She had a sudden image of the fat old janitor bent over his chess set in the basement, with the bare light bulb over his head, and herself standing by him, watching the deliberateness, the oddness of him there alone by the furnace.
“Last night?” she said.
“A heart attack. He was in his sixties.”
What Beth said next surprised her. It came out almost without conscious thought. “I’d like to come to the funeral.”
“The funeral?” Mrs. Deardorff said. “I’m not sure when—There’s an unmarried sister, Hilda Shaibel. You could call her.”
When the Wheatleys drove her to Lexington six years before, they had gone on narrow asphalt roads through towns where she had stared out the car windows at stoplights while brightly dressed people crossed the streets and walked on crowded sidewalks in front of shops. Now, driving back with Jolene, it was four-lane concrete most of the way and the towns were visible only as names printed on green signs.
“He looked like a mean son of a bitch,” Jolene said.
“He wasn’t easy to play chess with, either. I think I was terrified of him.”
“I was scared of all of ’em,” Jolene said. “Motherfuckers.”
That surprised Beth. She had imagined Jolene as fearless. “What about Fergussen?”
“Fergussen was an oasis in the desert,” Jolene said, “but he frightened me when he first came. He turned out to be okay.” She smiled. “Old Fergussen.”
Beth hesitated a moment. “Was there ever anything between you two?” She remembered those extra green pills.
Jolene laughed. “Wishful thinking.”
“How old were you when you came?”
“Six.”
“Do you know anything about your parents?”
“Just my grandmother, and she’s dead. Somewhere near Louisville. I don’t want to know anything about them. I don’t care whether I’m a bastard or why it was they wanted to put me with my grandmother or why she wanted to shove me off on Methuen. I’m just glad to be free of it all. I’ll have my master’s in August, and I’m leaving this state for good.”
“I still remember my mother,” Beth said. “Daddy’s not so clear.”
“Best to forget it,” Jolene said. “If you can.”
She pulled into the left lane and passed a coal truck and two campers. Up ahead a green sign gave the mileage to Mount Sterling. It was spring, almost exactly a year since Beth’s last trip in a car, with Benny. She thought of the griminess of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This white concrete road was fresh and new, with Kentucky fields and white fences and farmhouses on either side of it.
After a while Jolene lit up a cigarette, and Beth said, “Where will you go when you graduate?”
She was beginning to think that Jolene hadn’t heard her when Jolene spoke. “I’ve got an offer from a white law firm in Atlanta that looks promising.” She fell silent again. “What they want is an imported nigger to stay even with the times.”
Beth looked at her. “I don’t think I’d go any farther south if I was black.”
“Well, you sure ain’t,” Jolene said. “These people in Atlanta will pay me twice what I could get in New York. I’d be doing public relations, which is the kind of shuck I understand right to my fingertips, and they’ll start me out with two windows in my office and a white girl to type my letters.”
“But you haven’t studied law.”
Jolene laughed. “I expect they like it that way. Fine, Slocum and Livingston don’t want any black female reviewing torts. What they want is a clean black woman with a nice ass and a good vocabulary. When I did the interview I dropped a lot of words like ‘reprehensible’ and ‘dichotomy,’ and they picked right up.”
“Jolene,” Beth said, “you’re too smart for that. You could teach at the University. And you’re a fine athlete…”
“I know what I’m doing,” Jolene said. “I play good tennis and golf and I’m ambitious.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “You may have no idea just how ambitious I am. I worked hard at sports, and I had coaches promising I’d be a pro if I kept at it.”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
Jolene let the smoke out slowly. “Beth,” she said, “what I want is what you’ve got. I don’t want to work on my backhand for two years so I can be a bush league pro. You’ve been the best at what you do for so long you don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”
“I’d like to be half as good-looking as you are…”
“Quit giving me that,” Jolene said. “Can’t spend your life in front of a mirror. You ain’t ugly anymore anyhow. What I’m talking about is your talent. I’d give my ass to play tennis the way you play chess.”
The conviction in Jolene’s voice was overwhelming. Beth looked at her face in profile, with its Afro grazing at the top of the car interior, at her smooth brown arms out to where her steady hands held the wheel, at the anger clouding her face, and said nothing.
A minute later Jolene said, “Well, now. There it is.”
About a mile ahead to the right of the road stood three dark brick buildings with black roofs and black window shutters. The Methuen Home for Orphaned Children.
A yellow-painted wooden stairway at the end of a concrete path led to the building. Once the steps had looked broad and imposing to her, and the tarnished brass plaque had seemed a stern warning. Now it looked like only the entrance to a shabby provincial institution. The paint on the steps was peeling. The bushes that flanked them were grubby, and their leaves were covered with dust. Jolene was in the playground, looking over the rusty swings and the old slide that they had not been allowed to use except when Fergussen was there to supervise. Beth stood on the path in the sunlight, studying the wooden doors. Inside was Mrs. Deardorff’s big office and the other offices and, filling one whole wing, the library and the chapel. There were two classrooms in the other wing, and past them was the door at the end of the hallway that led to the basement.
She had come to accept the Sunday-morning chess games as her prerogative. Until that day. It still constricted her throat to remember the silent tableau following Mrs. Deardorff’s voice shouting “Elizabeth!” and the cascade of pills and fragmented glass. Then no more chess. Instead it had been the full hour and a half of chapel and Beth helping Mrs. Lonsdale with the chairs and listening to her give her Talks. It took another hour after putting the chairs away to write the précis Mrs. Deardorff had assigned. She did it every Sunday for a year, and Mrs. Deardorff returned it every Monday with red marks and some grim exhortation like “Rewrite. Faulty organization.” She’d had to look up “Communism” in the library for the first précis. Beth had felt somewhere in her that Christianity ought to have something more to it.
Jolene had come over and was standing beside her, squinting in the sunlight. “That’s where you learned to play?”
“In the basement.”
“Shit,” Jolene said. “They should have encouraged you. Sent you on more exhibitions after that one. They like publicity, just like anybody else.”
“Publicity?” She was feeling dazed.
“It brings in money.”
She had never thought of anyone there encouraging her. It began to enter her mind now, standing in front of the building. She could have played in tournaments at nine or ten, like Benny. She had been bright and eager, and her mind was voracious in its appetite for chess. She could have been playing grandmasters and learning things that people like Shaibel and Ganz could never teach her. Girev was planning at thirteen to be World Champion. If she had had half his chances, she would have been as good at ten. For a moment the whole autocratic institution of Russian chess merged in her mind with the autocracy of the place where she was now standing. Institutions. There was no violation of Christianity in chess, any more than there was a violation of Marxism. It was nonideological. It wouldn’t have hurt Deardorff to let her play—to encourage her to play. It would have been something for Methuen to boast about. She could see Deardorff’s face in her mind—the thin, rouged cheeks, the tight, reproving smile, the little sadistic glint in her eyes. It had pleased her to cut Beth off from the game she loved. It had pleased her.