Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

She had never thought of anyone there encouraging her. It began to enter her mind now, standing in front of the building. She could have played in tournaments at nine or ten, like Benny. She had been bright and eager, and her mind was voracious in its appetite for chess. She could have been playing grandmasters and learning things that people like Shaibel and Ganz could never teach her. Girev was planning at thirteen to be World Champion. If she had had half his chances, she would have been as good at ten. For a moment the whole autocratic institution of Russian chess merged in her mind with the autocracy of the place where she was now standing. Institutions. There was no violation of Christianity in chess, any more than there was a violation of Marxism. It was nonideological. It wouldn’t have hurt Deardorff to let her play—to encourage her to play. It would have been something for Methuen to boast about. She could see Deardorff’s face in her mind—the thin, rouged cheeks, the tight, reproving smile, the little sadistic glint in her eyes. It had pleased her to cut Beth off from the game she loved. It had pleased her.

“You want to go in?” Jolene asked.

“No. Let’s find that motel.”

The motel had a small pool only a few yards from the road, with some weary-looking maples beside it. The evening was warm enough for a quick swim after dinner. Jolene turned out to be a superb swimmer, going back and forth the length of the pool with hardly a ripple, while Beth treaded water under the diving board. Jolene pulled up near her. “We were chicken,” she said. “We should have gone in the Administration Building. We should have gone in her office.”

The funeral was in the morning at the Lutheran Church. There were a dozen people and a closed casket. It was an ordinary-sized coffin, and Beth wondered briefly how they could fit a man of Shaibel’s girth into it. Although the church was smaller, it was much like Mrs. Wheatley’s funeral in Lexington. After the first five minutes of it, she was bored and restless, and Jolene was dozing. After the ceremony they followed the small procession to the grave. “I remember,” Jolene said, “he scared shit out of me once, hollering to keep off the library floor. He just mopped it, and Mr. Schell sent me in to get a book. Son of a bitch hated kids.”

“Mrs. Deardorff wasn’t at the church.”

“None of them were.”

The graveside service was an anticlimax. They lowered the coffin, and the minister said a prayer. Nobody cried. They looked like people waiting in line at a teller’s window at the bank. Beth and Jolene were the only young ones there, and none of the others spoke to them. They left immediately after it was over, walking along a narrow path in the old cemetery, past faded gravestones and patches of dandelions. Beth felt no grief for the dead man, no sadness that he was gone. The only thing she felt was guilt that she had never sent him his ten dollars—she should have mailed him a check years ago.

They had to pass Methuen on the way back to Lexington. Just before the turnoff, Beth said, “Let’s go in. There’s something I want to see,” and Jolene turned the car down the drive to the orphanage.

Jolene stayed in the car. Beth got out and pushed her way into the side door of the Administration Building. It was dark and cool inside. Straight in front of her was a door that read HELEN DEAR-DORFF—SUPERINTENDENT. She walked down the empty hallway to the doorway at the end. When she pushed it open, there was a light on below. She went slowly down the steps.

The chessboard and pieces weren’t there, but the table he had played on still sat by the furnace, and his unpainted chair was still in position. The bare bulb over it was on. She stood looking down at the table. Then she seated herself thoughtfully in Mr. Shaibel’s chair and looked up and saw something she had not seen before.

Behind the place where she used to sit to play was a kind of rough partition made of unplanned wooden boards nailed to two-by-fours. A calendar used to hang there, with scenes from Bavaria above the sheets for the months. Now the calendar was gone and the entire partition was covered with photographs and clippings and covers from Chess Review , each of them neatly taped to the wood and covered with clear plastic to keep it clean and free of dust—the only thing in this dingy basement that was. They were pictures of her. There were printed games from Chess Review , and newspaper pieces from the Lexington Herald-Leader and the New York Times and from some magazines in German. The old Life piece was there, and next to it was the cover of Chess Review with her holding the U.S. Championship trophy. Filling in the smaller spaces were newspaper pictures, some of them duplicates. There must have been twenty photographs.

“You find what you were looking for?” Jolene asked when she got back to the car.

“More,” Beth said. She started to say something else but didn’t. Jolene backed the car up, drove out of the lot and turned back onto the road that led to the highway.

When they drove up the ramp and pulled onto the interstate, Jolene gunned the VW and it shot ahead. Neither of them looked back. Beth had stopped crying by then and was wiping her face with a handkerchief.

“Didn’t bite off more than you could chew, did you?” Jolene said.

“No.” Beth blew her nose. “I’m fine.”

The taller of the two women looked like Helen Deardorff. Or didn’t exactly look like her as much as display all indications of spiritual sisterhood. She wore a beige suit and pumps and smiled a good deal in a way totally devoid of feeling. Her name was Mrs. Blocker. The other was plump and slightly embarrassed and wore a dark floral print and no-nonsense shoes. She was Miss Dodge. They were on their way from Houston to Cincinnati and had stopped by for a chat. They sat side by side on Beth’s sofa and talked about the ballet in Houston and the way the city was growing in culture. Clearly they wanted Beth to know Christian Crusade was not merely a narrow, fundamentalist organization. And just as clearly they had come to look her over. They had written ahead.

Beth listened politely while they talked about Houston and about the agency they were helping to set up in Cincinnati—an agency that had something to do with protecting the Christian environment. The conversation faltered for a moment, and Miss Dodge spoke. “What we would really like, Elizabeth, would be some kind of a statement.”

“A statement?” Beth was sitting in Mrs. Wheatley’s armchair facing them on the sofa.

Mrs. Blocker picked it up. “Christian Crusade would like you to make your position public. In a world where so many keep silent…” She didn’t finish.

“What position?” Beth asked.

“As we know,” Mrs. Dodge said, “the spread of Communism is also the spread of atheism.”

“I suppose so,” Beth said.

“It’s not a matter of supposing,” Mrs. Blocker said quickly. “It’s a matter of fact. Of Marxist-Leninist fact. The Holy Word is anathema to the Kremlin, and it is one of the major purposes of Christian Crusade to contest the Kremlin and the atheists who sit there.”

“I have no quarrel with that,” Beth said.

“Good. What we want is a statement.” The way Mrs. Blocker said it echoed something that Beth had recognized years before in Mrs. Deardorff’s voice. It was the tone of the practiced bully. She felt the way she did when a player brought out his queen too soon against her. “You want me to make a statement for the press?”

“Exactly!” Mrs. Blocker said. “If Christian Crusade is going to—” She stopped and felt the manila envelope in her lap as though estimating its weight. “We had something prepared.”