The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick

by Morley Torgov

  “Speaking of confession,” Teitelman continued, “I suppose what all of us here have most in common is that good old-fashioned sense of guilt that makes our world go round. The difference is that when a Protestant feels guilty about his sins, he climbs on a soapbox at a street corner and shouts his confession; a Catholic climbs into a box and whispers his; a Jew, on the other hand, locks himself in the basement and writes his autobiography.”

  “Oh my God!” Moskover whispered in horror. “They’ll never forgive us if we live a hundred years!”

  Picking up steam, Teitelman rolled on, “That’s one of the reasons we Jews are called ‘People of the Book.’ But not the main reason. The main reason is that down through the ages somebody or other in authority has always thrown the book at us.”

  Once again, the audience broke into appreciative applause. “Thank you, thank you very much.” The rabbi bowed his head jerkily. Zelig Peikes buried his face in his hands. Several seats from Peikes, the wife of Milt Katzenberg grumbled, “What’s he think this is, a nightclub?” Clearly, the rabbi’s flock was not prepared for a shepherd who cracked jokes when confronted with an amplification system and a captive audience. Nor were the bishop and priest. Both squirmed in their skimpy chairs; both looked ecumenically baleful.

  Confident now that he had the audience with him, totally blind to the agony among his own congregants, the young Lubavitcher ran on. “I’m from Boston where the famous Boston Tea Party took place. The American settlers objected to the British tax and dumped all their tea into Boston Harbour. Then the Jewish settlers threw in a little sugar and lemon and drank the whole thing.”

  Teitelman paused to allow laughter to roll over him like a warm towel. “When I told my friends in Boston I was coming all the way up here to Steelton, they said I’d be bored to death in a town like this. They said Steelton was so boring that the Steelton Daily Star, instead of publishing obituaries, publishes a list of who survived.”

  Out there, beyond the footlights, the rabbi’s own people were curdling with embarrassment, but the rabbi was still unaware of them, of the mayor and guest of honour sitting forward in their seats, their faces reflecting mounting anxiety over the direction this invocation was taking.

  “I noted on this envelope,” Rabbi Teitelman took from his pocket the envelope from the mayor’s office and held it aloft, “I noted that Steelton’s emblem consists of two lions wrestling with each other. Nobody can tell which lion is Mr. Quain and which is Mr. DiAngelo, but it doesn’t matter. The motto under the emblem reads LABOR OMNIA VINCIT: LABOUR CONQUERS ALL. I guess that tells us whose side City Hall is on, doesn’t it?”

  This brought a wild cheer from a large segment of the audience and some jeering from a smaller segment, and it inspired Scotty DiAngelo to rise from his chair and lift his arms in the gesture of a triumphant prizefighter. Drummond Quain glared at the Lubavitcher, then turned and scowled at Mayor Perkins, who pretended not to notice.

  “How appropriate it is,” said Teitelman, “that we have with us this evening the Provincial Minister of Culture, a man who has done so much to keep the culture of Steelton provincial.”

  Claxton Thye now joined the expanding brotherhood of unhappiness. As Minister of Culture he’d been as ungenerous to the Finsterwald tribute as he’d been to Mayor Perkins’ sewage dreams when Minister of Public Works. As far as he was concerned, his presence alone was a sufficient contribution to the event. But this circumstance had not yet been revealed to the local press for reasons of taste and Thye wondered how on earth it could have been leaked to — of all people — this outlandish rabbi.

  Again Zelig Peikes found himself being buried under a hailstorm of advice.

  Morris Moskover leaned toward him. “Peikes, do something! Say something! He’s ruining us!”

  “Make a signal,” Milt Katzenberg whispered. “Wave your handkerchief.”

  “Handkerchief nothing!” said Harry Zwicker. “Stand up and tell him to sit down.”

  “I can’t do that,” Peikes protested.

  “Why not?” said Katzenberg. “Who pays his salary?” “Don’t send him this month’s cheque!” Moskover said to Katzenberg.

  “Look who’s giving orders,” Katzenberg shot back. “You still owe last year’s dues, Moskover.”

  Caught in this crossfire, Peikes was almost relieved when Rabbi Teitelman’s voice broke in.

  “A word now about our benefactor,” Teitelman directed his attention to Mrs. Gabor-Mindesz, “or should I say benefactory, bearing in mind that Steelton’s culture will never slumber so long as there’s Mindesz Lumber.”

  Applause and laughter.

  “Commercials he’s doing now!” said Katzenberg. Peikes and his band smouldered.

  “That’s all I need,” moaned Sam Lipicoff, a competitor of the late Tomas Gabor-Mindesz, whose own company, Lipicoff Lumber, was on thin ice twelve months of the year.

  On stage, the dignitaries were struggling to maintain their composure. Mrs. Gabor-Mindesz, unamused by the rabbi’s rhyme, fanned herself vigorously with a copy of her speech. Thrown together in adversity, Bishop Archer and Monsignor O’Neil conferred behind a raised program. Only Scotty DiAngelo, union leader, glowed with satisfaction, no doubt reading into the rabbi’s new interpretation of his hometown motto signs of future victories at the picket lines.

  For dramatic effect, the Lubavitcher halted his invocation long enough to pour himself a glass of water. After a quick gulp, he turned toward the guest of honour, Buckner Finsterwald. “About Buckner Finsterwald — Bucky Finsterwald — there is much to be said.”

  “Please, please God, don’t let him say it,” Augustus Glick prayed.

  “Amen!” Peikes added.

  The Lubavitcher paused again to steal a glance at his notes. “This native son, forged in Steelton as he so dramatically puts it in his autobiography, this man for whom the crucible of boyhood was a simmering vat of chicken soup, except that as the Great Depression wore on all his family could afford was a photograph of chicken soup clipped from a magazine —”

  Sarah Glick frowned at Henry Glick. “That wasn’t in the book, was it? I don’t remember anything like that.” Henry Glick could not bring himself to speak.

  “— and yet, and yet ladies and gentlemen, despite the constant presence of the wolf at their door — not an ordinary wolf mind you, but Sol Wolfe, their landlord at the time —” In the audience, Millie Wolfe, spinster-daughter of the late

  Sol Wolfe, whose shabby building had once housed the hollow-bellied Finsterwalds, groaned, “How the devil would Teitelman have known that!”

  Teitelman carried on. “In the face of manifold tribulations and deprivations, the humour of Buckner Finsterwald, Bucky, bubbled up from the deepest and most traditional well-springs of Jewish wit: turmoil and mineral oil.”

  “Shocking! Absolutely shocking!” Reva Skolnick, president of the Jewish Women’s Auxiliary, hissed.

  Under the glare of the overhead stage lights, Buckner Finsterwald, once so composed, so full of his own eminence, the sheen of his garb reflecting the sheen of his reputation, now commenced to age, to wilt and shrivel like Dorian Gray before the spectators’ eyes. Was this his sixtieth birthday? His seventieth? His hundredth? His eyes, fixed upon the young rabbi at the lectern, pleaded that the invocation end.

  A few rows from the stage, Zelig Peikes, too, fixed his gaze upon the rabbi with the same desperation, hoping to catch his eye, to convey with a subtle motion of the head or a barely perceptible frown the urgency of stopping before all was lost: all those years of leaving well enough alone, all the itchy areas of Steelton life, all the rashes, the benign tumours, now suddenly exposed by this unpredictable monologist. And as for Peikes himself, the past few minutes had seen his lengthy presidential career plummet from twilight into a netherworld. “After tonight,” he said to himself, “I’ll be lucky to be elected dog catcher.”

  Teitelman, however, had seen and heard only the applause and laughter of a demonstrative majority. “May I
close my few remarks …”

  “Thank God!” said Zelig Peikes.

  “May I close my few remarks by calling now upon the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all praise be to Him, to make His countenance to shine upon us and give us peace, all of us, regardless of race, colour or creed, of course. Amen.” Folding his notes, Teitelman restored them to the inside pocket of his coat. In shoes the size of barges, he shuffled across the stage to his seat, pausing only long enough to acknowledge a final round of applause with the characteristic jerky bow of his head. On either side of him, the dignitaries sat like granite statues, as though frozen for all time. Only Scotty DiAngelo displayed flesh and blood, chuckling to himself, revelling in the opening of someone else’s wounds, the ruffling of someone else’s feathers, the pricking of someone else’s balloons.

  At the rear of the auditorium, behind the last row seats in the dark standing-room section, was one citizen of Steelton for whom the moment was filled only with unspeakable pleasure — Maximilian Glick.

  The boy had slipped into the auditorium after the audience was seated and the house lights dimmed. Slipping away now as unobtrusively, he started for home, taking deep breaths, letting the bracing night air expand the feeling of pride in his chest. After all, had he not provided grist for the rabbi’s mill? And the applause — Maximilian understood applause. Applause was food and drink. Applause was approval, gratitude, love. Applause was something offered to one in a hundred, one in a thousand! How many people ever knew the sound of it, the sight of it, the very taste of it!

  Eleven

  The day after Steelton Community Day, a Thursday, began for Rabbi Teitelman like most others. At dawn his cheap old-fashioned alarm clock kept up the irritating noise that always made him feel as though he were being regimented to daily toil in a salt mine.

  After morning prayers there was a simple breakfast: a piece of fruit, a three-minute egg, tea (black, no sugar). Saturday morning’s sermon was only half-written; to complete it took another couple of hours of study and writing. Then there was Sunday morning’s weekly Bible story to prepare for the kindergarten class, always a chore because it necessitated squeezing the cruelty of oppressors, the evil of sinners and the wrath of God through a fine strainer until they were reduced to innocent baby food.

  Lunch was a scoop of cottage cheese, fruit again, tea again.

  At Steelton’s Sacred Heart Hospital there was a visit to Mrs. Shainhouse, whose gallstones rested in a sealed jar on her night table, preserved as testimony to the patient’s bravery and her surgeon’s vanity. Then on to Nathan Pripchik, recuperating from a hernia operation and an interminable history of poor Pripchik’s symptoms, surgery and hair-raising after-effects. Leaving the wards at last, Teitelman made up his mind that hospital visitations were really the business of Christian missionaries, not rabbis.

  Having no appetite now for food or drink, the rabbi forewent his usual mid-afternoon snack (more fruit, more tea, this time with lemon). Instead, he immersed himself in the Torah portion for the coming Sabbath, thankful that nowhere in the text for that week was there to be found a single reference to any part of the human anatomy.

  Promptly at four o’clock the rabbi opened the door of his apartment to admit an ebullient Max.

  “Hi. You were great!” Maximilian chirped.

  “Great? What’re you talking about?”

  “Last night. I sneaked into the auditorium. Caught the whole show. I scored it ten for Teitelman, zero for Finsterwald. I hear he still sold a lot of books afterward, though.”

  “Tons.”

  “That’s probably because everybody felt sorry for him,” said Max.

  Teitelman shook his head remorsefully. “I don’t know what got into me. Somewhere inside me there’s a fool.”

  “The audience loved it.”

  “Not all of them, unfortunately. I ran into Mr. Peikes in the lobby. You should’ve seen the look on his face. As for the people on the stage, you’d think I had leprosy. The only person who spoke to me was that union fellow, DiAngelo.” Teitelman shook his head again. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  Maximilian was determined to see the bright side. “Well, as far as I’m concerned you were terrific. I don’t care what people are saying.”

  “What are people saying, Max? Your folks, for instance, what are they saying?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it is, they’re saying it in Yiddish.”

  “I see,” said the Lubavitcher. He paused to weigh this bad news.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Max said.

  Teitelman smiled. “So long as it’s not personal.”

  “What did get into you?”

  The rabbi reflected for a moment. “The same thing that got into me when I was about your age. One day, at cheder, a Lubavitch kid like myself leaned across the aisle and whispered, ‘Hey, Teitelman, know what God said when Moses had a headache? — Moses, take two tablets.’ I laughed out loud and we both got into big trouble. Ended up cleaning off every blackboard in school. But I was never quite the same after that. I thought to myself, it was worth it. One good laugh is worth twenty blackboards. I guess you could say that during the rest of my academic career I majored in blackboards. The day I graduated they rolled my doghouse into the assembly so they could hand me my diploma.”

  Teitelman laughed. For the first time, Maximilian noted that Teitelman’s laugh — unlike Rabbi Kaminsky’s, which had been deep and from the chest — seemed to come from somewhere behind his thin nose, travelling a much shorter route to the open air and emerging in rapid metallic bursts, like machine gun fire.

  “You know any more of those?” Maximilian asked.

  “More of which?”

  “Jokes like, ‘Take two tablets’ …”

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Mr. Glick. But first you must promise not to breathe a word of this, otherwise God help you. Okay?”

  Max started to cross his heart, then thought better of it. “Promise,” he said.

  “The truth is, I have a million of ’em. You see, by the time I had reached my teens, the one thing I really wanted to be was a comedy writer. You must understand something, Max. My father is a Lubavitcher rabbi; so was his father, in the old country, in Poland. My older brother who lives in Cleveland is a Lubavitcher rabbi. Also my two uncles in Los Angeles. You get the picture? Well, there was a whole world outside the Teitelman household and I felt like a shut-in, pressing my nose against the windowpane, watching all the ‘free’ people out there running and playing and doing as they pleased. So, I had to smuggle joke books into my bedroom and hide them. And I spent hours making up new jokes. And I thought to myself, some day, Kalman Teitelman, you’re gonna be Neil Simon and Woody Allen and Mel Brooks all rolled into one. I was even going to change my name. Kal Title. Or Kelly Title. Great, huh?”

  “What happened?”

  Teitelman sighed. “I guess it was inevitable. One day my father discovered my joke books and the notebooks where I’d scribbled a bunch I’d made up. He did the worst thing imaginable, Max — he didn’t have a temper tantrum. Instead, he handed them back to me, very quietly; then he went into his study, put his head down on his arms and wept very quietly. All the rest of that day and most of the next he fasted. It was like I had died and he was in mourning.”

  Maximilian looked puzzled. “I don’t understand. You once told me that Lubavitchers believe in joy, that they like to dance and sing and even drink at celebrations. I remember you said that they believe in putting lots of spirit into worship so that even the commonest man, and not just the richest or the most educated, can feel close to God.”

  “Ah, yes, so I did. But, and it’s an important but, we also believe in being very learned. Ignorance is not bliss, Maximilian. And we believe in strict obedience to many of the old rules about Jewish social and religious life. To put it plainly, Maximilian, we just don’t play around.”

  “And your family thought you were just playing around?”

  “Alas
, yes.” Rabbi Teitelman tilted his chair back a bit, at the same time shifting his small black skullcap forward on his head so it wouldn’t fall off. “Anyway, bad news always travels fast. Before I could utter another one-liner, my older brother was on the phone from Cleveland followed by both uncles from Los Angeles, long distance person-to-person, begging me to save what was left of my soul and saying things like, ‘How can you do this to your father?’ and other comments designed to make me feel like I had invented the Golden Calf. I’ll spare you all the horrible details after that series of phone calls, Mr. Glick. It’s enough to say that they won, I lost and here I am in Steelton, pouring out my confession to a twelve-year-old piano player. You want me to let you in on another secret, while I’m at it?”

  “Yes!” By now Maximilian was eager to hear more from the man he’d once looked on as a clam in a black suit.

  “Not a word about this, remember?”

  “Not a word,” Max said solemnly.

  “Late at night, when the world is fast asleep and there’s a fair chance that God is looking the other way, I lie awake thinking up jokes.”

  “Where do you get your ideas?”

  “You never know when an idea will hit you,” replied the rabbi. “Trouble is, often an idea hits me at the most inappropriate time, when I’m supposed to be deadly serious. I’ll give you an example, one that happened right here in Steelton. You recall, Maximilian, last October, the day before Yom Kippur, I led a small group of people to the St. Anne River for the ritual of emptying our pockets of sins. And Mr. Pripchik accidentally dropped a ten-dollar bill into the water —”

  “And you almost drowned fishing it out?”

  “Well, next day, Yom Kippur, just as the fast was coming to an end at sundown and I was about to blow the shofar, it happened. I couldn’t help it, Max. This joke just appeared— click! — like a test pattern on the television. There I am, you see, on a riverbank, preaching this sermon about how we have to improve our ways in the new year ahead. And I’m in the middle of it when poor old Pripchik drops his ten-spot in the river. And as I jump into the water to pluck it out, I’m saying, ‘We must alter our lives, my friends; it’s a time for change.’ And old Pripchik calls out, ‘If it’s all the same to you, Rabbi, I’ll take two fives.’”