Behind me, I heard Liu shouting out my name, and begging us to be careful. “Easy does it,” I said.
“I wasn’t trying to jump. I’m just feeling a little dizzy,” Dad whispered back.
“Then let’s sit down,” I suggested. “Because I’m not letting go. If you go over the edge, I’m going, too.”
“Okay, let’s sit,” he agreed.
Slowly, holding on to each other, we sat down side by side on the edge of the roof, with our legs hanging over the side of the building. I felt a bit dizzy myself, so I kept my eyes fixed on Lady Liberty’s torch and tried to figure out what to say. “Mom is downstairs waiting for us,” I told him very gently. “You have nothing more to prove here. Not to me, not to George Liszt, not even to Fischer and Morphy. I’ve seen you at your best—I’ll never forget what you did to Grandmaster Sanchez. It’s enough.”
“No, it’s not enough,” he replied in a whisper. “I wasn’t going to jump just now … but part of me wanted to.”
I let go of his arm and took his right hand. It felt cold and clammy. “What are you talking about?”
“George Liszt has led the life I should have had,” he whispered. “He’s traveled to international tournaments, and won brilliancy prizes, and followed his stars. Not a week has gone by in my tiny office in New Jersey when, on some deep level, I haven’t thought of who I should have been, and rued the day I quit, and hated myself for the weak coward I am. I pushed it far away and tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but this tournament—and especially this last game—has forced me to dredge it up and face it. You want to hear the truth about Grandmaster Pratzer? That’s who your father is. A man who regrets his life.”
“You walked away from this crazy chess world for good reasons.”
“That’s what I tried to tell myself,” he agreed. “And it’s true enough on some level. But it’s also a big lie.”
I held his hand tightly. “There are two sides to everything. You made a mature decision.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I love you and your sister and your mom, and I want to go home. But I also know this—I see it very clearly. There’s a big part of me that can’t possibly leave now. I can’t walk back into my office on Monday morning and pretend this never happened, and pick up the first tax forms on my desk and sip the bitter coffee from the cracked mug.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked him.
A spark seemed to kindle in his black eyes, and he squeezed my hand. “There’s only one thing to do. I need to go down there and face Liszt and finish this game. Not for your mother, or for you, or for anyone else in the world. This is something I need to do for me. For me. And I’m ready.”
I spoke softly. “I’m not sure you can handle it. You look terrible, and I’m worried about your heart. Also, they probably disqualified you as soon as you left the penthouse. Anyway, you’re almost surely out of time by now.”
“Got to do it,” he whispered, and the spark in his eye had kindled into a flame. It danced and flickered like a kind of madness, but it also gave him new strength and determination. “Got to try. You’re my son. Help me.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay, Dad. I’ll stay with you every step of the way. And the first one’s going to be the hardest. Can we slide back on our butts and get away from the edge before we stand up?”
Dad’s sweaty body trembled. “I don’t know if I can move,” he said. “I’m kind of frozen here.”
“Just a few inches,” I encouraged. “Backward. Come on. One, two … three.”
We slid inch by inch back from the abyss, and then stood up and started walking across the roof.
Liu hurried over. “Hi, Mr. Pratzer. Can I help you?”
“Take my other arm,” he said. “I’m feeling better now, but I’m still a little dizzy.”
Liu took his other arm and we braced him between us and led him back toward the stairs. “Let’s go quickly,” Dad said. “I can’t have much time left on my clock.”
“Don’t worry about the game,” Liu told him. “It really doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to my father,” I told her. “He’s going to go down and finish. And that’s his decision, so we have to respect it and help him.”
Liu looked back at me. “Great,” she muttered, “two insane men in one family. I really know how to pick ’em.”
“I like this girl, Daniel,” my father told me as we took another step. “You might want to keep her around for a while.”
34
“It’s over,” George Liszt shouted as soon as he saw us walk into the penthouse playing area. “He’s disqualified himself. Who knows where he’s been?”
The ref called over the tournament director, a well-dressed, dignified older man, who ordered that Dad’s clock be stopped while the whole mess was sorted out. I saw that Dad only had four minutes and seven seconds remaining.
“I know where he’s been,” I told them. “On the roof. By himself. There’s a surveillance camera up there if you need proof.” I made that up, but it sounded plausible.
Liszt turned to the tournament director. “He could have had help. He could have checked the position on a computer. He could have made a cell phone call to anyone.”
Dad stayed silent, so I jumped to his defense. “My dad doesn’t have a cell phone with him,” I said. “And he didn’t bring a computer on this trip. He just needed a breath of fresh air. You know what I think?”
Liszt glared at me. “I couldn’t care less.”
“I think you don’t have the guts to face him and finish this,” I said. “I think you’re a bully, and you did your best to scare me into taking him home, but right now you’re the one who’s scared.”
The enormous grandmaster stepped toward me threateningly, but my father cut him off and said softly: “George, my son has a point. Why don’t we just sit down at the board and finish this ourselves?”
Liszt looked at my father and saw something he didn’t like. Despite my dad’s paleness, despite the fact that he was sweaty and still trembling, there was a new resolve in his face and a competitive fire glowing in his eyes. “No,” Liszt growled. “I’m out of here. It’s over.”
The tournament director glanced from Liszt to my dad, sizing the situation up. “One question—why did you leave the playing area, Grandmaster Pratzer?”
I realized that the cameras were rolling and that whatever Dad answered would be heard and seen by hundreds of people downstairs. “Because I’m a coward sometimes, and I was afraid, and I couldn’t handle the pressure,” Dad said softly, looking into the eyes of the tournament director. Then Dad’s voice hardened. “But I can handle it now.”
“Now is too late, you wacko,” George Liszt told him. “It’s over. I’ve won and I’m leaving. Give me my money.”
“It’s not over,” the tournament director declared with authority. “We’re outside the rule book here. This is my call, and I declare the game on. It’s black’s move.” He looked at Liu and me. “Only the two players can stay.”
“Goodbye,” I said to my father.
He whispered, “Thanks, Daniel. Tell Mom I love her,” and sat down at the chessboard. “George,” he said, “we’ve had this coming a long time. I believe it’s my move.”
Liu and I rode down in the elevator. “Wow,” she said, “that was intense. Do you think he can really win the game in four minutes? Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses. Maybe he just needs to finish.”
“It matters,” I told her.
The doors opened, and we found ourselves in the crowded common area, where the excitement had reached a fever pitch. My father had taken forty precious seconds to think about his move, and the master was on his podium, waving his arms as he moved pieces on a demo board.
“Grandmaster Pratzer is offering to sacrifice a knight for two pawns,” the master explained. “It looks to me to be a highly speculative sacrifice, but he must have calculated that if white grabs the knight he will have a hard time stop
ping black’s pawns from advancing.”
George Liszt spent ten minutes staring hard at the board, pondering that same calculation. He looked like a man at a fork in a road, trying to pick a route and suspecting that either path might lead to disaster. He leaned forward and tilted back, he crossed his arms and laid them flat, he squinted at the board and then he glared across at my father. Dad gave him a slightly amused smile back, as if to say: “So you see it, too? What are you going to do about it?”
“Daniel!” My mom came rushing over, trailed by Kate, Eric, and Dr. Chisolm. “What, for God’s sake, was your father doing on the roof?”
“Just getting a breath of air,” I lied badly. “He had a touch of claustrophobia.”
“Morris never had claustrophobia in his life,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”
I met her eyes. “He’s got to do this, Mom.”
“That’s the truth?”
I nodded. “And he said to tell you he loves you.”
She looked back at me, took a quick breath, and grabbed on to the back of a chair for momentary support. “Can’t you explain to me why he’s putting himself through this?” she asked softly. “If I understood the reason, then it might be easier.”
“It goes way back to when he was a teenager, before he met you,” I told her. “If you want to know more than that, you’ve got to ask him.”
She looked for a second like she was contemplating taking the elevator up to the penthouse and asking him right there, and trying to put a stop to this herself. Then she glanced at my father’s face on the monitor. He was watching Liszt, waiting for the big man to move. Dad looked tense and haggard, but an almost imperceptible smile never left his lips. It transformed him, giving him an air of confidence and calmness beyond his exhaustion, as if he were somehow enjoying the pain of this struggle. Mom shrugged her shoulders. “Okay, Morris,” she whispered. “If this is what you have to do, then win it.”
Liszt reached a hand down to the chessboard and decisively took the knight, accepting Dad’s sacrifice.
My father looked back at his old rival for a half second, and the bemused smile on his face became a tiny bit more pronounced. Without studying the board any further, my dad quickly made a bold pawn move.
“That’s a very aggressive pawn thrust for black,” the master said. “It’s difficult to calculate it out fifteen or twenty moves in advance, but it doesn’t look sound to me. The time pressure must be getting to Pratzer.”
“No, is the best move,” a heavily accented voice contradicted him. A man in an ill-fitting suit clambered up onto the podium next to the master. I recognized Former World Champion Contender Arkady Shuvalovitch. “Is exactly the right line for black,” he said. “Only chance.”
“But he only has three minutes left,” the master said.
“Better than two minutes,” Shuvalovitch observed, his eyes never straying from the position.
I realized that this graceless little man with a superb chess brain—who had once played for the championship of the world—could see something in the position that was beyond the ken of the master.
Liszt’s own face tightened at my father’s bold pawn advance, and he fired right back with a move of his own.
“They’re into it now,” the master said. “Black has no time to hesitate, and white is doing a superb job of moving quickly, too, not letting black think on his time.”
They moved faster and faster, stroke and counterstroke, both of them hunched over the chessboard, slamming down pieces and hitting the clock so that their arms and hands were almost a blur. There must have been three hundred people in the common area now, reacting to every move with groans or applause. My dad was the crowd favorite—he had less than a minute left and everyone loves an underdog.
The funny thing was that my father didn’t look scared now. He was a short, bald man, drenched in sweat and visibly trembling, but he somehow looked completely in control and even, momentarily, heroic—as if he had been born for this moment, and waited years for it, and now that it had finally arrived, he was ready and locked in. Time after time I thought he was lost, but he made bold move followed by bold move with an uncanny certainty, as if he were following a script he had already written out in his head.
My mother stood next to me and watched him play with shining eyes. She didn’t know chess, but it didn’t matter. As the crowd lustily cheered him on, she turned to me and whispered, “He’s good, isn’t he?”
“No, Mom,” I told her, “he’s great.”
Liszt looked more and more worried. He was biting his knuckles and throwing constant glances over at my dad’s clock, which showed less than twenty seconds. My father’s king had joined his two pawns on their march across the board, and it was clear that Liszt could not stop them. So he sacrificed his rook for both black pawns, and now he was way down in material and clearly had a lost game, but my dad had only seventeen seconds left. If Dad’s clock ran out before he checkmated Liszt, he would lose on time.
My father slid all the way forward on his seat, almost embracing the chessboard, taking less than a second per move. He was marching another pawn the length of the board to queen it. The crowd cheered his every step, as Liszt parried and retreated and tried his best to halt the pawn. Ten seconds left. Eight. Seven. I began to suspect that even if Dad queened the pawn he would never have time to win the game. Liszt must have reached the same conclusion—he looked more confident. Dad would never make it. Six seconds left. Five.
Dad’s pawn was now one square away from queening, but he only had four seconds left. Three.
Dad moved his king and the crowd let out a collective sigh. It sounded like the air escaping from a punctured blimp as it sputters to the ground for a spectacular crash. Dad had blundered horribly. He had moved his king away from his pawn, allowing Liszt to take it with his own king. Liszt hesitated for a second, as if not able to believe his good fortune. Then he took Dad’s pawn with his king, slammed his fist down triumphantly on the clock, and said: “It’s over, Morris. Your last hope is gone. You lose.”
Dad reached down and moved his knight in a black blur, and said “Checkmate,” and stopped his clock with one second left.
It slowly dawned on me that by grabbing the pawn with his king, Liszt had opened himself up to a hidden checkmate by Dad’s knight and two bishops, and somehow in the whirl of time pressure my father had seen it.
Liszt looked down at the board and then reeled back as if he had been shot by a bazooka shell. “No,” he muttered.
My father held out his hand. “Nice game.”
Then the giant grandmaster was on his feet, shouting: “This will not stand! I already won. You left the playing area. I will appeal this. I won first prize!” He pushed over the chess table, and my dad jumped out of the way in the nick of time. Then Liszt grabbed a chair and brandished it like a weapon, and there was shouting and confusion, and the live feed from the camera cut out.
My mom grabbed my arm, panicked, and asked, “What’s happening?”
“Liszt can’t handle losing,” I told her.
“Yes, but what happened to Morris?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted, worried.
“He’ll be okay,” Liu assured her.
“Yes, there are plenty of people up there to deal with this,” Dr. Chisolm agreed, sounding a bit worried himself and punching buttons on his cell phone. “I’m sure everything’s under control.”
There was an eerie, charged silence in the common area as three hundred people stared up at the two dark monitors. No one left. The throng of chess players milled around, waiting and whispering about the gargantuan struggle they had just witnessed. And then there was a ping and the doors to the private penthouse elevator opened. My father stepped out alone.
He looked very small and frail standing there, and even a little lost. He stumbled out of the elevator and blinked, as people called out questions to him about George Liszt and what had happened up in the penthouse. “He hit the referee with a
chair,” my father said, glancing around at the swirl of faces and the bright lights. “He’s upstairs now. Talking to the hotel security.” Then my dad spotted us and waved, and started to cross the carpet.
I took my mother’s arm and led her toward him, but we had to fight our way through the crowd. Kate reached Dad first, and he put his hand on her shoulder as if for support. Then he saw us getting close and opened his arms, and the next thing I knew we had all joined him in a big family hug.
The crowd broke into applause—a loud and spontaneous ovation that kept getting louder second by second, but my father didn’t seem to hear it.
I think his legs had pretty much given out because it felt like I was propping him up. The ovation from the crowd washed over us in waves as we stood there embracing, and then Dad looked at my mother and kissed her on the lips, and whispered to her and to all of us, “Let’s go home.”
CODA
Chess club was done for the day and so was I. It was a warm May afternoon and I had played four games and won two of them, which was a disappointing result for me these days. In the two months since the tournament I had climbed several hundred rating points to become a class B player and it was pretty clear that next fall I would make the travel team of the Looney Knights—the only sophomore on the squad. I realize that’s not quite the same as cracking into the starting lineup of the New York Yankees, but progress is progress.
I wasn’t studying chess that much, but three nights a week I was playing a game against my dad. He would set up two boards on our dining room table after dinner and I would sit down at one of them and Kate would reluctantly sit down at the other, muttering something like “According to the parenting books, too much chess at an early age can stunt a child’s delightfully unformed mind…”
“Whereas unlimited talking on a cell phone can promote creativity and intellectual development?” Dad asked her. “Don’t even go there. Today I want you both to play the black side of the French, try to trade off your weak bishops, and put as much pressure as you can on my center.”