The Queen's Gambit: Chapters 1–3

The photograph, taken on the porch of the gray house on Maplewood Drive, showed Beth in a simple cotton frock.

In the Methuen Home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Beth was given a tranquilizer twice a day. So were all the other children, to “even their dispositions.” Beth’s disposition was all right, as far as anyone could see, but she was glad to get the little pill.

Mr. Shaibel reached out a fat hand to one of the larger black pieces, picked it up deftly by its head and set it down on a square at the other side of the board.

There were subdued giggles.

She put a hand to her heart, feeling in the bottom of the breast pocket of her blouse for that morning’s pill. The fear reduced itself perceptibly.

Then she put the pieces on their home squares: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, and the row of pawns in front of them.

“When White moves pawn to queen four, Black does this.” He reached down and moved the white pawn two squares up the board, his almost invariable first move.

He nodded impassively.

“Do I move first?” she said, incredulous.

He played the Levenfish Variation; she kept her eyes on his bishop’s command of the long diagonal, the way it was waiting to pounce. And she found a way to neutralize it on the seventeenth move. She was able to trade her own, weaker bishop for it.

He leaned forward and said, “I’ll teach you chess notation.”
She looked up at him.
“The names of the squares. I’ll teach you now.”

“‘For his gayer hours she has a voice of gladness/and a smile and eloquence of beauty…’” read Mr. Espero, while Beth’s mind danced in awe to the geometrical rococo of chess, rapt, enraptured, drowning in the grand permutations as they opened to her soul, and her soul opened to them.

“‘For his gayer hours she has a voice of gladness/and a smile and eloquence of beauty…’” read Mr. Espero, while Beth’s mind danced in awe to the geometrical rococo of chess, rapt, enraptured, drowning in the grand permutations as they opened to her soul, and her soul opened to them.

She anticipated every feint, every threat that he knew how to make.

This time she moved pawn to queen four on both and followed it with pawn to queen’s bishop four—the Queen’s Gambit.

She felt deeply relaxed, almost in a dream. She had taken seven tranquilizers at about midnight, and some of the languor was still in her.

She was half the size of these easy, insolent students with their loud voices and bright sweaters.

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.

The shouts from the film arena rose to a roar, and the volume of the frenetic music rose with it.

Stately music came from the movie in the Library.

Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was of a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.

“Your behavior has come as a profound shock to all of us. Nothing”—for a moment the muscles at the sides of Deardorff’s jaw stood out like steel cables—“nothing in the history of the Metheun Home has been so deplorable. It must not happen again.”

“Your behavior has come as a profound shock to all of us. Nothing”—for a moment the muscles at the sides of Deardorff’s jaw stood out like steel cables—“nothing in the history of the Metheun Home has been so deplorable. It must not happen again.”

“You will be in chapel thirty minutes early and will be responsible for setting up the chairs. If you are in any way remiss in this, Miss Lonsdale has been instructed to report to me. If you are seen whispering to another child in chapel or in any class, you will automatically be given ten demerits.”

Mrs. Deardorff went on about Beth’s schoolwork while the lady in the blue cardigan paid rapt attention.

She had a brown nylon valise beside her on the bed; it was packed with her three dresses and four sets of underwear, her toothbrush, comb, a bar of Dial soap, two barrettes and some plain cotton handkerchiefs.

In the living room the TV was playing unattended; a deep male voice was declaiming about Anacin.

“God knows,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “God knows they have to be meticulous about whom they turn their charges over to. You can’t have scoundrels taking the responsibility for a growing child.”

There was a dresser, and a desk whose orange-looking wood matched it, with a pink glass lamp on it, and a pink chenille bedspread on the enormous bed.

“Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self- deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it..."

My father was a surgeon and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.

Mrs. Wheatley did most of the talking. Beth could see her become more expansive with each question.

It was good to see the names of the variations again; the Levenfish, the Dragon, the Najdorf. They were like incantations in her head, or the names of saints.

Behind some of the moves—not the glamorous ones like the queen sacrifices but sometimes only in the one-square advance of a pawn—she could see subtleties that made the small hairs on the back of her neck tingle.

Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.

“Can anyone say it verbatim?”

“That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt.

“I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.”

“Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified.

Mrs. Wheatley seemed to have a good many colds. “I have a proclivity for viruses,” she would say.