The Queen's Gambit

Chess Openings, with a hundred and seventy different lines stemming from
P—QB4. She would memorize and play through them all in her mind at
night. When that was done and she knew all the variations, she could go on
to the Pirć and the Nimzovitch and the Ruy Lopez. Modern Chess Openings
was a thick, dense book. She would be all right.
Leaving Geography class one day, she saw Mr. Shaibel at the end of the
long hallway. He had a metal bucket on wheels with him and was mopping.
The students were all going the other way, to the door that led to the yard
for recess. She walked down to him, stopping where the floor was wet. She
stood for about a minute until he looked up at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They won’t let me play anymore.”
He frowned and nodded but said nothing.
“I’m being punished. I…” She looked at his face. It registered nothing. “I
wish I could play more with you.”
He looked for a moment as if he was going to speak. But instead he
turned his eyes to the floor, bent his fat body slightly and went back to
mopping. Beth could suddenly taste something sour in her mouth. She
turned and walked back down the hall.
***
Jolene said there were always adoptions around Christmas. The year after
they stopped Beth from playing chess there were two in early December.
Both pretty ones, Beth thought to herself. “Both white,” Jolene said aloud.
The two beds stayed empty for a while. Then one morning before
breakfast Fergussen came into the Girls’ Ward. Some of the girls giggled to
see him there with the heavy bunch of keys at his belt. He came up to Beth,
who was putting on her socks. It was near her tenth birthday. She got her
second sock on and looked up at him.
He frowned. “We got a new place for you, Harmon. Follow me.”

---

She went with him across the ward, over to the far wall. One of the
empty beds was there, under the window. It was a bit larger than the others
and had more space around it.
“You can put your things in the nightstand,” Fergussen said. He looked at
her for a minute. “It’ll be nicer over here.”
She stood there, amazed. It was the best bed in the ward. Fergussen was
making a note on a clipboard. She reached out and touched his forearm with
her fingertips, where the dark hairs grew, above his wristwatch. “Thank
you,” she said.

---

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