The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick Read online

  At which point Maximilian Glick returned home from school.

  “Surprise! Surprise!”

  “Happy birthday!”

  He looked at four beaming, loving faces; then his eyes fell on the object behind.

  And Maximilian Glick, just into his ninth year of life, wanting in his young heart nothing more than a model Boeing 747 — the one with battery-powered wing lights flashing on and off and engines whining as if ready for take-off — Maximilian Glick found himself led to a monstrous piano, a dark spooky form that reminded him of the sacrificial altar he’d seen recently in a horror movie.

  “Happy birthday, Maximilian,” said his father.

  Old Augustus Glick wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “Many happy returns, Maximilian.”

  Max’s mother kissed him first where the dark wavy hair on his head was parted, then again on the bridge of his neatly shaped nose, making him squint. “It’s not a violin,” she said, “but at least it’s got strings, Maxie.”

  And Bryna Glick, swollen with happiness because to her a house without music was a body without blood, bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Max,” she glowed, “it was my idea. Someday, when you’re a fine musician like your great-grandfather and great-grandmother in Russia, you’ll thank me for this.”

  On the birthday cake, carried proudly into the dining room by Max’s mother, it seemed to the boy that there were not eight but eighty candles all burning brightly. For suddenly Maximilian Glick felt old, much older than his years.

  Henry Glick had opened a bottle of wine for this festive occasion and for the first time Max was permitted a small glass all to himself. “A toast,” said the boy’s father. The adults at the table raised their glasses. “To Maximilian!”

  “To Maximilian!” said his grandfather.

  “To Maxie!” said his mother.

  There was a pause. At last Grandmother Glick, still aglow, raised her glass a bit higher than the others. “To Maxie,” she said.

  The boy managed a smile. With his elders gazing down on him, he brought his wine glass to his lips and took a sip, all the while keeping his eyes on the one person in the circle responsible for this betrayal. How could you do this to me? he asked silently. How could you?

  Maximilian Glick was looking directly at his grandmother, at Bryna Glick.

  While the others lingered over the dinner table, arguing as usual about what their son and grandson ought to be when he grew up, Max, having excused himself, went out onto the front porch and sat on a step. With his back against a thick wooden spindle that supported the handrail, he surveyed the world around him.

  The Glick house was situated on the crown of Pine Hill, the highest section of Steelton, a city in northern Ontario of fifty thousand or so inhabitants. It was an old red brick house, built some fifty years earlier by Augustus Glick, not long after he and Bryna had settled in what was then a town of a few thousand. Max’s father was born in that house.

  Eventually Augustus retired from the furniture business he had founded, leaving it in Henry’s capable hands. The elder Glicks moved into an apartment downtown, not large but modern and comfortable, with a balcony that overlooked the St. Anne, and Max’s parents took over the old house in time for the arrival of their infant son.

  A wide porch, painted white with gunmetal trim, ran the length of the house. From that vantage point one could take in the city below.

  The west end of town was dominated by the steel plant. By day, the plant sprawled like a gathering of dragons, belching smoke and fire. At night, the dragons breathed flames into the velvety sky, turning it red. In the clear still air of this night, the smoke from the plant rose straight up until it seemed to Max that soot would soon cover the moon.

  To the east there was the harbour, bustling with lake freighters. At this hour their shapes were indistinguishable, appearing to Max as long strings of lights, some heading upriver in the direction of Duluth or Thunder Bay, others bound for Detroit and Cleveland, places Max had heard about, places he yearned to see. Occasionally, the ships would signal to each other with short sharp blasts of their horns; otherwise they moved in total silence.

  At the centre of the panorama stood downtown Steelton, block after block of buildings of questionable architectural parentage arranged around the junction of King Street and Queen Street. In their prime, King and Queen were hot-blooded rivals for the town’s commerce. Recently, however, the pulse had begun to weaken in these avenues as first one, then another, shopping centre opened on the outskirts of town. With the exception of the odd hardy entrepreneur — like Max’s father — most of the downtown merchants had gone to asphalt pastures in the suburbs, leaving King and Queen to the city’s institutions.

  The most noble of these were the banks, small-scale replicas of Greek temples, erected in an earlier time when depositors equated security and integrity with fluted pillars. There were insurance and financial and real estate offices with plain no-nonsense facades that could have been designed only by a committee of carpenters. The two local movie houses, battered victims of television and suburban living, huddled for comfort beside each other on King Street, their once-proud marquees shorn because of a municipal ordinance against overhangs.

  By contrast, the YMCA and the Memorial Arena stood their ground directly across the street, as if to demonstrate that there were still muscle and energy left in the old ward. Thanks to the presence of Steelton General Hospital and a row of doctors’ offices and pharmacies, several blocks of Queen were as antiseptic as any public thoroughfare could be. But next door to Healing dwelt Justice, a germ-laden courthouse built in the latter days of Queen Victoria, which sat on its treeless lot looking very much like the old lady herself: stolid, crusty and humourless.

  At least once a year, usually around New Year’s Eve, in one or another of the town’s bars, chairs would still fly and glassware scatter like shrapnel over nothing more important than which street — King or Queen — was the main one. But one fact about their intersection was undisputed: it was clearly the most chaotic in all of Steelton. Traffic jams, non-existent anywhere else in town, occurred with regularity at King and Queen every weekday at five, as mill workers streaming east along King locked car horns with downtown office workers streaming west, all of them intending to proceed north on Queen to suburban homes in the hill sections. As one depended upon the law of gravity, one could rely on the traffic lights at that intersection to be out of order in winter (usually the result of iced-up power lines or a delinquent snowball aimed expertly at a red light). In summer the pavement would be torn up; Steelton’s city council was forever opening, closing and reopening gaping craters in that portion of the roadway as part of some grand vision of sewage disposal to which the mayor and his aldermen had, like crusaders, dedicated themselves.

  One of the last retailers on King Street, not far from its intersection with Queen, was A GICK & SON. The largest furniture store in these parts, A GICK & SON (est. 1924) catered to every taste. Among its patrons were elderly couples who decorated their modest bungalows with too many doilies, china cats and velvet cushions bearing scenes of palm trees and full moons set against black skies. Young couples, too, could find what they wanted at Glick’s — the up-to-the-minute furnishings, which, like their fantasies, were in one day and out the next. Some Saturdays, if there was nothing better to do, Maximilian would roam among the rows of chesterfields and rocking chairs and end tables pretending that they were planes lined up in a hangar and that he could choose any one and be off into the skies in minutes. Secretly, he wished Henry Glick were the captain of a jetliner and he its co-pilot.

  Except for the distant toot now and then from the steel plant, or the sound of freight cars being shunted to and fro in the rail yards running parallel to the river, all of Steelton lay silent now. From inside the house came murmurs that told Maximilian his future was probably still being debated over the dinner table, as if nothing else in Steelton, or all the world, mattered. And glancing over his shoulder
, he could see through the living room window the upper structure of the old Bechstein, a dark cloud over the horizon.

  And for the first time a thought occurred to Maximilian: one could be surrounded by love, security, comfort — but still feel lonely. What was more, the boy couldn’t recall a time when he’d felt more like a Maximilian, burdened with becoming an adult before his time.

  On the following day, at the start of Maximilian’s Hebrew lesson, Rabbi Kaminsky, his teacher — who’d been spiritual leader of Steelton’s Jewish community for more than twenty years and knew everything that went on in the lives of its people — extended his hand and smiled. “Well, Maxileh, let me shake the hand of the next Horowitz.”

  “Who’s Horowitz?”

  “What, you’ve never heard of Horowitz, probably the greatest pianist that ever lived? There are many outstanding piano players in this world, Maxileh, but there’s only one Horowitz!”

  The boy took Rabbi Kaminsky’s hand with no show of enthusiasm. As far as Maximilian Glick was concerned, unless this Horowitz had piloted an x-15 to Mars and back without stopping for lunch, the name was of very little interest.

  Rabbi Kaminsky, a perceptive man, nodded his head. “Don’t despair, Maximilian,” he said. “Sometimes God has a habit of dropping pianos on us. But other times … other times He parts the waters of the Red Sea!”

  All the way home from that Hebrew lesson, Maximilian thought about the parting of the Red Sea and that evening he once again sat alone on the front porch, his back pressed against the handrail spindles, looking up at the sky. A minute or two earlier the sun had disappeared, as if sucked down the enormous smokestacks of the steel plant, but there were just enough rays left to paint the trail of a jetliner passing high overhead, turning it to bright silver against the darkening blue. Max imagined for a moment that the sky was a sea and that the airliner — almost invisible now — was parting it, permitting the passengers within to pass to some promised land: a place where, in the shadows of tall skyscrapers, in the tide of human beings that swept along the sidewalks of a metropolis, a boy like him could do what a boy wanted most to do — make his own choices.

  “Someday … someday …” Maximilian Glick, his eyes on the vanishing remnant of jet trail, whispered to himself. “I must get out. I must get out. I will get out!”

  Two

  It fell to Bryna Glick as the family’s senior advisor on cultural matters to recommend a piano teacher for Maximilian. But the moment she announced her choice, the family’s junior advisor on such matters, her daughter-in-law, objected vehemently.

  “What!” said Sarah Glick. “Deliver an innocent eight-year-old into the hands of that … that disgusting man! Everyone in town knows Derek Blackthorn is never more than six inches from a bottle of gin, even in his sleep!”

  “What goes through the man’s kidneys is of no importance to me, Sarah dear.”

  “With all due respect, Mother, you must be blind to the man’s personal life. Totally blind.”

  “Really, Sarah dear? What else have I overlooked?”

  “I’ve never seen him without a cigarette dangling out of a corner of his mouth. And God only knows what else he smokes in that house of his.”

  “I’m not interested in his lungs either, Sarah dear.”

  “I doubt if he’s taken a bath since the day he landed in Steelton.”

  “He takes long walks in the rain instead,” said Bryna Glick. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Controversies of this sort were not unusual between Bryna and Sarah Glick. Whenever one chose to be prosecutor, the other automatically elected to act as defence counsel. According to their husbands, who found themselves regularly pressed into jury duty, the two women actually thrived on this adversary system; it was their continuing source of energy, their own peculiar fountain of youth.

  “With all due respect, Mother,” Sarah Glick went on, refusing to retreat, “there are at least a half-dozen better piano teachers in Steelton.”

  “Tidier, Sarah dear, not better.”

  “Tidiness and talent go hand in hand.”

  “Maybe when it comes to interior decorators.”

  “Pablo Picasso was no interior decorator and his studio was absolutely spotless.”

  “That was only when he was old,” said Bryna, “and turning out doodles nobody could understand.”

  “Doodles! Why, Pablo Picasso died a multi-millionaire!” “Maybe so, Sarah dear, but he never got a cent of my money.”

  Sarah Glick covered her eyes with her hands. “My God,” was all she could manage, in a small voice.

  “Now listen, Sarah,” Bryna Glick closed in. “Like it or not, Derek Blackthorn happens to be the best piano teacher in northern Ontario. One of his pupils won a scholarship last year to the Toronto Conservatory, Amy Czerczewski — her father’s a steelworker at the plant — and the talk is that the girl’s on her way to the top … New York! It’s a fact, too, that Derek Blackthorn’s uncle was Sir Basil Blackthorn, the man who conducted the Philharmonic in London, England, back in the Forties.”

  “I don’t care if his uncle was Ludwig van Beethoven,” said Maximilian’s mother, “he’s not a fit person to have around a young impressionable boy like Maxie.”

  It was common knowledge in Steelton (where very little was ever secret from anybody) that Derek Blackthorn’s house down by the St. Anne River, near the harbour, was one house that would never be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. For one thing, Blackthorn and his wife, in addition to being prodigious smokers and drinkers, were as uninterested in good housekeeping as one could be without having one’s dwelling condemned by civic officials. And neither of them really cared what people thought. Visitors to their house reported that it was a two-storey ashtray. Like the late Uncle Max from Chicago, the Blackthorns reeked of tobacco smoke and their fingers were stained yellow from years of accumulating nicotine.

  Shizuko Blackthorn (often called “Madama Butterfly” behind her back by some of the more cultured locals) was from somewhere in the Orient. Most people thought the Philippines or Japan, though she preferred to say San Francisco because apparently there was some question about whether or not she had entered Canada legally. She was a potter; she turned out bowls and vases of all sizes and shapes, and teapots with wicker handles, which she sold through a local craft shop. Marvelling at the delicate beauty of her work, people wondered at the Blackthorn residence, which looked as though a tornado had struck the place once a day, every day, since the day ten years ago when the tall, angular Englishman and his short, wiry wife had moved in.

  Questions were raised in well-kept living rooms from one end of town to the other as to whether or not the strange pair were really married. (Max, who heard the questions, never got to hear the answers; every time the topic came up in his presence, his parents and their friends suddenly began to converse in the eternal language of secrecy — Yiddish — a language young Max had not yet learned to speak or understand.)

  For all these reasons, Sarah Glick once again said flatly that she didn’t want any son of hers exposed to the likes of Derek Blackthorn, good teacher or not. But Bryna Glick stood firm. “We are hiring Mr. Blackthorn to be Max’s piano teacher, not his spiritual guide,” she said.

  Maximilian — a third member of the all-male jury (but without voting rights) — heard this last statement with some relief, for in Rabbi Kaminsky the boy had a friend, a man he considered his soulmate.

  With fewer than twenty-five Jewish families in Steelton, there were only a handful of children who required instruction in the Hebrew faith and language. This they received every afternoon at cheder, a special class held after regular school hours in the tiny brick-and-stucco synagogue in the old section of Steelton near city hall. One would think that the children, having put behind them a normal day of schooling, would resent an hour of cheder before they went home to their suppers. But not so.

  Rabbi Kaminsky was a good-natured man, about the same age as Augustus Glick, outwardly a bit f
ormal but with a soul as warm as a bowl of porridge. When he told stories from the Old Testament, it was as if he’d been alive in Biblical times and had personally witnessed all the miracles and catastrophes of Jewish history, so passionate and colourful was his delivery. He was clean-shaven except for a neat moustache that peeked out from under his nose. His suits were always pressed and spotless, his dark grey homburg (which he wore at all times except, presumably, to bed) always well-brushed. Everything about him — his measured walk, the way he sat (making certain to flick the knees of his trousers to preserve the crease and prevent bagging), the way he brought a teacup to his lips

  — was dignified, in the manner of an ambassador at court. He had a powerful baritone voice. “When he chants, God listens!” his congregants said.

  To Maximilian Glick, it sounded as though Derek Blackthorn and Rabbi Kaminsky were born and raised on different planets. From what he’d heard thus far in the debate between his mother and grandmother, he was prepared to dislike this fellow Blackthorn immediately, even though he’d never laid eyes on the man. Anyway, thought Max, who would want to trust his grandmother’s judgment? Was she not the one who’d gotten him into all this? Life could have been so simple. A model Boeing 747 — that’s all the boy had really wanted. Was that too much to ask of four adults, one of whom — his father — ran the largest furniture store in the whole of northern Ontario?

  In the end, Bryna Glick won out. Perhaps it was the good fortune of the Czerczewski girl that decided it, but more likely it was that Max’s mother liked two things in her house: peace and order.

  Order she achieved by seeing to it that every corner of the fine old house shone. Henry Glick liked to say that the reason he fell in love with Sarah Nashman at college was that she was the only girl he’d met who looked forward to doing floors and windows. There wasn’t a wax, a polish, a compound or a soap with which even the young Sarah hadn’t been on intimate terms.