Frank Brady was eighty-two, he’d just undergone a series of treatments for macular degeneration, and his hip was bothering him, but none of that was slowing him down. Not with a world championship taking place in his hometown. He showed up to the championship each day dressed in a dapper suit and full of energy. I don’t think I saw anyone those two weeks who seemed to be enjoying themselves more. He knew everyone, and he couldn’t move five feet without someone stopping him to talk. As Fischer’s biographer, founding editor of Chess Life magazine, former secretary of the United States Chess Federation and past president of the Marshall Chess Club, the guy was a walking candy factory of delicious chess anecdotes, gossip, and history. (And his interests weren’t limited to chess. He’d taught journalism at several New York area universities, including Columbia and St. John’s, and had written biographies of Aristotle Onassis, Barbra Streisand, Orson Welles, and Hugh Hefner. He’d even worked for Hefner at Playboy earlier in his career.)
Earlier in the championship, I finally caught him unoccupied for a moment and asked him the one question no one had been able to answer.
“Do you remember Bobby and Kubrick playing together at the Marshall at any point?” I asked.
“I’m sure they played,” he said. “Bobby was always there. Stanley came by nearly every week to the Marshall. It was round-robin tournaments when he dropped by. They definitely would have played. Stanley was impossible to forget.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’d never pay his fucking dues!” Brady said, then howled with laughter. “I’d always have to hound him and he’d reply the same way whenever he came in, ‘You can take it out of my winnings.’ The arrogant prick.”
Brady had told me to swing by the Marshall Chess Club so he could show me the place and we could talk more. The day after Magnus’s shocking loss in game eight was an off day, so I took Brady up on his invitation.
The Marshall Chess Club owned the brownstone at 23 West Tenth Street in the extravagantly wealthy Greenwich Village neighborhood and had celebrated its one hundredth anniversary the year before. There are more than five hundred current members who are welcome seven days a week. Membership for New York residents is $325 a year and less for younger or more accomplished players. There are tournaments most nights—three or four hundred a year, Brady had told me—and frequently many incredibly talented masters and grandmasters are available to give lessons. What the old Yankee Stadium represented to a dynasty of baseball’s legendary players, the Marshall was to a host of the twentieth century’s great American chess players. Despite Frank Marshall being one of the game’s most elite players, his attitude toward all chess players was overwhelmingly welcoming and inclusive. While Marshall was widely regarded as the most beloved of all chess masters, you could feel inside his club that he loved players with even more affection than he received. A hundred framed portraits of players adorn the interior in celebration of their contributions to chess. When you arrive and look over the faces and level of comfort and familiarity members have with this place, it’s clear that wherever they go after the Marshall closes shop at night, this is their true second home; they live here and are welcomed like family. Brady’s bias and paternal warmth toward all chess players is palpable.
New York chess legend Asa Hoffmann was there the night I showed up. I recognized him from photographs and interviews he had given in documentaries. Hoffmann was a go-to subject for outsiders seeking to understand the dark allure of chess, largely on the basis of the New York City, upper-crust, lucky-sperm-club, born-on-third-base life he gave up to pursue the game as chess’s peculiar answer to Fast Eddie Felson. He was two weeks older than Fischer, seventy-three now, and physically slight, but Hoffmann, even sitting alone at a chessboard staring at a portrait of the young Fischer hanging on the wall, filled the whole building with his personality. He was as keen to talk about his gambling exploits with backgammon and bridge or Scrabble and poker as he was to talk about chess. He began talking about four hundred different mostly worthless things he was trying to sell (chess antiques, signed first editions of his book Chess Gladiator, clocks, copies of a 1987 New York Times profile on him, etc.). I was never fully able to understand why exactly he was selling them, beyond the compulsion of any social interaction needing to collide with commerce. Within five minutes, unprompted, Hoffmann raised the subject of money at least fifty times with the same wry chuckle trailing off each time. And yet, Hoffmann, the son of Park Avenue lawyers, educated at Hunter College Elementary, Horace Mann, and Columbia—some of the finest institutions in the country—against his parents’ wishes had abandoned their hope of becoming a lawyer and dropped out of Columbia to devote himself to chess full-time.
“Explain this to me,” I said.
Hoffmann shrugged.
“I mean, my uncle was a big-shot Harvard lawyer. My parents wanted me to go down that path also. But I ended up earning a million dollars here and there on the chessboard. Sure, never tournaments. Never made virtually anything at tournaments despite winning numerous times throughout my life. But five dollars here and there at blitz?”
“You made a million dollars here and there hustling speed chess?” I interjected.
“Before computers took that market away, it was possible. Washington Square? Liberty Park next to the World Trade Center? Sure. I earned a million dollars. It just took me fifty years to do it. I probably averaged twenty grand a year overall. But remember! There’s no taxes on that.”
Brady and his wife of fifty years, Maxine, strolled into the back room of the Marshall. Maxine was a writer herself and the author of The Monopoly Book: Strategy and Tactics of the World’s Most Popular Game. Maxine pulled a book from the library and sat in the corner quietly reading while her husband bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine and came over with careful steps to the free chair next to the chess table where I was sitting. I could tell from the way he squinted in the glare of the light in the room that he’d had another round of injections for his macular degeneration.
He sat down.
“So are you going to play in the tournament tonight?” Brady asked me.
“Are you?” I said.
“I always have an excuse why not to play,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I like to win games, but losing them? The balance is not there anymore at my age. It still gets to me.”
“How do you think Magnus feels after last night?” I asked.
“He took that loss hard. The press conference also. That was quite a performance he gave.”
“Only four games left,” I said. “You think he’ll bounce back?”
Brady smiled.
“He should. But then . . . you never know.”
And then he proceeded to tell me the story of how he met Fischer. I wasn’t sure how many thousands of times Brady had told the story, but from Maxine’s reassuring smirk it was a lot. Yet it was clear he’d still yet to get the wrapping paper off. When he talked about Fischer his eyes lit up in a way they didn’t when he talked about anyone else, even as his voice revealed some lingering sadness playing with his emotions. Brady was still interested in the chess world, but you could tell that since Fischer, nothing had ever been quite as interesting.
Brady first encountered Bobby Fischer in 1955 at a tournament being played only four blocks away. Fischer was twelve and Brady was twenty-one. They became fast friends. A year later, on October 17, 1956, Fischer played his “Game of the Century” at the Marshall against 1953 US Open champion Donald Byrne. After a minor mistake by Byrne on the eleventh move, Fischer mystified observers with a queen sacrifice six moves later. As Fischer gradually devoured Byrne’s rook, both his bishops, and a pawn in exchange for the queen, the crowd, and Byrne, slowly got wise to Fischer’s miraculous method at work. As Fischer closed in for a checkmate, Byrne’s queen was forced to remain idle and useless on the opposite side of the board.
Brady was an ally and close friend to a man who made one of the oddest and most spectacular ascents in American culture. Brady was with Fischer at the Marshall in 1965 when Fischer remotely played by teletype in the Havana-based Capablanca Memorial tournament. Fischer had been offered $3,000 to show up in Havana to compete, but the US Department of State refused to allow him to travel as tensions continued to simmer between Cuba and the United States after the April 17, 1961, Bay of Pigs invasion and the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than at any other point before or since. Dr. José Raúl Capablanca Jr., son of the tournament’s namesake and one of Fischer’s cherished chess heroes, relayed Fischer’s moves in Havana. Despite the ridiculous circumstances in which Fischer was forced to compete, he placed fourth. The same year as the Capablanca Memorial, Brady wrote Profile of a Prodigy, the first-ever biography of the twenty-two-year-old Fischer. As a courtesy, Brady allowed Fischer to see the manuscript before publication. Fischer immediately objected to being identified as a Jew in the book. It was his only objection. Brady explained to Fischer that, under Talmudic law, Bobby was Jewish owing to his Jewish mother, Regina. “I don’t give a crap about Talmudic law,” Fischer replied. Fischer ended their friendship based on this dispute.
Sadly, going back as far as his teenage years, Fischer had made anti-Semitic remarks, and one account I read noted that he cherished a color photograph that he kept of Adolf Hitler. Brady loathed this side of Fischer, but interestingly refused to attribute it in any way to being a by-product of mental illness. He held Fischer entirely responsible, lamenting, “Bobby just went . . . rotten.”
In many ways the Marshall felt like a loving parent’s shrine dedicated to Fischer. Lush black-and-white photographs and news clippings from Fischer’s youth were on all the walls. Yet there wasn’t any artifact after 1972 that I could find. Fischer’s post-1972 legacy’s omission haunted the rooms as much as anything present.
I asked Brady if he had ever point-blank asked Bobby Fischer about losing. Brady’s eyes lit up and he smiled bashfully. “I certainly did ask him that question once. Once and only once. And I remember exactly what he said in response. He looked up from the board where we were playing and shouted, ‘Don’t ever ask me about losing! Don’t ever ask me again!’ ”
“After Fischer refused to defend his title and went into hiding, who was the next young American player who came along that really resonated as the next Fischer? Was there anybody like him?”
“We had some strong players who came up where I’m sure the comparison was spoken of out loud,” Brady said.
I was still thinking of Magnus and the abyss.
“Did any of those players after Fischer, carrying the burden of becoming the next Fischer, crack under the pressure?”
An older gentleman, who had been eavesdropping from another table at which a young chess player’s mother was talking, spoke a name in a tone befitting a séance: “Peter Winston.”
A silence spread out over the room, as though we were picking at a ghostly scab.
“Peter Winston,” Brady agreed solemnly. “Yes. Quite true.”
“Who’s Peter Winston?” I asked.
“Very talented player from New York,” Brady said. “Two years after Fischer won the world title, Winston shared first prize at the 1974 US Junior Championships. And he was a math prodigy even before he was a chess prodigy. Peter got a lot of attention in 1972, when he was fourteen, beating Walter Browne, who was then the six-time national champion. That got people talking. He absolutely crushed Browne.”
“What happened to him after that?” I asked.
“Well . . .” Brady took a breath and played with his beard for a second. “You can go in the other room and talk to Jay Bonin. Very fine chess player. Probably the most active chess player in the country. He’s an international master. He was one of the last people to see Peter during a tournament at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side in the winter of 1977. Bonin was playing there too. Winston had been institutionalized for a time. He dabbled in illicit drugs. Things had been deteriorating with him for a while and he became somewhat unhinged. The medication he was taking was also having a lot of negative effects. He’d go off it and perhaps it was even worse for him. Peter went to that tournament and played nine straight games against vastly inferior competition. But he still managed to lose each and every game. He vanished soon after that during one of the worst recorded blizzards in New York City. He left behind his money and ID, and walked out into that blizzard, and his body has never been found. He was only twenty when he disappeared.”
From the other table, the stranger added, “If indeed he did kill himself, Peter would have made sure his body would never be found.”
“I never met Peter myself,” Brady confessed. “He disappeared in 1978. I first read about him in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964 or 1965. They did a cover story about child genius and there was a profile on him in that issue. He was six and from Sands Point Elementary in Long Island, a school for gifted kids, and Peter was the one who stood out with his ability in math. His father was a professor at Columbia but he died young. A heart attack or something. I think Peter wasn’t even ten yet. They lived up on Riverside Drive next to Columbia.”
A large man in spectacles, maybe sixty, ducked his head into the room to say hello to Brady and his wife.
“Jay,” Brady said. “Hold on one second, if you would. Brin here would like to talk to you for a second about Peter Winston. You played him at Hunter College High School at the last tournament he played, isn’t that right?”
Bonin nodded his head.
“He went zero and nine,” he said. “I was there. Almost forty years ago. My God, that’s scary. Nobody knows for sure where he is now. He disappeared. I assume he committed suicide. He could be institutionalized somewhere. Peter had such a tragic life. He was such a talented player. I didn’t know him terribly well. We played here a few times. The tournament’s starting downstairs. I have to go.”
“Good luck tonight,” Brady smiled.
Bonin adjusted his glasses.
“You too,” he said, “if you ever start playing again.”
Brady turned back to me.
“About six years ago,” he said, “totally out of the blue, a woman named Florence called me. It was Peter’s mother. This was thirty-two years after he disappeared. She told me she had a lot of chess stuff and would I like to come up and look at it. I could have whatever I wanted. I brought Maxine and an intern I had working with me up to her apartment on Riverside. We met the mother, only for a few minutes. Very sweet person. She was moving. She had to move. It was a Columbia University–owned apartment. She had to get out. She led me to a room in the apartment, and the strange thing was, all of Peter’s clothes were there. This was over thirty years after he disappeared and it looked like he was just going to come in that night and go to sleep.”
“Totally preserved?” I asked.
“Totally preserved,” Brady said. “She told us she didn’t enter the room at all. It wasn’t a very big room, very basic but comfortable for one person. Mostly books. I took almost all the chess books, maybe four or five boxes at least. And we brought them here to the Marshall. We used to have lots of book sales. Almost right after the phone call from Peter’s mother, I found out she died.”
We said nothing for a moment.
“Chess has these kinds of extraordinary characters,” Brady said.
“BOY GENIUS,” the cover of the December 19, 1964, issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaims. And inside, in Gilbert Millstein’s profile on Peter Jonathan Winston, titled “The Remarkable Life of a Little Genius,” the first thing we learn about the six-year-old Winston is that he is “alarmingly bright” yet “far more human—and fascinating—than the stereotypical child prodigy.” Little Winston is shown in a series of photographs, drawing math diagrams, arguing with teachers, and working with his mother on his homework.
Not long after Winston first enrolled at his school for gifted children on Long Island at the age of five, the headmaster, Benjamin Fine, a former education editor of the New York Times, asked him when his birthday was: “March 18, 1958,” Winston answered. Then he asked Fine the same thing, though quickly qualifying that he was only interested in the month and day, not the year. We can only imagine how the adults who observed this exchange might have reacted. Fine told him his birthday was on September 1.
“You’re lucky,” Peter responded. “Daddies can come to your party.”
“What do you mean?” Fine asked.
“Well, your birthday’s on a Sunday,” Winston replied. “It’s not a working day. But next year it’s going to be on a Tuesday. Normally it would have been on a Monday, but 1964 will be a leap year.”
Fine blinked at Winston before turning to the parents in the room. “I heard him, all right. But I’m not sure I believe it.”
So Fine and the parents consulted an almanac to confirm Winston’s accuracy. More adults stepped up to have him perform the same magic trick. Winston obliged—he had already taught himself to make the snap calculation for any year between 1800 and 2000—before changing the subject to a more interesting discussion with Fine about positive and negative numbers.
In the profile, Peter is described as “intense-looking,” and one faculty member remarked that he looked “coiled.” The big-eared boy was prone to temper tantrums. The six-year-old Winston is quoted within the first hundred words of the article as confessing, “I think I have a sickness that only I know about and nobody else can understand. . . . I don’t think I know how to love.”
Over the weekend following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Winston intensely prepared a presentation for school on Monday, inventorying in great detail the shooting with information culled from hours spent scouring newspapers and watching television. He delivered his own epic eulogy for Kennedy in front of teachers and classmates.
“The fact is,” Gilbert Millstein writes, “that Peter Winston is not simply an intellectually gifted child. He is clearly a prodigy, and if intelligence tests are any criterion, at the heady level of genius.” Indeed, the clinical psychologist who tested Winston for admission into the school concluded, “Peter is a true genius. He is 5 yrs. and 5 mos. and his range of information, arithmetical reasoning, attention, concentration and abstract reasoning is equivalent to 15 yrs. and 10 mos.”
Yet Peter’s lack of coordination was noted in his inability to even properly hold a pencil. This, combined with his “merely average” scores on judgment tests, restricted his soaring scores elsewhere from “pressing against the maximum” frontiers of genius.
Winston was also nearly as famous at school for his free spirit and eccentric behavior. He still slept in a crib in his parents’ bedroom. He refused any food at Sands Point Elementary. He struggled with an inability to relate to classmates. He kissed hands. When a child joined him in a sandbox, Winston would break the ice by declaring the latest symphony his mother had played him. He desperately wanted to get along with other children, but didn’t seem to know how. His sadness and aggression became noted traits early on, overshadowed by his total powers of absorption with subjects he became obsessed with. He could read at two. Mastered fractions at three. At six he memorized the names, ages, and terms of office of every president, along with the names, capitals and populations of all fifty states and the exact date they entered the union.
“How come you’re so interested in me?” Winston asks the reporter at one point in the interview. But he already knows the answer, yet carefully underplays it. “I am unusual, a little.”
“My husband, Leonard, says we’re like the poor fisherman and his wife who were given a gem,” Winston’s mother explained. “We don’t quite know what to do with this gem. We haven’t got any plans for Peter. We just want him to be happy. . . . Maybe he won’t be able to make use of this vast potential; maybe something will get in the way. But I have hopes that nothing will. I’m not fearful for him, but I am protective. A few weeks ago, when he was going to sleep, he said to me, ‘Do you want me to be famous?’ I said no.”
Between the time this Saturday Evening Post profile was published and Winston’s father died suddenly from a heart attack, chess entered Winston’s life and exercised a tremendous hold over the prodigiously talented child. His father had expressly discouraged his son from playing chess, afraid, according to a source close to the family who spoke with me but asked not to be identified, “he’d grab it and run. He wanted him to remain with his true gift, which was math. Peter’s grandfather taught him chess and his dad was not happy.” Winston’s father’s fears about chess taking over his son’s life proved all too warranted.
Soon after his father’s death, the brilliance of Winston’s games were being written up in magazines. Before he was old enough to qualify for a driver’s license, Random House approached him with a book contract to explore chess. But already his stability and mental health were also increasingly becoming an issue. He frequently abandoned his schoolwork and, still in his teens, cofounded an alternative high school. By some accounts, like many youths in America at that time, he dabbled in LSD, and this potentially exacerbated his struggles to keep a grip on his life. He openly complained of feeling burned out and coping with intense feelings of alienation.
In 1974, at the US Junior Championships, Winston, only sixteen, tied for first place after playing to a draw in the final against future grandmaster Larry Christiansen. Winston was offered an opportunity to play in the World Junior Championships in Manila and accepted.
In Manila, despite his best efforts, Winston was unable to muster anything but a discouraging sixth place. Two years later, back in New York in 1976, age eighteen, he was hospitalized and diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatric issues led Winston to repeatedly, voluntarily, and with increasing urgency, return to mental hospitals, where he was given heavy doses of dangerous, mind-altering medication and often left in padded rooms. His diagnosis was later switched to one of manic depression. Winston would emerge from treatment complaining that his medication had tampered with his mind and fouled up his cognitive functions.
He returned to the sanctuary of chess outside institution walls and discovered that his game had deteriorated immensely, perhaps triggering further fears that the deterioration was irrevocable. Winston entered tournaments and was dominated by opponents whose ability was vastly inferior to his own, as previously exhibited. On top of whatever prescribed medication Winston was taking, according to several people who knew him that I interviewed, he experimented with illicit drugs also. As he struggled to keep his life together, friends noted with alarm and deep concern that he abandoned any semblance of basic hygiene. He rarely bathed or slept.
In late 1977, as winter took hold in New York, Winston entered the Hunter College High School tournament and lost those nine games in succession. For a player rated as highly as Winston, this created a controversy. An administrator from FIDE ventured that the possibility of a player of Winston’s caliber losing all his games at the tournament was so statistically remote that instead the most likely scenario was that Winston had lost them intentionally. Officials refused to rate the tournament results. After losing his final series of games, Winston allegedly threw away all the medication he had been prescribed for his manic depression disorder.
• • •
One night not long after, in January 1978, according to Sarah Weinman’s 2012 report in the New York Observer, Winston called his sister Wynde to plead with her to pick him up from a racetrack at the Meadowlands in New Jersey and bring him back to her apartment in Manhattan. Wynde agreed and drove off into the night only to find her brother severely distressed. She brought him back to her apartment to sleep. When Peter awoke, his sister offered her apartment for as long as Winston needed on the condition that he immediately see a doctor. Winston wasted no time responding to the offer and ran screaming out the door without even gathering his jacket. He had no money or belongings with him.
Winston headed to an unidentified friend’s apartment. The friend was with his family eating lunch when Winston deliriously spoke of fleeing to Texas to meet with Walter Korn, a seventy-year-old author who had most notably written several revised editions of Modern Chess Openings, which many tournament players considered essential reading. Winston described Korn as “God.” The friend’s parents were so troubled by Winston’s state that they called his mother.
Winston left the apartment before his mother or anyone else could do anything and wandered out into one of the most notorious blizzards to have ever struck New York. The storm shut down traffic from as far as Virginia all the way north to Maine. Winston was six weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. According to Weinman’s reporting, the NYPD has no record of anyone named Peter Winston disappearing, and his Social Security number has never seen any activity since.
Where this gets extra spooky is that when I filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the NYPD, they denied my request on the basis that the case was still open. I appealed, given that it’s going on forty years since Winston disappeared, and was denied again. This time the NYPD said they had no records related to Peter Winston. Also, while most information publicly available related to Winston’s disappearance dates him walking out into a blizzard in late January, the actual blizzard of 1978 formed on February 5 and broke on February 7. A source I talked to who was close to the family, and who had never before gone on record about Winston’s disappearance, was categorical that the last time they saw him alive was during the blizzard in an apartment on Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, just above Washington Square Park. They also assured me a missing-person report had indeed been filed with the police and that private investigators were hired by the family to track Winston down. When everything failed, a psychic was even consulted.
Weinman suggests that on the remote chance Winston is alive, he may have been discovered during that winter storm and placed in an asylum. Or he may be buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island—131 acres at the western end of the Long Island Sound—where 550 indigent corpses remain unidentified. The Hart Island cemetery is the largest tax-funded graveyard on earth. Over a million people are buried on the island. I put in requests there too for possible information about Winston, and came back with another dead end.
• • •
After learning of D. T. Max’s March 21, 2011, New Yorker profile of the rising then-twenty-year-old chess sensation Magnus Carlsen, fellow New Yorker writer and film critic Richard Brody was immediately taken fifty-three years back to when he first encountered Peter Winston, at the age of five, at Sands Point Academy. He wrote about their relationship in The New Yorker on St. Patrick’s Day, the day before Winston’s fifty-third birthday. Brody remembered Winston as “the only true, epochal genius I’d ever met,” and Magnus Carlsen’s journey “brought up a painful riot of memories,” Brody wrote. “I played lots of chess as a child and through adolescence, largely due to the electrifying personal influence of one childhood friend, whose story, as it turns out, is a horrifying mystery.”
When the Saturday Evening Post mentioned Winston arguing with a fellow classmate about the existence of God, Brody was that unnamed child. Brody learned chess at the age of seven and regularly played with, and was crushed by, the prodigiously talented Winston. From the start, Brody was in awe of Winston and his “sublime insolence” that once led a teacher to threaten to hurl a rock through Winston’s skull. For the next five years the two became very close, until going their separate ways at different schools around the age of eleven. The last news Brody heard of Winston was that Winston had tied for the US Junior Championship in 1974.
Years later, long after Winston had disappeared during the snowstorm at the end of January 1978, Brody tried searching for details of what had become of his old friend, only to discover deeply troubling, vague accounts online of the circumstances of Winston’s deterioration.
Brody concluded his article darkly. “Playing chess in any serious manner is the best way for a young person to avoid facing the sort of complex interpersonal experience that is the most essential kind of learning that’s needed to help a person make his way in the world. I think of the time I spent on chess as worse than a distraction or a waste—a pathological delusion.”
I reached out to Richard Brody and asked him some questions about both Peter Winston and his thoughts on chess.
“I think that chess itself is a very troubling game for geniuses and for ordinary people, and perhaps much more for ordinary people,” he told me. “The analogy I would make is to Plato’s Republic: Socrates talks about how philosophy is important for young people to work on, but that young people should first have experience with the more practical side of life, adult life, adult responsibility, and then when they are worldly and generally experienced, then they’re ready for philosophy. Or, rather, they are raised to the level of life experience that makes them worthy of philosophy. Philosophy is too real and too perfect. If you study philosophy when you’re young, it spoils you for experience, which spoils experience for you. It actually makes you think the realm of ideas and the realm of books is better, worthier, than the realm of life that one experiences. A young person who has an imagination and energy and is given good books of philosophy as a teenager will never go out and live. And that is terrible. And chess is the same.”
“Could you tell me about meeting Peter for the first time?” I asked.
“It was September 1963, we were both five, and everybody else had short hair. Not crew cuts, but short hair. Peter had floppy hair. Everybody else wore nondescript clothing, middle-class clothing. There was something bohemian about Peter’s clothing even then. His shoes were a little different. His shirts were different—a little more rumpled. His father was a professor at Columbia. His mother taught also. His parents were intellectuals. Everybody else there came from the suburbs. Peter wasn’t from the suburbs.
“The Saturday Evening Post, a very popular magazine at the time, sent a reporter into school that year. When it came out in September, it was a profile of a young genius.”
“And it was your friend Peter,” I said.
“Yes,” Brody said. “It was Peter. Our fathers would take Peter and me to the Museum of Natural History or to go hear [Leonard] Bernstein conduct the [New York] Philharmonic, that sort of thing. I had visited his apartment a few times at that point. He was insolent in a lovely way. He was very plainspoken but he didn’t smile a lot. He wasn’t dour, but his remarks were sharp, cutting; as I recollect he didn’t have a hell of a lot of respect for authority even then. But not in a negative way. It became a bit of a problem as he got older. One science teacher who took exception to Peter’s cutting remarks used to yell at him and even hurled chalk at him.”
“When do you remember chess entering your lives?” I asked.
“I don’t remember chess until second or third grade. Peter and I played at seven or eight and he trounced me. He would give me queen odds and still destroy me.”
“Did that hurt?” I asked.
“Not at all.” Brody laughed. “Didn’t hurt me at all. I mean, we all recognized Peter’s genius. I already knew that he was different from the rest of us, in a very good way. And his father died soon after. Dropped dead of a heart attack. What its effect on him emotionally was, I don’t know. Kids don’t talk that way. I didn’t and he didn’t. But what I knew from my parents was that it had a significant economic effect, that he went from a middle-class kid to a poor kid overnight. From then on, whenever we did stuff with Peter and his mother came along and my father was there, my father always picked up the check. That sort of thing. We weren’t rich, but we were middle-class.
“And then in sixth grade our little group dispersed suddenly. I went to a suburban public school and Peter went to a private school. I think I saw him once or twice after that. It was pleasant but the thread was kind of cut. Then I followed his exploits in chess, because I was still playing chess. I was still the best local player, and I would read chess magazines where ‘Winston wins this tournament.’ ‘Winston wins that tournament.’ ‘Winston rising star.’ ‘Winston wins US Junior Championship.’ I was really kind of delighted for him.”
“And Bobby Fischer was exploding at the same time and taking chess with him,” I said.
“Fischer was exploding at the same time. That’s right. Peter won the US Junior Championship only two years after Fischer won in Iceland.”
“And America was rabidly chess-crazy?” I asked.
Brody laughed.
“America was chess-crazy. Did Peter himself dream that he would be another Fischer? I think people know their limits. He wasn’t playing at Fischer-like levels. He must have known.”
“Do you remember first hearing the rumor that Peter had disappeared?” I asked.
“I vaguely remember hearing a rumor about Peter having vanished and thinking that it was crazy,” Brody said. “This was the age before the internet. A story I heard was that he walked out of that last tournament he played without a coat and walked out to some bridge and was never seen again. I don’t know how the Peter I knew became the person that disappeared. I knew two stories that weirdly seemed inconsistent with each other. The kid I knew and ultimately what happened. And for the little bits and pieces of information I had in between, they didn’t add up one way or the other. His adolescence and upbringing was obviously different than mine. He came from much more sophisticated people than I did. In a certain way I knew that he was, it’s putting it funny, living a much more interesting life than I was. He was enjoying freedoms far wider than those that I enjoyed. I wasn’t judgmental about it at all. I admired him. As much as I considered him a genius of math and chess, I sort of considered him a genius of life. I don’t know that he read more than I did, but he read more widely than I did. He traveled. His imagination was far less inhibited and conventional. He had a very free mind. Even though his world experience wasn’t enormous, I considered him far more worldly than me.”
“And what about after chess took over?” I asked.
“That’s the paradox, because as I came to understand, chess is a narrowing thing, not a broadening thing. Anybody is lucky to have one gift. Peter had one enormous gift that manifested itself in so many different ways. He was a vast mind attached to a vast character. He had a paradigm-changing intelligence. He wouldn’t just respond to a new argument; he’d create a new category. I remember when Peter would play chess, like for fun, and something came out. It was like a different, ferocious side of his character. It came out when he discussed chess.”
“Are you convinced Peter is dead?” I asked.
“Why would I be?” Brody said. “If he froze to death in the street during that blizzard, why wasn’t he found? You know, what I heard way back is Peter disappeared. So the only story I ever heard subsequently is, he left that chess tournament. I don’t know how, if I wanted to, I could disappear. I wouldn’t know how to do it. How to leave my life without a trace. When I was younger I used to fantasize. I actually thought about it. That I wanted to do it, but I imagined, how would you do it? I literally don’t know. And I’m guessing it’s easier to imagine how to kill yourself than it is to imagine how to disappear. Was Peter’s disappearance a spur-of-the-moment thing or premeditated? But I don’t believe his mother, Florence, would have stopped looking for him. I can’t believe that she would not have made an exceptional effort to find out if he was alive. That she wouldn’t comb every hospital on the continent.”
Because I knew Winston’s mother was dead, I tracked down Peter Winston’s sister, Wynde Juliet Winston, in Maryland, where she operates a law practice. I spoke with her for ten minutes about the possibility of her sharing her memories of her brother. She hadn’t been pleased by what had been written about him and was wounded by numerous inaccuracies perpetuated about him. I liked her immediately and quickly felt ashamed to be bothering her. Before I was born, my mother lost an infant son to crib death and it stained the identity of our family in strange ways I’m still working through. But the way Wynde had lost her brother was unfathomably traumatic and damaging. We ended our conversation with her politely telling me that after forty years she still wasn’t sure if she was ready to talk about Peter. From the tone of her voice, she hadn’t come very far from the first day of losing him.