The Queen's Gambit

Ladies’ Home Journal.”
Beth kept looking at her, trying not to let the astonishment show in her
face. Mrs. Wheatley’s dishonesty seemed in every way to match her own.
Then she said, “Where would we stay?”
“At the Gibson Hotel, in a double room at twenty-two dollars a night.
The Greyhound tickets will be eleven-eighty apiece, and there will, of
course, be the cost of food. I have calculated all of it. Even if you win
second or third prize, there will be a profit.”
Beth had twenty dollars in cash and a packet of ten checks in her plastic
purse. “I need to buy some chess books,” she said.
“By all means,” Mrs. Wheatley said, smiling. “And if you’ll make out a
check for twenty-three dollars and sixty cents, I’ll get the bus tickets
tomorrow.”
***
After buying Modem Chess Openings and a book on the endgame at
Morris’s, Beth walked across the street to Purcell’s Department Store. She
knew from the way girls talked at school that Purcell’s was better than Ben
Snyder’s. She found what she wanted on the fourth floor: a wooden set
almost identical to the one Mr. Ganz owned, with hand-carved knights and
big, substantial pawns, and rooks that were fat and solid. She was
undecided for a while over the board and almost bought a wooden one
before settling on a folding linen board with green and beige squares. It
would be more portable than the other.
Back home she cleared off her desk, put the board on it and set up the
pieces. She piled her new chessbooks on one side and placed the tall silver
trophy in the shape of a chess king on the other. She turned on her student
lamp and sat at the desk, just looking at the pieces, at the way their curves
picked up the light. She sat for what seemed like a long time, her mind
quiet. Then she picked up Modern Chess Openings. This time she began at
the beginning.

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***
She had never seen anything like the Gibson Hotel before. Its size and
bustle, the bright chandeliers in its lobby, the heavy red carpeting, the
flowers, even the three revolving doors and the uniformed doorman who
stood beside them were overwhelming. She and Mrs. Wheatley walked up
to the front of the hotel from the bus station, carrying their new luggage.
Mrs. Wheatley refused to hand it over to the doorman. She lugged her
suitcase up to the front desk and registered for them both, unperturbed by
the look the room clerk gave them.
In the room afterward, Beth began to relax. There were two big windows
overlooking Fourth Street with its rush hour traffic. It was a crisp, cold day
outside. Inside they had this thick-carpeted room with the big white
bathroom and fluffy red towels and a huge plate-glass mirror covering one
wall. There was a color TV on the dresser and a bright-red bedspread on
each of the beds.
Mrs. Wheatley was inspecting the room, checking the dresser drawers,
clicking the TV on and off, patting away a wrinkle on the bedspread.
“Well,” she said, “I asked them for a pleasant room, and I believe they gave
it to me.” She seated herself in the high-backed Victorian chair by her bed
as though she had lived in the Gibson Hotel all her life.
The tournament was on the mezzanine in the Taft Room; all Beth had to
do was take the elevator. Mrs. Wheatley found them a diner down the street
where they had bacon and eggs for breakfast, then she went back to bed
with a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer and a pack of Chesterfields while
Beth went down to the tournament and registered. She still did not have a
rating, but this time one of the men at the desk knew who she was; they
didn’t try to put her in the Beginners Section. There would be two games a
day, and the time control would be 120/40, which meant you had two hours
to make forty moves.
While she was signing in, she could hear a deep voice coming through
one of the double doors that stood open to the Taft Room, where the games
would be. She looked that way and saw part of the big ballroom, with a
long row of empty tables and a few men walking around.
When she walked in, she saw a strange man slouched on a sofa with
black-booted feet resting on a coffee table. “…and the rook comes to the

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seventh rank,” he was saying. “Bone in the throat, man, that rook there. He
took one look at it and paid up.” He leaned his head against the back of the
sofa and laughed loudly in a deep baritone. “Twenty bucks.”
Since it was early, there were only half a dozen people in the room, and
no one was at the long rows of tables with paper chessboards on them.
Everyone was listening to the man talking. He was about twenty-five and
looked like a pirate. He wore dirty jeans, a black turtleneck and a black
wool cap pulled down to his heavy eyebrows. He had a thick black
mustache and clearly needed a shave; the backs of his hands were tanned
and scraped-looking. “The Caro-Kann Defense,” he said, laughing. “A
genuine bummer.”
“What’s wrong with the Caro-Kann?” someone asked. A neat young man
in a camel’s hair sweater.
“All pawns and no hope.” He lowered his legs to the floor and sat up. On
the table was a soiled old beige-and-green chessboard with battered wooden
pieces on it. The head had fallen off the black king at some time or other; it
was held on with a piece of gritty adhesive tape. “I’ll show you,” the man
said, sliding the board over. Beth was now standing next to him. She was
the only girl in the room. The man reached down to the board and with
surprising delicacy picked up the white king pawn with his fingertips and
dropped it lightly on king four. Then he picked up the black queen bishop
pawn and dropped it on queen’s bishop three, put White’s queen pawn on
the fourth rank and did the same with Black’s. He looked up at the people
around him, who were by now all paying close attention.
“The Caro-Kann. Right?”
Beth was familiar with these moves, but she had never seen them played.
She expected the man to move the white queen’s knight next, and he did.
Then he had the black pawn capture the white, and took the capturing pawn
with the white knight. He played Black’s king knight to bishop three and
brought White’s other knight out. Beth remembered the move. Looking at it
now, it seemed tame. She found herself speaking up. “I’d take the knight,”
she said quietly.
The man looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you that kid
from Kentucky—the one who wiped out Harry Beltik?”
“Yes,” Beth said. “If you take the knight, it doubles his pawns…”

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“Big deal,” the man said. “All pawns and no hope. Here’s how to win
with Black.” He left the knight in the center of the board and played Black’s
pawn to king four. Then he continued laying out the moves of a game,
shuffling the pieces around on the board with casual dexterity, occasionally
pointing out a potential trap. The game built to a balanced fugue in the
center. It was like time-lapse photography on TV where a pale-green stalk
humps itself from dirt, heightens, swells and explodes into a peony or a
rose.
Some other people had come into the room and were watching. Beth was
feeling a new kind of excitement with this display, with the knowingness,
the clarity and nerve of the man in the black cap. He began trading pieces in
the center, lifting the captured ones off the board with his fingertips as
though they were dead flies, keeping up a soft-voiced patter that pointed out
necessities and weaknesses, pitfalls and strengths. Once, when he had to
reach across the board to the back rank and move a rook from its home
square, she was astonished to see as he stretched his body that he was
carrying a knife at his waist. The leather-and-metal handle protruded above
his belt. He looked so much like someone out of Treasure Island that the
knife did not seem at all out of place. Just then he paused in his moving and
said, “Now watch this,” and brought the black rook up to its king five
square, setting it down with a muted flourish. He folded his arms across his
chest. “What does White do here?” he asked, looking around him.
Beth considered the board. There were pitfalls all over for white. One of
the men watching spoke up. “Queen takes pawn?”
The man in the cap shook his head, smiling. “Rook to king eight check.
And the queen falls.”
Beth had seen that. It looked to be all over for the white pieces and she
started to say so when another man spoke up. “That’s Mieses-Reshevsky.
From the thirties.”
The man looked up at him. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Margate. Nineteen
thirty-five.”
“White played rook to queen one,” the first man said.
“Right,” said the other. “What else has he got?” He made the move and
continued. It was clear now that White was losing. There were some fast
trades and then an endgame that looked for a moment as though it might be
slow, but Black made a striking sacrifice of a passed pawn and abruptly the

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topology of pawn-queening made it clear that Black would have a queen
two moves before White. It was a dazzling game, like some of the best ones
Beth had learned from books.
The man stood up, took off his cap and stretched. He looked down at
Beth for a moment. “Reshevsky was playing like that when he was your
age, little girl. Younger.”
***
Back in the room Mrs. Wheatley was still reading the Enquirer. She looked
over her reading glasses at Beth as she came in the door. “Finished
already?” she said.
“Yes.”
“How did you do?”
“I won.”
Mrs. Wheatley smiled warmly. “Honey,” she said, “you are a treasure.”
***
Mrs. Wheatley had seen an ad about a sale at Shillito’s—a department store
a few blocks from the Gibson. Since there were four hours before Beth’s
next game, they went over, through lightly falling snow, and Mrs. Wheatley
rummaged in the basement awhile until Beth said, “I’d like to look at their
sweaters.”
“What kind of sweaters, dear?”
“Cashmere.”
Mrs. Wheatley’s eyebrows went up. “Cashmere? Are you sure we can
afford it?”
“Yes.”
Beth found a pale-gray sweater on sale for twenty-four dollars, and it fit
her perfectly. Looking in the tall mirror, she tried to imagine herself as a
member of the Apple Pi Club, like Margaret; but the face was still Beth’s
face, round and freckled, with straight brown hair. She shrugged and bought
the sweater with a traveler’s check. They had passed an elegant little shoe
store with saddle oxfords in the window on the way to Shillito’s and she
took Mrs. Wheatley there and bought herself a pair. Then she bought argyle

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socks to go with them. The tag said: “100% wool. Made in England.”
Going back to the hotel through a wind that whipped tiny snowflakes
against her, Beth kept looking down at her new shoes and high plaid socks.
She liked the way her feet felt, liked the tightness of the warm socks against
her calves, and liked the way they looked—bright expensive socks above
bright brown-and-white shoes. She kept looking down.
***
That afternoon she was matched with a middle-aged Ohioan with a rating of
1910. She played the Sicilian and forced him to resign after an hour and a
half. Her mind was as clear as it had ever been, and she was able to use
some of the things she had learned over the past weeks from studying her
new book by the Russian Master Boleslavski.
When she turned in her score sheet Sizemore was standing near the desk.
She saw a few other familiar faces from that tournament, and it felt good to
see them, but she really wanted to see only one player from before—
Townes. She looked several times but didn’t find him.
Back in their room that evening, Mrs. Wheatley watched The Beverly