The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick

by Morley Torgov

  “God no!”

  Shrewdly, Blackthorn pretended to be skeptical. “You sure?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Very well, then. Next evening there I was, way up in the upper tier of the concert hall, in the cheap seats, waiting, praying, mentally rechecking my calculations. Mass times velocity equals the Great Downward Plunge. And then, at last, the house lights dimmed. Out from the wings strode Sir Humphrey Bassett, substituting for Uncle Basil, who’d taken ill at the last minute, probably from overeating. Sir Humphrey Bassett had been my composition professor at the Royal College before the war. Great friend of contemporary music. I worshipped the man. Good God, what was I to do?

  “As he mounted the podium, I stood up. My throat went dry. I half-shouted, ‘Wait! There’s been a mistake!’ Two ushers nearby motioned fiercely to me to sit down and shut up. Before I could utter another sound, Sir Humphrey — who was also a very large man — brought his baton down firmly and the overture to Die Meistersinger began. Dum, dum, de- dum. And then, at the end of the fourth bar, precisely as I’d planned it, there was the conductor, suddenly up to his knees in lumber, awash in a sea of English oak and English carpet, the fruit of England’s forests and looms.

  “Well, my usher friends — they must have got their training at Scotland Yard — immediately put two and two together. Within the hour I found myself in yet another Elizabethan dungeon, this time for felons who tamper with podiums. At my trial I pleaded guilty. There was no point in doing otherwise; the night watchman’s identification was dead-on. The press got hold of the story and had great fun with it, of course. FAMED CONDUCTOR’S NEPHEW SLICES UP PODIUM, etcetera, etcetera. Again because of my veteran’s status, I got off with a suspended sentence. But as far as my family was concerned, there were no subtleties, no sensitivities, no honest human emotions involved in the affair. I’d committed a crime. What’s more, I’d committed it stupidly. Never mind why. Uncle Basil sent a note to my folks saying I was never to defile his doorstep again, that he’d see to it I never got a job in music in Britain, except polishing somebody’s tuba. My father was a tax accountant. He classified me as a total write-off.

  “Anyway, there was therefore only one course open to me: exile. So off I went to New Zealand, an Englishman’s Siberia. Served a life sentence for the next five years as a choirmaster in a small Anglican church. Took off for Australia. Another life sentence. This time three years as a music teacher at a private school for girls. At the end of those eight years, I wrote home to England proposing to return. My father sent back my letter unopened. Return to sender. Appeal denied! The next decade of my life has no fixed place of abode. I worked, wandered, squandered, bummed, drank, read with no sorrow at all that my distinguished uncle had passed on to that Great Restaurant in the Sky, learned with much sorrow that Sir Humphrey Bassett had died —”

  Derek Blackthorn paused. In the dark circles around his deep brown eyes Maximilian had always noted a touch of sadness, but at the mention of Sir Humphrey Bassett’s demise, those eyes took on a faraway look, as though recalling the sight of something, or someone, lost forever. Max expected his teacher to light the waiting cigarette at this point, but it remained unlit, perhaps out of respect for the late Sir Humphrey.

  After a moment or two, Blackthorn resumed. “To this day I’m not sure exactly how I landed on the west coast of Canada. I recall distinctly that I called home from Vancouver. I figured that, with Uncle Basil out of the picture, maybe the expatriate could return at last to his native land. My older sister answered the telephone. I could almost hear her rubbing her spinster’s hands with glee as she announced that my parents, first my mother, then my father, had passed away a year or so earlier, leaving everything to her. I reacted to this news by drinking everything the city of Vancouver had to offer within the space of twenty-four hours. I think I passed out on the sidewalk outside the local Sally Ann.”

  “Sally Ann?”

  “Salvation Army to you, Max. Ended up in hospital where they dried me out like a biscuit. One day they sent in a social worker to see if they could raise my attention span back to an adult level. The social worker was a young Japanese woman and, well, it turned out we had something in common: I wanted to get out of hospital; she wanted to get out of social work. We made the break together. With scarcely a cent to our names, we headed east, hoping to make it to Spain where she would resume her first love: ceramics. I would go back to my suite for strings, doing the best I could to reconstruct it from memory.”

  “Did you make it to Spain?”

  “Our money ran out. So did our luck. We made it to beautiful Steelton-by-the-Sea. No farther.”

  “Do you think you will ever get to Spain?” Max asked. Again, Blackthorn’s eyes took on their sad faraway look. Then, in a sudden change of mood, he said, “See here, Glick, where do you get off asking personal questions of that sort?”

  Confused and taken aback by this, Max said, “I don’t get it. You were just telling me your life story.”

  “I was doing nothing of the sort,” said Blackthorn coolly. “The entire tale is a tissue of lies.”

  “Then why?”

  Blackthorn rose from his armchair, transforming himself from a semi-horizontal slouching figure to a figure that towered over his young pupil seated on the piano bench.

  “I lied to you a moment ago, Max. The story I told you was indeed true.”

  “True?”

  “True. Every word of it. But then again, it’s false, flimsy as gossamer, a network of vapour trails. No sane person would ever tell such a story. No sane person would ever believe it. Don’t you agree?”

  “I, I, uh …” Maximilian was incapable of responding. He felt as if he’d just been spun round and round, deliberately made dizzy. He began to feel resentful. Why had Blackthorn toyed with him, made him feel foolish? In a time of betrayals, was this to be yet another one?

  Blackthorn stood smiling down at him. It was a shrewd smile, wise, a little too cunning for Max’s liking, not a smile to be comfortable with. It dared him to fathom some point that was beyond his depth, a point that — like a beginning swimmer — he could test only by letting go of the side of the pool, submerging himself, feeling nothing underfoot. “I don’t think I follow you,” he said, looking up at Blackthorn. He was beginning to wish he’d played the Chopin waltz better; then none of this would have happened.

  “What I’ve told you, Maximilian, might be called a parable. It may be true. Then again, it may be pure fiction. Now you’re not sure which, are you?”

  “No.”

  “And you may never know, Max. Never. Am I driving you slightly crazy with these thoughts? Are you beginning to feel a loss of balance?”

  “Yes,” said Max, increasingly unhappy about this turn in the conversation.

  “Splendid! You see, Max, whether the story I’ve told you about myself is true or not, the point is, you must never take people and events at face value. You’re accustomed to a life that comes delivered in neat packages. But now that you’re twelve and soon to be a man, according to your religious tradition, you must become unaccustomed to that. I repeat, Max: life is messy. And unless you intend to become a recluse and hole up somewhere in Tibet, you must learn to do some fancy zigzagging in this world. As in the case of your poor unpredictable rabbi. He’s made an error that’s human. Now Max, you must be divine, you must forgive him.”

  Without so much as a pause for breath, Blackthorn added, “Now let’s hear the C-Sharp Minor as Chopin intended it to be played. One-two-three, one-two-three.”

  Maximilian swung round on the piano bench and began.

  This time it sounded more like a waltz.

  Fifteen

  All the way home Maximilian pondered the chronicle told him by his piano teacher. Was it pure fiction? Could it have been true?

  By the time he reached his front porch he had made up his mind: the story had to be true. The proof was in the man’s face, Derek Blackthorn’s real autobiography. It took no stretch
of Max’s imagination to envision all the doors that had been shut in that face, all the heartless seaports and mean inland towns around the globe that had carved lines of hardship into it.

  Not only did the boy find the tale believable, he found it strangely exciting. For Maximilian Glick, raised in a house where the fork was always placed here, the knife there, where one never entered without wiping one’s feet (even on a perfect summer day), the idea that life was an endless series of mishaps made endurable by sporadic driblets of sanity, that idea was novel. More than novel. Amusing. Unsettling. Even scary. But undeniably exciting!

  Max set down his music books on a table in the entrance hall.

  “Max, is that you?” It was his mother, calling from the living room.

  “Yes.”

  “Come into the living room, Max. Please.”

  Maximilian stood at the entrance to the living room. Next to the fireplace stood his mother and father, calm but grim. On the chesterfield sat a man whom Max had never seen before. Despite the generous upholstery on the chesterfield, the man was obviously uncomfortable. He sat stiffly, holding a fedora on his lap, as if he had come for only a short time and was determined to leave at the earliest possible moment. Max noticed that the man had pale grey eyes. In his formal-looking dark overcoat, he had the look of a retired bodyguard, or a detective, a man who could easily look after himself in the darkest alleys of any city. He looked at Maximilian and nodded, without smiling, without a word.

  There was an awkward pause.

  Then Sarah Glick stepped forward. “Maxie,” she said, “this is Mr. Brzjinski. He has something to say to you.”

  Mr. Brzjinski stood, revealing himself to be even taller and more muscular than Maximilian had imagined.

  “How do you do, young man,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. “Your supper is waiting and so is mine, so I’ll come right to the point. Like they say, short and sweet.”

  The message Celia Brzjinski’s father had come to convey was short. But it was not sweet. Not to Maximilian Glick’s ears.

  Celia Brzjinski’s father and mother wanted no more of these foolish notions running through their daughter’s head about a career in music, about going off to some fancy school in that jungle known as New York City. Celia had been raised in a God-fearing home. Her oldest brother was studying for the priesthood. Some day, when their daughter was finished high school, she would acquire a degree in something sensible, like nursing at Steelton General or teaching at the community college in Nickel City. None of this nonsense about “Brzjinski and Glick” would have arisen, said Papa Brzjinski, if that crazy Englishman had stuck to his business. His business, according to Celia’s father, was to teach the girl to pedal better, no more, no less. From now on, Mr. Brzjinski announced, Celia would be continuing her piano lessons with Miss Klemenhoog, her old teacher, the one with the big feet.

  When he’d finished saying what he had to say, Mr. Brzjinski turned toward Henry and Sarah Glick, bowed his massive head curtly and muttered “Good night.”

  He brushed past Maximilian at the entrance to the living room, and without looking up or saying another word, let himself out of the house.

  How had Celia Brzjinski’s father learned of the secret?

  “I don’t believe in lying to you, Maximilian,” said Henry Glick, providing the answer. “Your mother and I were very disturbed about this matter. Your grandmother calls it puppy love, but in this day and age kids do so much more, know so much more, than your mother and I when we were young. Life can become so complicated, Maximilian. Do you understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  “What your father’s trying to say, Maxie, is that it’s important to us to maintain a Jewish home, a Jewish identity. And Celia’s parents feel exactly the same way about their religion and their cultural background.”

  “Besides,” Henry Glick added, “the world is full of struggling musicians. The sidewalks of New York are littered with the broken dreams of kids like you and Celia.” Henry Glick took his son by the shoulders and looked down earnestly into the boy’s face. “Do you understand what we’re saying to you, Maxie? Do you understand it’s for your own good?”

  What was the point of arguing, thought Maximilian. After all, there was only one of him and two of them. Three if you counted Mr. Brzjinski.

  “Please try to understand, Maxie,” Sarah Glick said.

  That night Maximilian lay awake for hours, thinking. He heard the clock atop the old town hall strike midnight, then one, then two. He heard the familiar whistle from time to time drifting across the sleeping city from the plant, signalling yet another volcanic eruption from the towering blast furnace as ore and limestone and fire became molten iron. At half past three his eyes, already heavy with yesterday’s bad news, gave up the struggle to stay open.

  Sometime around four in the morning Maximilian Glick found himself at a three-ring circus, in a tent jammed with spectators busy digging into boxes of popcorn, jabbering, spilling mustard on themselves from hotdogs, spilling orange drinks from paper cups, reaching, grabbing, laughing. Suddenly a shrill whistle cut through the din, jolting the unruly crowd into silence. It was the ringmaster, standing in the centre of the ring, demanding everyone’s attention as he introduced the circus acts. Max caught sight of his face, pink and shining under powerful overhead spotlights; it was the face of his gym teacher, Mr. Tipton-Thomas! Splendid in a red cutaway coat and white riding breeches, the ringmaster doffed his high black silk hat and, waving it with a flourish, gestured toward the outer ring to his right. “In this ring, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we have —” Now he waved the hat in the direction of the outer ring to his left. “And in this ring we have —” Finally he extended his arms to take in the centre ring. “And in this ring I give you —”

  The star attraction in each ring was the same: Maximilian Glick!

  “Impossible!” people in the audience began to whisper, then to shout.

  “Nothing is impossible,” the ringmaster shouted back at them. “Watch!” The ringmaster turned to Maximilian Glick in Ring One and nodded, indicating that the show should begin. He gave the same signal in turn to Maximilian Glick in Ring Two and Ring Three. All three Maximilian Glicks immediately launched into their acts.

  In Ring One, Maximilian heard the alarm clock go off, heard his father call “Time to get up, Maxie,” drank his juice, ate his toast and peanut butter, grabbed his schoolbooks, ran a few steps to his classroom, dashed to the blackboard, multiplied 39,758 by 6,743, divided the result by 15,334 (all in his head!) and chalked the correct answer on the blackboard in five seconds flat, turned and put on a long black academic robe and cap, took up a parchment scroll tied with a blue ribbon, untied the ribbon and read aloud: “Maximilian Glick is hereby awarded an Honorary Degree in Surgery, Chartered Accountancy and Judging, not to mention Auto Mechanics, Family Counselling, Plumbing and Electrical Repairs, and Aeronautical Engineering.”

  In Ring Two, the young star was playing two grand pianos at once, hopping from one keyboard to the next, then sitting between them and playing one keyboard with his right hand, the other with his left. Sometimes he seemed actually to have four hands and four feet. Now there were four grand pianos and Maximilian Glick was playing all of them simultaneously while, on a podium at the centre of the instruments, Sir Basil Blackthorn stood waving a long white baton. Suddenly the grand pianos began to split, each into two, then into four, until finally there were dozens of grand pianos and Maximilian was playing them all.

  In the meantime, in Ring One, he was removing a brain tumour from a patient on an operating table, calculating an enormous bill for his medical services on a computer covered with levers and blinking lights and banging a heavy wooden gavel on the bench as someone called out “Order in the court. Judge Glick is now about to pronounce sentence on the accused!”

  Over in Ring Three, Maximilian Glick was performing an entirely different act and with remarkable energy, considering that he was alre
ady busy beyond belief in the other two rings. Here he was wearing a tallis, a prayer shawl, over his shoulders, and tefillin, traditional little leather boxes containing scriptures that were placed on the left arm and on the forehead between the eyes. On his head was a silver yarmulke, a skullcap, that caught the rays of the overhead lights and reflected them dazzlingly into the spectators’ eyes. He was chanting in Hebrew a portion of the Torah from the Book of Numbers. “From the tribe of Reuben there were 46,500 … the tribe of Simeon, 59,300 … the tribe of Judah, 74,600.” The audience marvelled at his memory. There were gasps of amazement, especially when at one point he began to chant in three voices, his own boyish tenor, Rabbi Kaminsky’s resonant baritone and a third vocal range that had the high-pitched intensity of the Lubavitcher rabbi.

  Back to Ring One. Maximilian Glick has now removed two brain tumours, three spleens and eleven appendixes and he hasn’t even had lunch yet! He has also totalled a column of figures as broad and as long as the two-lane highway stretching all the way from Steelton to Nickel City. And he has sentenced eighteen convicted criminals to prison and let off three others with suspended sentences and stern warnings. He is about to hear his twenty-second case, a man charged with criminal negligence. “Read the charge, Clerk,” says Judge Glick. The court clerk rises and reads aloud, “Your Honour, this man is charged with keeping a loose, disorderly, and dangerous tongue in his mouth, and allowing it to escape on the night of —”

  The ringmaster looks triumphant as the audience applauds and cheers wildly. Microphone in hand, he calls out to the star in the rings: “Run, Maximilian. Jump, Maximilian. Operate, calculate, adjudicate, Maximilian! Play, Maximilian. Pray, Maximilian!”