Endgame by Frank Brady Read Free Book Online Page A

search for the secrets of thechessboard, and this preoccupation commanded his attention for hours on end.He was happy when the glare of the winter light ceased to pierce the broken shade of the kitchen window; it interfered with his thinking. When his sister Joanie or mother Geenie—as they were known by their friends—would come home in the late afternoon or early evening, they’d sometimes find Bobby in the dusk of the apartment, unaware or not caring that the lamps were unlit, staring at the board and lost in a reverie of tactics or strategies.
    Even though Regina felt Bobby was fairly independent, she was worried that he was home alone too much, and she had been seeking someone to childsit for him, to be sort of a companion. Money was a problem: Even a token payment to a caretaker was difficult to raise. So she had placed the following advertisement in the campus newspaper of Brooklyn College, not far from the Fischer home:
    Baby sitter wanted for schoolboy, 8½. Evenings, some weekends, in exchange for room, kitchen privileges. Sterling 3-4110 7 to 9 PM
.
    A young math student replied—he even knew how to play chess—but for unknown reasons he didn’t take the job. Bobby remained alone.
    Unlike Joan, Bobby seemed to have little interest in school, and whenever Regina helped him with his homework he typically gave it short shrift, impatient to go back to chess. She had great difficulty coping with his imperiousness: “I want to play
chess
!” he’d demand, with all the pomposity of a crown prince talking to a servant.And off he’d go to his chessboard, without his mother’s permission, leaving his school assignments in abeyance.
    It’s not that Bobby rejected the studiousness displayed by his sister and mother. Rather, he was bent on the acquisition of another skill: chess. The difference was that it was more important to him to study how to win with rook and pawn than to learn the three branches of government or where to move the decimal point in long division. The three Fischers, prototypes of Talmudic scholars, were always studying: Joan her textbooks; Regina her medical tomes; and Bobby the latest chess periodical. The apartment was often as silent as a library.
    One of Bobby’s few non-chess interests emerged unexpectedly during his eighth year in the summer of 1951, when Regina sent him to the VenderveerNursery School, a day camp in Brooklyn. Despite its name, the school accepted older children for its summer camp, and the program provided a place for Bobby to go once the school year ended. Either Regina or Joan would drop him off in the morning and fetch him in the late afternoon. Bobby fully expected to hate the camp—or at least dislike it—but he found that he enjoyed many of the physical activities it offered. Most important to him was Venderveer’s large outdoor pool, where he learned to swim.
    Thereafter every summer, when he was in one of the camps he attended and when he wasn’t studying chess,Bobby would train to take various Red Cross swimming tests, easily qualifying as an “Intermediate” and then “Advanced” swimmer. A true Piscean, he loved the water, especially if swimming meant competing with the other children in races. He was fast, determined, and alert, and the instant the swimming coach blew the whistle Bobby would kick off, often landing in the water when the other swimmers were still in mid-dive. Swimming gave him the chance to move and exercise his body, to uncramp it from the stiffening stillness of sitting with a chessboard or a book. He discovered that he loved moving through the water, and he found that he loved competition itself, whether swimming or playing chess. There seemed to be virtually nothing else he enjoyed doing.
    Regina began to fear for Bobby’s future if he didn’t take his schoolwork seriously. More than that, she was worried that his interest in chess was becoming obsessive. She believed he was so engrossed in the game that he was never quite in