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 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…”
“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 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.”