it she found a small picture of herself and Beltik at the back, and a banner headline: SCHOOLGIRL TAKES KENTUCKY CHAMPIONSHIP FROM MASTER. Their game was printed and the commentary said: “Onlookers were amazed at her youthful mastery of the fine points of strategy. She shows the assurance of players twice her age.” She read it twice before showing it to Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley was ecstatic; she had read the article in the Lexington paper aloud and then said, “Wonderful!” This time she read in silence before saying, “This is national recognition, dear,” in a hushed voice.

Mrs. Wheatley had brought the magazine with her, and they spent part of the time on the plane marking the tournaments Beth would play over the next several months. They settled on one a month; Mrs. Wheatley was afraid they would run out of diseases and, as she said, “credibility” if she wrote more excuses than that. Beth wondered to herself if they shouldn’t just ask for permission in a straightforward way—after all, boys were allowed to miss classes for basketball and football—but she was wise enough to say nothing. Mrs. Wheatley seemed to take immense enjoyment in doing it this way. It was like a conspiracy.

She won in Houston without any trouble. She was, as Mrs. Wheatley said, really “getting the hang of it.” She was forced to draw her third game but took the final one by a dazzling combination, beating the forty-year-old Southwest Champion as though he were a beginner. They stayed over two days “for the sun” and visited the Museum of Fine Arts and the Zoological Gardens. On the day after the tournament Beth’s picture was in the paper, and this time it made her feel good to see it. The article called her a “ Wunderkind .” Mrs. Wheatley bought three copies, saying, “I just might start a scrapbook.”

In January, Mrs. Wheatley called the school to say that Beth had a relapse of mono, and they went to Charleston. In February it was Atlanta and a cold; in March, Miami and the flu. Sometimes Mrs. Wheatley talked to the Assistant Principal and sometimes to the Dean of Girls. No one questioned the excuses. It seemed likely that some of the students knew about her from out-of-town papers or something, but no one in authority said anything. Beth worked on her chess for three hours every evening between tournaments. She lost one game in Atlanta but still came in first, and she stayed undefeated in the other two cities. She enjoyed flying with Mrs. Wheatley, who sometimes became comfortably buzzed by martinis on the planes. They talked and giggled together. Mrs. Wheatley said funny things about the stewardesses and their beautifully pressed jackets and bright, artificial make-up, or talked about how silly some of her neighbors in Lexington were. She was high-spirited and confidential and amusing, and Beth would laugh a long time and look out the window at the clouds below them and feel better than she had ever felt, even during those times at Methuen when she had saved up her green pills and taken five or six at once.

She grew to love hotels and restaurants and the excitement of being in a tournament and winning it, moving up gradually game by game and having the crowd around her table increase with each win. People at tournaments knew who she was now. She was always the youngest there, and sometimes the only female. Back at school afterward things seemed more and more drab. Some of the other students talked about going to college after high school, and some had professions in mind. Two girls she knew wanted to be nurses. Beth never participated in these conversations; she already was what she wanted to be. But she talked to no one about her traveling or about the reputation she was building in tournament chess.

When they came back from Miami in March, there was an envelope from the Chess Federation in the mail. In it was a new membership card with her rating: 1881. She had been told it would take time for the rating to reflect her real strength; she was satisfied for now to be, finally, a rated player. She would push the figure up soon enough. The next big step was Master, at 2200. After 2000 they called you an Expert, but that didn’t mean much. The one she liked was International Grandmaster; that had weight to it.

That summer they went to New York to play at the Henry Hudson Hotel. They had developed a taste for fine food, though at home it was mostly TV dinners, and in New York they ate at French restaurants, taking buses crosstown to Le Bistro and Cafe Argenteuil. Mrs. Wheatley had gone to a gas station in Lexington and bought a Mobil Travel Guide; she picked places with three or more stars, and then they found them with the little map. It was terribly expensive, but neither of them said a word about the cost. Beth would eat smoked trout but never fresh fish; she remembered the fish she’d had to eat on Fridays at Methuen. She decided that next year at school she would take French.