When she got home, Mrs. Wheatley had the magazine in her lap. She began reading aloud:
“‘With some people chess is a pastime, with others it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl—a young, unsmiling girl with brown eyes, brown hair and a dark-blue dress?
“‘It has never happened before, but it happened recently. In Lexington, Kentucky, and in Cincinnati. In Charleston, Atlanta, Miami, and lately in New York City. Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments strolls a fourteen-year-old with bright, intense eyes, from eighth grade at Fairfield Junior High in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet and well-mannered. And she is out for blood…’ It’s marvelous!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Shall I read on?”
“It talks about the orphanage.” Beth had bought her own copy. “And it gives one of my games. But it’s mostly about my being a girl.”
“Well, you are one.”
“It shouldn’t be that important,” Beth said. “They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian.”
“But, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “it makes you a celebrity!”
Beth looked at her thoughtfully, “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.
The next day Margaret stopped her in the hall. Margaret was wearing a camel’s-hair coat and her blond hair fell just to her shoulders; she was even more beautiful than she had been a year before, when Beth had taken the ten dollars from her purse. “The other Apple Pi’s asked me to invite you,” Margaret said respectfully. “We’re having a pledge party Friday night at my house.”
The Apple Pi’s. It was very strange. When Beth accepted and asked for the address she realized it was the first time she had ever actually spoken to Margaret.
She spent over an hour that afternoon trying on dresses at Purcell’s before picking a navy-blue with a simple white collar from the store’s most expensive line. When she showed it to Mrs. Wheatley that evening and told her she was going to the Apple Pi Club, Mrs. Wheatley was clearly pleased. “You look just like a debutante!” she said when Beth tried on the dress for her.
The white woodwork of Margaret’s living room glistened beautifully and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings—mostly of horses. Even though it was a mild evening in March, a big fire burned under the white mantel. Fourteen girls were sitting on the white sofas and colored wingback chairs when Beth arrived in her new dress. Most of the others were wearing sweaters and skirts. “It was really something,” one of them said, “to find a face from Fairfield Junior High in Life. I nearly flipped!” but when Beth started to talk about the tournaments, the girls interrupted her to ask about the boys at them. Were they good-looking? Did she date any of them? When Beth said, “There’s not much time for that,” the girls changed the subject.
For an hour or more they talked about boys and dating and clothes, veering erratically from cool sophistication to giggles, while Beth sat uneasily at one end of a sofa holding a crystal glass of Coca-Cola, unable to think of anything to say. Then, at nine o’clock, Margaret turned on the huge television set by the fireplace and they were all quiet, except for an occasional giggle, while the “Movie of the Week” came on.
Beth sat through it, not participating in the gossip and laughter during the commercials, until it ended at eleven. She was astounded at the dullness of the evening. This was the elite Apple Pi Club that had seemed so important when she first went to school in Lexington, and this was what they did at their sophisticated parties: they watched a Charles Bronson movie. The only break in the dullness was when a girl named Felicia said, “I wonder if he’s as well-hung as he looks.” Beth laughed at that, but it was the only thing she laughed at.
When she left after eleven no one urged her to stay, and no one said anything about her joining. She was relieved to get into the taxi and go home, and when she got there she spent an hour in her room with The Middle Game in Chess, translated from the Russian of D. Luchenko.
The school knew about her, well enough, by the next tournament, and this time she hadn’t claimed illness as an excuse. Mrs. Wheatley talked to the principal, and Beth was excused from her classes. Nothing was said about the illnesses she had lied about. They wrote her up in the school paper, and people pointed her out in the hallways. The tournament was in Kansas City, and after she won it the director took her and Mrs. Wheatley to a steakhouse for dinner and told her they were honored to have her participate. He was a serious young man, and he treated both of them politely.
“I’d like to play in the U.S. Open,” Beth said over dessert and coffee.
“Sure,” he said. “You might win it.”
“Would that lead to playing abroad?” Mrs. Wheatley asked. “In Europe, I mean?”
“No reason why not,” the young man said. His name was Nobile. He wore thick glasses and kept drinking ice water. “They have to know about you before they invite you.”
“Would winning the Open make them know about me?”
“Sure. Benny Watts plays in Europe all the time, now that he’s got his international title.”
“How’s the prize money?” Mrs. Wheatley asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Pretty good, I think.”
“What about Russia?” Beth said.
Nobile stared at her a minute, as though she had suggested something illicit. “Russia’s murder,” he said finally. “They eat Americans for breakfast over there.”
“Now, really…” Mrs. Wheatley said.
“They really do,” Nobile said. “I don’t think there’s been an American with a prayer against the Russians for twenty years. It’s like ballet. They pay people to play chess.”
Beth thought of those pictures in Chess Review, of the men with grim faces, bending over chessboards—Borgov and Tal, Laev and Shapkin, scowling, wearing dark suits. Chess in Russia was a different thing than chess in America. Finally she asked, “How do I get in the U.S. Open?”
“Just send in an entry fee,” Nobile said. “It’s like any other tournament, except the competition’s stiffer.”
She sent in her entry fee, but she did not play in the U.S. Open that year. Mrs. Wheatley developed a virus that kept her in bed for two weeks, and Beth, who had just passed her fifteenth birthday, was unwilling to go alone. She did her best to hide it, but she was furious at Alma Wheatley for being sick, and at herself for being afraid to make the trip to Los Angeles. The Open was not as important as the U.S. Championship, but it was time she started playing in something other than events chosen solely on the basis of the prize money. There was a tight little world of tournaments like the United States Championship and the Merriwether Invitational that she knew of through overheard conversations and from articles in Chess Review; it was time she got into it, and then into international chess. Sometimes she would visualize herself as what she wanted to become; a truly professional woman and the finest chessplayer in the world, traveling confidently by herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene. She often told herself that she would send Jolene a card or a letter, but she never did. Instead she would study herself in the bathroom mirror, looking for signs of that poised and beautiful woman she wanted to become.