Jesse Ball: The Lesson

Many worried that Loring would not be able to get along after Ezra’s death, but those fears proved groundless. Neighbors saw her each morning on the walks she had once taken by his side, and they saw at her evening, returning from the market. The signboard was still posted by the house, and she continued to take students, and to teach them well.

To her the grief did not diminish, but for the rest — it was soon old news. Life is always presenting new things that distract us from the old. After a while, no one asked her anymore about her husband, was she missing him. She came and went and it was for others as though he had not been. Yet each day she went to the cemetery, and renewed the freshness of his loss, and kept it close. For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core. And in that she was admitted into her own secret, and she went about as a person in a cloak and comforted thereby.

A knock came at the door of Loring’s house. When she went to see to it, there were two there: a boy and his mother. The boy’s name was Stan. His mother said things like, he is a prodigy, and, he can already read nearly anything, and, well, listen to him speak — it is just like talking to an adult.

Loring looked at this Stan. Will you speak? He spoke a bit, not much. I can play chess, he said. Will we play?

Who has he played? Loring asked. Nearly everyone, the answer was. He’s beaten them all, his father, his uncle, a man in the town square. I see, said Loring. How old is he? Five, five years old, or will be within the month.

Set up the board, she said to the boy. The board, though, was already set up. So, she disordered the pieces and pushed them all off. Set it up, she ordered. Be quick about it. To the mother, she said, it is often telling how a person does this.

He stumbled a bit and was clumsy, for the pieces were large. But soon he had the board all set up properly.

They sat down to play, and this is how it was: There was a mother standing by a door, dressed nicely in the sort of clothes one wears for a visit. There was a little boy sitting on a chair much too big for him before a chess set. And there was an old woman in clothes she had worn these many years, in a chair she had sat in this many years, before a chess set she had used for many years.

The first game the boy lost quickly. It was over as soon as it had begun. But the second — in the second, a very odd thing happened. He played an actual opening, and played it properly — and the opening was that that had been conceived by Loring’s husband, the Wesley-Fetz Counter Gambit. It was not much used. Ezra had used it, but few others. And now here, this boy was playing it.

He looked up suddenly from the board and his gaze met hers. She was sitting there, this old woman, sitting there with a child, and yet when he looked at her then, his eyes were like leaden impressions. They riveted her. She, hand still outstretched, having taken the bishop, was frozen, peering at him, and to her it seemed terrifying: as though she could see her husband, staring at her through the child’s face.

She coughed several times and looked away, set the bishop down. He made some move. She looked back at him and it was gone. He was simply a boy, some boy. She made a move and he would be forced to exchange queens. The boy resigned, and looked steadily out the window.

— I accept him as a student, said Loring.

They set up the board and stood.

— He is a prodigy, his mother said again. I am sure you can teach him a lot.

— We shall see, said Loring. Perhaps there is not much to teach.

— I don’t know what you mean.

Then she and the mother made arrangements, and the cost was established. The boy would come seven times over the course of the summer, once a week on Tuesdays, and stay the day. The mother gave some deposit and rose to go to the door.

— Until next week, she said.

— Goodbye, said Loring.

The boy looked at her and said nothing. Loring shut the door and then went and stood by the chessboard. Her heart was beating very fast, and she felt that something was happening, but she couldn’t say what. There was a photograph of her husband on the wall of that parlor, but in that moment Loring would not look at it. This feeling, that she could not do so — what did it mean? She could not say, and troubled, she went out of the house and shut the door.

While it was true that she was often seeing her husband, or having the feeling he had just left a place where she was arriving, still rarely had she seen him so clearly.

If a person were to die and be born again into a new body, in what way would that happen? In what way would the previous life inhabit the new life? Who knows such answers and may be trusted to speak truthfully?

Tuesday morning came.

And soon the sound of the knocker.

Loring opened the door and held it partway. In with the boy. Some pleasantries with the mother there by the door, and then the departure. Loring came from the hall to the parlor where the boy was waiting.

— Your mother and I have made a bargain. But you and I have made no bargain at all.

This was the sort of manner she had always adopted.

The boy watched her.

She sat in a high-backed chair by the fireplace. Her back was to the boy.

— I offer you also a bargain. I will teach you things about chess that will be helpful to you in your play. In return for that, you will do your best to listen to what I tell you. I don’t like to repeat myself, and in fact, I won’t. That’s how it is.

The boy came around and sat on the hearth rug.

— Shall I say what I want?

He really didn’t look very much like a child at all.

— That’s what a bargain is, replied Loring.

— Will you answer all questions? Not just chess questions?

— But you are here to learn chess.

The boy started to say something, then stopped. He messed around with his foot and then spoke up.

— My parents would never be able to tell. They don’t really know anything about chess.

— I see, said Loring. Let’s say then that that’s our bargain.

She reached out her hand and the boy took it. They shook.

In the night she had had a dream about her husband. He was on a ship carved from wood, from some enormous single tree. The captain of the ship was sitting frozen in a chair nailed to the deck. The mate was shouting that there must be some crack in the wood, somewhere, but that it could not be found. Her husband was not the captain, but he might have been, and if he wasn’t, then he was elsewhere in the ship. The night was early in that sea, and the waves grew worse the closer it came to dawn. If the crack could not be found…All night, Loring had this dream, repeating, and each time she strained to remember how it had ended before, but could not. When she woke, she found that she was sitting in the chair in the parlor, and facing her husband’s picture on the wall. What could she say to him, were she to see him? One never knows the uses of the things one does.

And then she was there at this bargaining, and just done shaking the boy’s hand, remembering the dream, and the long night.

— We will then begin, she said. Chess is a complicated game. It is complicated not simply because of the complications of the pieces and the squares, but also because of how people feel about chess. You will often meet people and play them and you will find that when you beat them in chess they feel they have been defeated completely, as though your mind were proved better than theirs. This is not true, of course. But many people believe it to be true, and even some who know that it is not true will still feel that it is true, viscerally. So, the question is, in what way can this be used as a part of the game. Well, actually, that is not the question at the moment. At the moment I am just describing the game, and showing you that this too is a part of it. Another part of the game is stamina. One can become tired over a series of games. Hopefulness can mediate the effects of that exhaustion.