The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick

by Morley Torgov

  “Max,” Henry Glick says sternly, “I demand to know what’s going on here.”

  Bryna Glick interrupts. “Really, Henry, there are times when you and your father haven’t the sense of humour of a turtle. Haven’t you ever heard of puppy love?”

  “Puppy love doesn’t include running off to New York City.”

  Max feels himself turning into fire.

  One of the visiting Lubavitchers, Herman Hitzik, the singer, says lightheartedly, “Well, if it’s puppy love, at least it’s between Jewish puppies.” The other visitors chuckle.

  “That’s just the point,” says Henry Glick. “The Brzjinskis are not a Jewish family.”

  The visiting Lubavitchers are suddenly sober. “Ah, I see,” says Hitzik, full of sympathy for the anxious parent. To the boy he says, “So, Maxie, you really planning to go to New York City? There’s a wonderful Lubavitch community there. It’s in a section of Brooklyn called Williamsburg. I could give you some names to look up. My cousin Shloime is a diamond-cutter there and he’s got a daughter about your age.” Herman Hitzik smacks his lips. “She’s a living doll, Maxie! Plays the flute. Hey, maybe you could be her accompanist!”

  Henry Glick scarcely hears any of this. His concerns are largely local. “Who are these Brzjinskis?” he asks Augustus. “He’s a builder. That’s all I know about him. She’s been in the store a couple of times.”

  “Who? The girl?”

  “No, the mother. Lots of money, but no taste.”

  Henry returns to Maximilian. “What’s this about New York?”

  “It’s only a joke.”

  “A joke?” Henry Glick is skeptical. “Then how come we haven’t been in on it? Or is it something you share only with the rabbi?”

  “I didn’t really mean it’s a joke. What I mean is —”

  Maximilian’s eyes brand Kalman Teitelman’s whitish face. It is at this point that the Great Hand that parted the Red Sea goes to work again, this time to lift the fog just enough to enable the young rabbi to perceive the wreckage his unthinking tongue has caused. “Oh, my God!” he whispers hoarsely. He blinks hard at Maximilian. “I’m sorry Max, old friend, I’m sorry.”

  In a flat quiet voice, Max stops him. “I’m not your friend.”

  Henry Glick, struggling to be civil, says, “Rabbi, I must insist. If you know something about Max that we ought to know …”

  The rabbi only ignores this interrogation. Over and over again he repeats, “I’m sorry, Max. So sorry.”

  Sarah Glick, re-entering the room with cups and saucers, senses immediately that while she has been brewing coffee the occupants, or some of them, have been brewing a fresh storm in the living room. “What’s wrong?” she asks Bryna Glick.

  “Our husbands are having a conniption over a silly little matter.”

  “It is not silly,” says Augustus Glick. “Why don’t you butt out, Bryna?”

  “I beg your pardon!” Bryna Glick yells at her husband.

  “Beg anything you like,” he yells back, “just so long as you butt out.”

  “Dad,” Henry Glick pleads, “take it easy.”

  “You’re a fine one to be telling me to take it easy,” Augustus tells his son. “You started it all.”

  “Who started what?” Sarah Glick asks.

  “Our son,” says Henry to Sarah, “has some cockeyed plan about running off to New York City with this girl, this Celia Whatever-her-name-is.”

  “New York City?” Sarah, half-frowning, half-smiling, puts down the tray and looks squarely at the boy. “Maxie, what on earth?”

  “Oh, let the poor kid alone,” Bryna says testily.

  “Mother,” says Sarah, “leave this to me, please.”

  Henry, also testy, says, “Sarah, there’s no need to talk to my mother that way.”

  Weakly, Rabbi Teitelman keeps interjecting, “It’s my fault. I started it all.”

  But no one seems to be listening to the Lubavitcher now. Without knowing precisely what they are arguing about, suspecting that something vaguely sinister is afoot between Maximilian — the apple of their eye — and this outcast girl sent by the devil to blight that apple, the Glick family fire and cross-fire at each other from their individual battle stations in the living room. In the hail of verbal bullets no one notices or cares that Rabbi Teitelman has sunk back into his chair. A watery film obscures his eyes. His pale hands hang limply between his knees. The toes of his black shoes, pointing inward, touch tragically.

  Nor do the Glicks notice that Maximilian is quietly, stealthily, making his way out of the living room. Kalman Teitelman notices. He calls out “Max, wait.”

  But the boy’s face, as he passes from Teitelman’s view through the archway, makes it clear that all paths of communication are sealed off. Perhaps forever.

  Part Three

  Fourteen

  As far as Maximilian Glick was concerned, the sky had fallen upon his private hopes and ambitions. And who had caused the sky to fall? In the courtroom of his mind he placed Kalman Teitelman on trial. The charge: Treason. The verdict: Guilty!

  And what ought the penalty to be? Something suitably Biblical, thought Maximilian. Banishment outside the gates of Steelton. An eye for an eye. Stoning. All three, maybe. Or again, something even more terrible, something inspired by the Industrial Age, involving complicated machinery, electricity and bubbling vats of chemicals. These thoughts cast long shadows across the boy’s waking hours. Nor were his sleeping hours any better. Revenge is a restless bedmate.

  To make matters worse, there had been a confrontation with his father and mother later that night, after their Detroit guests — murmuring awkward thanks and apologies — bundled themselves and the rabbi into the Mitzva-mobile and fled the disaster site. Max’s parents made their position clear to him: music was one of life’s more pleasant decorations, a nice finishing touch, something to be indulged in when the real cares and concerns of the day were over. Make no mistake about it, they said, the real world was the world of facts and figures, diseases and cures, money in the bank for rainy days and old age. Go off to New York City to study music? Never! And compound the disgrace by getting mixed up with — and, Heaven forbid, marrying — a Gentile girl? Out of the question!

  Especially humiliating to Maximilian were the reactions of his grandparents. Bryna Glick, by pooh-poohing the whole thing as a simple case of puppy love (with overtones of international travel), served only to irritate both her son — who thought she grossly underestimated the gravity of the matter — and her grandson, to whom the term “puppy love” was nothing short of an insult. Whether she meant to or not, she had taken his relationship with Celia Brzjinski and pinned diapers on it. As for Grandfather Glick, having rattled his dull sabre at the outset, he now elected to retire to the hills from which, like a tired old general, he could observe at a safe distance the tribulations in the valley below.

  Maximilian’s gloominess did not escape the attentive eyes and ears of Derek Blackthorn. Midway through a Chopin waltz, Blackthorn touched his pupil’s arm.

  Max stopped playing. “Yes, Mr. Blackthorn?”

  “Max,” said Blackthorn, “it’s a waltz, my boy, a waltz. Not dance music for King Kong.”

  Ordinarily, Maximilian would have accepted such well- meant criticism with a smile and begun again. This time, however, he hung his head over the keyboard and rested his fingertips lifelessly at the edge of the keys.

  “What’s the trouble, Mr. Glick? Not your week for waltzes?” joked Blackthorn.

  “It’s not my week for anything,” Maximilian muttered. Blackthorn looked at him closely. “Well, Max, I’m only a lowly piano teacher, not a psychiatrist, but would you like to tell me about it?”

  While Maximilian finally related the story of the fateful supper, Blackthorn listened patiently, without once interrupting the boy’s tale. When Max had finished, the piano teacher nodded his head thoughtfully. “Aha.” He paced back and forth several times, his bony fingers interlocked behind his back, creasi
ng the already rumpled corduroy jacket. His ever- present cigarette dangled from his lower lip, the smoke drifting upward into his eyes, forcing him to squint. Looking pensive, he puffed on. Finally, he stopped pacing and took a chair next to the piano. “How old are you, Max?”

  “Thirteen in September.”

  “Yes, of course. In September.”

  Blackthorn examined his pupil through the cloud of smoke. A long ash clung supernaturally to the end of his cigarette. Then, on the next puff, it released its hold and joined some others, along with two or three food stains, on his lapels. “It strikes me, Maximilian,” he said slowly, without removing the butt from between his teeth, “that the world has expected a great deal from you.”

  “My name’s mostly to blame for that, according to my grandmother.”

  “It also strikes me —” at this point Blackthorn removed the cigarette and ground its remains into an empty teacup, “— that you, as a result, expect a great deal from the world.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Maximilian said.

  “Well, take this rabbi for instance. What’s his name? Teitelman? Do you think he intended to do you harm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, was there even a hint of malice in what he did or said?”

  Maximilian shook his head. “How should I know? He’d had too much to drink. He was disgusting.”

  “Yes, I know, Max. That’s a condition with which I’ve had some familiarity in my lifetime.”

  “I know,” said Max. He hadn’t intended to admit that he knew about Blackthorn’s drinking, it had simply slipped out. “I’m sorry. What I meant was —”

  “You needn’t be embarrassed,” said Blackthorn. “My wife and I have learned one thing since settling in Steelton: everybody knows everything. It’s one of the more charming aspects of small-town life. I’m sure your rather peculiar friend in the black hat and red beard has learned the same lesson by this time.”

  “I don’t see what all this has to do with me,” Max said. “All I care about is that he got drunk and shot his mouth off. I kept my end of the bargain.”

  “What bargain, Max?”

  “I’ve never told a soul about his deepest secret: that he wants to be a comedian and still spends a lot of his time dreaming up jokes. And I never will.”

  “But you’ve just told me!” said Blackthorn. He peered intently into his pupil’s face. “Don’t you see, Max, how easy, how terribly easy it is for people to be less than perfect?”

  “But telling you now … it’s not the same.”

  “Oh, yes it is, Max. Yes it is! If you’d kept the rabbi’s secret perfectly, you wouldn’t have breathed so much as a word of it, not even a syllable, not to me, not to anybody. What I’m getting at, Max, is that life is really a sloppy business. It’s full of missed trains, unmade beds, friendships that are put together like puzzles and come apart the same way. You may make a lot of things in this life, my friend — money, contacts — but nothing is more important than making allowances.”

  Blackthorn paused to light up another cigarette, inhaling deeply, as if it were his first of the day. “You want to know what a fellow like me is doing in a town like Steelton?” he asked in an offhand manner. “I’m sure you’ve heard a hundred and one stories on the subject, all of them pure speculation, I hasten to add. Most of ’em come back to me in one form or another. Some old crust by the name of Moskover has been going around town lately telling people Shizuko and I are a team of spies. Last year’s rumour was that I’d killed a man in a duel in Mexico and Interpol was looking for me. The year before that, I was a deserter from the French Foreign Legion. Shizuko is supposed to be a fugitive from justice, too. Landed on the coast of California from a Japanese submarine a few days before Pearl Harbour for the purpose of reporting movements of U.S. warships out of San Diego. A neat trick, considering Shiz was six years old at the time. I’m sure you’ve heard most of this nonsense before, Max.”

  Maximilian hesitated. “Well …”

  “You can be frank, Max. We’re talking man to man.”

  “I didn’t know Mrs. Blackthorn was only six at the time.”

  Blackthorn laughed. “She’ll be furious with me. She guards her age like the Royal Mint. Anyway, all that’s beside the point.” He paused to butt the latest cigarette in the same empty teacup, withdrew another from the package beside the keyboard and held it, unlit, between his long fingers. It seemed to Max that whatever one heard about the evils of cigarettes, to Derek Blackthorn they were a life-support system, even unlit.

  Legs extended before him, long and parallel, like a pair of skis, Blackthorn slouched back in his armchair. He went on. “Back in 1946, I was fresh out of the Royal Air Force. I’d been a fighter pilot for three-and-a-half years, seen action over Europe, North Africa, been shot up, shot sideways, shot down, as you know. Did more living in those three-and-a-half years than most people do in a lifetime. I’d put in a couple of years at the Royal College of Music before I went into the service and managed to keep up with my studies to some extent during off-hours in the air force. That is, when I wasn’t busy pounding out ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ on the mess-hall piano for a bunch of drunken pals. Anyway, I did some serious composing, two or three orchestral things, including a suite for strings I thought was quite good. The suite was really pretty sketchy, but I intended to have a steady go at it now that the war was over.

  “I showed the sketches to my Uncle Basil, Sir Basil Blackthorn. He was the music director of the London Philharmonic in those days. A very Edwardian character, always wore a cutaway coat and striped pants, even when he went to the seaside in summer. All the great English composers at one time or another were obliged to embrace dear Uncle Basil’s rather ample posterior in order to get their works played by the Philharmonic. That was a fact of musical life in England. But I — being the man’s nephew and being a bit of a war hero, at least in my own eyes — made the mistake of assuming that he would grasp immediately the enormity of my genius and schedule at least one of my works for the first available concert. This is probably boring you stiff, Glick.”

  “No, no. Honest!” Maximilian said, pleased that only he, in all of Steelton, was privileged to hear the inside story.

  “Well, much to my chagrin, dear Uncle Basil gave my work no more than a cursory look. I’m sure he spent more time searching through the London Times that day to see if his name was in print. ‘Derek my boy,’ he said, ‘war has a brutalizing effect on composers and I’m afraid your stuff is proof of that sad truth.’ He was referring to the fact that I’d used some rather harsh discords here and there. Nothing more shocking than, say, Stravinsky or Prokofiev had used, though in all honesty it wasn’t exactly the sort of tune you left the concert hall whistling. Anyway, Max, by the time he instructed his butler to show me to the door, I’d called him a doddering old fool and he’d called me an insolent young fool and that was the end of nepotism in the Blackthorn dynasty.”

  “Nepotism?”

  “Ne-po-tism. Look it up when you get home, Max. To continue: the first thing I did, after being ushered out of Uncle Basil’s flat, was to head straight for the nearest pub.”

  “Pub?”

  “Tavern. Booze-ateria. Drinkatorium.”

  “Right.”

  “And at the pub I proceeded to get drunk, so drunk in fact that the proprietor showed me to his door, where a kindly policeman, perceiving by the button in my lapel that I was a war veteran, hailed a cab to take me home, instead of hauling me in for being disorderly in a public place. Inside the cab things only got worse. I don’t know what it was. I didn’t like the colour of the cabbie’s shirt, I think, and halfway home he pulled over to the curb and showed me his door. I got out, or rather fell out, muttering unprintable epithets about the working classes of England, at which point another constable, this time less charitable, hailed a patrol car and off I went to an Elizabethan dungeon for vagrants, a place that made Devil’s Island look like the Ritz.

&nbs
p; “It wasn’t until the middle of that night, when I began to sober up, that I realized that somewhere along my descent into Hell I’d lost my manuscripts. In the morning, the magistrate, who also perceived the button in my lapel, let me off with a lecture about the proper way to rehabilitate oneself after an armistice. I don’t think I heard a word of it. I could only think that my precious manuscripts were lost and I had no copies. All that day I retraced my steps, which was no easy task considering my steps had been, shall we say, multi-directional. Also I’d been thrown out of a flat, a pub and a cab and it was a bit difficult to go back to my hosts for assistance under the circumstances.”

  “Did you ever find the manuscripts?”

  “Never. Well, I stewed for several days and decided that all this havoc was the fault of Uncle Basil and I vowed to create double-havoc. I’d show him what it meant to be brutalized by peace, let alone by war. You sure I’m not boring you, Glick? Perhaps you’ve a date with the fair Miss Brzjinski.”

  “I’m meeting Celia later for a Coke. It’s okay, though...”

  “Several days went by; then I hit on a plan. I got hold of a chest of carpenter’s tools, a beat-up tweed cap, a pair of workman’s boots. Posing as a maintenance man, I got past the night watchman of the concert hall where Uncle Basil was to conduct the Philharmonic next evening. You must understand that, being an Edwardian, my uncle overate much of the time. Sir Basil Blackthorn carried a lot of weight in English musical circles, literally as well as figuratively, which was precisely what I was counting on.

  “With my carpenter’s tools I lifted the carpet that was tacked to the conductor’s podium. Then, with such skill that even I was amazed, I took a fine saw and cut the strips of flooring on the podium. Not all the way through, mind you, but just sufficiently so that, under a certain degree of strain, they would give way. I knew that the opening number on his program would be Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger, which begins with some good loud chords and calls for a succession of heavy downbeats on the part of the conductor. Then I tacked the carpet back into place like a real professional, bid the night watchman good night and vanished into the London fog. My God, I do apologize, Max. I’m sure your arteries must be hardening out of sheer boredom.”