Chapter One

Chapter One

What is the opposite of losing?

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we were playing chess. Felicia Blumenthal had invited the strays to her home on Francis Avenue—an old habit, hospitality to strangers, made urgent for her generation by the war. He was her cousin, “much removed,” she said, laughing, as she brought him over to where I was standing in the blue dining room balancing a plate of turkey, and when I asked him what he was thankful for, his eyes registered surprise and he said, “This,” meaning the lunch. He had come in from London the night before, he was leaving the next morning for Chicago. I had come from my studio wearing a long black skirt and white shirt. He stepped back and looked at me. “A flutist or an oboe player?” he asked. I had always wanted to play the oboe. He asked if I was cold, the dining room shaded on the north side of the house, Felicia too European to turn up the heat. We left our plates on the sideboard and crossed the hall into the living room, skirting the group standing around the fireplace —men in gray suits, a woman in a red sari—and gravitating instead to the sunny bay window. He sat on one antique blue-velvet chair, I sat on the other, the marble chessboard on the table between us.

I reached into the diagonal of sunlight, my hand momentarily translucent as I moved the white knight into position to capture the black bishop.

Andreas looked, saw, and moved his bishop away. The black bishop glided to safety, the inner recesses of black and white squares. Instead he would sacrifice a pawn: out of the many, this one.

“Your turn,” he said