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, looking up, his eyes blue-gray, the color of river stones.

My half brother, Anton, had taught me to play, long afternoons at the table in front of the high window looking out to the sea, his face grim. He was the child of our mother's brief early marriage, the half in half brother a splinter under his skin. "Checkmate," he would say, explaining that it came from the Arabic sha¯h ma¯t, meaning the king is dead. I said it meant he was her mate, the queen more elusive, more inventive, the one who moves freely in all directions. Who invented this game, I wondered, Andreas waiting. I touched the castle, its evenly chiseled turrets saying harmony, symmetry, even as its straight-line moves--up, down, across--concealed the darker purposes of alignment, the closing in of castle and knight on the unsuspecting (did she know, how did she know, why didn't she know) queen.

Andreas leaned forward, the lines of his face deepening in concentration, and then he swept his queen across the board. "Check."

The sun, horizontal now, ignited the yellow leaves on the maple tree outside the window.

He sat back, watching my face.

"Do you know how green your eyes are in this sun?" his voice quiet, as if to himself.

I looked at him, surprised, and at his hand at the edge of the board.

"What is the opposite of losing?" I asked him.

"Finding," he said.

And so it began.

The next morning it snowed, unexpectedly. Huge flakes hung suspended in a yellow-gray haze, revealing the air, its density, and also gravity, as tumbling slowly and then for a moment resisting, they were pulled inexorably down. The leaves of late fall mingled with the snow of oncoming winter as I crossed the yard holding the university buildings apart, each building standing alone, discrete. This was Puritan New England. No touching, no leaning on one another. It was more or less how I'd been living since Simon was killed, my husband shot by my half brother. I stared at the buildings, stony like Anton's face, memory rising, anger propelling me...

 

"A sensuous first novel exploring the permeable boundaries of women's inner and outer worlds."

 

"A rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person's love story."

 

"Both a thought-provoking polemic and a love story."

 

"An enthralling novel, tender, scary, and compelling. It crackles with a fierce intelligence and keeps the reader mesmerized throughout."

 

"Ambitious . . . full of lyrical passages."

 

"The pleasures of this novel are many indeed. . . . Readers will find themselves haunted by [Kyra's] clear call to push against the boundaries of their lives. Love is a risk that is always worth taking, Gilligan reminds us."

 

Kyra by Carol Gilligan
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