The Shape of a Miracle : Part 5

Benjamin's Gift
by Michael Golding

(Page 5 of 5)

And though Benjamin did his best to see that his new gift did not provide the shock, on the morning of October 24, 1929, something else did: the New York Stock Exchange collapsed into panic, and their entire life's savings were lost. Compared with the losses of others, Edward and Lavinia's losses were meager. And perhaps if they had felt good about how good they felt when they made love, or their son's skin had not looked like the backdrop to one of Macy's Christmas windows, they would have been able to sustain the shock. But they didn't, and it did, so on October 25, while Benjamin was at school, they sealed the windows, turned on the gas, and promptly asphyxiated themselves.

"Benjamin!"

Benjamin looked up to find Mr. Petersen, a few strands of hair bravely combed up over his balding head, standing grim-faced in the doorway.

"Feet off the upholstery and look sharp!" he said. "Mr. Feinstein will see you in five minutes."

Mr. Petersen turned and reentered the office, and Benjamin lowered his feet so that they dangled, once more, above the ground.

Benjamin had no parents now. He also had no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles, no grandparents, and no cousins. Mr. Petersen was a social worker, the office he sat in belonged to the law firm of Wittman, Waxman, and Feinstein, and Benjamin, although he did not know what it meant, was about to be made a ward of the state.

Benjamin closed his eyes and tried to block out the dank, musty smell that filled the room. He wondered what it would smell like in the place they were going to take him, the place they had told him he was going to have to live in now that his mother and father were dead. When he opened his eyes, he looked at the painting across from him. There were twelve men in the small boat being led away from the wreckage; there were people on the boat that was sinking beneath the waves; there was a faint rainbow arcing between the two crafts. Benjamin did not know if it was possible, but he decided that he would try to enter the painting, to disappear from the darkness of the law office waiting room and enter an alternate world. He realized that he might miss his mark, that he might will himself onto the wrong ship, that he might get trapped on the sinking vessel and be pulled beneath the waves. But even that seemed better than the dull, gray fate into which Mr. Petersen was about to usher him.

He closed his eyes. He breathed in deeply. He concentrated. Then Benjamin disappeared.

The Hispano-Suiza

What is the shape of a miracle? Is it slender, compact, able to fit, like a silver bead, within the palm of your hand? So dense, so deeply concentrated, that it carries an entire universe inside its smooth, brittle shell? Or is it fluid, ephemeral, an invisible substance that pours out over the moment, releasing upon its subjects a whiff of the sublime, transforming them, man and child and thing, forever?

Jean Pierre Michel sat in the back of his Hispano-Suiza V8 convertible with his veils carefully arranged about him and his fingertips poised, on either side of his body, upon the taut red leather interior. The top was down, and Cassandra Nutt was at the wheel: massage therapist, tax accountant, pastry chef, chauffeur, it was but another of her roles in Jean Pierre Michel's service, though one she enjoyed a good bit more than the rest. The Hispano-Suiza was superb to handle. On weekends, when Jean Pierre Michel decided to drive out to Connecticut or Long Island, Cassandra Nutt imagined herself to be a bold aviatrix, piloting the red-and-white vehicle on a sleek course through the sky. She felt the heft and grace of the automobile as she felt them in herself: powerful when necessary, fleet and subtle when she desired. It was never a chore to be asked to go driving. All she needed was the road, the car, and a destination.

Now she was purring down Fifth Avenue on a late-October morning with a pseudo-Arabian sheikh in the backseat. The traffic was light; with the industrial average still plummeting like a suicidal finch, the streets of Manhattan were open wide to the solitary Halloween parade of Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky. They continued down Fifth Avenue until they came to Fourteenth Street, where they turned and headed west. When they reached the corner of Fourteenth and Seventh, they stopped to allow a woman pushing a dark blue baby carriage to cross over to the south side of the intersection. And that was when the miracle - solid or fluid - occurred. For when the Hispano-Suiza stopped to allow the pram to pass, it held a stunning black woman in her early forties wearing a sleek beaver coat and an aviator's cap and an elderly white man dressed in a set of flowing robes. But when it started again, turning left on Seventh Avenue into the heart of Greenwich Village, it suddenly held, in addition to these two, an exquisite young boy with a strawberry birthmark on his face.

When Benjamin saw the red leather interior of the car and the crisp white veils of the man beside him, he knew that he had not entered the painting. Yet he felt that his efforts had not entirely failed: he had definitely willed himself into something more interesting than what Mr. Petersen had had in mind. When Jean Pierre Michel became aware of the young boy beside him, he did not question where he had come from or how or when or why he had entered his car. He only knew that he had found his son - or, rather, that his son had found him. And when Cassandra Nutt glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the ravishing child with the extraordinary light in his eyes, she could only think that veils or no veils, Halloween parade or not, Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky had finally met his match.

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.