Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

The only problem was that, on the road, she took the pills from Mrs. Wheatley’s prescription to help her sleep at night, and sometimes it required an hour or so to get her head clear in the morning. But tournament games never started before nine, and she made a point of getting up in time to have several cups of coffee from room service. Mrs. Wheatley did not know about the pills and showed no concern over Beth’s appetite for coffee; she treated her in every way like an adult. Sometimes it seemed as though Beth were the older of the two.

Beth loved New York. She liked riding on the bus, and she liked taking the IRT subway with its grit and rattle. She liked window shopping when she had a chance, and she enjoyed hearing people on the street talking Yiddish or Spanish. She did not mind the sense of danger in the city or the arrogant way the taxis drove or the dirty glitter of Times Square. They went to Radio City Music Hall on their last night and saw West Side Story and the Rockettes. Sitting high in the cavernous theater in a velvet seat, Beth was thrilled.

She had expected a reporter from Life to be someone who chain-smoked and looked like Lloyd Nolan, but the person who came to the door of the house was a small woman with steel-gray hair and a dark dress. The man with her was carrying a camera. She introduced herself as Jean Balke. She looked older than Mrs. Wheatley, and she walked around the living room with quick little movements, hastily checking out the books in the bookcase and studying some of the prints on the walls. Then she began asking questions. Her manner was pleasant and direct. “I’ve really been impressed,” she said, “even though I don’t play chess myself.” She smiled. “They say you’re the real thing.”

Beth was a little embarrassed.

“How does it feel? Being a girl among all those men?”

“I don’t mind it.”

“Isn’t it frightening?” They were sitting facing each other. Miss Balke leaned forward, looking intently at Beth.

Beth shook her head. The photographer came over to the sofa and began taking readings with a meter.

“When I was a girl,” the reporter said, “I was never allowed to be competitive. I used to play with dolls.”

The photographer backed off and began to study Beth through his camera. She remembered the doll Mr. Ganz had given her. “Chess isn’t always ‘competitive,’” she said.

“But you play to win.”

Beth wanted to say something about how beautiful chess was sometimes, but she looked at Miss Balke’s sharp, inquiring face and couldn’t find the words for it.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No. I’m fourteen.” The photographer began snapping pictures.

Miss Balke had lighted a cigarette. She leaned forward now and tapped the ashes into one of Mrs. Wheatley’s ashtrays. “Are you interested in boys?” she asked.

Beth was feeling more and more uneasy. She wanted to talk about learning chess and about the tournaments she had won and about people like Morphy and Capablanca. She did not like this woman and did not like her questions. “I’m interested in chess mostly.”

Miss Balke smiled brightly. “Tell me about it,” she said. “Tell me how you learned to play and how old you were.”

Beth told her and Miss Balke took notes, but Beth felt that she wasn’t really interested in any of it. She found as she went on talking that she really had very little to say.

The next week at school, during algebra class, Beth saw the boy in front of her pass a copy of Life to the girl next to him, and they both turned and looked back at her as though they had never seen her before. After class the boy, who had never spoken to her before, stopped her and asked if she would autograph the magazine. Beth was stunned. She took it from him and there it was, filling a full page. There was a picture of her looking serious at her chessboard, and there was another picture of the main building at Methuen. Across the top of the page a headline read: A GIRL MOZART STARTLES THE WORLD OF CHESS. She signed her name with the boy’s ball-point pen, setting the magazine on an empty desk.

When she got home, Mrs. Wheatley had the magazine in her lap. She began reading aloud:

“‘With some people chess is a pastime, with others it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl—a young, unsmiling girl with brown eyes, brown hair and a dark-blue dress?

“‘It has never happened before, but it happened recently. In Lexington, Kentucky, and in Cincinnati. In Charleston, Atlanta, Miami, and lately in New York City. Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments strolls a fourteen-year-old with bright, intense eyes, from eighth grade at Fairfield Junior High in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet and well-mannered. And she is out for blood…’ It’s marvelous !” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Shall I read on?”

“It talks about the orphanage.” Beth had bought her own copy. “And it gives one of my games. But it’s mostly about my being a girl.”

“Well, you are one.”

“It shouldn’t be that important,” Beth said. “They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian.”

“But, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “it makes you a celebrity !”

Beth looked at her thoughtfully, “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.

The next day Margaret stopped her in the hall. Margaret was wearing a camel’s-hair coat and her blond hair fell just to her shoulders; she was even more beautiful than she had been a year before, when Beth had taken the ten dollars from her purse. “The other Apple Pi’s asked me to invite you,” Margaret said respectfully. “We’re having a pledge party Friday night at my house.”

The Apple Pi’s. It was very strange. When Beth accepted and asked for the address she realized it was the first time she had ever actually spoken to Margaret.

She spent over an hour that afternoon trying on dresses at Purcell’s before picking a navy-blue with a simple white collar from the store’s most expensive line. When she showed it to Mrs. Wheatley that evening and told her she was going to the Apple Pi Club, Mrs. Wheatley was clearly pleased. “You look just like a debutante!” she said when Beth tried on the dress for her.

The white woodwork of Margaret’s living room glistened beautifully and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings—mostly of horses. Even though it was a mild evening in March, a big fire burned under the white mantel. Fourteen girls were sitting on the white sofas and colored wingback chairs when Beth arrived in her new dress. Most of the others were wearing sweaters and skirts. “It was really something,” one of them said, “to find a face from Fairfield Junior High in Life . I nearly flipped!” but when Beth started to talk about the tournaments, the girls interrupted her to ask about the boys at them. Were they good-looking? Did she date any of them? When Beth said, “There’s not much time for that,” the girls changed the subject.

For an hour or more they talked about boys and dating and clothes, veering erratically from cool sophistication to giggles, while Beth sat uneasily at one end of a sofa holding a crystal glass of Coca-Cola, unable to think of anything to say. Then, at nine o’clock, Margaret turned on the huge television set by the fireplace and they were all quiet, except for an occasional giggle, while the “Movie of the Week” came on.