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pushed to remember the book’s title some fifteen years later, Bobby said that it
might
have been
Tarrasch’s Best Games of Chess
.He then named Siegbert Tarrasch, a German player, as “one of the ten greatest masters of all time.” Whatever the book was, Bobby figured out how to follow the games, which were presentedmove by move using descriptive chess notations (e.g., P–K4 for “Pawn to King Four”).
    The rest of camp was occasionally fun. Bobby rode a horse named Chub, played with a black-and-white calf, engaged in an occasional softball game, and made a boat in the arts-and-crafts class—but he still couldn’t relate to the other children. After a full month away, using one of the pre-addressed and stamped postcards given to him by Regina, he issued a plaintive appeal in large block letters: MOMMY I WANT TO COME HOME .
    Soon after, Bobby forgot about chess for a while. Other games and puzzles entered the household, and the chess set, with some pawns missing, was stored in a closet. After about a year, however, chess reentered his mind.In the winter of 1950, when he was seven years old, he asked Regina if she’d buy him another, larger chess set for Christmas. She bought him a smallish, unweighted wooden set that was housed in a sliding, unvarnished wooden box. Although Bobby immediately opened his gift, he didn’t touch it for about a month. He had no one to play with.
    He was often alone. When he came home from school, it was usually to an empty apartment. His mother was at work during the days and sometimes in the evenings, and his sister was generally busy in school until later in the afternoon. Though Regina was concerned about her son, the simple truth was that Bobby was a latchkey child who craved but was not given the maternal presence that might have helped him develop a sense of security. Moreover, Regina’s financial circumstances had caused the family to move so frequently that Bobby never gained a sense of “neighborhood.” And it didn’t help that there was no father present.
    Regina tried giving her son the approval that every child needs, and the wings to find himself, by encouraging him to engage in sports, take part in family excursions, and do better in school. But as time went on, Bobby just kept journeying more and more into himself, once again reading chess books and playing over games from the past. The possibilities of chess somehow made his essential loneliness and insecurity less painful.
    Regina believed that she could learn and excel at anything, except perhaps chess, and that her children also had the capacity to master anything. The social workers that she confided in invariably suggested that she enroll Bobby in a small private school where he could receive closer attention and wherehe could develop at his own pace. Money was always an issue for her though, and she couldn’t afford to enroll him in a school that demanded tuition. She received no child payment or alimony from Hans Gerhardt Fischer, but she did receive occasional checks for $20—not totally insignificant in those years—that arrived sporadically but often weekly, sent by Paul Nemenyi—like Gerhardt Fischer, a physicist. Nemenyi was a friend whom Regina had first met when she was a student at the University of Colorado in Denver and then later reconnected with in Chicago. He may have been Bobby’s biological father. The patrimony has never been proven one way or the other. Regina not only denied that Nemenyi was Bobby’s father, but once stated for the record to a social worker that she’d traveled to Mexico in June 1942 to meet her ex-husband Hans Gerhardt, and that Bobby was conceived during that rendezvous.However, a distant relative of Bobby’s suggested that the reason Regina listed Hans Gerhardt as the father on Bobby’s birth certificate was that she didn’t want Bobby to be known as a bastard. “It
does
appear that Paul Nemenyi was the real father,” the relative said. It’s also possible that