The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick

by Morley Torgov

  And Shizuko Blackthorn in her quiet unassuming way had also become part of Maximilian Glick’s solar system. Though less than a second-rate housekeeper, she had become in Max’s eyes a first-rate hostess. More and more often of late, Shizuko would invite Maximilian to stay after his lesson for tea, which she served from one of her delicately patterned ceramic teapots and which they drank out of small matching, Japanese-style cups. It seemed to young Maximilian that at these simple tea-drinking sessions some entirely new and strange dimension in time was born. There was little talk of the past, the present or the future.

  The three of them — the Blackthorns and Max — sat quietly, sipping, blowing through compressed lips to cool the steaming brew, sipping again. What conversation there was emerged softly, like the sound of the blowing and sipping, and concerned the changing but timeless colours of the St. Anne River, visible through the high old-fashioned bay window in the living room, or the equally timeless squealing of the seagulls forever scavenging along the river banks.

  How different from the scene now in the Glick dining room, where the family prepared to dig into Max’s favourite cake: banana with orange icing. Sara Glick had baked it that morning. If Max lost, the cake would be a consolation prize. If he won, it would add to the taste of triumph. As Max made his way through his second large slice, the family — that is, the older Glicks — began as always to talk about what lay ahead for their boy. Funny, thought Max, when it came to his comings and goings his parents and grandparents seemed to have eyes in the backs of their heads and yet somehow their line of vision was always directed forward into the future, his in particular.

  Eventually the table talk came round to another very special event due to take place in Max’s young life: his bar mitzvah. After the summer holidays Max would begin a year of lessons and studies with Rabbi Kaminsky in preparation for his confirmation on his thirteenth birthday.

  “You’ll be a man at last,” said his father Henry.

  “He’s a man now!” said old Augustus Glick. He turned to his grandson. “You’ve always been a man, haven’t you, Maximilian?”

  Even if Max’s tongue hadn’t been cemented in banana cake, the boy would have let his grandfather’s question go unanswered. The whole business had grown ever so tiresome, the on-again off-again manhood that constantly trailed Max like an uninvited pet, usually a few paces behind, sometimes drawing alongside, sometimes even a pace or two ahead. On the other hand, thought Maximilian, perhaps that was the price a person had to pay in the process of becoming a Somebody. Everybody, even Sandy Siltaanen, probably paid a heavy toll for the tonnage of expectations, his own as well as others’.

  The following afternoon the front page of the Steelton Daily Star was taken up with an earthquake and flood in Bangladesh, a rebellion in Nicaragua, a subway strike in New York City, the sinking of an oil tanker off the coast of Spain. Sarah Glick glanced hastily over her husband’s shoulder at the headlines. “Bad news and more bad news. Don’t they ever print good news?”

  Henry handed her the newspaper. “Open your eyes, Sarah.”

  “What?” “Look again.”

  Sarah put on her reading glasses and squinted at the front page. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look again,” he laughed, pecking a finger into the lower right-hand corner of the front page, where, under a two- column headline that read HIGHEST FESTIVAL MARK TO PIANIST M. GLICK there was a photograph of Max (supplied to the press by the proud father himself, though he would deny it). The account spoke of “a breathtaking duel” between Max and Celia Brzjinski and quoted verbatim Professor Lacoste’s glowing praise.

  Not to be outdone, a television newscaster that evening called it “a local star war.”

  “Everybody’s talking about it,” Henry Glick exulted to his wife the next day.

  “Don’t breathe a word to Maximilian,” Sarah cautioned. “I don’t want this thing to go to his head.”

  “Our son’s a pretty solid citizen,” Henry assured his wife. “Don’t worry about it going to his head.”

  “Why not? It’s already gone to yours.”

  Overnight Maximilian Glick had blossomed from a confused number in a list of contestants into a distinct piece of news. Thanks to fifteen minutes or so on the stage of Steelton High, he was no longer the kid who couldn’t for the life of him tame a gymnasium horse; he was the kid who could take eight feet of piano and make it talk.

  Such sudden fame would have been enough to take full possession of anybody’s head, lock, stock and barrel. In Max’s case, however, that was impossible, for there was already a tenant occupying much of those premises. The tenant’s name? Celia Brzjinski.

  Immediately after the near-tie at the music festival, Celia’s father made up his mind that his daughter should become a pupil of Derek Blackthorn. Mr. Brzjinski was convinced that the girl’s former teacher, Miss Klemenhoog, was to blame for Celia’s overpedalling which — slight though it was — had cost her a win in the Mozart.

  “Klemenhoog has big feet. No piano player should have such big feet,” he declared. The fact that Derek Blackthorn pressed a pair of size twelves on the pedals was beside the point. “From now on, you’ll take lessons from that Englishman,” said Papa Brzjinski to his daughter. Of course Celia’s mother brought up the matter of the Blackthorns’ infamous style of living. “I’m a businessman,” Mr. Brzjinski, a highly successful land developer, responded sharply. “I deal in financial statements. I look at the bottom line. If it’s black, not red, I don’t ask questions. Go call Blackthorn.” And that was that.

  It was inevitable that Celia and Maximilian should meet one day at the Blackthorns’. Their teacher lost no time. “Sit down, you two,” he ordered, pulling an extra chair up before the grand piano. On the music stand before them he plunked down a thick book with pages resembling battered parchment. “I used to play this four-hands arrangement with my Uncle Basil when I was a kid. He went on to become Sir Basil. I, alas, just went on. Better luck to you, Celia and Max. Now give it a try.”

  They played at sight the first few pages of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a transcription for four hands, while Blackthorn, using an unlit cigarette as a baton, conducted energetically and sang along in every vocal range from basso profundo to coloratura soprano. “Enough!” he called, part way through the movement. “My mind’s made up. Next June you two will compete in the Four-Hands Open Class category.”

  “But that’s for adults,” said Celia.

  “Of course,” Blackthorn responded agreeably.

  “We’ll be up against people twice our age, maybe three times,” Max pointed out.

  “Then we shall simply have to accelerate your aging processes,” Blackthorn proposed. “Leave you to dry out in the sun, the way they do with fish. Now then, no more of this stuff about who’s adult and who isn’t. Let’s go back to bar twenty-four, please.”

  Afterward Shizuko Blackthorn served tea. The four sat cross-legged around a low coffee table, its top scarred from cigarette burns and stained with rings left by countless damp drinking glasses. And yet to Maximilian the little tea ceremony suddenly acquired the miracle of elegance. The miracle was Celia Brzjinski. There was something about the way she brushed an errant strand of fair hair from her eyes; the way she held the handleless Japanese teacup in her tapered fingers, as if it were a flower; the fact that she could sit cross- legged without hunching the way the girls on the volleyball team hunched during breaks. Above all, she could stay perfectly silent, while saying so much with the merest upturn of the corners of her mouth.

  It turned out that the Brzjinskis lived just a few blocks from the Glicks, and Maximilian walked Celia home.

  “What do you think of Blackthorn?” Max asked Celia after their lesson.

  “I don’t think he’d ever be any good at land development,” answered Celia, recalling that the Blackthorn front yard was a living museum of weeds, “but in some ways he reminds me a lot of my father.”

  “How come?”

&n
bsp; “They both say something can be done and that’s all there is to it. My father has this slogan framed over the desk in his office: ‘A man’s grasp must always exceed his reach.’”

  “In that case,” said Maximilian, “you know who should’ve won at the music festival?”

  “Who?”

  “Morton Kelly. His stomach exceeds his grasp, his reach and everything else.”

  They walked past an old Anglican church with a small cemetery beside it. From the churchyard came the smells of freshly cut grass and of lilacs, their lavender blooms in contrast to the ivied stone of the church building and the uncompromising rectangles of grey and black granite that seemed to grow out of the tree-shaded ground.

  “What do you suppose keeps people like the Blackthorns in a town like Steelton?” Maximilian asked.

  “I don’t know. Any time the subject comes up in our house,” said Celia, “my folks automatically start talking Polish.”

  “Funny, mine start talking Yiddish. You know Sandy Siltaanen?”

  “Who doesn’t know Sandy Siltaanen?” “His folks start talking Finnish.”

  “I guess that’s what keeps foreign languages alive,” said

  Celia.

  The two continued at a leisurely pace, saying nothing until Celia broke the silence. “What’s it like being Jewish?” she asked. “Is it true that all Jewish kids are born musical?”

  Max pretended to be horrified. “That’s gross! Who ever said they were?”

  “My mother. The night you won at the music festival. My dad began to self-destruct on the way home and said it was all Klemenhoog’s fault, you know, the thing about pedalling. But my mother said it was your fault.”

  “Fault?”

  “Well, not really fault. What she said was, ‘Jewish kids have an unfair advantage because they’re born musical.’”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” asked Max.

  Celia could tell he was trying not to laugh. “C’mon,” she protested. “I’m very serious.”

  “Well, do you believe it or don’t you believe it?”

  Celia thought about the question. “I don’t know. There aren’t any Jewish kids at the school I go to. You’re the only one I’ve met.”

  “Remember Bobby Rosenberg?” Max asked. “Who?”

  “Bobby Rosenberg, the first guy who played in our category?”

  Celia grimaced. “He was a national disaster!”

  “He was also a national Jewish disaster.”

  “Rosenberg’s Jewish?”

  Triumphant, Max nodded.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Tell that to your mother.”

  There was a slight edge now to Max’s voice and Celia began to regret that she’d brought up the subject. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope I haven’t said anything to insult you.”

  “It’s okay. I just think you oughta set your mother straight, that’s all.”

  “Easier said than done,” said Celia. “Nobody argues with my folks. Once they make up their minds about something that’s it.”

  “Who’s telling you to argue? Discuss.”

  Celia shook her head pessimistically. “All that stuff you hear on tv and radio about people communicating with each other, well, the idea’s never quite caught on in our family. If it’s somebody’s birthday you send them a card. If it’s Christmas you give them a gift. If they’re sick you keep out of their way and don’t make any noise. Some nights it’s so quiet at meal- time you can hear peoples’ watches ticking, especially if my dad’s had a bad day at one of the construction sites. I sometimes think it’s a miracle there’s a piano in the house. My mother inherited it from her old Aunt Hattie. Three cheers for dear old Aunt Hattie!”

  They resumed walking, still languorously. “You still haven’t told me what it’s like to be Jewish,” Celia reminded Max.

  “I’m not sure what to say. I mean, nobody’s ever asked me that question before. I guess I’d have to say …” He broke off for a moment, thinking. “I guess I’d have to say in our case there’s too much communication. Nobody ever shuts up. Everybody’s got to put in their two cents’ worth, you know? Also, if you’re Jewish you worry an awful lot. You worry if you’re not taking life seriously enough, you worry if you’re taking it too seriously. And sometimes you say to yourself, ‘Hey, I’m not worrying about anything!’ and then you really worry.”

  Warming to the subject, Max continued. “Also, if there’s one thing you need, it’s a dynamite memory. Like you can’t stuff a hunk of bubblegum into your mouth without remembering that somebody somewhere is starving. You can’t tell a joke without being reminded that somebody’s sick or dying. You can’t look forward to anything without remembering something that happened way back in the past, usually bad.”

  Celia sighed. “Sometimes I wish I’d been born something else. Maybe it would’ve been different if my dad was Irish and my mother Polish, instead of the other way around. And maybe it wouldn’t. Who knows? Do you ever wish you’d been born something else?”

  “Uhuh. A Finn. I’d like to be a Finn, like Sandy Siltaanen.”

  “Why a Finn?”

  “Because they’re Scandinavians and all Scandinavians are natural athletes. That’s a fact.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My dad,” said Max. “He says it’s in their blood.” Looking pensive, Celia slowed her step. “I don’t understand something,” she said. “If saying all Jewish kids are born musical is crazy, how come it’s not crazy to say all Scandinavian kids are athletic?”

  “Because my dad took all sorts of courses about people. At college. You know, philosophy, psychology, economics. He says, for instance, perfect strangers walk into his store and just like that” — Max snapped his fingers — “he can tell all about them … like how the inside of their house is decorated, what their cars are like, what they eat, even what they do for a living.”

  “Well,” said Celia, “my mother was a nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital before she got married. She knows a lot about the human body. I’m going to check it with her.”

  “Check what?”

  “If a Finn cuts himself and starts bleeding, do athletic corpuscles gush out all over the place?”

  Max stopped in his tracks. He looked into Celia’s face. No hint of an expression of any kind there. “You are putting me on?” Still no sign. He smiled shrewdly. “I think you just tied the score, right?”

  “One gross idea deserves another.” Celia smiled back.

  “Okay, Brzjinski, we’re even.”

  “Not quite. I’m still two marks behind you.”

  “That really bugs you, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Relax,” said Max. “If we do a number for four hands next year, we won’t be competing against each other.”

  “So what,” said Celia, teasing. “You’ll still owe me those two points.”

  “Okay. Instead of calling ourselves ‘Glick and Brzjinski’ we’ll call ourselves ‘Brzjinski and Glick.’ Deal?”

  Celia continued to play hard to get. “Well I figured we’d be called ‘Brzjinski and Glick’ in the first place. I mean, alphabetically or ladies first … no matter how you look at it, it should be ‘Brzjinski and Glick.’”

  “Maybe we oughta think about what Professor Lacoste said. Maybe I should change Maximilian and you should change Brzjinski.”

  “Okay,” Celia said, a little too agreeably. “I’ll make you a deal, then. I’ll change my second name to Jones and you pick something nice and easy for your first name, like Tom, Dick or Harry.”

  As they walked on, Max tested the new names thoughtfully. “Glick and Jones, Jones and Glick. Not bad. Tom Glick? Dick Glick? Dick Glick!”

  “We stay with what we’ve got, then?”

  “We stay with what we’ve got. That’s final.”

  After a moment’s reflection, Max said, “I think we oughta get ourselves a trademark.”

  “A trademark?”

&nbs
p; “Like ‘Chase and Sanborn.’ So nobody can steal our name.”

  “How do you get a trademark?” Celia wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Max replied. “I bet your dad’s got one for his company. Why not ask him?”

  “No thanks,” Celia said. “All he’d say is, ‘I never heard such a foolish idea.’ Why don’t you ask somebody in your family?”

  “Are you kidding? Ask a question like that around our house and you immediately get three days of discussion. My family’s like a closet full of wire hangers. Every time you reach for one, you get a whole armful, all tangled up.”

  “I vote we take our chances,” said Celia. “Who’d want to steal a name like ‘Brzjinski and Glick’ anyway? Or ‘Glick and Brzjinski’?” She laughed.

  “You never know,” said Max, very cautious and business-like. “Especially if we become famous.”

  Celia frowned. “If?”

  “Sorry. I mean when.”

  Maximilian’s sneakers carried him the rest of the way home, up Pine Hill, on columns of air. Once home, he decided not to go straight into the house where dinner was waiting, but flopped himself and his music books down on the steps of the front porch.

  Below him lay the small city, ready — like himself — for summer. Of all the seasons, summer was the easiest to accept, the one that required little or no preparation; no snow shovels and salt to station beside the front steps, no wood to pile for the living room fireplace; no woollens to unpack. Just summer, thought Max, plain and simple. Here I am. Come and get me.

  Heading into that summer, he could taste the sweet taste of Somebodyness. To get out of Steelton some day was still uppermost in his list of ambitions. But in the meantime there was July, there was August, there was Celia Brzjinski.

  For the first time in his young memory, Maximilian Glick had the feeling that Steelton — from the steel plant on the western flank, to the ships’ harbour on the eastern flank — Steelton was his.

  Six

  It was the day after Labour Day. Liberated by a three-thirty bell he thought would never ring, Maximilian Glick took his place in the marathon that always had its starting line at the main school exit and its finish line a half-dozen blocks to the east at Donut Heaven.