Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

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.”