Endgame

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by Frank Brady


  “Pawn to queen bishop four,” responded Collins in a basso profundo that could be heard across the street.

  Just as an accomplished musician can read a score and hear the music in his head, a master chess player with a strong memory can read the record of a game and see it in his mind’s eye. Composer Antonio Salieri was moved to tears of joy by reading some of Mozart’s scores before they were performed. In the same way, some chess players can be emotionally stirred by mentally replaying a brilliant game by a great master.

  In this case, Fischer was not only visualizing a game without benefit of board, pieces, or printed score; he was creating it, composing it as a motion picture in his mind. As he and Collins strolled down Flatbush Avenue, they were playing what is called “blindfold chess,” a form of the game practiced throughout the ages. There are accounts dating back to A.D. 800 of nomadic Arabs playing a kind of boardless and sightless chess while riding on camels. For many chess players—and especially for those people who don’t know the game—witnessing two players competing without sight of a board can evoke astonishment. The uncanny feats of memory on display can seem almost mystical.

  Collins was more than well schooled in strategic theory. He was the coauthor of the then latest edition of the modern bible of chess, Modern Chess Openings, which contained thousands of variations, positions, analyses, and recommendations. Bobby, who was becoming Collins’s pupil, had been studying past and present chess games for years and had begun to dip into Collins’s library of hundreds of books and periodicals.

  It was humid, threatening to drizzle. Earlier in the year Fischer had become the U.S. Junior Champion at a tournament in Philadelphia, and he’d just returned from the U.S. Open Championship in Oklahoma City, the youngest player, at thirteen, ever to compete in the event. Collins was a former New York State Champion, a veteran tournament player, and a renowned teacher of the game. He was forty-four years old.

  The odd couple continued to play their invisible game. Bobby mentally controlled the white pieces, Collins the black. As the contest seesawed, each player acted the role of predator and prey.

  Bobby had always been short for his age, and still only stood five-four, but he was just beginning to stretch out of his clothes and sprout up. By the time he was eighteen, he’d reach a height of six-two. He had bright hazel eyes and a shiny, toothy smile with a slight gap between his two front teeth. His beaming grin was that of a happy child who wanted to be liked, or at least to be engaging. On this night he wore a polo shirt, brown corduroy slacks—even though it was August—and battered black-and-white, $5 sneakers. His voice was slightly nasal, perhaps because he needed to have his tonsils and adenoids removed. His hair was a tufted brown crew cut, as if his mother, Regina, or his sister, Joan, had clipped it one day and a comb hadn’t touched it since. Bobby looked more like a farm boy from Kansas than a kid from the streets of Brooklyn.

  He usually stayed a few steps ahead of Collins and the others, wanting to go faster but grudgingly slowing up to announce his moves or to receive his teacher’s reply. Bobby’s answer to Collins’s move was always instantaneous, his response bursting from somewhere deep in his unconscious as he visualized bishops speeding along the diagonals, knights catapulting over pieces and pawns, and rooks seizing crucial squares. Occasionally, he’d split his mental gymnastics, leaving his imaginary board to swing a fantasy baseball bat and knock an invisible ball into the left-field stands of the Ebbets Field in his mind. Even more than a chess champion, young Bobby Fischer wanted to be Duke Snider, the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers baseball player.

  It was astonishing that Fischer, at thirteen, could excel at blindfold chess. Many seasoned players fail to master it. The boy didn’t prefer to play without sight of the board; it was just that he wanted to be involved in the game every spare minute, and the twenty-minute walk to the Silver Moon from the Collins home was just too long to go without a game. He didn’t seem to be distracted or annoyed by the honking traffic or the cacophony of music and voices spilling out onto the avenue.

  Even at this young age, Bobby had already played thousands of games, many in a form called “speed chess” or “blitz.” Instead of the usual one to two hours, speed chess often takes only ten minutes to complete; five minutes or less if the players want to challenge themselves even more. Sometimes the rule is that each move must be completed in no more than a second. In such cases, there’s virtually no time to reflect, to engage in that familiar inner dialogue: If I move my bishop here, and he moves his knight there, then maybe I should move my queen there—no, that won’t work! Then he’d take my pawn. So instead I’d better move … Bobby’s years of playing intense speed games helped lead to his ability to instantly comprehend the relationships of the pieces on the board.

  Walking down that Brooklyn street, Fischer and Collins exchanged knowing glances as they played. It was as if they were engaged in a secret ritual. As they approached the restaurant, each felt an unspoken pressure to finish the contest, but there wasn’t enough time. Just as they drew up to the front entrance, when some twenty-five moves had been made, Collins offered Bobby a draw. It was intended as a gentlemanly gesture, but Bobby looked hurt, almost insulted. To him a tie was equivalent to a loss, and he judged his position to be superior. He wanted to fight. Nevertheless, in deference to his mentor, he grudgingly agreed to a draw. He almost sang out his response: “Okaaay.” Then his mind immediately shifted to what awaited: his favorite Chinese meal of Egg Drop Soup, Chicken Chop Suey, pistachio ice cream, and inevitably, a large glass of milk.

  Regina Wender Fischer, Bobby’s mother, was born in Switzerland and moved with her family to the United States when she was just two years old. In her late teens—already graduated from college—she traveled to Germany to visit her brother, who was stationed there as a sailor in the U.S. Navy. In Berlin she was hired by the American geneticist Hermann J. Muller (who later won a Nobel Prize in physiology), to act as his secretary and governess for his child. Muller and Regina had met when she took courses at the University of Berlin, and they respected each other: She admired his brilliance and humanism, and he valued her because she knew German, could take shorthand, and was a speed typist. Also, she was bright enough to understand and accurately type his complex chemical and genetic ruminations. Muller encouraged her to study medicine and to follow him to Russia when he received research appointments both in Leningrad and Moscow—she ultimately remained in touch with him for more than fifty years. She became a student at the First Moscow Medical Institute from 1933 to 1938.

  There was another person, an associate of Muller’s, who also made the journey to Russia. A biophysicist, the associate was then known as Hans Gerhardt Fischer, but he’d changed his name from Leibscher to make it sound less Jewish as anti-Semitism took hold in Germany. Fischer secured a position at the Moscow Brain Institute, and in November 1933 he and Regina, who was then twenty, fell in love and were married in Moscow. A few years after the marriage their daughter Joan was born. With anti-Semitism flourishing in the USSR under Joseph Stalin, the young couple realized they and their infant were in danger. Although Regina had spent six years studying to be a physician, she left before completing her degree, took the baby to Paris, and settled there, working as a teacher of English.

  She and Hans Gerhardt had separated before they left Moscow, although they were still legally husband and wife. As it became probable that Germany would soon invade France, Regina, who held American citizenship, arranged to take Joan to the United States, but Hans Gerhardt, who’d moved to Paris to be near his daughter, was a German and therefore wasn’t permitted entry into the United States. Facing an uncertain fate, he left Europe and eventually settled in Chile. Regina divorced him for nonsupport in 1945, when she was living in Moscow, Idaho. The coincidence of a marriage and then a divorce both occurring in cities named Moscow was ironic enough to make headlines in local newspapers.

  Regina Fischer had no long-term residence during the early 1940s. Rather, she carted Joan from
place to place as the United States struggled with the end of the Depression and the country’s entry into the Second World War. She and her daughter lived barely above the poverty level. In June 1942, Regina became pregnant with her second child—Bobby—and she sent the five-year-old Joan to St. Louis to stay with Regina’s father, Jacob Wender, during her pregnancy. When Bobby was born at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago on March 9, 1943, Regina was homeless. She named her newborn Robert James Fischer, and Hans Gerhardt Fischer was listed as the father on the birth certificate, despite the fact that he’d never entered the United States. After spending about a week in the hospital, Regina and her baby moved into the Sarah Hackett Memorial House, a hospice for single mothers who lacked funds to provide for the welfare of themselves or their infants. Once there, Regina called her father and told him to bring Joan back to Chicago to join them, but the hospice refused to provide housing for the older child. When Regina refused to move, she was arrested by an officer of the Chicago Police Department for disturbing the peace, and she, Bobby, and Joan were forced to move out. She waived a jury trial, was ordered to have a psychiatric examination, and was found not guilty by a judge. The psychiatrist’s bizarre report stated that Regina had a “stilted (paranoid) personality, querulous, but not psychotic.” She immediately landed a job as a typist for the Montgomery Ward company and moved to an inexpensive one-room flat on the South Side of Chicago—2840 South Lake Park Avenue, Bobby Fischer’s address during the first weeks of his life.

  As Regina struggled to raise her children as a single parent, she begged for money from Jewish welfare agencies and other social institutions, from her father, Jacob Wender, and from anyone else whom she felt she could approach. Money was forthcoming, but it was never enough and it came too slowly. Always struggling financially and without support from a husband, Regina, during the war years, went wherever she could find work. One of Bobby’s first memories, when he was just a toddler, was of living in a trailer “out west.” “Out west” could have meant California, Idaho, Oregon, Illinois, or Arizona. The family lived in all of those places before moving to New York. Regina’s flexibility and desperation led her to a surprising gamut of jobs. She was a welder, schoolteacher, riveter, farm worker, toxicologist’s assistant, and stenographer, all throughout the early and mid-1940s.

  Six-year-old Bobby studied the maze. His effort lasted only a few seconds. He lifted his stubby number-2 yellow pencil and began to trace the route to a damsel imprisoned in a castle cell in the puzzle’s center. To rescue her, the knight, armed with a lance, would have to determine the proper starting point to get to the damsel, and then move her from her prison to the concluding space without crossing a line. At first, Bobby entered the maze at the top right corner. Working his way hurriedly through the alleys, circles, roundabouts, and barriers, he found himself trapped in a dead end, deadlocked and defeated.

  He quickly erased his work, put down his pencil, and studied the problem before him, deciding that if he began the journey at a different corner of the puzzle, he might find access to the damsel’s cell. He let his eyes examine each of the remaining starting-point possibilities—top left, bottom left, and bottom right—and then, in a form of backward reasoning, tracked the path from the princess to the knight. After several minutes, he saw that there was one path and one path only that led to the maiden—starting at bottom left. Now understanding the maze’s algorithm, he took up his pencil again, cut though the Gordian knot, and completed the task.

  His next task, to get to the treasure left by a gold miner in a more intricate and difficult maze, at first defeated him when he tried to solve it prematurely, without sufficient study. He flung his pencil down in frustration and grabbed a brown crayon, but this time he paused. Soon the answer became clear, and he felt silly that he hadn’t seen the solution immediately. “Look, Joanie!” he said proudly to his eleven-year-old sister. She nodded in approval.

  Parcheesi was a game that held Bobby’s interest for a while. He liked moving his tiger and elephant pawns through his opponent’s blockades, but he became furious if, owing to a toss of the dice, he was captured and sent back to “Start.” Other board games, such as Trouble and Sorry, were also problematic: If a touch of bad luck stymied his plans, he became angry and would abandon the game. Ultimately, he rejected all games of chance.

  To keep rambunctious Bobby occupied—in today’s parlance he might be referred to as hyperactive—Regina bought books such as 50 Peppy Picture Puzzles for Girls and Boys, and Pencil Puzzles: Sharpen Your Pencil, Sharpen Your Wits, which contained mazes, picture puzzles, and word games. Bobby would always go first to the mazes. Later, he became enamored of Japanese interlocking puzzles and dimensional wooden puzzles shaped in the form of an automobile or an animal. He would disassemble the fifteen or so pieces and spread them at random on the table or floor, then see how fast he could reassemble them. Speed of accomplishment was as important to him as solving the puzzles’ mystery.

  In early 1949 Regina Fischer took the least expensive housing she could find when she moved the family—Bobby, Joan, and herself—to East 13th Street in Manhattan, facing the kitchen back entrance of the famed Luchow’s restaurant, where many of the best chess players would occasionally dine. The Fischers could never afford to eat there. The apartment’s entrance was marred by a rusty fire escape running up the front, and there was only one small bedroom—but the rent was $45 a month.

  Located downstairs on the same street was what is known in New York City as a “candy store.” The small shop sold newspapers, magazines, toys, games, ice cream, sundries, and of course, candy. In March of 1949, on a rainy day when Bobby had just turned six, his sister, Joan, looking for yet another game to amuse or occupy her restless little brother, bought a plastic chess set for $1 at the candy store. The hollow pieces were barely taller than an inch, and the set came with a folding cardboard chessboard that had red and black squares. Neither Joan nor Bobby had ever seen a chess set before, but they followed instructions printed on the inside of the top of the box, with Joan acting as instructor even as she figured out the rules for herself. After describing which piece was which by name, the rules went on to explain the intricacies of how each piece moved: “The Queen moves as many squares in any direction as is possible, the Knight moves in an L shape and can jump over other pieces or pawns,” etc. Only a few other rudimentary hints were offered, such as that white should move first, and the object of the game was to checkmate, but not actually capture, the king.

  “Nobody we knew ever played chess and we never saw anyone playing it,” Fischer would later write. It’s impossible to say with certainty whether Bobby actually won the first game he played, but it’s likely he did, given his propensity for solving puzzles quickly and the fact that his first opponent was his sister, who didn’t particularly take to chess. “At first it was just another game,” remembered Bobby, “just a little more complicated.” Joan, tied to her homework—she was an honor student—quickly became uninterested in chess and didn’t have time for it, so Bobby taught his mother the moves. Bobby said later: “She was too busy to take the game seriously. For example, she’d try to peel potatoes or sew up a hole while she was playing, which, of course, annoyed me very much. After I’d beat her, I’d turn the board around and go on playing her side until I beat her a second time. Both of us got tired of this, and I was looking for someone to play chess with all the time.”

  That six-year-old Bobby was beating thirty-six-year-old Regina and eleven-year-old Joan, as brilliant as both were, is significant in understanding his rapidly evolving mastery of chess, and himself. It gave the boy confidence and built his self-esteem. The problem was that neither mother nor sister ever really wanted to play. “My mother has an anti-talent for chess,” Bobby once told an interviewer. “She’s hopeless.”

  Since Bobby couldn’t find a worthy opponent, or any opponent for that matter, he made himself his principal adversary. Setting up the men on his tiny board, he’d play game after game alone
, first assuming the white side and then spinning the board around, with some pieces often tumbling onto the floor. He’d scramble after them, place them quickly back on their squares, and then play the black side. Trying to outwit himself required an unusual turn of mind. Black, for example, knew what white was going to do, and vice versa, because black was Fischer and so was white. So the only way the game made any sense to Bobby was to study the board anew after every single move, pretending he was playing a real opponent. He tried to forget what he’d just planned to do when he was playing the other side. Instead, he sought to discover any trap or pitfall lurking in his “opponent’s” position and respond accordingly. To some, such a regimen might seem simplistic or maddening, even schizophrenic. However, it did give Bobby a sense of the board, the movement and role of the pieces, and the choreography of how a game of chess could develop. “Eventually I would checkmate the other guy,” he chuckled when he described the experience years later.

  In the fall of 1950, Regina moved the family out of Manhattan and across the bridge to Brooklyn, where she rented an inexpensive apartment near the intersection of Union and Franklin streets. It was only temporary: She was trying to get closer to a better neighborhood. Robbed of her medical degree in Russia because of the war, she was now determined to acquire a nursing diploma. As soon as she enrolled in the Prospect Heights School for Nursing, the peripatetic Fischer family, citizens of nowhere, moved once again—its tenth transit in six years—to a $52-a-month two-bedroom flat at 560 Lincoln Place in Brooklyn. Never shy about asking for what she or her children needed, Regina recruited neighbors to help her transport, box by box, the family’s sparse belongings across Eastern Parkway a few blocks, to what she expected would be a somewhat more lasting home. Though the small apartment was a third-floor walkup, its proximity to the nursing school enabled Regina to look after her children while attending classes. Bobby and Joan each had a room to themselves, and Regina slept in the living room on what was called a daybed. This apartment was also in a better neighborhood. Flatbush was middle-class Jewish, beginning to be populated by other ethnic minorities, and in closer walking distance to lush Prospect Park and the Botanical Gardens, as well as one of the city’s finest libraries, at Grand Army Plaza.

 

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