Grandmaster

  It was as if the numbers were calling out to me: “Hey, Daniel, this is your friend 123. Just plug me in right after the equal sign, old bud. Good to see you again. And give my regards to your dad.”

  I glanced away from my homework to the trophies on the shelf above my desk. There were more than twenty of them, and not all were merely for participating. I had worked hard to become a decent baseball player, a moderately competitive tennis player, and an acceptable soccer player with a good right foot. But I had never been great at any of them. I was never the go-to guy, the star picked first, the hitter with the Babe Ruth swing who came steaming around third with the coach windmilling his arm and everybody on their feet cheering wildly for a tape-measure home run.

  Part of the problem was that I just didn’t have the genes for it—my father was unathletic from his nose to his toes. I had inherited his small frame, with a noticeable improvement over the previous generation in strength and coordination. Not only couldn’t Dad throw a football in a spiral, but he couldn’t toss a baseball overhand more than twenty feet.

  Since he had no sports skills himself, I couldn’t blame him for never coaching me. What sucked was that he had no interest in my games. I had gone through Little League scanning the bleachers, wondering if he would show up and how long he would stay. I’ll never forget coming to bat with the bases loaded in a playoff game, glancing toward the stands, and seeing my dad reading the Sunday Times.

  I blinked away the vivid memory and tried to concentrate on a multivariable problem. A grocery makes a ten-pound sack of trail mix. They use cashews, raisins, and sunflower seeds. Raisins cost one dollar a pound, sunflower seeds two dollars, and cashews three dollars. The total cost of the sack is sixteen dollars. How much of each ingredient did the store use? I jabbed the pencil into the paper so hard the point snapped off, then laid it down on my desk and just sat there.

  A grandmaster. He had actually been a grandmaster. And I had sat up one night in the living room with a plastic chess set, teaching myself the most basic opening theory, and he had been right there, watching TV, and said absolutely nothing. A month later I had entered my first tournament and lost all five games and come home with my head hanging. “Maybe you should try something else,” he’d suggested. “Any interest in learning to play the trombone?”

  It pissed me off that he had hidden this big secret from me, but at the same time I couldn’t stop feeling excited and a little proud. Patzer-face’s father had really and truly been a grandmaster! How about that?

  I had picked up my pencil and was looking for the sharpener when my mom knocked on the door. “Daniel?”

  “I’m doing homework.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Not right now, Mom.”

  She opened the door. “Sorry, but I think you should come talk to your father.”

  “About what?”

  She walked over to me and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  She lowered her voice. “He loves you very much.”

  “He lied to us.”

  “He didn’t lie. He concealed.”

  “Cashews and raisins.”

  She looked at me. “What?”

  “I mean, big difference.”

  “There is a difference. He’s a good man, Daniel.”

  “You married him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I could hear the hurt in her voice, so I met her eyes and said, “Look, I know he’s a good man, and I love him, too, but he concealed something incredible that I would have liked to have known.”

  “We all conceal things,” she pointed out gently, “and sometimes we have our reasons.”

  I wondered what he had told her in the bedroom that had gotten her onto his side. My voice rose a little louder. “He told me he didn’t know how to play chess. That’s not just a lie, Mom. That’s a whopper. Let me be mad for a while, and then I’ll be okay. Okay?”

  “Not okay. Come now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s waiting for you. Please, sweetie.”

  She took my hand and I couldn’t fight her. I got up from my desk and let her lead me through the house to the screen door. She opened it and pushed me out.

  He must have heard the door close and me step onto the creaky floorboards, but he didn’t turn or say anything.

  I took a few steps toward him and waited. “Pop?” I finally said. “Or should I call you Grandmaster?”

  He turned then, with a sad look on his face. “The boys on your team were right,” he admitted in a low voice. “That was me.”

  “I know they were right,” I told him. “What I don’t know is why you didn’t tell me.”

  “But on another level, they weren’t right,” he mused, ignoring my question. “That wasn’t me. It was a completely different person, very long ago.”

  “You have an asterisk next to your name because your rating hasn’t changed in a million years, but you’re still Morris W. Pratzer,” I told him. “Grandmaster titles never go away.”

  He took his hands out of his pants pockets and let them hang awkwardly at his sides. “I’ve forgotten it all,” he said. “I haven’t pushed a pawn in twenty-nine years.”

  Twenty-nine years? He was not that old a guy. “How young were you when you made grandmaster?”

  He hesitated so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. “Sixteen and two months.”

  “Isn’t that some kind of record?”

  “Bobby Fischer made grandmaster at fifteen and a half. And since then a couple of players have made it even younger.”

  “Holy crap,” I said. “Fischer did it at fifteen and change, and you were sixteen and two months. You were really a slowpoke.”

  He read something in my face and shook his head. “Daniel, in your imagination you see some kind of brilliant and glorious chess champion,” he said. “But in my memory I see a sad little kid with glasses sitting at a tournament concentrating so hard his stomach feels tied up in double knots.”

  “That’s why you gave it up?” I asked. “Indigestion?”

  He shrugged and peered off the back porch into the shadowy darkness of the lawn, as if searching for something lurking out there. “One day in my junior year of high school I had won a tournament,” he told me in a near whisper, “and I was coming home in the evening carrying a big trophy. All of a sudden I met two kids from my high school. It was a girl I liked, with a guy I despised. They were coming from a party, arm in arm. I showed them my trophy and she admired it while he sneered at me. Then he led her away, and I watched them walking down the street, laughing together. I walked home alone with my trophy and put it on the shelf and stared at it for a couple of hours. And I never played again.”

  “Because chess wasn’t a good way to get girls?” I asked. “Did quitting help?”

  “Chess was not a good way of meeting girls, but it wasn’t just that,” he told me. “The teenage years are a search for identity. I didn’t want to be that boy. I was reaching a serious level of competition. I didn’t want to study chess theory for three hours a day. I hated who I was becoming and I guess I just wanted to have more fun.”

  “So you became an accountant.” I regretted it as soon as I had said it.

  “Well, MGM didn’t call and offer to make me the next James Bond,” he noted softly.

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  “I don’t hate what I do, Daniel. But I’m very sorry I lied to you about chess. It was painful when I played and painful when I gave it up, but you’re my son and I owe you the truth. Let’s try to be completely honest with each other going forward.”

  We stood silently on the porch for several seconds, listening to the crickets fiddling away in the backyard.

  “You can make it up to me,” I said. “Play this weekend.” I hesitated and then added in a very low voice: “They don’t respect me at the school. They call me Patzer-face. I want to bring you. It would make me prou
d.”

  “Your mother thinks I should play, too.” He nodded. “She says we don’t spend enough time together, and soon you’ll be grown and out the door.”

  “Don’t do it because she wants you to,” I told him.

  He surprised me by walking over and putting his arm on my shoulder. He’s not a demonstrative man, and I couldn’t remember the last time he had reached out to me. I pulled back a step, but his hand stayed awkwardly but resolutely atop my shoulder blade. “You really want this?”

  “I think it would be fun.”

  “That’s a ‘yes’?”

  “Don’t do it for me either.”

  He let out a long, tortured sigh. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t do it for your mother and I won’t do it for you and I certainly won’t do it for me, because we’re operating on a policy of total honesty here, and I don’t want to ever play chess again. But yes, I’ll do it.”

  “For who?” I asked, confused.

  “I said I’ll do it. Don’t push any more. Just take it or leave it, Daniel.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  His hand stayed on my shoulder a second more, and then he pulled it back. “With two conditions. First, don’t expect too much.”

  “Come on. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  “A very rusty old bicycle,” he said. “The wheels probably don’t even turn.”

  “We’ll oil them. What’s the second condition?”

  “After this is over, it’s over. One tournament. One time. I’ll spring for a New York hotel room. We’ll have to economize on meals and don’t expect Broadway shows. I’ll do my best and play my hardest. But that’s it. Okay?” He held out his hand to seal the deal.

  “Done,” I told him, shaking his hand and looking him in the eye. “But since we’re being totally truthful with each other, I’ve gotta tell you—I don’t buy that story about why you quit. Nobody gets that good at something and quits cold turkey ’cause they realize it’s not a good way to meet girls and their stomach hurts. Why did you really quit?”

  “Think what you want to think,” he said. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

  “Good night, Grandmaster. Can I call you that now?”

  “Never, ever,” he told me emphatically as he walked back into the house. And just before the screen door slammed I heard him mutter, “Good night, Patzer-face.”

  4

  When a girl can look beautiful streaked with pond scum, you know she’s dangerous. Her name was Britney, she was wearing waders and carrying a net, and her long brown hair was tucked up into a cap so it wouldn’t drag in the murky waters of Grimwald Pond. “Hey, are you ready for some high-quality goo?” she asked, walking up to me and depositing a netful of sludge in my glass beaker.

  Grimwald had been the first headmaster of Loon Lake Academy a hundred years ago. A photo of him hangs in the library near the reference section, a serious-looking man with a bushy mustache and a glare on his face that says: “Study harder and keep your big mouth shut.” According to the dates under the photo he was headmaster for almost a quarter of a century, so he probably deserved something better than getting his name on this fetid pond.

  “Collectors, scoop with the nets, don’t jab with them,” Mr. Cady, our bio teacher, urged, walking up and down the long line of kids like a general appraising his troops. “Try to preserve the sedimentary logic of the ecosystem. Surveyors, be vigilant. What you dismiss as a wood chip may in fact be something truly remarkable. Recorders, please write legibly.”

  I was a surveyor, knee-deep in pond water, holding a big glass vial in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. Britney was a collector. In addition to her netful of silt and ooze, she had managed to collect a long streak of orange-brown mud that ran from her hairline down past her wide blue eyes, an inch to the right of her cute nose, and terminated on a level with her puffy and highly sensual lips.

  “Thanks,” I told her, swishing her sample around in my water-filled vial and studying it through the magnifying glass. We had been in the same bio class for seven months, and even worked together as lab partners on occasion, but we had never stood together in a muddy pond before.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied with a little smile. “This is disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find much except mud and crud,” I said. “Maybe an old shoe if we get real lucky.”

  “I kind of hope I don’t find anything in here,” she told me, peering down. “Even an old shoe sounds pretty gross.” I expected her to trudge deeper into the pond, but Mr. Cady had moved on down the line so no one was watching us. She lingered, took a step closer, and surprised me by saying: “I hear from Brad that you’re going to New York this weekend.”

  I had e-mailed Brad the good news right after my conversation with Dad on the back porch. I nodded and tried to sound casual about it. She had never mentioned her senior boyfriend to me before. Come to think of it, in seven months of being in the same class, we had never discussed anything about our personal lives—not that I had much of a personal life. “Yeah, it should be, um, interesting.”

  “I know you guys will win,” she said. “Brad is such a strong player. And Eric never loses at anything either.” Her words sounded like such rah-rah girlfriend drivel that I almost dismissed her as a dumb and starry-eyed cheerleader for a jerk. But I couldn’t help wondering if on some deeper level she wasn’t really poking fun at Brad, and maybe even expressing a little sadness at being bound to these two arrogant big shots.

  I wanted to ask her why a nice fourteen-year-old girl would date an eighteen-year-old jerk—even if he was handsome and successful—and why her parents would let her. But instead, I looked right into her glistening blue eyes and said: “Well, I’ll probably lose every game. But it’ll still be fun to go to New York with my dad.”

  She looked a little surprised. If she was hanging around Brad and Eric she probably never heard them express doubts about winning anything. “Oh, don’t worry about screwing up,” she told me. “Brad was telling me about the tournament. Each team has to have six players to enter, but for every round they only count the scores of the top five. So even if you lose every game, it’s no problem. What’s the matter?”

  I stood there, nodding very slightly. Of course, that was why they had invited me. They didn’t care about my score—they were after my dad so they could have five superstrong players for each round. “Nothing,” I told her. And then, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice, I said: “You have mud on your face.”

  “Really? Yuck.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s just pond scum.”

  She gave me a curious look. “Did I make you feel bad telling you that only five players counted in each round? I thought you knew.”

  “I do now.”

  For a moment her face softened. “Sorry. The way Brad put it, it seemed like everyone was on the same page.”

  “I think you’d better collect some more mud,” I told her. “There’s nothing in this sample but silt.”

  Instead of walking away, Britney stepped yet closer. I could smell her lilac perfume over the stench of pond muck. “I think it’s sweet that you want to go to New York with your dad. Would you do me a favor, Daniel?” she asked. “I’m wearing these waterproof gloves. Would you wipe the mud off for me?”

  “Off your face?”

  “Yup.”

  I swallowed. “With what?”

  “Your hand.”

  I looked back at her and heard myself mumble: “Okay. Right or left?”

  She giggled. “Whichever’s cleanest.”

  I stuck the magnifying glass into my back pocket, handle first, and reached toward her hesitantly. The fingers of my right hand touched the side of her face.

  “Go on, wipe it off,” she said. “I don’t bite.”

  I wiped the mud off, which meant gently stroking down the side of her face. She tilted her head slightly and smiled back a little playfully at me.

  I reluctan
tly pulled my fingers away and took a breath. “It’s all off,” I said.

  “Thanks, Daniel,” she replied. “I may be coming to New York this weekend with my mom, so we may meet up with you guys for dinner. And you know what?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think you might just surprise yourself and win a game or two,” she told me. “I bet you’re a lot better than you know.”

  Then she turned and waded back into Grimwald Pond, her scoop net poised for the next interesting specimen that swam her way.

  5

  When I finished my homework on Thursday night and walked out into the living room, Dad was watching the news, but he was really waiting for me. He switched off the TV and said, “Where’s your chess set?”

  “Need to brush up?” I asked.

  “I want to see if I still remember how to set the pieces up,” he told me without a smile.

  I got the purple sack and the green-and-white-checked board and handed them over. He unrolled the board and dumped the sack of pieces out onto it and started setting up the white side. I probably should have helped him by setting up the black pieces, but I couldn’t stop myself from watching him.

  He had the strangest look on his face, as if he were returning to a place where something beautiful but also terrible had happened to him long ago. I got the feeling he had been absolutely positive he would never visit this place again. He almost seemed to be climbing onto the board himself and rubbing shoulders with the pieces so that he could exchange small talk with the pawns and salute the king and climb the crenellated parapets of the rooks. When he picked up a knight, his hand trembled.

  “You okay?” I asked him. “Something wrong with the knight?”

  His hand had frozen for a moment, with the knight suspended in midair. He was holding the piece by its long equine neck, and I saw his thumb trace down the length of the plastic horse as if stroking its mane. “It’s the only piece that can move at the beginning of a game,” he told me softly.

  “I never realized that,” I said.