The Queen’s Gambit: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Beth’s loss means she will place fourth or fifth in the tournament. Before the ceremony at 2:30 p.m., she drinks four cocktails to make the pain and shame go away. She’s upset she played like such a novice. She doesn’t go to the ceremony; instead, she goes to her room. There, she sees Mrs. Wheatley lying in bed, but Mrs. Wheatley doesn’t look right. Beth takes her arm and realizes that she is dead. After staring at her for five minutes, Beth picks up the phone. The manager helps her sort out the situation; a doctor surmises that she died of hepatitis. Beth asks for a prescription for a tranquilizer to calm herself, but the doctor says she doesn’t need a prescription to buy tranquilizers in Mexico.

With the manager’s help, Beth tracks down Mr. Wheatley to tell him that Mrs. Wheatley died. He doesn’t recognize Beth’s voice at first and he asks her to handle it, telling her that Mrs. Wheatley had a family plot in Mexico. He says that he’s strapped for cash, but if she can bury Mrs. Wheatley and make the mortgage payments, she can have the house and the equity.

The manager and the doctor take care of everything for Beth as she sorts through government forms. At the airport, Beth watches as the coffin is lifted into the plane, and she has a vision of it falling off the lift and crashing on the tarmac. On the plane, Beth declines a drink. Instead, she takes out a bottle of pills. She spent three hours the day before going to various pharmacies, buying 100 pills from each.

The funeral is simple and brief. A half hour before it begins, Beth takes four green pills. That afternoon, she finishes unpacking, and she cries for a long time. Suddenly, the phone rings, and it’s Harry Beltik. They talk about her game against Borgov, and he offers to help train her, saying that he’s in Lexington for the summer. He knows that she’s better than him, but also that she’ll need help if she’s playing Russians. Looking around at the reminders of Mrs. Wheatley, Beth invites Beltik over.

Beltik arrives 20 minutes later with a stack of chess books, which make Beth feel weary and disoriented. She says that she usually tries to play intuitively, and he replies that her intuition wasn’t good enough to beat Borgov. They quickly set up games and examine different endgame positions, working through lunch and dinner. He lectures her about keeping in good physical shape and getting enough sleep. While she examines a position, he goes to get groceries for her, and then he helps her work through a theoretical game that he learned in a book.

Beltik goes back to his hotel after midnight, and Beth continues to study a middle-game book, reviewing the games in her mind. She realizes that it’s more of an effort to visualize the board now than when she was eight or nine. She plays into the night, occasionally missing Mrs. Wheatley.

Beltik returns at 9 a.m. They play a few five-minute games, which Beth wins, but he insists that her strategies won’t work against Borgov—she needs to do a lot more work. He tells her to read Borgov’s book about his life and his career. As the days pass, Beth becomes caught up in chess in a new way, and her tranquilizers go unused in the nightstand. When Beltik mentions that he’s moving into an apartment soon, she offers to let him stay at the house with her, and he smiles, saying he thought she’d never ask.

Beth hasn’t been this immersed in chess since she was a little girl. Beltik is in class three afternoons a week and two mornings, and she spends that time studying his books. On his second night in the house, they also have sex. It’s simple and tame for them, and afterward he goes to bed in her old room. The next morning, she plays him in four quick games, hardly looking at the board. As they clean up breakfast, Harry says that the previous night was nice, but Beth can tell his feelings are mixed. She avoids the subject, asking to play chess instead.

After three weeks, Beth has gone through most of the game books. As she and Beltik discuss the game more, Beth begins to get frustrated that he’s not as quick as she is, which he senses. That Saturday, she starts to play him with a handicap: starting without one knight. She can sense that he hates it, and even with the odds skewed, she beats or draws him. That night and the next, he doesn’t come to bed. She doesn’t miss the sex, but she misses something. On the second night she has trouble falling asleep, and so she pulls out a beer and sits at the chessboard in Mrs. Wheatley’s pink robe, playing over some Queen’s Gambit games. She finishes three more beers before going back to bed and sleeping soundly.

On Monday, Beltik says that he’s taught Beth everything he knows, and he has to start focusing on his own studies; he’s going to be an electrical engineer. He is also moving into an apartment, because it’s closer to the university. He leaves at noon without much ceremony. For a moment, she wants to ask him to stay, but instead she takes four green pills. She hates being alone. That night, Beth watches TV and gets drunk, falling asleep on the couch and waking in the middle of the night to vomit. She takes more tranquilizers and sleeps again.

The next morning, Beth wakes with a determination to get on with her career. Mrs. Wheatley is dead, Harry is gone, and the U.S. Championship is in three weeks; she’ll have to beat Benny Watts. She takes out two books, including a book with Benny’s games, and she starts to analyze them, poring over them the rest of the day. That night, she takes two more tranquilizers and falls asleep instantly. She rises eagerly the next day to read more books of Paul Morphy’s games—there has never been anything like him before or since. He was a prodigy who would stay up all night drinking and talking before his games and then play the next day like a shark. She wants to be like him; she wants to win the U.S. Championship.