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for him.
    Carmine Nigro was a professional musician, and taught music in a number of styles. Since Bobby was such a sponge in absorbing the intricacies of chess, Nigro tried to foster in him an interest in music. Since the Fischers didn’t own a piano, Nigro began giving Bobby accordion lessons, lending him a somewhat battered “twelve-bass” instrument so he could practice at home.Soon Bobby was playing “Beer Barrel Polka” and other tunes and felt competent enough to give performances at more than one school assembly. After about a year, though, he concluded that the amount of time he was spending practicing the accordion was impinging on his chess studies. “I did fairly well on it for a while,” Bobby said, looking back, “but chess had more attraction and the accordion was pushed aside.”
    Until he was ten, Bobby’s regimen was fairly routine:He played at the Brooklyn Chess Club every Friday night, with Regina sitting on the sidelines, reading a book or doing her nursing homework. Late Saturday morning Nigro would pick him up in his car, and if Tommy Nigro was uninterested in playing, which was more often than not,Nigro would drive Bobby to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to get the boy some competition at the open-air chess tables. Nigro also had another agenda: At first, Bobby was somewhat of a slow player, and the chess players in the park were just the opposite.Nigro felt they wouldn’t tolerate Bobby’s sometimes languorous tempo, so he’d be forced to quicken his play and therefore his thinking.
    To boost his competitivenessBobby spent hours after school at the Grand Army Plaza library reading almost every chess book on the shelves. He became such a fixture there, and displayed such seriousness, thata photograph showing him studying appeared in the library’s newsletter in 1952 with a caption identifying him. It was the first time that his photograph appeared in print. Within a few months, he found that he could follow the games and the diagrams in the books without the use of a board. If the variations were too complex or lengthy, he’d check the book out, and at home, sitting in front of his chess set, he’d replay the games of past masters, attempting to understand and to memorize how they’d won—or lost.
    Bobby read chess literature while he was eating and when he was in bed.He’d set up his board on a chair next to his bed, and the last thing he did before going to sleep and the first thing he did upon awakening was to look at positions or openings. So many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bowls of cereal, and plates of spaghetti were consumed while Bobby was replaying and analyzing games that the crumbs and leavings of his food became encrusted in the crenellated battlements of his rooks, the crosses of his kings, the crowns of his queens, and the creases in the miters of his bishops. And the residue of food was never washed off.Years later, when a chess collector finally took possession of the littered set and cleaned it up, Bobby’s reaction was typically indignant: “You’ve ruined it!”
    He even maintained his involvement with the game while bathing. The Fischers didn’t have a working shower, just a bathtub, and Bobby, like many young children, needed to be urged to take at least a weekly bath. Regina established a Sunday night ritual of running a bath for him, practically carrying him to the tub. And once he was settled in the water, she’d lay a door from a discarded cabinet across the tub as a sort of tray and then bring in Bobby’s chess set, a container of milk, and whatever book he was studying at the time, helping him position them on the board. Bobby soaked sometimes for hours as he became engrossed in the games of the greats, only emerging from the water, prune-like, when Regina insisted.
    The neurons of Bobby’s brain seemed to absorb the limitations and possibilities of each piece in any given position, storing them for future reference. They remained