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Authors: David Klass

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BOOK: Grandmaster
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“Well, we did,” I said.

“Especially when we’re eating meat loaf,” Kate noted, grinding a piece of broccoli against her plate with her fork, as if attempting to break the limp vegetable up into subatomic particles that would then float away into the ether. “Who knows what goes into meat loaf.”

“Ground sirloin,” my mother said. “There were no rodent ingredients in the recipe. Could we get off this subject?”

“Try again, Daniel,” my father said. “Something fun and interesting must have happened today.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. Something unusual did happen in chess club.”

“It’s kind of hard to believe that anything fun and exciting could happen in a chess club,” Kate muttered.

“Go on, Daniel,” my mother encouraged me. “I’m sure we’d all like to hear what happened, including your sister.”

“There’s going to be a tournament in New York this weekend,” I said. “They’re only bringing three players from the whole team. They want me to come.”

“That’s exciting,” my mom said. “Do you want to go? Will the school pay for it?”

“It’s not a regular school tournament,” I told her. I was watching my dad as he chewed his meat loaf. “It’s a father-son tournament.”

His eyes flicked to me for a moment and then quickly down at his plate. He swallowed the meat loaf he was chewing and had a long drink of water, then slowly put down his fork.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” my mother said.

“Neither did I,” I told her. “And I still don’t.”

“When are we getting to the fun and interesting part?” Kate wanted to know.

“Your dad doesn’t play chess,” my mom observed.

Dad looked at her and then back at me.

“That’s what I told them,” I said. “Why would you want my dad? He can’t play at all. But they said they had done a computer search on all the team fathers, and he used to play really well.”

“They must have had the wrong Morris Pratzer,” my mother said. “It’s not a common name, but there are dozens of Pratzers out there.”

“They had looked up Morris
W.
Pratzer,” I told her, emphasizing the middle initial. “You’re Morris William Pratzer, right, Pop?”

“Yes,” my father answered softly, putting one hand flat on the table as if preparing to resign a chess game.

“According to their information, Morris W. Pratzer was a grandmaster.” I heard a little anger creep into my voice. “But that can’t be, because if you were a grandmaster, Dad, your son would know about it and not have to be told by a bunch of chess club bozos. Right? If you were a grandmaster, we would be playing games every night, and you would be teaching me openings and endgame theory and helping me out so I wouldn’t be just a patzer.”

My father stood up from the table and drew himself up to his full height of five feet four inches. His fist came down on the tabletop so hard that it rattled the silverware. “I’m not playing in any chess tournament in New York next weekend, and neither are you, Daniel. You’re going to help me clean the basement. Now, excuse me. I’ve lost my appetite.” He walked quickly away from the table.

My mother and I watched him go, and then looked at each other. She stood up and started after him.

“Well, that
was
kind of interesting,” Kate admitted to me. Then she shouted: “Hey, Dad, aren’t you going to finish
your
broccoli?”

 

3

 

He was standing on the back porch, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the half-moon that floated tiredly above this dinky New Jersey town, and I would have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t been so angry.

My mom opened the screen door and propelled me toward him with a gentle push. “Go, talk to him, Daniel. He has some good news.”

I wondered what kind of a conversation they had just had. After my dad stormed away from the dinner table, Mom had followed him into their room and shut the door. They had talked, often in loud voices, for the better part of an hour.

Kate had gone straight from dinner to her room and was blabbing away on the phone at ten thousand decibels, so even if I had wanted to eavesdrop on my parents, all I could hear was seventh-grade girl talk: “Do you really think he’s hot? No, of course I don’t like him. Don’t make me barf. I mean, he acts like a total dolt, but that look he gives you—oh my God—but he’s such a jerk. Where did you hear
that
? No, I swear I don’t and never will. But this is what his friend Allen told Susan that Glen overheard him saying about the time we met up at the ice rink and I spilled hot chocolate on him.”

I retreated into my own bedroom and took out my algebra homework and tried to lose myself in solving the sorts of problems that actually have logical answers. But my mind kept circling back like a boomerang toward a more difficult and personal mind twister: What kind of father is a master—no, a
grand
master—at something and never tells his family? What possible solution could there be for that? I forced myself to focus on the homework and whipped off a few problems in record time. Math is my best subject. I’m not a genius at it, but I must have inherited some of my dad’s numerical ability along with the lousy sports genes.

My father can add twenty four-digit numbers in his head faster than I can punch them into a calculator. “It’s no big deal,” he always says with a shrug, after amazing people with his party trick. “People are afraid of numbers but numbers are our pals. You just have to let them come in and play around like old friends.”

“How can numbers be friends?” I remember thinking at age seven or eight when I first heard him say it, trying to imagine a playdate between numbers 4 and 11, or a water balloon fight between 7 and 52. But when I hit fourth grade, I started seeing patterns that other kids couldn’t see, and when I looked at homework or test problems I often leapfrogged to the right answer.

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 proud.”

“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?”

BOOK: Grandmaster
4.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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