The Perseids and Other Stories Read Free Page A

direction.
    Once Jacob grasped the idea, he enjoyed working out the possibilities. In effect, the new rule took away the center of the board. A conventionally dominant position looked suddenly very different: a knight or a bishop could dominate from the rim. Castling became moot.
    And this time, Ziegler won the game. Jacob wanted to play again.
    “If you like,” Ziegler said mildly.
    Jacob failed to take note of the dusky winter sky beyond the window. He had always enjoyed his chess trances but he found this kind of chess even more enthralling, if only for its novelty. He longed to abandon himself to it, one more time, one more game, win or lose…. “Good,” Ziegler said approvingly as he set up the pieces once more, “but this time we wrap the board in
both
directions—rank and file, fore and aft. If one of my pieces reaches your first rank, it can keep going.”
    In effect, the looped board had become a sphere, a sphere represented on a plane, like a Mercator projection of the Earth. It would have meant instantaneous mutual checkmate if Ziegler had not added a set of first-pass rules. The consequences were subtle, at least until the endgame when the ranks had beenthinned; then Ziegler took him with a knight fork Jacob had completely overlooked.
    Spherical chess! He longed to play again.
    But this time Ziegler wouldn’t. “Look at the window, Jacob. The moon is up. You can feel the cold through the walls. Go home. Come see me again next week.”
    There was no new book this time. But that was all right. Spherical chess was a better gift. Anyway, Jacob hadn’t finished
The Time Machine and Other Stories.
    Rachel had been alone for hours. She stared at him accusingly when he came through the door. She had let the fire in the stove die away to nothing. The shack was brutally cold. The water in the wash pots had grown brittle lids of ice.
3.
    The February rent was due, and Jacob worked hard to make up the inevitable shortfall. He taught English to the Goldbergs, the Walersteins, the dimwitted Vincenzo sisters. He crept into Greek and Macedonian coffeehouses to accept bets on his chess prowess. He was punched once by a humiliated Galician dairy worker but escaped before he could be robbed. He developed a hole in his shoe.
    Rachel had passed deeply into the orbit of her madness this winter. She was hostile and withdrawn, hardly eating, and Jacob had to remind himself of what she had been when they were younger: Rachel at the Brant Street School, her hair in red ribbons. For all her moodiness, she had seemed golden in those days. She would take Jacob on long walks to the docklands or to the fancy English shops. They had shared stories with each other. Rachel had been a great reader of fairy tales. She had read to him from
Struwelpeiter
, her favorite book.
    In those days it had been possible to eke some kindness out of Rachel, before she closed herself to the world. He couldn’tremember the last time she had said a kind word to him, though she sometimes admitted being frightened.
    Was she dying? People don’t always die all at once, Ziegler had told him. Sometimes they die a little at a time. That makes it hard.
    Thursday of that week she came home at noon. Jacob saw her in the window as he was passing on his way to the Settlement House, and that was distressing, because she should have been at the factory. Now, of all times, they couldn’t afford the loss of her pay.
    “Cobb sent me home,” Rachel confessed when he hurried inside. She knotted her hands behind her back, and her voice was like ground glass in butter.
    “Why? What for?”
    She mumbled something about “the roof,” that she had heard “bees on the factory roof.”
    “Bees?” Jacob said, feeling sick.
    “They start fires,” Rachel said calmly. “They steal women.”
    She tried to warn Mr. Cobb but he wouldn’t listen. Jacob could imagine the scene altogether too easily. Of course there were no bees on the steep peaked roof of Cobb’s attic