The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick

by Morley Torgov

  “That’s a snappy little number,” said the used car dealer, “but it’s kind of small, isn’t it?”

  “Why do I need big?” asked the rabbi.

  “Maybe you oughta try it out first, Rabbi. I gotta be honest with you, sometimes the first owners of cars like these drive the devil out of them, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “What could be more appropriate for a clergyman!” said the rabbi with enthusiasm.

  While O’Grady made out the bill of sale, the young Lubavitcher smiled to himself. The idea of driving a car from which the devil had been cast out appealed to him almost as much as the low cost. O’Grady, a man of conscience, had discounted the sale price after confessing that only God knew how long the transmission would hold up.

  By nightfall the rabbi had fitted his books nicely into the trunk of the small, black car. A lone suitcase containing some clothing, and a cardboard carton holding personal papers, shared the passenger seat. The rabbi looked under his bed, checked his dresser drawers, ran his eyes over the bookshelves and desk in the living room, carried out a final inspection of the kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Satisfied that he’d packed everything he needed, he locked the apartment door behind him, slid the key under Mrs. MacWatters’ door, climbed behind the wheel of his new used car and drove off.

  On the edge of town he stopped only long enough to let the astonished attendant at an all-night service station fill the tank and check the oil. Then the little Japanese sports car gave a lurch and sped away, carrying the Lubavitcher rabbi into the night.

  Seventeen

  Staring moodily out the bay window at the slate-grey St. Anne, just beyond a raw patch of scrub and wild grass that separated his house from the river, Derek Blackthorn drew a heavy cardigan tighter around his hunched shoulders and shuddered. “The revenge of April on the human race,” he growled in a Shakespearean voice. “April … bastard child of spring and summer, claimed by both, disowned by both … this frowning month of everlasting mists …” Thick clouds now dipped so close to the water’s surface that they seemed about to blot the river dry. “Just look at that sky, Max. Shall we never see the sun again?”

  Maximilian, seated at the piano, head bent over the keyboard, showed not the slightest interest. He was only half listening, so lost was he in his own thoughts, thoughts made gloomier by the sound of rainwater dripping from the Blackthorns’ rusted eavestroughs, slowly, steadily, like the measured beat of time itself.

  Without taking his eyes from the scene outside, Blackthorn asked quietly, “You’re sure your decision is final? No chance you might change your mind?”

  Again the boy remained silent. Blackthorn turned and looked at him. “Max?”

  Max nodded. “No chance,” he said in a low voice.

  “I see.” After a moment’s pause, the teacher crossed the room and stood directly behind his pupil. Reaching over the boy’s shoulder, he poked a skeletal index finger into the sheet of music open above the keyboard. “Know what I think, Glick?” he said, trying to josh. “You’ve allowed yourself to become spooked by just the look of the piece. Now, it does, I grant you, resemble something Spot and Rover might have dragged in after a night of carousing on the town, all those killer-octaves and knuckle-cracking chords. And the key — my God, Max, five flats!”

  Blackthorn waited for some reaction from his pupil, but none was forthcoming. Forcing himself to be chipper, he went on, “Well, that’s a Liszt étude for you. Coronary music I call it. Never play Liszt without a doctor in the house!” Still no sign of life from Max. “Look, Maximilian,” Blackthorn brightened, “I could try ringing up the publisher, see if it’s possible to have the piece re-issued in something more palatable, say, the key of F. That’s only one flat. Of course, old Franz’ll turn over in his tomb, but it’s time he saw the other view anyway. Besides, it’s the tune that counts, I always say. What do you always say?”

  “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “What doesn’t really matter, Max?”

  “What key it’s in. I’m not going to enter the festival. Not this year. Not any year, maybe.”

  “You mean because you might have to compete against Celia?”

  As if defending the girl’s honour, Max shot a resentful look at his teacher. “Celia would never … I mean, she swore if I didn’t, she wouldn’t either.”

  Blackthorn chuckled cynically. “Oh, is that so?” he said. “Well, I’ve news for you, my friend. At this very moment Miss Brzjinski is well into the Concert Etude No. 3, five flats and all, presumably with Madame Klemenhoog and Papa Brzjinski hovering over her like midwives at a lying-in.”

  “I don’t believe it. She gave me her word.”

  “Ah, but she didn’t give you her father’s word, and in that family, it’s his that counts apparently.”

  Max gave his teacher a skeptical look. “How do you know all this?”

  “Simple, Max. It came from the unimpeachable source: Agnes Moore.”

  No more needed to be said. The boy understood immediately. Agnes Moore ran Steelton’s only music shop, a clearing house for local cultural gossip (including what really went on in the mansion of Mrs. Gabor-Mindesz after everyone, except a certain handsome cellist, left her soirees). If one wanted to know who was playing what and with whom, anywhere within a hundred miles of Moore’s Music Store, one had only to compliment the lady on her latest handwoven shawl (always the colour of cooked oatmeal) and say something in French to Gaston, her white poodle.

  Blackthorn brought his face close to Max’s. “Now then, won’t you snap out of this … this silliness?”

  “It’s not silliness,” Max insisted hotly.

  “I’m sorry, Max,” Blackthorn said quickly, backing off. “I oughtn’t to have put it that way. Please forgive me.”

  Returning to the bay window, Blackthorn leaned the palms of his hands against the cold glass. For a full minute the room was locked in a strained silence. Then without warning, Blackthorn swung round and, flinging all diplomacy to the April wind, shouted, “No, no, no! I bloody well refuse to stand by and let you do this to yourself, Max. All the hundreds and hundreds of hours you’ve worked and sweated. What about them? What about New York? Juilliard? What will you do instead, carry a towel and water bucket for the likes of Sandy Siltaanen? Hang around the bakery after school with the likes of Bobby Rosenberg? Deliver pizzas for Frank Senior’s?”

  “Maybe,” the boy mumbled.

  “Is that all you can say? Maybe?” Blackthorn raged. “I’ve put four years of my life into you, Max. Four hard, long —” Blackthorn broke off and turned away, shaking his head bitterly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Max in a voice barely audible. Without another word, he got up from the piano bench. Avoiding his teacher’s accusing gaze, he gathered up his jacket and scarf in a careless ball and without stopping to put them on, started out of the room. At the double doors that led to the entrance hall he tried to repeat “I’m sorry,” but the words stuck to his tongue.

  Maximilian made his way along the wet street with angry strides, feeling every inch the victim, mocked, betrayed, bereft of the thing closest to him: his private dreams. The wind off the river buffeted him, working its damp fingers up and down his back, but he was oblivious to it until, at last, bone-cold and defeated now even by the elements, he was forced to stop in his tracks to don his jacket and scarf. Looking up defiantly at the overcast skies, he called aloud, “Teitelman, I hope you’re satisfied. Damn you, Teitelman, wherever you are!”

  Wherever he was … that was indeed the question. Where was Kalman Teitelman?

  In the weeks following his disappearance, the Lubavitcher rabbi’s whereabouts had become the mystery on everyone’s lips.

  Though the service station attendant observed that the small Japanese car was definitely heading north when he last saw it, none of the townspeople along that stretch of highway reported the appearance of a vehicle matching the description of the rabbi’s, nor had anyone seen a stranger resembling the driver
himself.

  For once, Zelig Peikes, the president of the congregation, Harry Zwicker, the secretary, and Milt Katzenberg, the treasurer, were unanimous about something. “He must have turned around and headed south,” reasoned Zelig Peikes, and the others agreed.

  To the Jews of Steelton, “south” always meant Toronto and south was indeed the logical direction for a man like Kalman Teitelman to go. South was where there were Jewish schools, Jewish libraries and museums, synagogues so large you needed field glasses to see the rabbi in his pulpit. If you were sick, there was a Jewish hospital equipped like a luxury hotel. There was even a Jewish Y, in fact, two Jewish Y’s, one for the uptown athletes, one for the downtown athletes.

  You could be a sidewalk Jew in the south. There were whole sections of the city where one saw nothing but Jewish butcher shops and fish markets and bakeries, Jewish bookstores, restaurants and variety shops.

  And then there were study houses where a Lubavitcher scholar, starved for the company of other scholars after months of isolation in some northern wilderness, could find rich food for the mind and a hot, strong cup of tea with lots of lemon and sugar for the body.

  And most importantly, there were tailor shops where a Lubavitcher rabbi could find with ease exactly what he needed to replenish his traditional wardrobe.

  “Yes, he must be in Toronto,” said Zelig Peikes. “I’ll drop a line to the Central Jewish Agency there. They must have heard from him by now.”

  “Never mind dropping a line,” said Milt Katzenberg. “Call!”

  Coming from Milt Katzenberg, the congregation’s frugal treasurer, this was an extraordinary suggestion. Long distance calls were like champagne for breakfast and caviar at bedtime. Shameful extravagances. He was the kind of treasurer who counted every postage stamp, every paper clip.

  “Call!” Katzenberg repeated.

  Harry Zwicker went even further. “Make ten calls if you have to,” he said to Peikes. “God only knows what’s happened to the poor man. Maybe he was hijacked.”

  “Maybe he was mugged,” said Katzenberg, who loathed big cities. “You know what Toronto is like. Every second person on the streets is a professional mugger. I read it in the paper.”

  “Nonsense,” said Zelig Peikes, who considered himself much more sophisticated about such matters. “My brother Walter Peikes the multi-millionaire has lived in Toronto all his life and he’s never been mugged. Not once.”

  “That’s because your brother the multi-millionaire hasn’t bought himself a new suit since the Second World War,” said Katzenberg.

  “Let’s not waste time,” shouted Harry Zwicker. “Call, for God’s sake!” Zwicker’s sense of urgency reflected the anxiety of the entire congregation, for even the Lubavitcher’s sharpest critics were by this time deeply concerned about the young man’s safety.

  Peikes called the agency. No, they hadn’t heard so much as a word from Rabbi Teitelman.

  The agency in turn called a number of places in the city where a Lubavitcher might be found. The response was always the same: Kalman Teitelman? No, the name didn’t ring any bells. What did he look like? Red-headed? Thin and pale? Why, there were dozens of young Lubavitchers matching that description in Toronto. Easier to identify a wave in the ocean, a pebble on the beach!

  In desperation, the agency called the rabbi’s parents in Boston. This turned out to be a grave mistake. Informed that their son had apparently disappeared, the elder Teitelmans began to weep and wail on the other end of the line and the director of the agency began to wish his fingers had become paralysed a moment before he’d dialled their number.

  As time went by, it seemed that every man, woman and child in Steelton had some tale or other about where the Lubavitcher was supposed to be, about what he was supposed to be doing.

  Harry Zwicker’s cousin, who lived on a kibbutz in Israel, wrote Zwicker that a Kalman Teitelman from the United States was now residing at a neighbouring kibbutz near the Lebanese border, teaching English to children by day, leading a crack company of marksmen on guard duty by night.

  Abe Resnick, who sold machinery and tools to logging companies, heard from a number of his customers that the Lubavitcher — minus beard and wearing a heavy mackinaw jacket and steel-toed boots — was spotted operating a bulldozer deep in the timber country north of Thunder Bay.

  According to the loggers, he lived in a rooming house and took most of his meals at a highway truck stop run by an attractive middle-aged widow who was constantly serving him second helpings of dessert “on the house.”

  Gerry O’Grady, of O’Grady’s Honest-to-Goodness Used Cars, came across a magazine advertisement by an Italian car manufacturer showing one of its sports models being tested over a rugged mountain pass in Switzerland. He told a reporter for the Steelton Daily Star that the man behind the wheel was none other than the man to whom he had sold the little black Japanese two-seater. “No doubt about it,” said O’Grady.

  The proprietor of the Harbourside Motel said he’d swear on all the Gideon Bibles in his motel that he’d seen the Lubavitcher sporting a neat, red moustache and working as a bell captain at a large convention hotel in Las Vegas.

  Not to be outdone, Morris Moskover proclaimed that all the stories were accurate. “The man is everywhere and that’s all there is to it,” he said.

  Ever mindful of his presidential duties and with his eye fixed at all times on the next election, Zelig Peikes, with the assistance of the Central Jewish Agency, hired a new rabbi for Steelton’s Jewish congregation.

  “He’s the right man for us,” said Peikes. “He’s forty, has one wife, two kids, wears a three-piece suit and drives a four- door car.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Milt Katzenberg impatiently, “but what’s he look like?”

  “Like a lawyer, thank God!” replied Peikes.

  When news of the hiring of a new rabbi was announced at the Glick dinner table one evening, Bryna Glick once again found herself in the minority. “I still feel we let Rabbi Teitelman down,” she said. “You have to admit that he made all of us a little more conscious of our old-country values, a little less anxious to be like everybody else, to blend in with the woodwork, so to speak.”

  “With all due respect,” said Sarah Glick, “any man who deserts his post because his uniform’s been stolen or has simply vanished is not much of a man in my eyes.”

  Augustus Glick couldn’t miss an opportunity to needle his wife a bit. “I remember when you promoted him from corporal to captain on Yom Kippur night when he passed out after blowing the shofar.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, he’s still a captain,” Bryna retorted.

  Henry Glick disagreed. “I’ll admit that he made us pull up our socks when it came to things like attending services regularly, observing certain rules and regulations, details of that sort. But men like him really don’t belong in the twentieth century, I’m afraid.”

  “But what about the hundreds, even thousands, of Lubavitchers in the big cities – New York, Montreal, Chicago?” Bryna said. “Surely you’re not going to sit there and tell me they all belong to some other time, or on some other planet?”

  “That’s different, with all due respect,” Sarah Glick explained. “You see, in a metropolis like New York they have each other. They don’t stand out like oddballs, the way this young man did here.”

  Bryna Glick, having been addressed with all due respect twice in less than five minutes, could feel a small inner flame setting fire to her temper. “Sarah my dear,” she said to her daughter-in-law, “when Augustus and I first came to Steelton in the early Twenties, didn’t we look more than a little ‘oddball’?”

  Augustus Glick sat up. “I beg your pardon, my dear?”

  “You’ve forgotten the pictures of the two of us when we’d just gotten off the boat from Europe. I wore a dress that looked like a torn parachute and Augustus wore a pair of pants that were so ragged and short they looked as if they’d been eaten away by mice.”

  Now old Augus
tus Glick rose to the defence. “Now see here, Bryna, if you’re referring to the photographs that were taken in Halifax, I’ll have you know that those trousers belonged to my Uncle Gottfried, who served with distinction in the Horse Guard of the Austrian Army.”

  “I thought it was your grandfather that served with distinction in the Horse Guard,” said Bryna.

  Augustus stiffened his back like a soldier. “So he did. And my Uncle Gottfried. And several cousins as well. I come from a long line of fine loyal militiamen, men who were officers and gentlemen.”

  “But you still came to Canada in a pair of borrowed pants,” Bryna Glick shot back.

  Henry Glick took up arms now against Bryna. “I don’t see what Dad’s pants have to do with the Lubavitcher rabbi,” he said. “Or your dress, for that matter.”

  With Henry, Augustus and Sarah busy attacking on three flanks and Bryna busy with counterattacks, none of the Glicks noticed that Maximilian had discreetly slipped away from the dinner table, leaving his food largely untouched.

  In the peace and quiet of his bedroom, with the lights off, he stood at his window, looking out at the familiar landscape of Steelton.

  Was it possible, he wondered, that the small city had somehow grown smaller? How long had it been since he had last taken the time to stand there, in his private lookout atop Pine Hill, surveying the city that lay below? Weeks? Months? A year?

  Once again ships were moving in the St. Anne River, unconcerned about the odd little islands of ice that floated here and there, clinging to their sizes and shapes in the chilly spring night, but losing out little by little to the sun during the day. Except for the movement of the lake freighters, all of Steelton seemed to be plunged into stillness and darkness. There was life out there, to be sure. But in the “between” days and nights of a Steelton April, the local citizenry were not yet ready to unfold. Instead, people still cherished the habits of winter: a fireplace with a blaze, the evening paper, the inevitable glow of the television set in the living room.