She won in Houston without any trouble. She was, as Mrs. Wheatley said, really “getting the hang of it.” She was forced to draw her third game but took the final one by a dazzling combination, beating the forty-year-old Southwest Champion as though he were a beginner. They stayed over two days “for the sun” and visited the Museum of Fine Arts and the Zoological Gardens. On the day after the tournament Beth’s picture was in the paper, and this time it made her feel good to see it. The article called her a “Wunderkind.” Mrs. Wheatley bought three copies, saying, “I just might start a scrapbook.”
In January, Mrs. Wheatley called the school to say that Beth had a relapse of mono, and they went to Charleston. In February it was Atlanta and a cold; in March, Miami and the flu. Sometimes Mrs. Wheatley talked to the Assistant Principal and sometimes to the Dean of Girls. No one questioned the excuses. It seemed likely that some of the students knew about her from out-of-town papers or something, but no one in authority said anything. Beth worked on her chess for three hours every evening between tournaments. She lost one game in Atlanta but still came in first, and she stayed undefeated in the other two cities. She enjoyed flying with Mrs. Wheatley, who sometimes became comfortably buzzed by martinis on the planes. They talked and giggled together. Mrs. Wheatley said funny things about the stewardesses and their beautifully pressed jackets and bright, artificial make-up, or talked about how silly some of her neighbors in Lexington were. She was high-spirited and confidential and amusing, and Beth would laugh a long time and look out the window at the clouds below them and feel better than she had ever felt, even during those times at Methuen when she had saved up her green pills and taken five or six at once.
She grew to love hotels and restaurants and the excitement of being in a tournament and winning it, moving up gradually game by game and having the crowd around her table increase with each win. People at tournaments knew who she was now. She was always the youngest there, and sometimes the only female. Back at school afterward things seemed more and more drab. Some of the other students talked about going to college after high school, and some had professions in mind. Two girls she knew wanted to be nurses. Beth never participated in these conversations; she already was what she wanted to be. But she talked to no one about her traveling or about the reputation she was building in tournament chess.
When they came back from Miami in March, there was an envelope from the Chess Federation in the mail. In it was a new membership card with her rating: 1881. She had been told it would take time for the rating to reflect her real strength; she was satisfied for now to be, finally, a rated player. She would push the figure up soon enough. The next big step was Master, at 2200. After 2000 they called you an Expert, but that didn’t mean much. The one she liked was International Grandmaster; that had weight to it.
That summer they went to New York to play at the Henry Hudson Hotel. They had developed a taste for fine food, though at home it was mostly TV dinners, and in New York they ate at French restaurants, taking buses crosstown to Le Bistro and Cafe Argenteuil. Mrs. Wheatley had gone to a gas station in Lexington and bought a Mobil Travel Guide; she picked places with three or more stars, and then they found them with the little map. It was terribly expensive, but neither of them said a word about the cost. Beth would eat smoked trout but never fresh fish; she remembered the fish she’d had to eat on Fridays at Methuen. She decided that next year at school she would take French.
The only problem was that, on the road, she took the pills from Mrs. Wheatley’s prescription to help her sleep at night, and sometimes it required an hour or so to get her head clear in the morning. But tournament games never started before nine, and she made a point of getting up in time to have several cups of coffee from room service. Mrs. Wheatley did not know about the pills and showed no concern over Beth’s appetite for coffee; she treated her in every way like an adult. Sometimes it seemed as though Beth were the older of the two.
Beth loved New York. She liked riding on the bus, and she liked taking the IRT subway with its grit and rattle. She liked window shopping when she had a chance, and she enjoyed hearing people on the street talking Yiddish or Spanish. She did not mind the sense of danger in the city or the arrogant way the taxis drove or the dirty glitter of Times Square. They went to Radio City Music Hall on their last night and saw West Side Story and the Rockettes. Sitting high in the cavernous theater in a velvet seat, Beth was thrilled.
She had expected a reporter from Life to be someone who chain-smoked and looked like Lloyd Nolan, but the person who came to the door of the house was a small woman with steel-gray hair and a dark dress. The man with her was carrying a camera. She introduced herself as Jean Balke. She looked older than Mrs. Wheatley, and she walked around the living room with quick little movements, hastily checking out the books in the bookcase and studying some of the prints on the walls. Then she began asking questions. Her manner was pleasant and direct. “I’ve really been impressed,” she said, “even though I don’t play chess myself.” She smiled. “They say you’re the real thing.”
Beth was a little embarrassed.
“How does it feel? Being a girl among all those men?”
“I don’t mind it.”
“Isn’t it frightening?” They were sitting facing each other. Miss Balke leaned forward, looking intently at Beth.
Beth shook her head. The photographer came over to the sofa and began taking readings with a meter.
“When I was a girl,” the reporter said, “I was never allowed to be competitive. I used to play with dolls.”
The photographer backed off and began to study Beth through his camera. She remembered the doll Mr. Ganz had given her. “Chess isn’t always ‘competitive,’” she said.
“But you play to win.”
Beth wanted to say something about how beautiful chess was sometimes, but she looked at Miss Balke’s sharp, inquiring face and couldn’t find the words for it.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No. I’m fourteen.” The photographer began snapping pictures.
Miss Balke had lighted a cigarette. She leaned forward now and tapped the ashes into one of Mrs. Wheatley’s ashtrays. “Are you interested in boys?” she asked.
Beth was feeling more and more uneasy. She wanted to talk about learning chess and about the tournaments she had won and about people like Morphy and Capablanca. She did not like this woman and did not like her questions. “I’m interested in chess mostly.”
Miss Balke smiled brightly. “Tell me about it,” she said. “Tell me how you learned to play and how old you were.”
Beth told her and Miss Balke took notes, but Beth felt that she wasn’t really interested in any of it. She found as she went on talking that she really had very little to say.
The next week at school, during algebra class, Beth saw the boy in front of her pass a copy of Life to the girl next to him, and they both turned and looked back at her as though they had never seen her before. After class the boy, who had never spoken to her before, stopped her and asked if she would autograph the magazine. Beth was stunned. She took it from him and there it was, filling a full page. There was a picture of her looking serious at her chessboard, and there was another picture of the main building at Methuen. Across the top of the page a headline read: A GIRL MOZART STARTLES THE WORLD OF CHESS. She signed her name with the boy’s ball-point pen, setting the magazine on an empty desk.