The Shape of a Miracle : Part 2

Benjamin's Gift
By Michael Golding

(Page 2 of 5)

As childhood gave way to adolescence and adolescence to manhood, Jean Pierre Michel found his life taking on the shape and specificity of one of his gathered objects. After selling enough bromide and licorice root to gather independent means, Isaac Aaron and Alma Esther decided to move on from Lud: first to Spokane, Washington, then to Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and New York. Try as he might, Jean Pierre Michel could never get either of his parents to explain their crisscross journeying. Alma Esther suggested that they were exploring the parameters of a new diaspora; Isaac Aaron suggested that Jean Pierre Michel stop asking so many questions and learn to leave his suitcases partially packed. Because each city was so far from the one that preceded it, Jean Pierre Michel was forced to assemble a new collection in each new place he went, thus experiencing respective seasons with objects of the Pacific Northwest, the South during its reconstruction, the City of the Founding Fathers, the Seenaw and Moojalook Indian tribes, and, finally, whatever his heart desired. Manhattan was a dream city to Jean Pierre Michel, a place that contained the sort of diversity and energy for which he had spent his entire life developing an appetite. When Isaac Aaron and Alma Esther announced that they were pushing on for Europe, Jean Pierre Michel took a large chunk of his personal savings and bought them a steamer trunk. He was staying put.

For the next fifteen years, from the late 1870s to the mid-1890s, Jean Pierre Michel lived the exuberant life of the New York intellectual, holding down a wide variety of menial jobs while pursuing the erudition of his soul. It was a glory time in America: the Civil War was receding into the past, the second hundred years were just beginning. It was a time of hope, of the advent of iron and steel, of the promise of a new tomorrow. And Jean Pierre Michel was content just to sit at the table and be a part of the discussion. Until one day - June 16, 1895, to be exact - he decided that it was time to become rich. It was actually a decision: he woke at dawn, and by the time he had finished his morning coffee he had determined that he would become a millionaire before he reached his fortieth birthday. Perhaps it was his version of awakening in a dark wood, or perhaps it was the brisk, wagging finger of the approaching new century. Nevertheless he made the decision, devoted himself to it, and within a few short years had earned enough money to never have to work again.

How did he do it? How does anyone amass a sudden fortune: luck, a bit of chicanery, the strength to risk everything on an idea that glows in the moment, and, in Jean Pierre Michel's case, the efficacy of trout acacia resin for making spearmint chewing gum. But what mattered more than any of these factors - including luck, which figures in everything - was will. Once Jean Pierre Michel determined himself to become a millionaire, there was little left to do but count the money as it leapt into his pockets and the objects as they accumulated, from the Lacroix boxes to the Limoges porcelain to the beads to the birds to the bells to the pumice moon.

Jean Pierre Michel raised his bony knees, and the pumice moon bobbed gently on the surface of the water. When he looked at his new toy a thrill coursed through his body, but also a trace of irritation. Why hadn't he thought of it before? To possess the moon. What was the use of all his money if there were things still beyond his reach?

Jean Pierre Michel clasped the floating ball in his hand and lowered his legs. "Cassandra!" he cried. "The water's getting cold!"

For a moment there was silence. Then, somewhere in the mansion, a door slammed. Then silence again. Then the door to the bathroom swung open and a large, coffee-colored woman (a finger of cream, four teaspoons of sugar) wearing an elegant set of gold lam? lounging pajamas entered the room. She was carrying a stack of folded garments, and she looked at Jean Pierre Michel as if he were a highly impressionable, if somewhat demanding, child. "I told you not to stay in there so long," she said. "If that body o' yours gets any more wrinkled, I'll have to take you to the cleaners and get you pressed out."

Cassandra Nutt was Jean Pierre Michel's companion. She'd been in his service for twenty-five years, having come to him, in 1904, as a girl of sixteen and having worn, in the interim, every possible title from scullery maid to personal assistant. The only role she had consistently managed to avoid was that of mistress, although Jean Pierre Michel had tried everything he could think of to make her yield. When he'd come to her the first time, in the second-floor pantry, wearing nothing but a vast, salacious grin, the young girl had simply stared; she had seen a man's penis before, even an erect one, but she had never seen one so pale and so pink. It seemed comical to her, and strangely innocent, like the flexed, flailing arm of a petulant child. And though she'd gone on to have her share of white lovers, she could never quite take Jean Pierre Michel's penis seriously, no matter how many times, or in how many settings, he had presented it to her over the years.

In spite of her refusal to sleep with him, however - or perhaps because of it - Jean Pierre Michel lavished Cassandra Nutt with gifts. Jade-and-ivory brooches, pheasant feather hats, evening dresses trimmed with Spanish goat. Cassandra Nutt was fitted out in greater style than many of the women on the New York Social Register. More significant, she wore her finery both day and night, sporting chiffon tea dresses to do the morning shopping and hand-stitched furs to post Jean Pierre Michel's correspondence in the afternoon. She was so refined, so always elegant, that it was assumed by virtually everyone she encountered that she was Jean Pierre Michel's mistress. Cassandra Nutt, however, cared nothing for what people thought. She liked her clothes and she liked her work, despite her employer's frequently proffered penis. If she wished to wear a Paris gown to take out the trash, whose business was it but her own?

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.