فصل 3

THREE

“I see that you will be thirteen in two months, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Beth was seated in the straight-backed chair in front of Mrs. Deardorff’s desk. Fergussen had come and taken her from study hall. It was eleven in the morning. She had not been in this office for over three years.

The lady on the sofa suddenly spoke up, with strained cheerfulness. “Twelve is such a wonderful age!” she said.

The lady wore a blue cardigan over a silky dress. She would have been pretty except for all the rouge and lipstick and for the nervous way she worked her mouth when she talked. The man sitting next to her wore a gray salt-and-pepper tweed suit with a vest.

“Elizabeth has performed well in all of her schoolwork,” Mrs. Deardorff went on. “She is at the top of her class in Reading and Arithmetic.” “That’s so nice!” the lady said. “I was such a scatterbrain at Arithmetic.” She smiled at Beth brightly. “I’m Mrs. Wheatley,” she added in a confidential tone.

The man cleared his throat and said nothing. He looked as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

Beth nodded at the lady’s remark but could think of nothing to say. Why had they brought her here?

Mrs. Deardorff went on about Beth’s school work while the lady in the blue cardigan paid rapt attention. Mrs. Deardorff said nothing about the green pills or about Beth’s chess playing; her voice seemed filled with a distant approval of Beth. When she had finished there was an embarrassed silence for a while. Then the man cleared his throat again, shifted his weight uneasily and looked toward Beth as though he were looking over the top of her head. “Do they call you Elizabeth?” He sounded as if there were a bubble of air in his throat. “Or is it Betty?” She looked at him. “Beth,” she said. “I’m called Beth.”

During the next few weeks she forgot about the visit in Mrs. Deardorff’s office and absorbed herself in schoolwork and in reading. She had found a set of girls’ books and was reading through them whenever she had a chance—in study halls, at night in bed, on Sunday afternoons. They were about the adventures of the oldest daughter in a big, haphazard family. Six months before, Methuen had gotten a TV set for the lounge, and it was played for an hour every evening. But Beth found that she preferred Ellen Forbes’s adventures to I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke. She would sit up in bed, alone in the dormitory, and read until lights out. No one bothered her.

One evening in mid-September she was alone reading when Fergussen came in. “Shouldn’t you be packing?” he asked.

She closed her book, using her thumb to keep her place. “Why?”

“They haven’t told you?”

“Told me what?”

“You’ve been adopted. You’re being picked up after breakfast.”

She just sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at Fergussen’s broad white T-shirt.

“Jolene,” she said. “I can’t find my book.”

“What book?” Jolene said sleepily. It was just before lights out.

“Modern Chess Openings, with a red cover. I keep it in my nightstand.”

Jolene shook her head. “Beats the shit out of me.”

Beth hadn’t looked at the book for weeks, but she clearly remembered putting it at the bottom of the second drawer. She had a brown nylon valise beside her on the bed; it was packed with her three dresses and four sets of underwear, her toothbrush, comb, a bar of Dial soap, two barrettes and some plain cotton handkerchiefs. Her nightstand was now completely empty. She had looked in the library for her book, but it wasn’t there. There was nowhere else to look. She had not played a game of chess in three years except in her mind, but Modern Chess Openings was the only thing she owned that she cared about.

She squinted at Jolene. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

Jolene looked angry for a moment. “Watch who you go accusing,” she said. “I got no use for a book like that.” Then her voice softened. “I hear you’re leaving.” “That’s right.”

Jolene laughed. “What’s the matter? Don’t want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

Jolene slipped under the bedsheet and pulled it up over her shoulders. “Just say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, ma’am’ and you’ll do all right. Tell ‘em you’re grateful to have a Christian home like theirs and maybe they’ll give you a TV in your room.” There was something odd about the way Jolene was talking.

“Jolene,” Beth said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get adopted.”

Jolene snorted. “Shit,” she said, “I make out fine right here.” She rolled over away from Beth and curled up in bed. Beth started to reach out toward her, but just then Miss Furth stepped in the doorway and said, “Lights out, girls!” Beth went back to her bed, for the last time.

The next day Mrs. Deardorff went with them out to the parking lot and stood by the car while Mr. Wheatley got into the driver’s seat and Mrs. Wheatley and Beth got into the back. “Be a good girl, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said.

Beth nodded and as she did so saw that someone was standing behind Mrs. Deardorff on the porch of the Administration Building. It was Mr. Shaibel. He had his hands stuffed in his coverall pockets and was looking toward the car. She wanted to get out and go over to him, but Mrs. Deardorff was in the way, so she leaned back in her seat. Mrs. Wheatley began talking, and Mr. Wheatley started the car.

As they pulled out, Beth twisted around in her seat and waved out the back window at him, but he made no response. She could not tell for sure if he had seen her or not.

“You should have seen their faces,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She was wearing the same blue cardigan, but this time she had a faded gray dress under it, and her nylons were rolled down to her ankles. “They looked in all my closets and even inspected the refrigerator. I could see immediately that they were impressed with my provisions. Have some more of the tuna casserole. I certainly enjoy watching a young child eat.” Beth put a little more on her plate. The problem was that it was too salty, but she hadn’t said anything about that. It was her first meal at the Wheatleys’. Mr. Wheatley had already left for Denver on business and would be away for several weeks. A photograph of him sat on the upright piano by the heavily draped dining-room window. In the living room the TV was playing unattended; a deep male voice was declaiming about Anacin.

Mr. Wheatley had driven them to Lexington in silence and then gone immediately upstairs. He came down after a few minutes with a suitcase, kissed Mrs. Wheatley distractedly on the cheek, nodded a goodbye to Beth and left.

“They wanted to know everything about us. How much money Allston makes a month. Why we have no children of our own. They even inquired”—Mrs. Wheatley bent forward over the Pyrex dish and spoke in a stage whisper—“they even inquired if I had been in psychiatric care.” She leaned back and let out her breath. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” “No, ma’am,” Beth said, filling in the sudden silence. She took another forkful of tuna and followed it with a drink of water.

“They are thorough,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “But, you know, I suppose they have to be.” She had not touched anything on her plate. During the two hours since they arrived, Mrs. Wheatley had spent the time jumping up from whatever chair she was sitting in and going to check the oven or adjust one of the Rosa Bonheur prints on the walls, or empty her ashtray. She chattered almost constantly while Beth put in an occasional “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am.” Beth had not yet been shown her room; her brown nylon bag still sat by the front door next to the overflowing magazine rack where she had left it at ten-thirty that morning.

“God knows,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “God knows they have to be meticulous about whom they turn their charges over to. You can’t have scoundrels taking the responsibility for a growing child.” Beth set her fork down carefully. “May I go to the bathroom, please?”

“Why, certainly.” She pointed to the living room with her fork. Mrs. Wheatley had been holding the fork all during lunch, even though she had eaten nothing. “The white door to the left of the sofa.” Beth got up, squeezed past the piano that practically filled the small dining room and went into the living room and through its clutter of coffee table and lamp tables and huge rosewood TV, now showing an afternoon drama. She walked carefully across the Orion shag carpet and into the bathroom. The bathroom was tiny and completely done in robin’s-egg blue—the same shade as Mrs. Wheatley’s cardigan. It had a blue carpet and little blue guest towels and a blue toilet seat. Even the toilet paper was blue. Beth lifted the toilet seat, vomited the tunafish into the bowl and flushed it.

When they got to the top of the stairs Mrs. Wheatley rested for a moment, leaning her hip against the banister and breathing heavily. Then she took a few steps along the carpeted hallway and dramatically pushed a door open. “This,” she said, “will be your room.” Since it was a small house, Beth had visualized something tiny for herself, but when she walked in she caught her breath. It looked enormous to her. The floor was bare and painted gray, with a pink oval rug at the side of the double bed. She had never had a room of her own before. She stood, holding her valise, and looked around her. There was a dresser, and a desk whose orange-looking wood matched it, with a pink glass lamp on it, and a pink chenille bedspread on the enormous bed. “You have no idea how difficult it is to find good maple furniture,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “but I think I did very well, if I do say so myself.” Beth hardly heard her. This room was hers. She looked at the heavily painted white door; there was a key in it, under the knob. She could lock the door and no one could come in.

Mrs. Wheatley showed her where the bathroom was down the hall and then left her alone to unpack, closing the door behind her. Beth set down her bag and walked around, stopping only briefly to look out each of the windows at the tree-lined street below. There was a closet, bigger than Mother’s had been, and a nightstand by the bed, with a little reading lamp. It was a beautiful room. If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.

In the car Mrs. Wheatley had said how glad they were to have an older child. Then why not adopt Jolene? Beth had thought. But she said nothing. She looked at Mr. Wheatley with his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel and then at Mrs. Wheatley and she knew they would never have adopted Jolene.

Beth sat on the bed and shook off the memory. It was a wonderfully soft bed, and it smelled clean and fresh. She bent over and pulled off her shoes and lay back, stretching out on its great, comforting expanse, turning her head happily to look over at the tightly closed door that gave her this room entirely to herself.

She lay awake for several hours that night, not wanting to go to sleep right away. There was a streetlight outside her windows, but they had good, heavy shades that she could pull down to block it out. Before saying goodnight, Mrs. Wheatley had shown Beth her own room. It was on the other side of the hall and exactly the same size as Beth’s, but it had a television set in it and chairs with slipcovers and a blue coverlet on the bed. “It’s really a remodeled attic,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Lying in bed, Beth could hear the distant sound of Mrs. Wheatley coughing and later she heard her bare feet padding down the hallway to the bathroom. But she didn’t mind. Her own door was closed and locked. No one could push it open and let the light fall on her face. Mrs. Wheatley was alone in her own room, and there would be no sounds of talking or quarreling—only music and low synthetic voices from the television set. It would be wonderful to have Jolene there, but then she wouldn’t have the room to herself, wouldn’t be able to lie alone in this huge bed, stretched out in the middle of it, having the cool sheets and now the silence to herself.

On Monday she went to school. Mrs. Wheatley took her in a taxi, even though it was less than a mile. Beth went into seventh grade. It was a lot like the public high school in that other town where she had done the chess exhibition, and she knew her clothes weren’t right, but no one paid much attention to her. A few of the other students stared for a minute when the teacher introduced her to the class, but that was it. She was given books and assigned to a home room. From the books and what the teachers said in class she knew it would be easy. She recoiled a bit at the loud noises in the hallways between classes, and felt self-conscious a few times when other students looked at her, but it was not difficult. She felt she could deal with anything that might come up in this sunny, noisy public school.

At lunchtime she tried to sit alone in the cafeteria with her ham sandwich and carton of milk, but another girl came and sat across from her. Neither of them spoke for a while. The other girl was plain, like Beth.

When she had finished half her sandwich Beth looked across the table at her. “Is there a school chess club?” she asked.

The other girl looked up, startled. “What?”

“Do they have a chess club? I want to join.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “I don’t think they have anything like that. You can try out for junior cheerleader.” Beth finished her sandwich.

“You certainly spend a lot of time at your studies,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Don’t you have any hobbies?” Actually, Beth was not studying; she was reading a novel from the school library. She was sitting in the armchair in her room, by the window. Mrs. Wheatley had knocked and then come in, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and pink satin slippers. She walked over and sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, smiling at her distractedly, as though she were thinking about something else. Beth had lived with her a week now and she noticed that Mrs. Wheatley was often that way.

“I used to play chess,” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “Chess?”

“I like it a lot.”

Mrs. Wheatley shook her head as though shaking something out of her hair. “Oh, chess!” she said. “The royal game. How nice.” “Do you play?” Beth said.

“Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it. But my father used to play. My father was a surgeon and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.” “Could I play chess with him?”

“Hardly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “My father passed on years ago.”

“Is there anyone I could play with?”

“Play chess? I have no idea.” Mrs. Wheatley peered at her for a moment. “Isn’t it primarily a game for boys?” “Girls play,” she said.

“How nice!” But Mrs. Wheatley was clearly miles away.

Mrs. Wheatley spent two days getting the house cleaned for Miss Farley, and she sent Beth to brush her hair three times on the morning of the visit.

When Miss Farley came in the door she was followed by a tall man wearing a football jacket. Beth was shocked to see it was Fergussen. He looked mildly embarrassed. “Hi there, Harmon,” he said. “I invited myself along.” He walked into Mrs. Wheatley’s living room and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

Miss Farley had a set of forms and a check list. She wanted to know about Beth’s diet and her schoolwork and what plans she had for the summer. Mrs. Wheatley did most of the talking. Beth could see her become more expansive with each question. “You can have no idea,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “of how marvelously well Beth has adjusted to the school environment. Her teachers have been immensely impressed with her work…” Beth could not remember any conversations between Mrs. Wheatley and the teachers at school, but she said nothing.

“I had hoped to see Mr. Wheatley, too,” Miss Farley said. “Will he be here soon?” Mrs. Wheatley smiled at her. “Allston called earlier to say he was terribly sorry, but he couldn’t come. He’s really been working so hard.” She looked over at Beth, still smiling. “Allston is a marvelous provider.” “Is he able to spend much time with Beth?” Miss Farley said.

“Why, of course!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Allston is a wonderful father to her.”

Shocked, Beth looked down at her hands. Not even Jolene could lie so well. For a moment she had believed it herself, had seen an image of a helpful, fatherly Allston Wheatley—an Allston Wheatley who did not exist outside of Mrs. Wheatley’s words. But then she remembered the real one, grim, distant and silent. And there had been no call from him.

During the hour they were there, Fergussen said almost nothing. When they got up to leave, he held out his hand to Beth and her heart sank. “Good to see you, Harmon,” he said. She took his hand to shake it, wishing that he could stay behind somehow, to be with her.

A few days later Mrs. Wheatley took her downtown to shop for clothes. When the bus stopped at their corner, Beth stepped into it without hesitation, even though it was the first time she’d ever been on a bus. It was a warm fall Saturday, and Beth was uncomfortable in her Methuen wool skirt and could hardly wait to get a new one. She began to count the blocks to downtown.

They got off at the seventeenth corner. Mrs. Wheatley took her hand, although it was hardly necessary, and ushered her across a few yards of busy sidewalks into the revolving doors of Ben Snyder’s Department Store. It was ten in the morning and the aisles were full of women carrying big dark purses and shopping bags. Mrs. Wheatley walked through the crowd with the sureness of an expert. Beth followed.

Before they looked at anything to wear, Mrs. Wheatley took her down the broad stairs to the basement, where she spent twenty minutes at a counter with what a card said were “Dinner Napkin Irregulars,” putting together six blue ones from the multicolored pile, rejecting dozens in the process. She waited while Mrs. Wheatley assembled her set in a kind of mesmerized trial and error and then decided she didn’t really need napkins. They went to another counter with “Book Bargains” on it. Mrs. Wheatley read out the titles of a great many thirty-nine-cent books, picked up several and leafed through them but didn’t buy any.

Finally they took the escalator back to the main floor. There they stopped at a perfume counter so Mrs. Wheatley could spray one wrist with Evening in Paris and the other with Emeraude. “All right, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said finally, “we’ll go up to four.” She smiled at Beth. “Young Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.” Between the third and fourth floors Beth looked back and saw a sign on a counter that said BOOKS AND GAMES, and right near the sign, on a glass-topped counter, were three chess sets. “Chess!” she said, tugging Mrs. Wheatley’s sleeve.

“What is it?” Mrs. Wheatley said, clearly annoyed.

“They sell chess sets,” Beth said. “Can we go back?”

“Not so loud,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We’ll go by on the way back down.”

But they didn’t. Mrs. Wheatley spent the rest of the morning having Beth try on coats from marked-down racks and turn around to show her the hemline and go over near the window so she could see the fabric by “natural light,” and finally buying one and insisting they go down by elevator.

“Aren’t we going to look at the chess sets?” Beth said, but Mrs. Wheatley didn’t answer. Beth’s feet hurt, and she was perspiring. She did not like the coat she was carrying in a cardboard box. It was the same robin’s-egg blue as Mrs. Wheatley’s omnipresent sweater, and it didn’t fit. Beth did not know much about clothes, but she could tell that this store sold cheap ones.

When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Beth started to remind her about the chess sets, but the door closed and they went down to the main floor. Mrs. Wheatley took Beth’s hand and led her across the street to the bus stop, complaining about the difficulty of finding anything these days. “But after all,” she said philosophically as the bus drew up to the corner, “we got what we came for.” The next week in English class some girls behind Beth were talking before the teacher came in. “Did you get those shoes at Ben Snyder’s or something?” one of them said.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in Ben Snyder’s,” the other girl said, laughing.

Beth walked to school every morning, along shady streets of quiet houses with trees on their lawns. Other students went the same way, and Beth recognized some of them, but she always walked alone. She had enrolled two weeks late in the fall term, and after her fourth week, mid-term exams began. On Tuesday she had no tests in the morning and was supposed to go to her home room. Instead she took the bus downtown, carrying her notebook and the forty cents she had saved from her quarter-a-week allowance. She had her change ready when she got on the bus.

The chess sets were still on the counter, but up close she could see that they weren’t very good. When she picked up the white queen she was surprised at how light it was. She turned it over. It was hollow inside and made of plastic. She put it back as the saleswoman came up and said, “May I help you?” “Do you have Modern Chess Openings?”

“We have chess and checkers and backgammon,” the woman said, “and a variety of children’s games.” “It’s a book,” Beth said, “about chess.”

“The book department is across the aisle.”

Beth went to the bookshelves and began looking through them. There was nothing about chess. There was no clerk to ask, either. She went back to the woman at the counter and had to wait a long time to get her attention. “I’m trying to find a book about chess,” Beth told her.

“We don’t handle books in this department,” the woman said and started to turn away again.

“Is there a bookstore near here?” Beth asked quickly.

“Try Morris’s.” She went over to a stack of boxes and began straightening them.

“Where is it?”

The woman said nothing.

“Where’s Morris, ma’am?” Beth said loudly.

The woman turned and looked at her furiously. “On Upper Street,” she said.

“Where’s Upper Street?”

The woman looked for a moment as if she would scream. Then her face relaxed and she said, “Two blocks up Main.” Beth took the escalators down.

Morris’s was on a corner, next to a drugstore. Beth pushed open the door and found herself in a big room full of more books than she had ever seen in her life. There was a bald man sitting on a stool behind a counter, smoking a cigarette and reading. Beth walked up to him and said, “Do you have Modem Chess Openings?” The man turned from his book and peered at her over his glasses. “That’s an odd one,” he said in a pleasant voice.

“Do you have it?”

“I think so.” He got up from the stool and walked to the rear of the store. A minute later he came back to Beth, carrying it in his hand. It was the same fat book with the same red cover. She caught her breath when she saw it.

“Here you go,” the man said, handing it to her. She took it and opened it to the part on the Sicilian Defense. It was good to see the names of the variations again; the Levenfish, the Dragon, the Najdorf. They were like incantations in her head, or the names of saints.

After a while she heard the man speaking to her. “Are you that serious about chess?” “Yes,” she said.

He smiled. “I thought that book was only for grandmasters.”

Beth hesitated. “What’s a grandmaster?”

“A genius player,” the man said. “Like Capablanca, except that was a long time ago. There are others nowadays, but I don’t know their names.” She had never seen anyone quite like this man before. He was very relaxed, and he talked to her as though she were another adult. Fergussen was the closest thing to him, but Fergussen was sometimes very official. “How much is the book?” Beth asked.

“Pretty much. Five ninety-five.”

She had been afraid it would be something like that. After today’s two bus fares she would have ten cents left. She held the book out to him and said, “Thank you. I can’t afford it.” “Sorry,” he said. “Just put it on the counter.”

She set it down. “Do you have other books about chess?”

“Sure. Under Games and Sports. Go take a look.”

At the back of the store was a whole shelf of them with titles like Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess; Winning Chess Traps; How to Improve Your Chess; Improved Chess Strategy. She took down one called Attack and Counterattack in Chess and began reading the games, picturing them in her mind without reading the diagrams. She stood there for a long time while a few customers went in and out of the store. No one bothered her. She read through game after game and was surprised in some of them by dazzling moves—queen sacrifices and smothered males. There were sixty games, and each had a title at the top of the page, like “V. Smyslov—I. Rudakavsky: Moscow 1945” or “A. Rubinstein—O. Duras: Vienna 1908.” In that one, White queened a pawn on the thirty-sixth move by threatening a discovered check.

Beth looked at the cover of the book. It was smaller than Modem Chess Openings and there was a sticker on it that said $2.95. She began going through it systematically. The clock on the bookstore wall read ten-thirty. She would have to leave in an hour to get to school for the History exam. Up front the clerk was paying no attention to her, absorbed in his own reading. She began concentrating, and by eleven-thirty she had twelve of the games memorized.

On the bus back to school she began playing them over in her head. Behind some of the moves—not the glamorous ones like the queen sacrifices but sometimes only in the one-square advance of a pawn—she could see subtleties that made the small hairs on the back of her neck tingle.

She was five minutes late for the test, but no one seemed to care and she finished before everyone else anyway. In the twenty minutes until the end of the period she played “P. Keres—A. Tarnowski: Helsinki 1952.” It was the Ruy Lopez Opening where White brought the bishop out in a way that Beth could see meant an indirect attack on Black’s king pawn. On the thirty-fifth move White brought his rook down to the knight seven square in a shocking way that made Beth almost cry out in her seat.

Fairfield Junior High had social clubs that met for an hour after school and sometimes during home-room period on Fridays. There was the Apple Pi Club and the Sub Debs and Girls Around Town. They were like sororities at a college, and you had to be pledged. The girls in Apple Pi were eighth and ninth graders; most of them wore bright cashmere sweaters and fashionably scuffed saddle oxfords with argyle socks. Some of them lived in the country and owned horses. Thoroughbreds. Girls like that never looked at you in the hallways; they were always smiling at someone else. Their sweaters were bright yellow and deep blue and pastel green. Their socks came up to just below the knees and were made of 100 percent virgin wool from England.

Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, with her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth. The girls who belonged to the clubs wore lipstick and eye shadow; Beth wore no make-up and her hair still fell over her forehead in bangs. It did not occur to her that she would be pledged to a club, nor did it to anyone else.

“This week,” Mrs. MacArthur said, “we will begin to study the binomial theorem. Does anyone know what a binomial is?” From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this.

“Yes?” Mrs. MacArthur said.

Beth stood, feeling suddenly awkward. “A binomial is a mathematical expression containing two terms.” They had studied this last year at Methuen. “X plus Y is a binomial.” “Very good,” Mrs. MacArthur said.

The girl in front of Beth was named Margaret; she had glowing blond hair and wore a cashmere sweater of a pale, expensive lavender. As Beth sat down, the blond head turned slightly back toward her. “Brain!” Margaret hissed. “Goddamn brain!” ***

Beth was always alone in the halls; it hardly occurred to her that there was any other way to be. Most girls walked in pairs or in threes, but she walked with no one.

One afternoon when she was coming out of the library she was startled by the sound of distant laughter and looked down the hall to see, haloed by afternoon sunlight, the back of a tall black girl. Two shorter girls were standing near her, by the water fountain, looking up at her face as she laughed. None of their features was distinct, and the light from behind them made Beth squint. The taller girl turned slightly, and Beth’s heart almost stopped at the familiar tilt of her head. Beth took a quick dozen steps down the hallway toward them.

But it wasn’t Jolene. Beth stopped suddenly and turned away. The three girls left the fountain and pushed noisily out the front door of the building. Beth stood staring after them for a long time.

“Could you go to Bradley’s and get me some cigs?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I think I have a cold.” “Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. It was Saturday afternoon and Beth was holding a novel in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it. She was playing over a game between P. Morphy and someone called simply “grandmaster.” There was something peculiar about Morphy’s eighteenth move, of knight to bishop five. It was a good attack, but Beth felt Morphy could have been more destructive with his queen’s rook.

“I’ll give you a note, since you’re a bit youthful for smoking yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said.

“Three packs of Chesterfields.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had been in Bradley’s only once before, with Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley gave her a penciled note and a dollar and twenty cents. Beth handed the note to Mr. Bradley at the counter. There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek: he was running for President and probably wouldn’t make it because he was a Catholic.

There was a row of women’s magazines that all had faces on their covers like the faces of Margaret and Sue Ann and the other Apple Pi’s. Their hair shone; their lips were full and red.

She had just decided to leave when something caught her eye. At the lower right-hand corner, where the magazines about photography and sunbathing and do-it-yourself were, was a magazine with a picture of a chess piece on its cover. She walked over and took it from the rack. On the cover was the title, Chess Review, and the price. She opened it. It was full of games and photographs of people playing chess. There was an article called “The King’s Gambit Reconsidered” and another one called “Morphy’s Brilliancies.” She had just been going over one of Morphy’s games! Her heart began beating faster. She kept going through the pages. There was an article about chess in Russia. And the thing that kept turning up was the word “tournament.” There was a whole section called “Tournament Life.” She had not known there was such a thing as a chess tournament. She thought chess was just something you did, the way Mrs. Wheatley hooked rugs and put together jigsaw puzzles.

“Young lady,” Mr. Bradley said, “you have to buy the magazine or put it back.” She turned, startled. “Can’t I just…?”

“Read the sign,” Mr. Bradley said.

In front of her was a hand-lettered sign: IF YOU WANT TO READ IT—BUY IT. Beth had fifteen cents and that was all. Mrs. Wheatley had told her a few days before that she would have to do without an allowance for a while; they were rather short and Mr. Wheatley had been delayed out West. Beth put the magazine back and left the store.

Halfway back up the block she stopped, thought a moment and went back. There was a stack of newspapers on the counter, by Mr. Bradley’s elbow. She handed him a dime and took one. Mr. Bradley was busy with a lady who was paying for a prescription. Beth went over to the end of the magazine rack with her paper under her arm and waited.

After a few minutes Mr. Bradley said, “We have three sizes.” She heard him going to the back of the store with the lady following. Beth took the copy of Chess Review and slipped it into her newspaper.

Outside in the sunshine she walked a block with the paper under her arm. At the first corner she stopped, took out the magazine and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt, covering it with her robbin’s-egg-blue sweater, made of reprocessed wool and bought at Ben Snyder’s. She pulled the sweater down loosely over the magazine and dropped the newspaper into the corner trash can.

Walking home with the folded magazine tucked securely against her flat belly she thought again about that rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven, and Black had better not take it with his knight because… She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining rook could slide over, and if the black player took the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t… She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn moved again, and then the bishop went the other way and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One of the little boys across the street began crying. There was nothing Black could do. The game would be over in twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.

Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.

“Allston should have returned weeks ago,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying. She was sitting up in bed, with a crossword-puzzle magazine beside her and a little TV set on the dresser with the sound turned down. Beth had just brought her a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen. Mrs. Wheatley was wearing her pink robe and her face was covered with powder.

“Will he be back soon?” Beth said. She didn’t really want to talk with Mrs. Wheatley; she wanted to get back to Chess Review.

“He has been unavoidably detained,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Beth nodded. Then she said, “I’d like to get a job for after school.”

Mrs. Wheatley blinked at her. “A job?”

“Maybe I could work in a store, or wash dishes somewhere.”

Mrs. Wheatley stared at her for a long time before speaking. “At thirteen years of age?” she said finally. She blew her nose quietly on a tissue and folded it. “I should think you are well provided for.” “I’d like to make some money.”

“To buy clothes with, I suspect.”

Beth said nothing.

“The only girls of your age who work,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “are colored.” The way she said “colored” made Beth decide to say nothing further about it.

To join the United States Chess Federation cost six dollars. Another four dollars got you a subscription to the magazine. There was something even more interesting: in the section called “Tournament Life” there were numbered regions; including one for Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky, and in the listing under it was an item that read: “Kentucky State Championship, Thanksgiving weekend, Henry Clay High School Auditorium, Lexington, Fri., Sat. Sun.,” and under this it said: “$185 in prizes. Entry fee: $5.00. USCF members only.” It would take six dollars to join and five dollars to get into the tournament. When you took the bus down Main you passed Henry Clay High; it was eleven blocks from Janwell Drive. And it was five weeks until Thanksgiving.

“Can anyone say it verbatim?” Mrs. MacArthur said.

Beth put up her hand.

“Beth?”

She stood. “In any right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” She sat down.

Margaret snickered and leaned toward Gordon, who sat beside her and sometimes held her hand. “That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt. Gordon laughed. Beth looked out the window at the autumn leaves.

“I do not know where the money goes!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.” She plopped into the chintz-covered armchair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wide-eyed, as if expecting a guillotine to fall. “I have paid electric bills and telephone bills and have bought simple, uncomplicated groceries. I have denied myself cream for my morning coffee, have bought nothing whatever for my person, have attended neither the cinema nor the rummage sales at First Methodist, and yet I have seven dollars left where I should have at least twenty.” She laid the crumpled one-dollar bills on the table beside her, having fished them from her purse a few moments before. “We have this for ourselves until the end of October. It will scarcely buy chicken necks and porridge.” “Doesn’t Methuen send you a check?” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley brought her eyes down from the ceiling and stared at her. “For the first year,” she said evenly. “As if the expenses of keeping you didn’t exhaust it.” Beth knew that wasn’t true. The check was seventy dollars, and Mrs. Wheatley didn’t spend that much on her.

“It requires twenty dollars for us to live passably until the first of the month,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I am thirteen dollars short of that.” She turned her gaze briefly ceilingward and then back to Beth again. “I shall have to keep better records.” “Maybe it’s inflation,” Beth said, with some truth. She had taken only six, for the membership.

“Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified.

The problem was the five dollars for the entry fee. In home room, the day after Mrs. Wheatley’s oration about money, Beth took a sheet from her composition book and wrote a letter to Mr. Shaibel, Custodian, Methuen Home, Mount Sterling, Kentucky. It read: Dear Mr. Shaibel:

There is a chess tournament here with a first prize of one hundred dollars and a second prize of fifty dollars. There are other prizes, too. It costs five dollars to enter it, and I don’t have that.

If you will send me the money I will pay you back ten dollars if I win any prize at all.

Very truly yours,

Elizabeth Harmon

The next morning she took an envelope and a stamp from the cluttered desk in the living room while Mrs. Wheatley was still in bed. She put the letter in the mailbox on her way to school.

In November she took another dollar from Mrs. Wheatley’s purse. It had been a week since she wrote Mr. Shaibel, and there had been no answer. This time, with part of the money, she bought the new issue of Chess Review. She found several games that she could improve upon—one by a young grandmaster named Benny Watts. Benny Watts was the United States Champion.

Mrs. Wheatley seemed to have a good many colds. “I have a proclivity for viruses,” she would say. “Or they for me.” She handed Beth a prescription to take to Bradley’s and a dime to buy herself a Coke.

Mr. Bradley gave her an odd look when she came in, but he said nothing. She gave him the prescription and he went to the back of the store. Beth carefully avoided standing near the magazines. When she took the Chess Review a month before, it had been the only copy. He might have noticed it right away.

Mr. Bradley brought back a plastic container with a typed label on it. He put it down on the counter while he got a white paper bag. Beth stared at the container. The pills in it were oblong and bright-green.

“This will be my tranquility medicine,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “McAndrews has decided I need tranquility.” “Who’s McAndrews?” Beth said.

“Dr. McAndrews,” Mrs. Wheatley said, unscrewing the lid. “My physician.” She took out two of the pills. “Would you get me a glass of water, dear?” “Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. As she was going into the bathroom for the water, Mrs. Wheatley sighed and said, “Why do they only fill these bottles half full?” ***

In the November issue there were twenty-two games from an invitational tournament in Moscow. The players had names like Botvinnik and Petrosian and Laev; they sounded like people in a fairy tale. There was a photograph showing two of them hunched over a board, dark-haired and grim-lipped. They wore black suits. Out of focus, behind them, sat a huge audience.

In a game between Petrosian and someone named Benkowitz, in the semifinals, Beth saw a bad decision of Petrosian’s. He started an attack with pawns but shouldn’t have. There was a commentary on the game by an American grandmaster, who thought the pawn moves were good, but Beth saw deeper than that. How could Petrosian have misjudged it? Why hadn’t the American seen the weakness? They must have spent a long time studying it, since the magazine said the game took five hours.

Margaret only slipped the shaft into her gym lock and didn’t twist the dial afterward. They were in shower stalls side by side now, and Beth could see Margaret’s sizable breasts, like solid cones. Beth’s chest was still like a boy’s and her pubic hair had just started coming in. Margaret ignored Beth and hummed while she soaped herself. Beth stepped out and wrapped herself in a towel. Still wet, she went back into the locker room. There was no one there.

Beth dried her hands quickly and very quietly slipped the shaft out of Margaret’s lock, muffling it in her towel. Her hair dripped on her hands, but that didn’t matter; there was water all over from the boys’ gym. Beth slipped off the lock and opened the locker door, slowly so it wouldn’t squeak. Her heart was thumping like some kind of little animal in her chest.

It was a fine brown purse of real leather. Beth dried her hands again and lifted it down from the shelf, listening carefully. There were giggles and shouts from the girls in the shower, but nothing else. She had made a point of being the first in, to get the stall nearest the door, and she had left quickly. No one else would be through yet. She opened the purse.

There were colored postcards and a new-looking lipstick and a tortoise-shell comb and an elegant linen handkerchief. Beth pushed through these with her right hand. At the bottom, in a little silver money clip, were bills. She pulled them out. Two fives. She hesitated for a moment and then took them both, together with the clip. She put the purse back and replaced the lock.

She had left her own door shut but unlocked. She opened it now and slid the clipped fives into her Algebra book. Then she locked her door, went back to the shower and stayed there washing herself until all the other girls had left.

When everyone else was gone, Beth was still getting dressed. Margaret had not opened her purse. Beth sighed deeply, like Mrs. Wheatley. Her heart was still pounding. She got the money clip out of her algebra book and pushed it under the locker Margaret had used. It might have just fallen there from Margaret’s purse, and anybody could have taken the money. She folded the bills and put them in her shoe. Then she took her own blue plastic purse from the shelf, opened it and reached into the little pocket that held the mirror. She took out two green pills, put them in her mouth, went to the washstand and swallowed them down with a paper cup of water.

Supper that night was spaghetti and meatballs from a can, with Jell-O for dessert. While Beth was doing the dishes and Mrs. Wheatley was in the living room turning the volume up on the TV, Mrs. Wheatley suddenly said, “Oh, I forgot.” Beth went on scrubbing the spaghetti pan and in a minute Mrs. Wheatley appeared with an envelope in her hand. “This came for you,” she said and went back to the Huntley-Brinkley Report.

It was a smudged envelope addressed in pencil. She dried her hands and opened it; there were five one-dollar bills inside and no message. She stood at the sink for a long time, holding the bills in her hand.

The green pills were four dollars for a bottle of fifty. The label read: “Three refills.” Beth paid with four one-dollar bills. She walked home briskly and put the prescription slip back in Mrs. Wheatley’s desk.