Peace she achieved by giving in whenever an issue threatened a serious rip in the family fabric. Argue she would, and hotly too, when she thought she was right, and even when she suspected she might be wrong. But if the contest came to a stalemate, Sarah Glick’s white flag went up slowly over her trench. Anyway, she told herself, a good soldier knew that the real objective of the day was to survive until tomorrow. The trick was to repair the face of defeat with the cosmetics of honourable withdrawal. Besides, there would be other sunrises over other battlefields; she knew that too.
So that is what Sarah Glick finally did. “All right, Mother, I give up. You win,” she said to Bryna Glick, throwing up her hands in a gesture of surrender.
Bryna and Sarah bestowed gracious smiles on each other. And two of the jurors grinned with satisfaction. Only the third — the one without a vote — remained sober, sober as the face of judge Wilhelm von Finkenstein.
Three
It was true, all true, Maximilian Glick told himself as he took in the Blackthorn household that first Saturday morning. The place was a two-storey ashtray. Unlike his own house, this and its grab-bag contents offered evidence of neglect — no matter where one’s eyes fell — not ordinary neglect but a condition of carelessness achieved only through diligent effort. Nothing seemed to be in place or to match anything. The pictures on the walls weren’t level with the floors, which weren’t level with the ceilings. Two cats roamed freely over furniture, books, dishes, so freely one would have thought they held the mortgage on the premises. (One, a pitch-black cat, was called “Spot”; the other, a wary female that never ventured outdoors, was “Rover.”) It was as if the Blackthorns had hired a staff to come in regularly and unclean the house.
Two things in the Blackthorn living room did seem to have escaped ramshackledom: a grand piano in the bay window and a framed photograph of Derek Blackthorn perched atop a tall, narrow bookcase where Spot and Rover couldn’t possibly knock it over. The piano was old; Maximilian reckoned it was at least as old as his Bechstein at home. But its mahogany surface shone like a mirror and the ivory of its keys was creamy to the eye and even creamier to the touch.
The photograph of Blackthorn, set in a handsome tooled-leather frame, showed him wearing the uniform of a pilot, posing at the nose of an aircraft (which greatly surprised the boy).
“Yes, Maximilian, that is me, believe it or not,” said Blackthorn matter-of-factly, sensing his new pupil’s astonishment.
“You were in the air force?”
“Yes, the Royal Air Force. Second World War.”
“What kind of plane is that?”
“Spitfire. Best fighter ever built. None better. Germans wished they’d had ’em.”
“Did you shoot down any enemy planes?”
“Well, let’s just say I got to fire a few rounds of ammunition now and then. Until July 23, 1944. That was the day I got shot down. Over Malta. Landed in the Mediterranean. Spent a few hours in the sea, thrashing about and making a complete fool of myself. Got awfully waterlogged. Thought I was finished.”
“And then you were rescued?”
“Yes, by an American destroyer. Pure unadulterated luck. Made up my mind after that experience to avoid two things in life: war and water.” Seating himself at the piano, Blackthorn plunged his fingers into the keyboard, producing an ear- splitting G-major chord, as if punctuating his war record once and for all. “And now, enough about my glorious past. Let’s get down to your questionable future, Mr. Glick.” He motioned the boy to be seated beside him at the grand piano. “Do you know how to find middle C, Maximilian?”
“Yes.” The boy pointed instantly to the key.
Blackthorn looked displeased. “How about G sharp?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Maximilian confessed.
“Splendid, Max, splendid.” His face brightened immediately. “Then I am superior to you, after all. For a moment I was afraid I had another precocious young snot on my hands.” Blackthorn placed a hand on Maximilian’s shoulder. “Mr. Glick, you and I are going to make music together. No doubt about it. Can you keep a secret from your chums?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Blackthorn laid an index finger — a long, bony index finger with a distinct yellowish tinge along its length — on one of the keys. “That is G sharp. Now you play the note.”
Oh well, Maximilian told himself, if one had to take piano lessons, it was far better to take them from a man who was once shot down over the Mediterranean.
Maximilian Glick set his own index finger, so short, so pale, so innocent looking by comparison, upon the same key and pressed down.
The first note. Of the first lesson.
By the time Maximilian Glick was eleven it was clear he had the makings of a real musician. His fingers found their way up and down the Bechstein’s keyboard with remarkable confidence and accuracy. He could sight-read a new piece of music almost as quickly as he could the headlines in the Steelton Daily Star. Because of the boy’s mathematical bent, Derek Blackthorn started him on harmony, theory and counterpoint sooner than most and promised Grandmother Glick that before long her grandson would be ready for an elementary course in composition.
It was just as well that young Maximilian Glick had the makings of a real musician, because there was one thing he did not have: the makings of a real athlete.
In the school gymnasium, all of the dexterity, the quickness, the concentration he displayed at the piano, or over a problem in arithmetic or science, abandoned him, as if an electric current had been switched off. Nobody was quite certain why. There was nothing lacking in his physique: statistically he was the right height for his age, the right weight. Well, perhaps a pound or two under (he detested the sight of food in any form before noon).
Totally baffled, his physical education instructor, Mr. Tipton-Thomas, stood, hands on hips, shaking his head, looking the boy up and down. “Glick,” he said, “I don’t know what to think about you. You’ve got all the right parts: two arms, two legs, two eyes and only one head, thank God! But put ’em all together and they take off in seven directions at once.”
The other kids in the gym class laughed and Sandy Siltaanen, a popular blond blue-eyed kid and the best athlete in school, laughed hardest. “It’s okay, Glick,” said Sandy, catching his breath after another masterful jump, laying a big-brotherly arm around Max’s drooping shoulders, “you got nothing to worry about. Someday you’ll take over your dad’s furniture business and guys like me’ll end up driving your delivery trucks.”
“Yeah? Who says so?” Selling china figurines to old ladies and kidney-shaped coffee tables to newlyweds was not Maximilian Glick’s idea of a future.
Sandy Siltaanen, as cheerful about his dismal failures in the classroom as he was about his natural skill on the track or in the pool, smiled good-naturedly. “That’s what my mom says every time I come home with another C minus in history and a D in English.”
Max wasn’t sure what he detested most. Was it that he was the gymnasium joke, the last choice whenever teams were chosen? Or that all his peers seemed to assume he would simply inherit the family furniture business someday and that would be that?
I have to become a Somebody, the boy lectured himself, a real Somebody.
Look at Sandy, now there was a real Somebody. Sandy Siltaanen, who had walked, run, skipped, hopped, jumped and dashed away with just about every trophy at the Northern Ontario Junior Olympics last fall. Siltaanen stepping onto the winner’s podium on the final night of the games, his head a shining sheaf of wheat under the brilliant gym lights, those northern-blue eyes beaming out among the stalks, the shy- proud grin of victory, the applause, the shouts of praise and encouragement. Mr. Tipton-Thomas telling the Steelton Daily Star’s sports editor, “Rome, Tokyo, Stockholm. The sky’s the limit for a kid like that!”
There was a time when Maximilian longed to be known as the daring young Glick on the flying trapeze. Oh yes! To realize this dream, he compromised. With eyes closed, scarcely dar
ing to breathe, he drank milk at breakfast, crunched his way through a terrible succession of cold cereals, even let the odd boiled egg slither down his throat. He did push-ups in the privacy of his room. At school he consciously adopted Sandy’s stance — hands loosely on hips, head bent forward as if ready for flight. All to no avail.
His athletic ambition soon came to an abrupt end once and for all time on Parents’ Night at school.
There it stood, the gym horse, raised to a height just challenging enough for an eleven-year-old. Any kid with enough coordination to step over a puddle could do it. A run of six or seven paces, then hit the springboard at the right spot, somersault across the horse and onto the mat. One by one, led of course by the incomparable Siltaanen, the boys hurdled the horse, each successful somersaulter earning a burst of parental applause.
And then came Glick.
Maybe his run was too short. Maybe the spring in the springboard suddenly turned to molasses. Maybe the seemingly inert gym horse suddenly came alive and bucked like a bronco. All Max knew was that for a precarious moment he was sprawled on his stomach across the horse. His luck, like his arms and legs, seemed to have checked out without leaving a forwarding address. Over the side he tumbled, heavily, landing flat on his back like a dying cowboy.
Mr. Tipton-Thomas ran from the sidelines and helped him to his feet. “Sorry folks,” the gym teacher called to the audience, “somebody musta shot this fella’s horse from under him.”
Half groggy, Maximilian glanced at the crowd in the stands. They were all laughing. He looked over at Henry and Sarah Glick. They too were laughing. His own father and mother … laughing.
“Well, why not?” said Henry Glick later. “After all, it wasn’t the end of the world. Anyway, Maxie, we weren’t laughing at you, we were laughing with you.”
“How could you be if I wasn’t laughing?”
“Let’s not get carried away with technicalities, Max,” said Henry Glick, dismissing his son’s embarrassment as if it were over nothing more earth-shattering than a ketchup stain on a new shirt. “Anyway, Max, athletics are like toys. They soon stop being important. At least, that’s what I learned at your age.”
Sarah Glick, too, refused to view the incident as anything more than a trivial mishap. “Maxie,” she said, “you mustn’t always take life so seriously.”
“Why not?” Maximilian demanded. “You do. You’re always worrying about what I’m going to be when I’m older.”
“That’s different, Maxie.”
“How’s it different?”
“We’re your parents. That’s what mothers and fathers are for: to worry. Now go soak those bones of yours in a nice hot bath.”
A few days later, Maximilian sat at his desk in the small cheder, the Hebrew school, listening to Rabbi Kaminsky drum the history of Abraham and Abraham’s descendants into his pupils’ minds. “Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob, who begat Joseph …” At the conclusion of all these begats, the rabbi asked, “Now, who can tell me what those great figures had in common?”
Maximilian’s hand went up first. “What they had in common,” said Maximilian Glick, “was that Abraham worried about Isaac, who worried about Jacob, who worried about Joseph.” The boy paused. “I don’t remember who Joseph worried about.”
After class, Rabbi Kaminsky took Maximilian aside. “I’ve heard some strange answers to that question over the years, but yours, Max, yours …”
The boy related the incident at the gymnasium on Parents’ Night (which the rabbi, naturally, had already heard about) and his encounter with his parents after that calamity.
“They say I take life too seriously.”
“That’s a very serious accusation, Max. Are you guilty or not guilty?”
“I don’t know.” Max thought for a moment. “Guilty, I guess.”
The rabbi now removed his gold-rimmed spectacles and set them down carefully on his desk. Slowly, gently, using thumb and forefinger, he rubbed his eyelids, his way always of summoning up some memory from his distant past. “How times change!” he said. “When I was your age, in our village in Poland, taking life too seriously was the only way we were allowed to take it. To study around the clock, to be pious, modest, respectful, these things were expected of us, even in our sleep. Fun? Fun was strictly rationed, like bread in a time of famine, like water in the desert. I remember once, Max, my worldly curiosity got the better of me and I smuggled a newspaper from Warsaw into cheder. An ordinary harmless Jewish newspaper, Max! My teacher caught me reading it and for that unpardonable frivolity I had to sit on a stool in the corner like a dunce for the rest of that week. ‘The trouble with you, Kaminsky, is that you don’t take life seriously!’ I can still hear that old dragon scolding me. I can still see him waving his long pointer under my nose.”
“How did you get out?” Maximilian asked.
“When I was sixteen my parents had to ship me off to Warsaw to further my Hebrew education. It was one of the happiest days of my life, that first day in Warsaw.” The rabbi’s eyes grew large and he extended his arms wide, as if holding a ballooning world in the palms of his hands. “There was only one happier: the day I landed in Canada.”
The rabbi put his spectacles back on and for a moment studied his pupil. “Tell me, Maximilian, why do you take life so seriously?”
“It’s not my fault. It’s theirs.”
“Theirs?”
“My dad, my mom, my grandparents.”
Rabbi Kaminsky’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? How so? To me they always seem so high-spirited, like they all take from the same bowl of cherries.”
“That’s because you don’t live with them,” said Maximilian. “Sometimes I think they stay up all night thinking about nothing except how I’ll get along when I’m thirty. Will I eat a decent breakfast every morning? Will I remember to tuck the shower curtain into the tub before I turn on the water?”
Rabbi Kaminsky shook his head knowingly. “Times change. But some things remain the same.”
“Did your parents drive you crazy?”
The rabbi, looking over his shoulder as if on the watch for spies, answered in a low voice. “The walls have ears, so I will tell you this quietly. All parents drive their children insane. Especially Jewish parents.” He wagged a warning finger at Max. “Bear in mind,” he said with mock severity, “if you ever quote me publicly, I will deny I ever made such a statement!”
“But why are Jewish parents worse?” asked Maximilian. “It’s not a matter of worse. It’s a matter of different. Jewish parents don’t really beget children, they build children. It’s in our blood. It goes back through all the centuries when we had nothing else to build. You see, Max, you’re not just a person, you’re a piece of construction, a building. And your parents are the building superintendents. If they keep checking the foundation, it’s because — come rain, come wind, come earthquake — if you don’t stand up, they don’t stand up. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
Maximilian shook his head. He understood, but very little contentment flowed from this understanding. “I don’t want to be a building,” he said.
“Then what do you want?”
“To be a Somebody. So I can get out of Steelton, like Sandy Siltaanen.”
“You mean the Finnish kid that looks and moves like a Greek god?”
“Yes,” said Max, surprised that the rabbi would know about the young athlete.
“May my sainted teacher forgive me, I read everything in the paper,” explained the rabbi. “Even the HELP WANTED ads.”
Maximilian went on, “Our gym instructor says someday Sandy will be good enough to go to Rome and Tokyo and Stockholm, places like that.”
“But you, Max,” the rabbi smiled sympathetically, “you are not exactly a Greek god on your feet, are you?”
Max nodded sadly in agreement.
“Then you must find another way to be a Somebody, mustn’t you?”
“But how?” There was a note of desperation in Max’s qu
estion.
“The answer,” said Rabbi Kaminsky, gazing intently at his pupil, “is right at your own fingertips. You want to get to Rome? To Tokyo? To Stockholm? Go home, Maximilian. Go home and practise!”
The boy took up his books and started out. At the door, he turned. “Mind if I ask you something, Rabbi?”
“The timid cannot learn; the impatient cannot teach. Ask.”
“Why do you read the HELP WANTED ads? Are you looking for another job?”
The rabbi laughed. “Maximilian, rabbis are not like Jerusalem. A rabbi can be here today” — he snapped his fingers — “and gone tomorrow.”
“You mean,” said Max, finding this incredible, “a rabbi can actually get fired?”
“Why not?”
“But you’ve been here all your life!”
“Max, there you go taking life too seriously again. Don’t concern yourself, my friend. I plan to be here for the rest of my days, with a little luck. But I promise you, if there’s a change in my plans, you’ll be the first to know.” The rabbi glanced at his gold pocket watch. “Go home and practise,” he commanded. “You’ve already wasted fifteen minutes. At this rate you’ll never even make it to Warsaw.”
Without another word, the boy was out the door.
At that moment Maximilian knew two things for certain
— that he wanted Rabbi Kaminsky to be around forever and that he had not wasted fifteen minutes.
That Maximilian Glick hadn’t wasted so much as a second of precious time was proven during his next piano lesson, when Derek Blackthorn suggested that Max should enter the annual Steelton Music Festival. “I think you’re ready to compete at the Grade Eight piano level,” said Mr. Blackthorn, chewing a mint — one of the many Max always made certain to bring with him, a defence against the tobacco-and- alcohol cloud that enveloped the grand piano and all who came within range.
The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick Page 3