There were no two chessboards alike in the bar. They had arrived on the premises from various locations, other incarnations, foreign countries, having seen the world in all its brilliant and bustling and beggarly wonder. They had been sold on markets and in boutiques and in tents and bazaars, or had been made especially for royal children by master carvers. They had been saved from plundering empires and looted from ransacked museums. There were smoked glass boards with polished pieces, others made of varnished wood, pink and cream ivory, jade, woven straw and slate. There was even a bronze board that weighed as much as a human head‚ with a hole in one corner where an emerald had been pried out.
Players were amateur professionals and minor celebrities from Coney, from all over the city and beyond. Local champions attended with regularity, vying over the top spots. Occasionally a flamboyant character would turn up and draw the attention of the locals, an English shire-man who wore a top hat to compete in because he said it brought him luck, and a Russian who had come over for the world tournament in ’39 and had heard bizarre tales of the Coney Island chess-wars and wanted to see them for himself. There was once an ex-congressman, a motion-picture star, a duke, an African chief. There were the old Europeans who played chess in Prospect Park in the day under the shady trees and in Varga at night, who would not allow their photographs to be taken if they won. There were carnival workers and the inventive, sequitor-minded children of the circus. And then there was Grace.
The Lady of Many Eyes
Grace had solemn eyes that were territorial and displaced and dark, like the eyes of the children from eastern Europe that had, for the last two years, been arriving in England in droves on the Kindertransport. She was perhaps twenty years too early for those trains and there might have been eyes like hers all over Brooklyn that had arrived there by some stray, unorganized miracle, by their own dogged mobility. Her eyes said that she also arrived young in a foreign country, or on the cusp of two ages, that time when life can be so easily hindered or so easily accelerated at the bidding of a catalyst, holding the hand of someone who may or may not be her father, a man who disappeared into the crowds of the great city shortly after the boat docked and the official checkpoints were cleared. The eyes spoke somehow of abandonment and resolve, and about a new name, eclipsing and clumsy and Christian, which was designed to cancel out bitter history and give her peace but didn’t. They spoke of adoptive parents, early efforts to learn a language that fitted in her mouth like a wrong shape, triumph, for she was determined in that as in all things, and other languages picked up in waiting rooms and on street comers and with the exchange of money. They said something of failed immigration procedures and a leap to the underside of the city without a second thought because she would not ever go backwards in life. And they described how the taste of her homeland’s traditional foods was not quite the same in America, not quite, there was a subtle mistranslation. But when she heard violin music on Brooklyn’s Yiddish radio and those sad male voices lamenting through apartment windows and inside restaurants the city suddenly seemed like a familiar local graveyard, inhabiting the ghosts of her never revealed nation and she could grieve.
There was an important secret about New York that Grace found out one day, very early on after that brave leap from one civilization to another, lying on the sidewalk with blood coming from her nose and legs. She took a guess at universal human kindness and spoke a very old and very reliant word to a stranger. And a woman she didn’t know spoke the same word back to her and helped her up. The secret was that if the city tipped just so against the light you could see a fine web between corresponding human hearts throughout it, like a spider’s web revealed in the grass on the steppe in the morning dew against the sun. It connected all paths and all peoples with a frail strength that could be traversed if you learned how to move that way. And she learned to tightrope it, like a little spider from home to home, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, delicately between native tongues and histories and cultures. And the beauty was, if you turned and looked behind you, perhaps you would see that you had spun a separate strand along which others could then follow, adding to the web.
Cyril Parks swore that he saw all this in Grace’s eyes when he first met her, in the spring of 1940. Beyond that he could only speculate, for she never spoke of an abandoned town’s name, a river indicating the border of two countries on a map, a family crest or lowly shack, or which cruel twist in Europe’s fabric by which cruel empire, monarch or army general’s hand, had wrung her people out.
Her own troubles travelled down a long way into her, became mature in her voice like something that has churned and changed to a different substance after much motion and time. She slipped between identities, slipped the nets of conversations which would eventually trap her and pin her down. Her heritage was American, it was all she would ever say, slipping the country on like a large overcoat to cover her native dress. She knew the Polish butcher to affectionately call him Tatusiu, she knew her local synagogue Rabbi, the Italians, the Ukrainians, she bought bulk-sized bags of oats and rusk from the Jewish bakery at trade price. She knew the recipe for the pogácsa which the Hungarian mothers baked in ashes for their departing sons. She would send the men and women and children of southern Brooklyn to Euginio, Oceanic Walk’s resident dentist, saying that he was her uncle, she washed her dresses and headscarves alongside the black women that were domestic servants and the Japanese women and the poorer Jewish daughters at the great concrete and iron sinks of the washhouse because amongst the steam and suds gossip and songs translated into community. In the meat-packing district of the city she exchanged money with middle business men. Most people presumed her to be their own, emancipated but choosing to remain associated, and their presumptions simply made it so. It turned out she had the bad temper of every nation, showing it sporadically and viciously, and she could curse profoundly at anyone of any offending nationality as she could also console and toast and bless. She may have known the songs of the Saracens and the secrets of Cleopatra’s maidservants with their cosmetic confidentialities, the great kings of the Middle East, and every carnival cousin in Russia for all anyone knew about her. Her soul might have been loaned by one of several supreme or subordinate beings. She may have owned the petrified heart of Icarus and the charred harness of his blackened wings. She took to Coney like an otter to the shining, reedy river, had worked there for several years before Cy came to meet her. Those who knew her were not surprised by her choices, though this did little to undermine the irrevocable misfortune of her story.