Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  During King Marke’s lamentation, Jameson O’Maurigan went over to Bill’s Bar to quench his special fearful thirst. He met a Reuters correspondent he knew there and lost his way (back to the Czgowchwz event). The two drinking companions left Bill’s drunk, moments before the second-act intermission at the opera house, so that when Lavinia and Jonathan came in looking for Jameson, the barman could only give them another of the poet’s recurrent fugue messages—worrying, hide-and-seek directions invariably hinting at doom in cryptic, allusive complaint.

  During this same interval, there was complaint elsewhere —in huddled groups indoors and out, in short but agitated cloakroom queues, and from the backs of certain Mercedes-Benz limousines driving away from the scene. Many of the most guttural, entrenched Wagnerites were seeing fit to leave the performance in huffs, denouncing everything. As Paranoy would recall in the article “Czgowchwz at Stake”: “She gave them dramatic soprano vocalism in extremis: passion, anguish, obsession, terror. They, the recusant old guard, bleated back nursery demands. They wanted Isolde their way—mellifluous, mit Schlag.” (It must be recorded that Leda Freitag seemed never to stop applauding. One might have thought that enough.)

  Backstage, Mawrdew Czgowchwz went to Laverne Zuckerman’s dressing room to let her know just how well she had managed the Watch. The young mezzo was herself nearly beside herself with rapt admiration for the way the Liebesnacht had sounded in her ears upstage. There was still something dreamlike to Laverne Zuckerman about the past months she had spent being, as Mawrdew Czgowchwz kept insisting, “a sister, a real sidekick.” At the same time, the nervous atmosphere—the supercharged, turbulent quality of this night’s performance—frightened her. She remembered the way certain favorite recurring dreams can suddenly careen offtrack some nights in troubled sleep, approaching unfamiliar fantasies in regions darker than the darkest off-stage wings. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was telling her what she felt coming back from the audience that night. “A lot of them hate what we’re doing; they’ll just have to learn.” The two singers then slipped into the darkened wings together, taking the positions they would hold throughout Act III, until their entrance. Laverne Zuckerman imagined what that would occasion...

  Trixie Gilhooley shouted up at the Countess Madge from her seat in Row G of the Orchestra: “Where the hell’s everybody going? She’s a STAR!” The Countess looked straight ahead.

  In every tier, insulting reactions mouthed by desiccated sensibilities clashed with ardent commitment in scattered sorties. The main theater of action was the front lobby leading out onto Broadway. There the Juilliard and Riverdale contingents, fired with loyalty and visionary zeal, had set up a gamut of the best and fiercest Czgowchwz Jacobins in town, whose drill-formation harangues drove the Old Guard into the outer darkness. A few outraged haughty flinthearts dared round on the militants, threatening to summon the police. “Which ones, you beasts, the S.S.?” they taunted back.

  Ralph checked out the whole rough scene. He saw Paranoy turn a shade he reckoned close to Metrocolor scarlet trying desperately (it seemed) to get up enough spit to let one fierce old Hunnish dowager have it right between the eyes, while other “gem-leashed reptiles” slithered down the grand staircase mumbling abuses impotently in the teeth of the Paranoy scorn. He heard Tangent Percase snap, “Why, you dim bitch!” at some epicene confection in the Grand Tier foyer. In the Balcony alcove, Ralph himself turned to one dissenting frump ranting on to many others at the refreshment stand. “Get out of this opera house!” he demanded. As it happened, they all did.

  Shock and no slight terror shot through the box adjacent to the one Grace Jackson-Haight and her party had taken that evening. Left alone at the intermissions, Sister Rose Rotten Rodney Bergamot, tippling from a pint flask in the privacy of the rear salon behind the box’s drapes, had overheard a particularly mucky sample of the Old Guard anti-Czgowchwz cant rattling on sforzato next door and, as a result of the prickings of righteous ire (and a particularly prickly starched wimple), forgot herself. Grace and her cortege returned to find a tacky incident developing—one that threatened to spread dangerously along the string of boxes. Complaints were already on their way to the front-of-the-house manager (that hated buffoon the standees had dubbed “Scarpia”) concerning what seemed to be an improbable version of that cheap old joke: the foul-mouthed drunken nun running amok. Grace was just able in the event to drag Sister Rose Mouth out of the action and down the side stairs to the packed front area of the house-right Orchestra standing room (where Rotten Rodney, less wimple, managed to disappear in among the receptive mob), and to return herself barely in time to bat innocent eyes and coo, “I beg your pardon; in here?” to the bleary lackeys representing the complaint, before the houselights went down for the final act.

  Achille Plonque lay finishing his dictation. It had become his habit in the months since he had first sung leading tenor roles in four languages opposite Mawrdew Czgowchwz to record his continual amazements into a small portable Dictaphone. The feverish heldentenor had thrown himself down for a few hasty minutes on the dressing-room couch, in costume for Act III, to deliver his recollection of the Liebesnacht. In Ralph’s English version: “These are again the immediate dazzled reactions of one who by the most fortunate exigency in the working out of intention into realized occurrence [Ralph was wrestling here with a quantity of German chain words, since it was Plonque’s habit to record his thoughts in the language of the performance involved] has been partner and as it were catalyst perhaps to the creation of dramatic-musical effects nearly as disturbing as they are perfect. We are told somewhere that such is always the necessary way of revelation, is that not so? [Nicht wahr?] Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s Isolde...”

  Tangent Percase had returned to his perch in the Paranoy box to scribble a few heartfelt, deathless appreciations of his own onto vellum (in a tastefully calf-bound pocket daybook), in a microscopic hand (in authentic mollusc-mauve ink). He commenced puzzling out some half thoughts (“To teach is merely to learn”) on what must now become the matter of his next public inquiry at the New School: “The Function of Ecstasy.”

  Never once that night, from the time the curtain rose on the first act until the middle of the Liebestod, did Pèlerin Deslieux either rise from his seat in the center of the front row of the Dress Circle or allow anyone to disturb him by passing either way in front of him as he sat there. A complete and utter repose possessed him (sitting there) so that he became, in the midst of so much eddying conflict, the keystone of endurance.

  Neither did the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier either leave her box or answer any questions. Nor did either of these so much as look back or forth to one another at the intermissions. There was no good reason to, and all good reason not to: each had a premonition...

  The third act began in a hush. The shepherd’s plaintive horn sounded high up on the slanting geometric precipice of Tristan’s castle’s watchtower, set at a dizzy angle against a restless cycloramic sea-and-sky projection representing the horizon off the coast of Brittany. The music keened on, a stark stretch. Dozens of subtly graduated light cues created weird, unsettling effects. In the wings, immobile behind a jagged, vaulted flat, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, still searching for that key to the Liebestod, slipped into meditation, into reverie, into the sea-sky, anxiety-ridden projection, into the horn’s melisma...

  Isolde on the high seas seeking Tristan. Mawrdew Czgowchwz away back, as if submerged, in a memory. High on the Irish Sea that last summer, in the company of the Countess Madge, Dame Sybil, G-G, Achille Plonque, Creplaczx, and Paranoy, sailing with the light crew of the Deirdre: a waspish Wexford captain, and two young boatswains, each of whom the diva recalled as a perfect example of the astonishing open beauty the Irish possess, undifferentiated by gender—the men and the women matching feature to feature, seemingly all compact of variant qualities in the single angelic order of androgyny.

  They had sailed a calm, lake-like sea, bound south-south-east for Cornwall. The air that day had the taste of mint. Th
ey stood together at the prow, drinking whiskey and talking dreaming. Suddenly, with no warning, “free, gratis, and fer nuthin’,” a squall came up to knock them about on the deck, drenching them, frightening Creplaczx, delighting the Countess Madge. And then it was past and gone, just in fair time for them to see the first outline of Tintagel appear out of the mists on Cornwall’s Atlantic coast.

  Tintagel’s ruins, splendid, murky, loomed above the party aboard the Deirdre. Mawrdew Czgowchwz declared she saw spectral figures weaving in the shadows, heard them whispering in the echo chambers deep in the huge phantom cave where they beached at high tide. Centuries of bygone life drifted together, present now in the ravaged towers, on the strand, up on the jutting rocks, and in the fields that had been the royal apartments. A fiercely attractive flash of melancholy had seized the diva on the voyage from Wexford. She felt it had to do with something other than the beauty of the Irish boys. At Tintagel some ayenbite gripped and stung.

  Achille Plonque had launched into Tristan’s narration. “Ich war, wo ich von je gewesen, wohin auf je ich geh’: im weiten Reich der Weltennacht.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz stood motionless, expressionless, and unhearing. She looked down from Tintagel’s abandoned cliffs. Yseult, the Irish princess, had sailed these waters as a captive. “What can it be,” Czgowchwz had pondered, vexed, “that draws me so to this creature?” On the promontory, floating back through time, she had stood in the open courtyard, her loosed hair flowing attractively: heraldic banners. She watched them all living there about her, singing, dancing, at dalliance in high-vaulted chambers, covered in the skins of animals. She had joined them as a captive, in her mind—where indeed it was all just happening...

  She heard no music in the theater. She heard nothing but voices, telling her in the preterite:

  Tristan, lover, wound, betrayal,

  history, passion, theater...

  Tintagel, vision, captive...

  Yseult, bound away, exile, remember whence...

  Ireland, the voyage, the squall, the lovely

  boatswains laughing as if mourning...

  shepherd mourning Tristan,

  captive as if Yseult...

  Tristan lay at Tintagel, waiting. She must go to him, forever damned. No, where there was sin, salvation followed. They were in truth the one act. Furiously willing that salvation, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, hearing, plunged, bounding onstage.

  Looking back later, no one remembered much. Achille Plonque’s reactions were, in this instance, never recorded, although he later recalled how he would come to wake up screaming for weeks afterward, remembering what he did.

  Laverne Zuckerman remembers that during the long scene in which Tristan lay lamenting, while the shepherd’s horn announced no sail in elegiac wail, Mawrdew Czgowchwz leaned weakly against the backcloth backstage looking, as the young mezzo told the Secret Seven and the press next day, “like someone being sentenced!!”

  The Countess Madge point-blank refuses to remember.

  In any case it happened. During the last moments of Tristan’s scene, at “Die mir die Wunde ewig schliesse,” Mawrdew Czgowchwz suddenly bolted from her waiting position backstage, jumping her entrance cue as if possessed. This hurtling precipitance left Laverne Zuckerman completely stunned, and drew a most inopportune, unwelcome gasp from Creplaczx on the podium. Achille Plonque sat up aghast. Murmuring spread up and out over the shocked audience. Those who might not have known the score were made aware of the frightening disruption in seconds, encountering the mournful display of a disoriented woman lurching quite obviously out of sorts about the center stage. The coldest terror he had ever known in fact or fantasy gripped Merovig Creplaczx’s heart. The distracted lady tottered, then dropped to her knees. She began to sing—a kind of Sprechstimme declamation—“Tristan! Geliebter!” Creplaczx dropped his baton; the orchestra droned off.

  Achille Plonque took the initiative. He exclaimed “Isolde!” in key, and sank to his supposed death. Mawrdew Czgowchwz flung herself on top of him. Creplaczx then took the cue, hissing “Liebestod!” at the distracted players in the pit. King Marke and his retainers stared from the wings in dismay. Mawrdew Czgowchwz began to sing the Liebestod.

  Francobolli avowed next day it was “simply the greatest piece of singing” he had ever heard. There was no disputation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz that night sang the most oracular Liebestod the world has ever heard.

  It was not sung in German. Francobolli first supposed it to be Czech—and wondered why—until he was carried away elsewhere with the rest by the “utterly incredible avalanche of regal tone this majestic goddess unleashed.” Next to nobody in the Metropolitan Opera House audience in these moments knew anything more, or could know more, than that a voice beyond voices (the oltrano) was singing a passage beyond passage.

  Ralph saw the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier begin to stand at the very beginning of the ecstatic finale. She stood supported for a second or two, and then fell back into her chair again, fainting away at once. Ralph, who had been at her same side at the Traviata, shook her gently. She revived, enough to murmur. Ralph listened very closely, his ears meanwhile so full of Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s pealing voice he feared paralysis. The Countess gasped and whispered, “My life, she’s singing in the Irish!” Then she fell down on the floor.

  It was true. Mawrdew Czgowchwz that night sang the Liebestod for once and for all time in that same tongue the Irish once sang in of love and death in the Western World.

  It was over; it began. The noise they heard backstage sounded like only one thing: Revolution in the Streets. The curtain had gone up and down three times before what had happened to Mawrdew Czgowchwz became apparent. Each time the same love-death tableau revealed itself, the roar increased in mounting, detonating frenzies, until Achille Plonque and Laverne Zuckerman realized together that the curtain must not go up again.

  Merovig Creplaczx bolted from the stage-right wings as the curtain came down for the third and last time—in a state compounded of a boiling rage and a wild desire—to be confronted with the spectacle of Mawrdew Czgowchwz lying outstretched, senseless, in Achille Plonque’s embrace. Plonque held her against himself; her hair fell over his shoulder and down both sides of him like heraldic raiment. He turned away stage left still holding her, as if he had just rescued her off a torpedoed ship at sea, and took her back to the star dressing room, while Creplaczx—wailing piteously—was at first restrained by King Marke’s retainers, but then let free to race across the stage and down the same long hall in Yseult’s tragic wake.

  Laverne Zuckerman ran distracted, fully costumed, through the side pass door into the Thirty-ninth Street lobby and then into the auditorium, climbing the first flight of stairs at a bounding stride to reach the boxes, where the word had just arrived that Mawrdew Czgowchwz had collapsed. The Countess Madge had just revived. The cheering had already begun to break off into wailing everywhere as the news of the disaster wove at the speed of sound through rows and tiers. Laverne Zuckerman led the way downstairs as Ralph guided the Countess through twisting, despairing crowds and the remaining Secret Seven fought their way along in file behind, until they all approached the star-dressing-room door to find Pèlerin Deslieux already standing guard. The old house doctor was announcing “a total nervous collapse.” The Countess was admitted. Others began their vigil.

  As it had done before, joyously, now again the opera house remained, in sorrow, peopled and lit after midnight. This time, reporters dispatched to the scene worked at their missions in hushed voices while the grim, appalled audience—old-guard Wagnerites among the rest—awaited developments.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz was taken back to the Plaza after several doctors had examined her. “She requires complete rest.” Nothing more or less was said. She was dressed warmly and carried to her car—again by Achille Plonque. When the crowds in the street cheered “Brava Czgowchwz, divina!” in tears, she looked up at the tenor in a dreamy questioning way the while she wondered where she was. By the time she was back upto
wn, the late edition of the Times had come out on Forty-third Street with the front-page shocker: “MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ IN COLLAPSE / Diva Suffers Nervous Prostration/ After Stunning Isolde Triumph at the Met.” The News and Mirror hit the city streets a few hours later with identical lurid front-page pictures of the final Tristan tableau and centerfolds of the diva in Achille Plonque’s arms on the stagedoor steps, of Merovig Creplaczx lunging in fury at an inquiring photographer, and of assorted faces and figures in the vivid crowd—including a study of the sobbing Trixie Gilhooley being comforted with a flask by what looked to be a nursing nun wearing nothing on her head but netted, short-cropped platinum hair.

  With Mawrdew Czgowchwz removed, gloom set in in dead cold earnest. Grace Jackson-Haight invited as many as she knew would come back with her to her place. Nobody wanted to go home and face facts. A large assorted group decided to try breakfasting at Reuben’s and hanging about the Plaza hoping for further word. “She’ll snap out of it,” they said to one another. “She’ll wake up feeling flawless, and come to the window and wave. Come on!” Most Czgowchwz intimates had already taken cars to the hotel, where they sat up in absolute silence through the hours before dawn.

  The news had reached Casa Cedrioli in a flash. Neriac confederates backstage had got on the telephone down in the boiler room just after the collapse, during the early confusion. Old Mary Cedrioli shrieked out loud over the phone in (what one supposes she supposed) triumph. She began to dance up and down, shouting pig-Italian dithyrambs, waking the neighbors, until something made her stop a second to check in on her mother, whom she hadn’t thought about all night. Suddenly, all the other desolate hate freaks huddled together in the reeking Cedrioli kitchen heard first another shriek and then a howling canine wail. Then she herself, Old Mary Cedrioli, dashed out like the demented thing she was into the cold deserted streets, waking the neighborhood. She had found her sainted ancient mother dead.