by Walter Tevis
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.
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 goin
g 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.
Beth sat through it, not participating in the gossip and laughter during the commercials, until it ended at eleven. She was astounded at the dullness of the evening. This was the elite Apple Pi Club that had seemed so important when she first went to school in Lexington, and this was what they did at their sophisticated parties: they watched a Charles Bronson movie. The only break in the dullness was when a girl named Felicia said, “I wonder if he’s as well-hung as he looks.” Beth laughed at that, but it was the only thing she laughed at.
When she left after eleven no one urged her to stay, and no one said anything about her joining. She was relieved to get into the taxi and go home, and when she got there she spent an hour in her room with The Middle Game in Chess, translated from the Russian of D. Luchenko.
***
The school knew about her, well enough, by the next tournament, and this time she hadn’t claimed illness as an excuse. Mrs. Wheatley talked to the principal, and Beth was excused from her classes. Nothing was said about the illnesses she had lied about. They wrote her up in the school paper, and people pointed her out in the hallways. The tournament was in Kansas City, and after she won it the director took her and Mrs. Wheatley to a steakhouse for dinner and told her they were honored to have her participate. He was a serious young man, and he treated both of them politely.
“I’d like to play in the U.S. Open,” Beth said over dessert and coffee.
“Sure,” he said. “You might win it.”
“Would that lead to playing abroad?” Mrs. Wheatley asked. “In Europe, I mean?”
“No reason why not,” the young man said. His name was Nobile. He wore thick glasses and kept drinking ice water. “They have to know about you before they invite you.”
“Would winning the Open make them know about me?”
“Sure. Benny Watts plays in Europe all the time, now that he’s got his international title.”
“How’s the prize money?” Mrs. Wheatley asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Pretty good, I think.”
“What about Russia?” Beth said.
Nobile stared at her a minute, as though she had suggested something illicit. “Russia’s murder,” he said finally. “They eat Americans for breakfast over there.”
“Now, really…” Mrs. Wheatley said.
“They really do,” Nobile said. “I don’t think there’s been an American with a prayer against the Russians for twenty years. It’s like ballet. They pay people to play chess.”
Beth thought of those pictures in Chess Review, of the men with grim faces, bending over chessboards—Borgov and Tal, Laev and Shapkin, scowling, wearing dark suits. Chess in Russia was a different thing than chess in America. Finally she asked, “How do I get in the U.S. Open?”
“Just send in an entry fee,” Nobile said. “It’s like any other tournament, except the competition’s stiffer.”
***
She sent in her entry fee, but she did not play in the U.S. Open that year. Mrs. Wheatley developed a virus that kept her in bed for two weeks, and Beth, who had just passed her fifteenth birthday, was unwilling to go alone. She did her best to hide it, but she was furious at Alma Wheatley for being sick, and at herself for being afraid to make the trip to Los Angeles. The Open was not as important as the U.S. Championship, but it was time she started playing in something other than events chosen solely on the basis of the prize money. There was a tight little world of tournaments like the United States Championship and the Merriwether Invitational that she knew of through overheard conversations and from articles in Chess Review; it was time she got into it, and then into international chess. Sometimes she would visualize herself as what she wanted to become; a truly professional woman and the finest chessplayer in the world, traveling confidently by herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene. She often told herself that she would send Jolene a card or a letter, but she never did. Instead she would study herself in the bathroom mirror, looking for signs of that poised and beautiful woman she wanted to become.
At sixteen she had grown taller and better-looking, had learned to have her hair cut in a way that showed her eyes to some advantage, but she still looked like a schoolgirl. She played tournaments about every six weeks now—in states like Illinois and Tennessee, and sometimes in New York. They still chose ones that would pay enough to show a profit after the expenses for the two of them. Her bank account grew, and that was a considerable pleasure, but somehow her career seemed to be on a plateau. And she was too old to be called a prodigy anymore.
SIX
Although the U.S. Open was being held in Las Vegas, the other people at the Mariposa Hotel seemed oblivious to it. In the main room the players at the craps tables, at roulette and at the blackjack tables wore brightly colored double-knits and shirts; they went about their business in silence. On the other side of the casino was the hotel coffee shop. The day before the tournament Beth walked down an aisle between crapshooters where the main sound was the tapping of clay chips and of dice on felt. In the coffee shop she slid onto a stool at the counter, turned around to look at the mostly empty booths and saw a handsome young man sitting hunched over a cup of coffee, alone. It was Townes, from Lexington.
She stood up and went over to the booth. “Hello,” she said.
He looked up and blinked, not recognizing her at first. Then he said, “Harmon! For Christ’s sake!”
“Can I sit down?”
“Sure,” he said. “I should have known you. You were on the list.”
“The list?”
“The tournament list. I’m not playing. Chess Review sent me to write it up.” He looked at her. “I could write you up. For the Herald-Leader.”
“Lexington?”
“You got it. You’ve grown a lot, Harmon. I saw the piece in Life.” He looked at her closely. “You’ve even gotten good-looking.”
She felt flustered and did not know what to say. Everything about Las Vegas was strange. On the table in each booth was a lamp with a glass base filled with purple liquid that bubbled and swirled below its bright pink shade. The waitress who handed her a menu was dressed in a black miniskirt and fishnet hose, but she had the face of a geometry teacher. Townes was handsome, smiling, dressed in a dark sweater with a striped shirt open at the throat. She chose the Mariposa Special: hot cakes, scrambled eggs and chili peppers with the Bottomless Cup of coffee.
“I could do half a page on you for the Sunday paper,” Townes was saying.
The hot cakes and eggs came, and Beth ate them and drank two cups of coffee.
“I’ve got a camera in my room,” Townes said. He hesitated. “I’ve got chessboards, too. Do you want to play?”
She shrugged
. “Okay. Let’s go up.”
“Terrific!” His smile was dazzling.
The drapes were open, with a view of a parking lot. The bed was huge and unmade. It seemed to fill the room. There were three chessboards set up: one on a table by the window, one on the bureau, and the third in the bathroom next to the basin. He posed her by the window and shot a roll of film while she sat at the board and moved the pieces. It was difficult not to look at him as he walked around. When he came close to her and held a little light meter near her face, she found herself catching her breath at the sensation of warmth from his body. Her heart was beating fast, and when she reached out to move a rook she saw that her fingers were trembling.
He clicked off the last shot and began rewinding the film. “One of those should do it,” he said. He set the camera on the nightstand by the bed. “Let’s play chess.”
She looked at him. “I don’t know what your first name is.”
“Everyone calls me Townes,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I call you Harmon. Instead of Elizabeth.”