The Shape of a Miracle : Part 1

Benjamin's Gift
by Michael Golding

With the publication of his first novel, Simple Prayers, Michael Golding was hailed as one of the most captivating new voices of his generation. Now he triumphs again with the enchanted tale of an eccentric connoisseur of beauty whose life is transformed when he meets a most unusual boy. Through wild adventures and wondrous discoveries, their relationship will lead them to a world of mind and heart, fear and grace, startling reality and transcendent magic.

His European-North Dakota-Jewish origins were humble, but New York tycoon Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky eventually towered over a gilded era. To money itself he was indifferent. All that mattered was that he was able to surround himself with things of beauty, not the least of which was his exotic companion Cassandra Nutt, whose thirst for life was exceeded only by Jean Pierre's own fabulous hunger for cars, clocks, cloaks, pianos, horses, houses, swimming pools, airplanes, and lovers.

Then, at the age of seventy-one, Jean Pierre Michel finally acquires the one possession that has always eluded him: a son. Benjamin is an astonishingly beautiful orphan of the Depression, marred by only a single, striking imperfection: a strawberry birthmark that spreads, like the Russian steppes, across his right cheek and throat. Generous and selfish, prodigy and fool, he will grow to be the betrayed son, the spurned lover, the escaped Jew. And he will be blessed by a disturbing yet wondrous gift.

From New York to Amsterdam, from the Jazz Age to the Age of the Computer, Benjamin's Gift is a richly comic, deeply moving tour de force filled with vivid incident and incandescent characters. It is, in short, the story of our century.

Chapter 1

October 31, 1929, Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky sat in his Carrara marble bathtub in his twenty-seven-room Fifth Avenue mansion and stared at the putty-colored, porous sphere that floated in the violet water. Approximately the size of a small grapefruit, it was carved to resemble the elusive fellow who peered down from the night sky over Manhattan. The pumice moon was not the only object to adorn Jean Pierre Michel's bath; on the broad ledge that surrounded the tub sat a red-and-gold Japanese eggshell-lacquer dragon, a hexagonal fired-clay bowl inscribed in Sanskrit, and a miniature Egyptian chrysoprase-and-moonstone funerary urn. The pumice moon, however, was the only thing that interested Jean Pierre Michel at the moment.

It had been given to him the night before by one of the chief attractions of the Lieberman Follies, one Clarisse Mimsette O'Connor. She'd presented it to him in bed after having discovered, the night before that, that after having made love to her four times, at the age of seventy-one, Jean Pierre Michel was still erect. Clarisse Mimsette O'Connor had been too exhausted for a fifth round (she had, after all, performed three solo numbers in that evening's Follies, including an elaborate and somewhat embarrassing routine with an ostrich), but she'd spent the following afternoon, between the matinee and evening performances, in search of an appropriate gift to express her gratitude. When she'd found the pumice moon she was delighted: as far as she could tell, the only thing that Jean Pierre Michel did not possess was the moon.

Jean Pierre Michel wanted everything. Cars, clocks, cloaks, pianos, horses, houses, racing yachts, swimming pools, aeroplanes. To money itself he was indifferent; he spent no Scrooge-like hours stacking up coins, and he gave away prodigious amounts to hospitals and universities and arts foundations. All that mattered was that he had enough left over to buy beautiful things. Beauty was like a drug to Jean Pierre Michel; it filled him with such intense pleasure, he became near catatonic. An Aschermann lamp or a Matisse nude simply froze him in place, and a woman - well, just thinking about Clarisse Mimsette O'Connor set his septuagenarian body on fire.

Jean Pierre Michel slid down beneath the water and laid his head back into the smooth cavity that had been carved, at the apex of the tub, to fit the exact dimensions of his cranium. As he glanced down at his body, it looked distorted beneath the water, yet even from that skewed perspective it held no surprises for him. When dressed in a waistcoat and a silk cravat, Jean Pierre Michel could easily pass for a man in his late fifties. Without his clothes, however, he was every bit his age, and he could almost chart the decay on a daily basis. It was strange to be old, like suddenly finding yourself driving a car that was desperately in need of a paint job. Only the infallibility of his sexual drive kept him from junking the entire thing; with an engine so insistent, he could accept the brutal decline of the outer shell.

Having settled beneath the water, Jean Pierre Michel looked about the room. It was lavish by any standards, with eighteen-karat-gold fixtures and carved onyx sinks and rose quartz sconces upon the walls. No matter how magnificent his surroundings, however, he could never forget that he had not always lived in such splendor. Jean Pierre Michel had been born in 1858 in the small town of Lud, North Dakota. As far as anyone could tell, his mother and father were the only Jews ever to have lived in Lud, and how they had gotten there was something of a mystery. Yes, Jews wander; in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, they rarely wandered to places where pig farming was the chief means of earning a living. Isaac Aaron and Alma Esther Rosenberg Chernovsky had nevertheless managed it and once there had set up a small general store, stocked with the basic necessities of the North Dakota life (plus a few oddities, like Isaac Aaron's mother's cheese piroshkis), and had proceeded to live quite nicely. Alma Esther was a delicate girl, with frail, slender limbs and that pale, almost translucent skin that reveals the fine tracery of the veinwork beneath. It was from her that Jean Pierre Michel got his air of nobility, as well as his somewhat unorthodox name. After a lifetime of Rosenberg, Chernovsky was little relief to Alma Esther.

She therefore chose to give her firstborn son (her only son, for birth, withher tiny body, was a trauma she would never allow herself to repeat) a set of fluid French pr?noms to balance it out. Isaac Aaron thought that it was ridiculous to give French names to a Russian-German-North Dakotian Jew, but he soon discovered that they suited his son: there was something strangely refined about Jean Pierre Michel, though it was coupled with a vigor that prevented him from seeming effete. Jean Pierre Michel's affection for beautiful things was apparent from the start: before he could even walk he began rearranging the decorative objects in his mother's salon. When he was old enough to do chores, he hired himself out to the neighboring farms in return for whatever caught his eye: a pair of old stirrups, a milking pail, a piece of bubbled glass. He would carry these things back to his room and study them for hours - holding them gently up to the light, running his fingers across their rough or smooth surfaces. There was a secret inside the beauty of these treasures; there was a reason that they gave him the feeling they did, though he did not know what it was.

Copyright © 1999 by Michael Golding

About the Author

Born and raised in Philadelphia and Miami, educated at Duke and Oxford, Michael Golding moved to New York in the eighties to pursue a career in the theatre. After several years of work Off-Broadway (including a season with the Lion Theatre Company on Theatre Row and playing Romeo in the Joseph Papp/Riverside Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet), he decided to move to Paris to begin writing. After a year in Paris, he travelled on to Venice, where both his son Joshua and his first novel, Simple Prayers, were born.