Fianchetto

FIANCHETTO/Tom Ireland HANNAH, MY DAUGHTER, asked me to teach her to play chess. She had been teaching school in Istanbul. There, she said, young people take chess lessons the way they take music lessons in the States, but none of her Turkish friends wanted to trouble themselves with a total beginner. This took me by surprise, not so much because she wanted to learn the game, which she had never expressed any interest in before, but because of her sudden forthcomingness. I couldn't remember a time when she had actually come out and asked me to do something with her. She was home for the summer before leaving for her freshman year at St. John's College, Annapolis. I had not played since high school and no longer even owned a chess set. But yes, of course, I would be happy to teach her. I learned the game from my grandfather, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Sparks Cline. My mother, his daughter, claimed it was improper to use the "reverend" without the "doctor," as in "Reverend Cline"—a propriety I recalled while watching the telecast of Princess Diana's funeral service, in which the dean of Westminster Abbey and other members of the clergy were called "the Reverend Doctor" by the British commentator. "Reverend," my mother insisted, was an adjective . It needed something to modify. When I knew my grandfather, he had retired from the Episcopal ministry. I was too young to have heard him preach in his last church, in Watertown, Connecticut, following congregations in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. My sisters enjoyed reminding me that I had not yet been born when my grandparents lived in Watertown, so I could not possibly remember anything about it. But I had seen pictures of the church and rectory, and all the famous events of my mother's childhood were set, in my imagining of them, in that tall gray house on the village green. One of my grandfather's vocal cords had been removed, and he talked in a cheerful, gusty whisper. He was not a pious man. He drank a little Scotch, and he never talked about God, at least not in the company of his grandchildren. Our chess games were just games. They never had the stink of instruction. He always beat me, but so amicably that when it was over, I never felt beaten. We played to the death: resigning was not part of the game. He applied the checkmate, laughed, and proclaimed as loudly as he could in his half-voice, "Good! Good!" The Missouri Review · 139 After my grandmother died, he moved to a home for retired Episcopalian ministers, Druim Moir, outside Philadelphia. I remember a long, lugubrious building of ivied brick and slate, flowered walks, ponderous furniture, a wainscoted library, old men in black wearing clerical collars, and, except in the kitchen, no women—a monastery, essentially, and overly staid for someone of my grandfather's high, good spirits. Beyond those stubborn convictions in his, our, Protestant lineage that it was neither manly nor godly to complain, it was simply not in his nature. During World War I as a young chaplain in France, he wrote letters to my grandmother in Boston that made trench warfare sound like a well-contested game of chess: a struggle, yes, but an interesting one, and bound to end soon. He did not write a word about the suffering of wounded and dying men—only that he regularly gave communion to the troops and exercised the general's horse. Once, with shells exploding nearby, he saw a French officer having dinner in the trench, with a table, a clean tablecloth, and a bottle of wine. This was the view of the war that he sent home to his family. My grandfather and I almost never saw one another after he moved to Druim Moir, but we began a chess correspondence. He had always been a great writer of letters, gracing his correspondents with pages of florid script. (He had worked his way through college as a scribe.) In letters written to me before I could read, between the lines, he inked little drawings of objects mentioned in...