The Lesson

The First Visit

Tuesday morning came.

And soon the sound of the knocker.

Loring opened the door and held it partway. In with the boy. Some pleasantries with the mother there by the door, and then the departure. Loring came from the hall to the parlor where the boy was waiting.

— Your mother and I have made a bargain. But you and I have made no bargain at all.

This was the sort of manner she had always adopted.

The boy watched her.

She sat in a high-backed chair by the fireplace. Her back was to the boy.

— I offer you also a bargain. I will teach you things about chess that will be helpful to you in your play. In return for that, you will do your best to listen to what I tell you. I don’t like to repeat myself, and in fact, I won’t. That’s how it is.

The boy came around and sat on the hearth rug.

— Shall I say what I want?

He really didn’t look very much like a child at all.

— That’s what a bargain is, replied Loring.

— Will you answer all questions? Not just chess questions?

— But you are here to learn chess.

The boy started to say something, then stopped. He messed around with his foot and then spoke up.

— My parents would never be able to tell. They don’t really know anything about chess.

— I see, said Loring. Let’s say then that that’s our bargain.

She reached out her hand and the boy took it. They shook.

In the night she had had a dream about her husband. He was on a ship carved from wood, from some enormous single tree. The captain of the ship was sitting frozen in a chair nailed to the deck. The mate was shouting that there must be some crack in the wood, somewhere, but that it could not be found. Her husband was not the captain, but he might have been, and if he wasn’t, then he was elsewhere in the ship. The night was early in that sea, and the waves grew worse the closer it came to dawn. If the crack could not be found…All night, Loring had this dream, repeating, and each time she strained to remember how it had ended before, but could not. When she woke, she found that she was sitting in the chair in the parlor, and facing her husband’s picture on the wall. What could she say to him, were she to see him? One never knows the uses of the things one does.

And then she was there at this bargaining, and just done shaking the boy’s hand, remembering the dream, and the long night.

— We will then begin, she said. Chess is a complicated game. It is complicated not simply because of the complications of the pieces and the squares, but also because of how people feel about chess. You will often meet people and play them and you will find that when you beat them in chess they feel they have been defeated completely, as though your mind were proved better than theirs. This is not true, of course. But many people believe it to be true, and even some who know that it is not true will still feel that it is true, viscerally. So, the question is, in what way can this be used as a part of the game. Well, actually, that is not the question at the moment. At the moment I am just describing the game, and showing you that this too is a part of it. Another part of the game is stamina. One can become tired over a series of games. Hopefulness can mediate the effects of that exhaustion.

Stan was looking in the other direction. It was unclear whether or not he had been listening.

— Where did you learn to play? he asked.

— I was taught by my brother. He was also a master, but much older.

— Where is he?

— Oh, he died very long ago.

— Was he that old?

— No, he was killed. By mistake.

There was a clock on the mantel. It made a distinct tick and one might imagine that the boy, in future years, would think back on his time in that quiet room, and that the particular ticking of that clock would be recalled to him as part and parcel of that moment. In fact, one never knows what one will remember or why. There is a clock museum, for instance, at least it is called a clock museum (it is the front room of someone’s house), where there are at least two hundred clocks, all going at the same time. The noise is bewildering and wonderful. Everyone who hears it feels they must return and sit a little longer in one of the chairs here and there throughout the room, but of course, they do not come back.

Just as the return to the clock museum is lost, so is the sound of the clock in the Wesley house. The boy was drowsing and wakes at a loud tick. Loring was watching him and considering. They had just played another three games, all of which the boy lost. She had told him to look at the games, and to tell her in ten minutes why he had lost, and in the thinking, curled up in that black oak chair by the wall, he had fallen asleep.

— I have a question for you, he said.

He was wearing a very light brown color and this made him appear sympathetic to all those who saw him that morning. Someone in the street had even said to someone else, why, that is a fine little boy. Not everything in the world is for the worse.

Of course, this is not at all true. It is simply an explanation of the light brown color, and in that sense I stand by the anecdote.

— What is your question?

— Is that your husband on the wall?

Loring was astonished. Could he know nothing about Ezra? One is always surprised by the lack of knowledge others show about our dead. But for him not to know? When she had seen Ezra looking through his eyes?

— He was a chess player as well. That’s him, there. Fifteen years ago, I believe it was taken. I would have to say that: that it was fifteen years ago. Or perhaps longer, perhaps twenty-five.

— Was he very good?

— He was the strongest one for some years, the strongest of all. The best players would gather in some city, to play for some purse, I too, and he would defeat us all. But his style was too wild, and it tired him.

— I don’t understand.

— I will explain this eventually. For now, to answer you. He was also, like me, a master. Now, do you know what went wrong in those games?

— No.

— Figuring out what you did wrong and fixing it, that’s what being a chess player really is.

The bell rang, then, and a bunch of letters fell through the slot in the front door. The two in the parlor could hear them land, one by one on the wood floor of the hall.

— One moment, said Loring.

She was gone and came back and in coming back took a dull knife from the drawer of a desk. One letter she opened. The others she had left by the door. This letter was small, and shaped like a letter. Not all letters are, you know!

— Hmmm, she said.

and

— Something is ready in town. I am going to go down and pick it up. You shall come with me. We’ll get lunch there. There’s nothing to eat in the house anyway.

The boy got his coat and she fetched hers from a peg in the hall. Out the door they went. The hour was eleven. It was that sort of day where eleven means waiting. So, in that way, it was very comfortable to set out at such a time.