The Queen's Gambit

TWO

They were watching the Saturday-afternoon movie when Mr. Fergussen came to take her to Mrs. Deardorff’s office. It was a movie about table manners called “How to Act at Dinnertime,” so she didn’t mind leaving. But she was frightened. Had they found out that she never went to chapel? That she saved pills? Her legs trembled and her knees felt funny as Mr. Fergussen, wearing his white pants and white T-shirt, walked her down the long hallway, down the green linoleum with black cracks in it. Her thick brown shoes squeaked on the linoleum, and she squinted her eyes under the bright fluorescent lights. The day before had been her birthday. No one had taken any notice of it. Mr. Fergussen, as usual, had nothing to say: he walked smartly down the hall ahead of her. At the door with the frosted glass panel and the words HELEN DEARDORFF—SUPERINTENDENT he stopped. Beth pushed open the door and went inside.

A secretary in a white blouse told her to go on to the back office. Mrs. Deardorff was expecting her. She pushed open the big wooden door and walked in. In the red armchair sat Mr. Ganz, wearing a brown suit. Mrs. Deardorff was sitting behind a desk. She peered at Beth over tortoise-shell glasses. Mr. Ganz smiled self-consciously and rose halfway from the chair when she came in. Then he sat down again awkwardly.

“Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said.

She had closed the door behind her and now stood a few feet away from it. She looked at Mrs. Deardorff.

“Elizabeth, Mr. Ganz tells me that you are a”—she adjusted the glasses on her nose—“a gifted child.” Mrs. Deardorff looked at her for a moment as though she were expected to deny it. When Beth said nothing, she went on, “He has an unusual request to make of us. He would like you to be taken to the high school on…” She looked over at Mr. Ganz again.

“On Thursday,” Mr. Ganz said.

“On Thursday. In the afternoon. He maintains that you are a phenomenal chess player. He would like you to perform for the chess club.”

Beth said nothing. She was still frightened.

Mr. Ganz cleared his throat. “We have a dozen members, and I’d like you to play them.”

“Well?” Mrs. Deardorff said. “Would you like to do that? It can be arranged as a field trip.” She smiled grimly at Mr. Ganz. “We like to give our girls a chance for experience outside.” That was the first time Beth had heard of it; she knew of no one who ever went anywhere.

“Yes,” Beth said. “I’d like to.”

“Good,” Mrs. Deardorff said. “It’s settled, then. Mr. Ganz and one of the girls from the high school will pick you up after lunch Thursday.”

Mr. Ganz got up to go, and Beth started to follow, but Mrs. Deardorff called her back.

“Elizabeth,” she said when they were alone, “Mr. Ganz informs me that you have been playing chess with our custodian.”

Beth was uncertain what to say.

“With Mr. Shaibel.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That is very irregular, Elizabeth. Have you gone to the basement?”

For a moment she considered lying. But it would be too easy for Mrs. Deardorff to find out. “Yes, ma’am,” she said again.

Beth expected anger, but Mrs. Deardorff’s voice was surprisingly relaxed. “We can’t have that, Elizabeth,” she said. “as much as Methuen believes in excellence, we can’t have you playing chess in the basement.”

Beth felt her stomach tighten.

“I believe there are chess sets in the game closet,” Mrs. Deardorff continued. “I’ll have Fergussen look into it.”

A phone began ringing in the outer office and a little light on the phone began flashing. “That will be all, Elizabeth. Mind your manners at the high school and be sure your nails are clean.”

In “Major Hoople” in the funnies, Major Hoople belonged to the Owl’s Club. It was a place where men sat in big old chairs and drank beer and talked about President Eisenhower and how much money their wives spent on hats. Major Hoople had a huge belly, like Mr. Shaibel, and when he was at the Owl’s Club with a dark beer bottle in his hands, his words came from his mouth with little bubbles. He said things like “Harrumph” and “Egad!” in a balloon on top of the bubbles. That was a “club.” It was like the library reading room at Methuen. Maybe she would play the twelve people in a room like that.

She hadn’t told anyone. Not even Jolene. She lay in bed after lights out and thought about it with an expectant quiver in her stomach. Could she play that many games? She rolled over on her back and nervously felt the pocket of her pajamas. There were two in there. It was six days until Thursday. Maybe Mr. Ganz meant she would play one game with one person and then one game with another, if that was how you did it.

She had looked up “phenomenal.” The dictionary said: “extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.” She repeated these words silently to herself now: “extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.” They became a tune in her mind.

She tried to picture twelve chessboards at once, spread out in a row on the ceiling. Only four or five were really clear. She took the black pieces for herself and assigned the whites to “them” and then had “them” move pawn to king four, and she responded with the Sicilian. She found she could keep five games going and concentrate on one at a time while the other four waited for her attention.

From out at the desk down the corridor she heard a voice say, “What time is it now?” and another voice reply, “It’s two-twenty.” Mother used to talk about the “wee, small hours.” This was one of them. Beth kept playing chess, keeping five imaginary games going at once. She had forgotten about the pills in her pocket.

The next morning Mr. Fergussen handed her the little paper cup as usual but when she looked down into it there were two orange vitamin tablets and nothing else. She looked back up at him, behind the little window of the pharmacy.

“That’s it,” he said. “Next.”

She didn’t move, even though the girl behind her was pushing against her. “Where are the green ones?”

“You don’t get them anymore,” Mr. Fergussen said.

Beth stood on tiptoe and looked over the counter. There, behind Mr. Fergussen, stood the big glass jar, still a third full of green pills. There must have been hundreds of them in there, like tiny jellybeans. “There they are,” she said and pointed.

“We’re getting rid of them,” he said. “It’s a new law. No more tranquilizers for kids.”

“It’s my turn,” said Gladys, behind her.

Beth didn’t move. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out.

“It’s my turn for vitamins,” Gladys said, louder.

There had been nights when she was so involved in chess that she had slept without pills. But this wasn’t one of them. She could not think about chess. There were three pills in her toothbrush holder, and that was it. Several times she decided to take one of them but then decided not to.

“I hear tell you going to exhibit yourself,” Jolene said. She giggled, more to herself than to Beth. “Going to play chess in front of people.”

“Who told you?” Beth said. They were in the locker room after volleyball. Jolene’s breasts, not there a year before, jiggled under her gym shirt.

“Child, I just know things,” Jolene said. “Ain’t that where it’s like checkers but the pieces jump around crazy? My Uncle Hubert played that.”

“Did Mrs. Deardorff tell you?”

“Never go near that lady.” Jolene smiled confidentially. “It was Fergussen. He told me you going to the high school downtown. Day after tomorrow.”

Beth looked at her incredulously. The staff didn’t trade confidences with the orphans. “Fergussen…?”

Jolene leaned over and spoke seriously. “He and I been friendly from time to time. Don’t want you talking about it, hear?”

Beth nodded.

Jolene pulled back and went on drying her hair with the white gym towel. After volleyball you could always stretch out the time, showering and getting dressed, before going to study hall.

Beth thought of something. After a moment she spoke in a low voice, “Jolene.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did Fergussen give you green pills? Extra ones?”

Jolene looked at her hard. Then her face softened. “No, honey. I wish he would. But they got the whole state after ’em for what they been doing with those pills.”

“They’re still there. In the big jar.”

“That a fact?” Jolene said. “I ain’t noticed.” She kept looking at Beth. “I noticed you been edgy lately. You having withdraw symptoms?”

Beth had used her last pill the night before. “I don’t know,” she said.

“You look around,” Jolene said. “They’ll be some nervous orphans around here the next few days.” She finished drying her hair and stretched. With the light coming from behind her and with her frizzy hair and her big, wide eyes, Jolene was beautiful. Beth felt ugly, sitting there on the bench beside her. Pale and little and ugly. And she was scared to go to bed tonight without pills. She had been sleeping only two or three hours a night for the past two nights. Her eyes felt gritty and the back of her neck, even right after showering, was sweaty. She kept thinking about that big glass jar behind Fergussen, filled with green pills a third of the way up—enough to fill her toothbrush holder a hundred times.

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.

Five o’clock study hall was intolerable. She tried playing chess in her mind, but it seemed for once pale and meaningless after the afternoon at the high school. She tried reading Geography, since there was a test the next day, but the big book was practically all pictures, and the pictures meant little to her. Jolene was not in the room, and she was desperate to see Jolene, to see if there were any more pills. Every now and then she touched her blouse pocket with the palm of her hand in a kind of superstitious hope that she would feel the little hard surface of a pill. But there was nothing there.

Jolene was at supper, eating her Italian spaghetti, when Beth came in and picked up her tray. She went over to Jolene’s table before getting her food. There was another black girl with her. Samantha, a new one. Jolene and she were talking.

Beth walked straight up to them and said to Jolene, “Have you got any more?”

Jolene frowned and shook her head. Then she said, “How was the exhibit? You do okay?”

“Okay,” Beth said. “Haven’t you got just one?”

“Honey,” Jolene said, turning away, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

The Saturday afternoon movie in the library was The Robe. It had Victor Mature in it and was spiritual; all the staff was there, sitting attentive in a special row of chairs at the back, near the shuddering projector. Beth kept her eyes nearly shut during the first half-hour; they were red and sore. She had not slept at all on Thursday night and had dozed off for only an hour or so Friday. Her stomach was knotted, and there was the vinegar taste in her throat. She slouched in her folding chair with her hand in her skirt pocket, feeling the screwdriver she had put there in the morning. Walking into the boys’ woodworking shop after breakfast, she took it from a bench. No one saw her do it. Now she squeezed it in her hand until her fingers hurt, took a deep breath, stood up and edged her way to the door. Mr. Fergussen was sitting there, proctoring.

“Bathroom,” Beth whispered.

Mr. Fergussen nodded, his eyes on Victor Mature, bare-chested in the arena.

She walked purposively down the narrow hallway, over the wavy places in the faded linoleum, past the girls’ room and down to the Multi-Purpose Room, with its Christian Endeavour magazines and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and, against the far wall, the padlocked window that said PHARMACY.

There were some small wooden stools in the room; she picked up one of them. There was no one around. She could hear gladiatorial shouts from the movie in the library but nothing else except her footsteps. They sounded very loud.

She set the stool in front of the window and climbed onto it. This put her face on a level with the hasp and padlock, at the top. The window itself, made of frosted glass with chicken wire in it, was framed in wood. The wood had been thickly painted with white enamel. Beth examined the screws that held the painted hasp. There was paint in their slots. She frowned, and her heart began to beat faster.

During the rare times when Daddy had been home, and sober, he had liked to do little jobs around the house. The house was an old one, in a poorer part of town, and there was heavy paint on the woodwork. Beth, five and six years old, had helped Daddy take the old switch plates and outlet plates off the walls with his big screwdriver. She was good at it, and Daddy praised her for it. “You catch on real quick, sweetiepie,” he said. She had never been happier. But when there was paint in the screw slots he would say, “Let Daddy fix that for you,” and would do something to get the screw head ready so that all she had to do was put the blade in the slot and turn. But what did he do to get that paint away? And which way should you turn the screwdriver? For a moment she almost choked in a sudden flush of inadequacy. The shouts from the film arena rose to a roar, and the volume of the frenetic music rose with it. She could get down off the stool and go back and take her seat.

But if she did that, she would go on feeling the way she felt now. She would have to lie in bed at night with the light from under the door in her face and the sounds from the corridor in her ears and the bad taste in her mouth, and there would be no relief, no ease in her body. She took the screwdriver handle and banged the two big screwheads with it. Nothing happened. She gritted her teeth and thought hard. Then she nodded grimly, took a fresh purchase on the screwdriver, and using the corner of its blade, began to chisel out the paint. That was what Daddy had done. She pressed with both hands, keeping her feet firmly on the stool, and pushed along the slot. Some paint chipped loose, exposing the brass of the screw. She kept pushing with the sharp corner and more came loose. Then a big flake of paint fell off, and the slot was exposed.

She took the screwdriver in her right hand, put the blade carefully in the slot and turned—to the left, the way Daddy had taught her. She remembered it now. She was good at remembering. She twisted as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She took the screwdriver away from the slot, gripped it in both hands and put the blade back in. Then she hunched her shoulders together and twisted until her hands felt sharp pains in them. And suddenly something squeaked, and the screw loosened. She kept twisting until she could take it out the rest of the way with her finger and put it in her blouse pocket. Then she went to work on the other screw. The part of the hasp she was working on was supposed to be held by four screws—one at each corner—but only two had been put in. She had noticed this during the past several days, just as she had checked every day at Vitamin Time to see if the green pills were still there in the big jar.

She put the other screw in her pocket, and the end of the hasp came loose by itself, with the big padlock still hanging there, the other end supported by the screws that held it to the window frame. It had not taken her long to understand that you would have to remove only half a hasp, not both halves, the way it had looked at first.

She pulled open the window, leaning back so it could go by her, and put her head inside. The light bulb was off, but she could see the outline of the big jar. She put her arms inside the opening, and standing on tiptoe, pushed herself as far forward as she could. That put her belly on the sill of the window. She began to wriggle, and her feet came away from the stool. There was a slightly sharp edge along the window sill, and it felt as though it were cutting her. She ignored it and kept on wriggling, doing it methodically, inching forward. She both felt and heard her blouse ripping. She ignored it; she had another blouse in her locker and could change.

Now her hands touched the cool, smooth surface of a metal table. That was the narrow white table Mr. Fergussen stood against when he gave them their medicine. She inched forward again, and her weight came down on her hands. There were some boxes there. She pushed them aside, clearing a place for herself. Now it was easier to move. She let her weight come forward with the sill under her hips until it scraped the tops of her legs and she was able to let herself flop onto the table, twisting herself at the last second so she wouldn’t fall off it. She was inside! She took a couple of deep breaths and climbed down. There was enough light for her to see all right. She walked over to the far wall of the tiny room and stopped, facing the dimly visible jar. It had a glass cover. She lifted this and set it silently on the table. Then she slowly reached inside with both hands. Her fingertips touched the smooth surface of tens of pills, hundreds of pills. She pushed her hands deeper, burying them up to the wrists. She breathed in deeply and held her breath for a long time. Finally she let it out in a sigh and removed her right hand with a fistful of pills. She did not count them, simply put them in her mouth and swallowed until they had all gone down.

Then she stuffed three handfuls of pills in her skirt pocket. On the wall to the right of the window was a Dixie Cup dispenser. She was able to reach it by standing on tiptoe and stretching. She took four paper cups. She had decided on that number the night before. She carried them over, stacked, to the table that held the pill jar, set them down neatly, and filled them one at a time. Then she stood back and looked at the jar. The level had dropped to almost half what it had been. The problem seemed insoluble. She would have to wait and see what happened.

Leaving the cups, she went to the door that Mr. Fergussen used when he went to do pharmacy duty. She would leave that way, unlocking it from the inside, and make two trips to carry the pills to the metal stand by her bed. She had a nearly empty Kleenex box to put them in. She would spread a few sheets of Kleenex on top and put the box in the bottom of her enameled nightstand, under her clean underwear and socks.

But the door would not open. It was locked in some serious way. She examined the knob and latch, feeling carefully with her hands. There was a thick, heavy sensation at the back of her throat as she did this, and her arms were numb, like the arms of a dead person. What she had suspected when the door wouldn’t open turned out to be true: you had to have a key even from the inside. And she could not climb back out the little window carrying four Dixie cups full of tranquilizers.

She grew frantic. They would miss her at the movie. Fergussen would be looking for her. The projector would break down and all the children would be sent into the Multi-Purpose Room, with Fergussen monitoring them, and here she would be. But deeper than that, she felt trapped, the same wretched, heart-stopping sensation she had felt when she was taken from home and put in this institution and made to sleep in a ward with twenty strangers and hear noises all night long that were, in a way, as bad as the shouting at home, when Daddy and Mother were there—the shouting from the brightly lit kitchen. Beth had slept in the dining room on a folding cot. She felt trapped then, too, and her arms were numb. There was a big space under the door that separated dining room from kitchen; the light had streamed in under it, along with the shouted words.

She gripped the doorknob and stood still for a long moment, breathing shallowly. Then her heart began beating almost normally again and feeling came back into her arms and hands. She could always get out by climbing through the window. She had a pocket full of pills. She could set the Dixie cups on the white table inside the window and then, when she was back on the stool outside, she could reach in and take them out, one at a time. She could visualize it all, like a chess position.

She carried the cups over to the table. She had begun to sense in herself an enormous calm, like the calm she had felt that day at the high school when she knew she was unbeatable. When she set down the fourth cup she turned and looked back at the glass jar. Fergussen would know that pills had been stolen. That could not be hidden. Sometimes her father had said, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

She took the jar over to the table and poured the contents of the Dixie cups back into it, stepped back and checked. It would be simple to lean over from the outside and lift the jar out. She knew, too, where she could hide it, on the shelf of a disused janitors’ closet in the girls’ room. There was an old galvanized bucket up there that was never used; the jar would fit into it. There was also a short ladder in the closet, and she could use it safely because a person could lock the door on the girls’ room from the inside. Then, if there was a search for the missing pills, even if they found them, they couldn’t be traced to her. She would take only a few at a time and wouldn’t tell anyone—not even Jolene.

The pills she had gulped down a few minutes before were beginning to reach her mind. All of her nervousness had vanished. With clear purposefulness, she climbed up on Mr. Fergussen’s white table, put her head out the window and looked around her at the still-empty room. The jar of pills was a few inches from her left knee. She wriggled her way through the window and onto the stool. Standing up high there, she felt calm, powerful, in charge of her life.

She leaned forward dreamily and took the jar by its rim in both hands. A fine relaxation had spread through her body. She let herself go limp, staring down into the depths of green pills. Stately music came from the movie in the Library. Her toes were still on the stool and her body was loosely jackknifed over the window ledge; she no longer felt the sharp edge. She was like a limp rag doll. As her eyes lost focus, the green became a bright luminous blur.

“Elizabeth!” The voice seemed to come from a place inside her head. “Elizabeth!” She blinked. It was a woman’s voice, harsh, like Mother’s. She did not look around. Her fingers and thumbs on the side of the jar had gone loose. She squeezed them together and picked up the jar. She felt herself moving in slow motion, like slow motion in a movie where someone falls from a horse at a rodeo and you see him float gently to the ground as though it could not hurt at all. She lifted the jar with both hands and turned, and the bottom of the jar hit the window ledge with a dull ringing sound and her wrists twisted and the jar came loose from her hands and exploded on the edge of the stool at her feet. The fragments, mixed with hundreds of green pellets, cascaded to the linoleum floor. Bits of glass caught light like rhinestones and lay in place shivering while the green pills rolled outward like a bright waterfall toward Mrs. Deardorff. Mrs. Deardorff was standing a few feet away from her, saying, “Elizabeth!” over and over again. After what seemed a long time, the pills stopped moving.

Behind Mrs. Deardorff was Mr. Fergussen in his white pants and T-shirt. Next to him stood Mr. Schell, and just behind them, crowding to see what had happened, were the other children, some of them still blinking from the movie that had just ended. Every person in the room was staring at her, high on the miniature stage of her stool with her hands a foot apart as though she were still holding the glass jar.

Fergussen rode with her in the brown staff car and carried her into the hospital to the little room where the lights were bright and they made her swallow a gray rubber tube. It was easy. Nothing mattered. She could still see the green mound of pills in the jar. There were strange things happening inside her, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep and woke only for a moment when someone pushed a hypodermic needle in her arm. She did not know how long she was there, but she did not spend the night. Fergussen drove her back the same evening. She sat in the front seat now, awake and unworried. The hospital was on the campus, where Fergussen was a graduate student; he pointed out the Psychology Building as they drove past it. “That’s where I go to school,” he said.

She merely nodded. She pictured Fergussen as a student, taking true-false tests and holding his hand up when he wanted to leave the room. She had never liked him before, had thought of him as just one of the others.

“Jesus, kid,” he said, “I thought Deardorff would explode.”

She watched the trees go by outside the car window.

“How many did you take? Twenty?”

“I didn’t count.”

He laughed. “Enjoy ’em,” he said. “It’ll be cold turkey tomorrow.”

At Methuen she went directly to bed and slept deeply for twelve hours. In the morning, after breakfast, Fergussen once again his usual distant self, told her to go to Mrs. Deardorff’s office. Surprisingly, she wasn’t afraid. The pills had worn off, but she felt rested and calm. While getting dressed she had made an extraordinary discovery. Deep in the pocket of her serge skirt, survivors of her being caught, her trip to the hospital, her undressing and then dressing again, were twenty-three tranquilizers. She had to take her toothbrush out of its holder to get them all in.

Mrs. Deardorff kept her waiting almost an hour. Beth didn’t care. She read in National Geographic about a tribe of Indians who lived in the holes of cliffs. Brown people with black hair and bad teeth. In the pictures there were children everywhere, often snuggled up against the older people. It was all strange; she had never been touched very much by older people, except for punishment. She did not let herself think about Mrs. Deardorff’s razor strop. If Deardorff was going to use it, she could take it. 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.

Mrs. Deardorff did not invite her to sit. Mr. Schell was seated on Mrs. Deardorff’s little blue chintz sofa, and in the red armchair sat Miss Lonsdale. Miss Lonsdale was in charge of chapel. Before she had started slipping off to play chess on Sundays, Beth had listened to some of Miss Lonsdale’s chapel talks. They were about Christian service and about how bad dancing and Communism were, as well as some other things Miss Lonsdale was not specific about.

“We have been discussing your case for the past hour, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said. Her eyes, fixed on Beth, were cold and dangerous.

Beth watched her and said nothing. She felt something was going on that was like chess. In chess you did not let on what your next move would be.

“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.”

Mr. Schell spoke up. “We are terribly disappointed—”

“I can’t sleep without the pills,” Beth said.

There was a startled silence. No one had expected her to speak. Then Mrs. Deardorff said, “All the more reason why you should not have them.” But there was something odd in her voice, as though she were frightened.

“You shouldn’t have given them to us in the first place,” Beth said.

“I will not have back talk from a child,” Mrs. Deardorff said. She stood up and leaned across the desk toward Beth. “If you speak to me like that again, you will regret it.”

The breath caught in Beth’s throat. Mrs. Deardorff’s body seemed enormous. Beth drew back as though she had touched something white hot.

Mrs. Deardorff sat down and adjusted her glasses. “Your library and playground privileges have been suspended. You will not attend the Saturday movies and you will be in bed promptly at eight o’clock in the evenings. Do you understand?”

Beth nodded.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“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 paused. “You understand the meaning of ten demerits, Elizabeth?”

Beth nodded.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Elizabeth, Miss Lonsdale informs me that you have often left chapel for long periods. That will end. You will remain in chapel for the full ninety minutes on Sundays. You will write a summary of each Sunday’s talk and have it on my desk by Monday morning.” Mrs. Deardorff leaned back in the wooden desk chair and folded her hands across her lap. “And Elizabeth…”

Beth looked at her carefully. “Yes, ma’am.”

Mrs. Deardorff smiled grimly. “No more chess.”

The next morning Beth went to the Vitamin Line after breakfast. She could see that the hasp had been replaced on the window and that this time there were screws in all four of the holes at each side of the padlock.

When she came up to the window Fergussen looked at her and grinned. “Want to help yourself?” he said.

She shook her head and held her hand out for the vitamin pills. He handed them to her and said, “Take it easy, Harmon.” His voice was pleasant; she had never heard him speak that way at vitamin time before.

Miss Lonsdale wasn’t too bad. She seemed embarrassed at having Beth report to her at nine-thirty, and she showed her nervously how to unfold and set out the chairs, helping her with the first two rows of them. Beth was able to handle it easily enough, but listening to Miss Lonsdale talk about godless communism and the way it was spreading in the United States was pretty bad. Beth was sleepy, and she hadn’t had time to finish breakfast. But she had to pay attention so she could write her report. She listened to Miss Lonsdale talk on in her deadly serious way about how we all had to be careful, that communism was like a disease and could infect you. It wasn’t clear to Beth what communism was. Something wicked people believed in, in other countries, like being Nazis and torturing Jews by the millions.

If Mrs. Deardorff hadn’t told him, Mr. Shaibel would be expecting her. She wanted to be there to play chess, to try the King’s Gambit against him. Maybe Mr. Ganz would be back with someone from the chess club for her to play. She let herself think of this only for a moment and her heart seemed to fill. She wanted to run. She felt her eyes smarting.

She blinked and shook her head and went on listening to Miss Lonsdale, who was talking now about Russia, a terrible place to be.

“You should’ve saw yourself,” Jolene said. “Up on that stool. Just floating around up there and Deardorff hollering at you.”

“It felt funny.”

“Shit, I bet. I bet it felt good.” Jolene leaned a little closer. “How many of them downers you take, anyhow?”

“Thirty.”

Jolene stared at her. “She-it!” she said.

It was difficult to sleep without the pills, but not impossible. Beth saved the few she had for emergencies and decided that if she had to stay awake for several hours every night, she would spend the time learning the Sicilian Defense. There were fifty-seven printed pages on the Sicilian in Modem Chess Openings, with a hundred and seventy different lines stemming from P—QB4. She would memorize and play through them all in her mind at night. When that was done and she knew all the variations, she could go on to the Pirć and the Nimzovitch and the Ruy Lopez. Modern Chess Openings was a thick, dense book. She would be all right.

Leaving Geography class one day, she saw Mr. Shaibel at the end of the long hallway. He had a metal bucket on wheels with him and was mopping. The students were all going the other way, to the door that led to the yard for recess. She walked down to him, stopping where the floor was wet. She stood for about a minute until he looked up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They won’t let me play anymore.”

He frowned and nodded but said nothing.

“I’m being punished. I…” She looked at his face. It registered nothing. “I wish I could play more with you.”

He looked for a moment as if he was going to speak. But instead he turned his eyes to the floor, bent his fat body slightly and went back to mopping. Beth could suddenly taste something sour in her mouth. She turned and walked back down the hall.

Jolene said there were always adoptions around Christmas. The year after they stopped Beth from playing chess there were two in early December. Both pretty ones, Beth thought to herself. “Both white,” Jolene said aloud.

The two beds stayed empty for a while. Then one morning before breakfast Fergussen came into the Girls’ Ward. Some of the girls giggled to see him there with the heavy bunch of keys at his belt. He came up to Beth, who was putting on her socks. It was near her tenth birthday. She got her second sock on and looked up at him.

He frowned. “We got a new place for you, Harmon. Follow me.”

She went with him across the ward, over to the far wall. One of the empty beds was there, under the window. It was a bit larger than the others and had more space around it.

“You can put your things in the nightstand,” Fergussen said. He looked at her for a minute. “It’ll be nicer over here.”

She stood there, amazed. It was the best bed in the ward. Fergussen was making a note on a clipboard. She reached out and touched his forearm with her fingertips, where the dark hairs grew, above his wristwatch. “Thank you,” she said.