Going to the high school was her first ride in a car since she came to Methuen. That was fourteen months ago. Nearly fifteen. Mother had died in a car, a black one like this, with a sharp piece of the steering wheel in her eye. The woman with the clipboard had told her, while Beth stared at the mole on the woman’s cheek and said nothing. Had felt nothing, either. Mother had passed on, the woman said. The funeral would be in three days. The coffin would be closed. Beth knew what a coffin was; Dracula slept in one. Daddy had passed on the year before, because of a “carefree life,” as Mother put it.
Beth sat in the back of the car with a big, embarrassed girl named Shirley. Shirley was in the chess club. Mr. Ganz drove. There was a knot as tight as wire in Beth’s stomach. She kept her knees pressed together and looked straight ahead at the back of Mr. Ganz’s neck in its striped collar and at the cars and buses ahead of their car, moving back and forth outside the windshield.
Shirley tried to make conversation. “Do you play the King’s Gambit?”
Beth nodded, but was afraid to speak. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and very little for nights before that. Last night she had heard Fergussen talking and laughing with the lady at Reception; his heavy laughter had rolled down the corridor and under the doorway into the ward where she lay, stiff as steel, on her cot.
But one thing had happened—something unexpected. As she was about to leave with Mr. Ganz, Jolene came running up, gave Mr. Ganz one of her sly looks and said, “Can we talk for just a second?” Mr. Ganz said it was okay, and Jolene took Beth hastily aside and handed her three green pills. “Here, honey,” she said, “I can tell you need these.” Then Jolene thanked Mr. Ganz and skipped off to class, her geography book under one thin arm.
But there was no chance to take the pills. Beth had them in her pocket right now, but she was afraid. Her mouth was dry. She knew she could pop them down and probably no one would notice. But she was frightened. They would be there soon. Her head was spinning.
The car stopped at a light. Across the intersection was a Pure Oil station with a big blue sign. Beth cleared her throat, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mr. Ganz said.
Beth shook her head firmly. “I can’t wait.”
Mr. Ganz shrugged. When the light changed, he drove across the intersection and into the gas station. Beth went in the room marked LADIES and locked the door behind her. It was a filthy place, with smear marks on the white tiles and a chipped basin. She ran the cold-water tap for a moment and put the pills in her mouth. Cupping her hand, she filled it with water and washed them down. Already she felt better.
It was a big classroom with three blackboards across the far wall. Printed in large capitals on the center board was WELCOME BETH HARMON! in white chalk, and on the wall above this were color photographs of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Most of the regular desks had been taken out of the room and were lined along the hallway wall outside; the rest had been-pushed together at the far end. Three folding tables had been set up to make a U in the center of the room, and on each of these were four green-and-beige paper chessboards with plastic pieces. Metal chairs sat inside the U, facing the black pieces, but there were no chairs facing the white ones.
It had been twenty minutes since the stop at the Pure Oil station and she was no longer trembling, but her eyes smarted and her joints felt sore. She was wearing her navy pleated skirt and a white blouse with red letters spelling Methuen over the pocket.
There was no one in the room when they came in; Mr. Ganz had unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. After a minute a bell rang and there were the sounds of footsteps and some shouts in the hallway, and students began to come in. They were mostly boys. Big boys, as big as men; this was senior high. They wore sweaters and slouched with their hands in their pockets. Beth wondered for a moment where she was supposed to sit. But she couldn’t sit if she was going to play them all at once; she would have to walk from board to board to make the moves. “Hey, Allan. Watch out!” one boy shouted to another, jerking his thumb toward Beth. Abruptly she saw herself as a small unimportant person—a plain, brown-haired orphan girl in dull institutional clothes. She was half the size of these easy, insolent students with their loud voices and bright sweaters. She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again, with the pieces set in the familiar pattern, and the unpleasant feelings lessened. She might be out of place in this public high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.
“Take your seats and be quiet, please.” Mr. Ganz spoke with surprising authority. “Charles Levy will take Board Number One, since he’s our top player. The rest can sit where they want to. There will be no talking during play.”
Suddenly everyone was quiet, and they all began to look at Beth. She looked back at them, unblinking, and she felt rising in her a hatred as black as night.
She turned to Mr. Ganz. “Do I start now?” she asked.
“With Board Number One.”
“And then I go to the next one?”
“That’s right,” he said. She realized that he hadn’t even introduced her to the class. She stepped over to the first board, the one with Charles Levy sitting behind the black pieces. She reached out, picked up the king’s pawn and moved it to the fourth rank.
The surprising thing was how badly they played. All of them. In the very first games of her life she had understood more than they did. They left backward pawns all over the place, and their pieces were wide open for forks. A few of them tried crude mating attacks. She brushed those aside like flies. She moved briskly from board to board, her stomach calm and her hand steady. At each board it took only a second’s glance to read the position and see what was called for. Her responses were quick, sure and deadly. Charles Levy was supposed to be the best of them; she had his pieces tied up beyond help in a dozen moves; in six more she mated him on the back rank with a knight-rook combination.
Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and her shoes squeaked as she moved down the rows of players. The room was silent; she felt her own presence centered in it, small and solid and in command. Outside, birds sang, but she did not hear them. Inside, some of the students stared at her. Boys came in from the hallway and lined up along the back wall to watch the homely girl from the orphanage at the edge of town who moved from player to player with the determined energy of a Caesar in the field, a Pavlova under the lights. There were about a dozen people watching. Some smirked and yawned, but others could feel the energy in the room, the presence of something that had never, in the long history of this tired old schoolroom, been felt there before.
What she did was at bottom shockingly trivial, but the energy of her amazing mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen. Her chess moves blazed with it. By the end of an hour and a half, she had beaten them all without a single false or wasted move.
She stopped and looked around her. Captured pieces sat in clusters beside each board. A few students were staring at her, but most avoided her eyes. There was scattered applause. She felt her cheeks flush; something in her reached out desperately toward the boards, the dead positions on them. There was nothing left there now. She was just a little girl again, without power.
Mr. Ganz presented her with a two-pound box of Whitman’s chocolates and took her out to the car. Shirley got in without a word, careful not to touch against Beth in the back seat. They drove in silence back to the Methuen Home.