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at the cracked photograph, which she’d fetched out of her closet for us to see. “You’ll both see that someday. It makes these puny falls here look like a joke. They’re not great falls—unless they’re all you know, like these hicks who live here.”
    I believe our mother expressed to her parents her dissatisfactions and possibly talked about leaving our father and taking Berner and me with her to Tacoma. Before that, I didn’t know Seattle and Tacoma were so close. I had known about the Space Needle from our weekly school newspaper, and that it would soon be built. I wanted to see it. The World’s Fair seemed brilliant and dazzling contemplated from Great Falls, Montana. I have no idea if our grandparents were sympathetic to our mother’s complaints or would’ve welcomed us home with her. It had been fifteen years that she’d been gone, without their blessing. They were old—rigid, conservative, intellectual people who’d saved their own lives at a bad time and wanted life to be predictable. They merely could’ve been receptive. Though neither, as I’ve said, do I believe leaving would’ve been a simple matter for her—even as out of place as she was. In that way she may have been less unconventional and more conservative than I give her credit for being. More like her parents than she knew.
    I WAS BY THEN extremely interested in beginning Great Falls High School and wished it could start long before September, so I would be out of the house more. I’d found out the chess club met once a week through the summer in a dusty, airless room in the school’s south tower. I rode my bicycle over the old, arched river bridge, all the way up to Second Avenue South, to be an “observer” of the older boys who played against each other and talked cryptically about chess and about their personal strategies and power sacrifices and tossed around famous players’ names I didn’t yet know—Gligorish, Ray Lopez, even Bobby Fischer who was already a master and admired by the club members. (He was known to be Jewish, which I took some unreasonable, silent pride in.) I had no idea about how to play. But I liked the orderliness of the board and the antiquated appearance of the pieces and how they felt in my hand. I knew a person needed to be logical to play and be able to plan moves far in advance and have a good memory—at least the other boys said as much. The members didn’t mind my presence, and were arrogant but friendly, and informed me about books I should read and about the monthly Chess Master magazine I could subscribe to if I was serious. There were only five of them. No girls were members. They were the sons of lawyers, and doctors at the hospital, and talked pretentiously about all sorts of things I knew nothing of but was fiercely interested in. The spy plane incident, Francis Gary Powers, the “Winds of Change,” the revolution in Cuba, Kennedy being a Catholic, Patrice Lumumba, whether the executed murderer Caryl Chessman had played chess instead of having his last supper, and whether it was right or wrong for baseball players to have their names on their jerseys—conversations that made me realize I didn’t know much that was going on in the world, but needed to.
    My mother encouraged my playing. She told me her father used to play in a park in Tacoma against other immigrants, sometimes competing in several games at once. She thought chess would sharpen my wits and make me more at ease with how complex the world was, and make confusion not be a thing to fear—since it was everywhere. With what I’d saved of my dollar-a-week “bat-hide” allowance, I’d bought a set of Staunton plastic chess pieces at the hobby shop on Central, along with a roll-up vinyl board, which I kept permanently set up on my dresser top, and also bought an illustrated book the club members recommended to teach myself the rules. This I kept with my Rick Brant science mysteries and the Charles Atlas muscleman books that