Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  Jameson O’Maurigan woke in a strange bed. He shivered, naked again. He thought it must be morning.

  Moments later, he was on the street, in day-old clothes, still shivering. He went into a diner on West Houston Street for coffee and, while waiting, picked up the Daily News. The next thing he knew, he felt ice picks lancing his brains. He fled into the street. He tripped and fell, cutting his face on an icy fender. He hailed an early scab taxi and staggered in. “The Plaza! Please, the Plaza!” He heard an early-morning news flash on the cab radio: Nothing was changed; Mawrdew Czgowchwz was asleep. He rode north in agony. Reaching the Plaza fountain, the cab skidded to a halt. Jameson flung bills at the driver, leaped out of the taxi, and fell again on the ice. He looked at the imperious Plaza façade. It stood there; it didn’t care. He staggered forward against morning; he cared. He found his sister asleep in a chair in the crowded Palm Court. The entire lobby had the look of some improbably posh evacuation center or some other-worldly steamship lounge adrift in a doldrum latitude. Outdoors, a brilliant sun melted layers of sooted snow in Central Park. Indoors, overwrought Christmas decorations reinforced the gloom. The hotel staff were being solemnly generous with quantities of cushions and fresh coffee, but there could be little question of the vigil’s going on much longer into the morning.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke early. She sat up in bed and looked. The Countess Madge came closer...

  The eminent Dr. Zwischen arrived at the Plaza just after nine o’clock. Less than an hour later, the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier came down into the Palm Court to deliver a message to the press and the public (“in a low-pitched, steady, nearly abstract declamation which cut through the listeners’ continuous breathy rumbles of shock and dismay like alto plain song over creaks and soughing wind in desolate haunted rooms and corridors”—Paranoy, in his diary, that somber afternoon):

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz, entirely physically well, woke early this morning in a state of complete amnesia. She knows nothing of herself, nor recognizes anyone at all. She will speak only in the Erse tongue, and only then again and again of what appears to be a very distant memory. Since at the moment it is only I myself, my nephew Jameson O’Maurigan, and my niece Lavinia O’Maurigan Stein who are able to exchange any words at all with the patient, thus to create an atmosphere of trust, it has been decided by Miss Czgowchwz’s closest friends that she shall be taken to my home, Magwyck, for rest and treatment until the drastic causes of her crise be fathomed and dealt with at all. I know that Mawrdew Czgowchwz, when she shall be herself again, will thank you all, each one, for waiting through this darkling winter trial with her. It will, I know, be through our love and our steadfast patience that one fine day, and very soon, our friend will sing for us again. Thank you, and vivat Czgowchwz!

  Then it was really over. The silence of the crowd’s breaking up seemed to Percase and Paranoy (and to those few others who found themselves able at all to stand away the smallest distance from dire circumstance to formulate analogies) more memorably frappant than any Czgowchwz ovation they had ever heard or heard of. There was nothing further to be said. The city went its way to work. The Countess Magdalen took Mawrdew Czgowchwz home.

  Dolores’s column headlined that afternoon: “IS MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ INSANE?” At the Crossroads Café, the Neriacs, reading, merely transposed the subject and the verb into a stiff, sure exclamation of their own wicked conclusions. Not only was Mawrdew Czgowchwz “abbatz” as sure as there was vengeance, but there was “also no true justice either meanwhile anyway.” There she was, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, allowed to rest up quite comfortable in that old pagan Irish biddy’s fortress uptown, while meanwhile poor Old Mary Cedrioli was even now laid up tied to an old iron bed in Bellevue just because some Irish cops found her last night on the Bowery clawing her shriveled tits—you almost had to laugh, though—screaming “Ho ‘mazzata la mamma!” It was just proof of how the fuckin’ Irish still ran New York the same as always. Well, it was all very sad. Maybe it was just as well Morgana was retiring. So they all went to the fare-well...

  Christmas that year never came to much among the more simpatico Met regulars. Attendance fell off severely in the New Year; more and more people stayed home playing records. The weary winter set in for keeps.

  5

  THE WONDROUS saga of the second Czgowchwz return, in the psychic pannage season, that return from regions all too few have ever charted, is many sagas’ interweaving. The vast unraveled display of all the versions, points of view, convictions, and testimonies of so many compulsive seekers after Czgowchwz truth suggests the spectacle of some ticker-tape parade’s litter-choked aftermath, supposing the triumphant Czgowchwz comeback’s wake papered with incessant strips of pertinent leading-clue material: depositions, letters, reports, ad hoc, ad lib, ad nauseam, ad infinitum...(But no sentence in fact or fiction could convey the discrete truth, or for a certain fact get nearer to that shifting mystery than any words get to the true fulfillment of that unique resolve the Shadow in the recess of the mind resolves.)

  All the intimate vigilants met and kept on meeting all through the early “coaxing” period, during which time their hunches, their insights, their desperate recollections, and the rest of it required (as it were) committee-pooling, thrashing out, distillation, and delivery-in-redaction up to the Countess Madge for Celtic transmission, all which while the work kept going on under the supervision of the autocratic Zwischen. It was in this agonizing way that Mawrdew Czgowchwz came at first to understand—and in quick time, it seemed, to accept—the fact that she was “a person to be preserved,” someone some incalculable number of other persons cared so much for and about, they were now living their own lives in suspension—interluded—on spare time. The mail pouring in at WCZG stacked to the ceilings. The Secret Seven tried their best to deal with much of it, but the pressures attendant upon their watch at Magwyck left them sore and exhausted. Paranoy broadcast a plea that all correspondence cease. He promised faithful daily reports between the playing of Czgowchwz records, tapes, and conversations—the station’s continuous vigil demanded by short-wave listeners coast to coast, in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Montreal, New Orleans, and in towns and villages past counting. From Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, and San Juan came pleas for daily Spanish broadcasts of the Czgowchwz news. Consuelo Gilligan agreed to prepare these. The BBC, RAI, ORTF, and Radio Éireann each sent a special correspondent to monitor developments.

  Having at the outset appeared giddy—like a child relieved of an oppressive weight laid upon her by dim previsions of the life lying ahead—soon Mawrdew Czgowchwz, in the New Year, after waking in the dark to the sounds of revel in the freezing streets, experienced a dim gestalt-recall: of that very thing’s happening somewhere, sometime before. “She remembers singing Violetta!” Ralph attempted insisting. But the recall vanished in gray dawn. Thereafter the patient grew ever more grave. Under Zwischen’s efficient tyranny, recollections, precognitions, simultaneous delusions and clarifications wracked a foundering mind. Co-efforts redoubled in two directions, the prognosticative and the animadversive. Trying to see some possible way ahead, trying to look back for a reason to, Mawrdew Czgowchwz fought hardest of all to retain as best she might her own unmoving center.

  So far as the public world’s appreciation of the Czgowchwz collapse was affected, it seemed most to be so by overloads of perspectives. (Hence the mails: all the frantic demands.) The intense shock and continuing bewilderment resulting from the patient’s insistent employment of faultless Hibernian Gaelic—for no question put in English, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish, or Russian registered—boggled the common mind. (“On top of everything else!” people said.) This very same exotic consequence was at the same time of course the primary empathetic aggravation among the Secret Seven, not the least because of the wearing effect the diurnal struggles began to have on the unflinching Countess Madge. Known for years to be able to talk any number of various gossips hoarse in a marathon, she began to be too we
ary by each nightfall to tell anybody anything, and by and by even less able each long day to complete to Zwischen’s satisfaction the constant strophic-antistrophic interlocutory sessions with the supine diva (whose own energies, so far as talking in circles went, seemed boundless, grounded as they were in the subpersonal abyss, source of demonic power).

  Then one morning in darkest early January, Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke and spoke Italian. Ralph was summoned in prompt haste. For days thereafter they sat talking together. (It’s all still there on Ralph’s tapes.) Most of the Czgowchwz dialogue was monologue—long, winding, lyric, plaintive cavatinas whose impact left Ralph emotionally spent by every noontime, never able to eat much lunch. He lost all the sturdy weight he had regained in that year since the strike, and when asked after, would invariably respond, “I’m wrecked! Meanwhile the tapes are flawless!”

  Merovig Creplaczx insisted something be done to enable the diva to refind her native tongue, and Zwischen attempted a bolder sort of commanding hypnosis: a fondling induction (Creplaczx fondling physically) into automatic trance, a technique he had been avoiding, he announced sternly, for fear of “disequilibriating the balance.” The results were amazing, and for Creplaczx dismaying. Ordered in trance to utter something in her own first language, she simply nodded, relieved, and commenced to go on and on again in Erse—describing, the bewildered Countess Madge explained, idyllic scenes of childhood and mumbling snatches of old ballads, canticles, keenings, and prayers—so that Merovig Creplaczx tore at his graying hair and fell down weeping out loud, moaning, “She is insane! She must be insane!” The Countess Madge put him out.

  “Well, where did she learn it, and when?” demanded Cassia Verde-Dov’è, sporting an officious phoque, sitting finishing a second vaporetto cocktail at a serious hat-lunch at the old New Weston in the company of Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, Consuelo Gilligan, and Gaia della Gueza. “Madge never uses it except when she’s three sheets to the wind, or in ceremony! Oh, waiter...”

  Dame Sybil wondered herself. “Well,” she said to herself, “she has sung in Dublin, and at Wexford.” She pondered the evidence. “No,” she told herself, “two week-long seasons singing Carmen, Amneris, Dalila, and Katisha” (at the Gaiety Theatre) “and one long weekend in Wexford” (that mad weekend after which, on the Monday, they had sailed across to Cornwall, to Tintagel) “could leave one little time apart to master that cryptic offshoot lingo, Hibernian, even supposing—as is not the case—the tongue to be in current common use.” There must exist some unsuspected forthright answer.

  Consuelo thought it through. It had to do, she suspected, with forces lying elsewhere...

  G-G thought it was ugly, black witchcraft.

  Jameson O’Maurigan walked slowly along, arm in arm with Lavinia, through those tortuous lanes traversing landscaped hillocks, dark tunnels, lakeside byways, and meadow downs that all extend (all intertwining) up through the charted Cytherean reaches in lower-mid Central Park known as the Rambles, an area valued in certain quarters as the perfect Gotham rendezvous for languorous Maytime trysts and recognized in certain others as the perfect Gotham repository for select victims of sudden and violent deaths.

  Now in winter nothing was so certain. The snow lay blanketed and clean in hollows. Granite slab stones, snow-crested, thrust, rose, creating angular, sheer precipices. Amazing icicled configurations hung, fell apart, and splintered, on and from leafless branches “in piercing crystal distress,” as Jameson put it into words that afternoon. (His verse was considered “bruised.”)

  They spoke of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. (“All radically depends on so much else.”) They shrugged, walking from plane to plane in slanting spirals, but they could not, nor would they, shrug off the weight of their anguish.

  “I think it’s obvious,” said Jameson deliberately coldly, “this Gestapo quack, Zwischen, is just no good with her.”

  Lavinia wanted to cry. “But, Jamie, he’s eminent!”

  “Eminent? Eminent! Shit!”

  “Well, you’ll get nowhere shouting!”

  “Eminence! ‘Eminence’ is like ‘Fame,’ ‘Farce,’ ‘Camp’!”

  “I don’t know. Is it really?” Lavinia shivered a bit.

  “Don’t cry, Vanilla. It’s fake; it wastes.”

  “It’s easier than thinking...” She nodded; she got a grip.

  Jameson put his arm around his twin. “I know what you’re thinking. Mawrdew Czgowchwz is Famous. Is that a Farce? Well, you realize it often is, just. Of course it’s High Farce, but think. Think back to those collisions. It’s fantastically cast, the chases are electric, and disaster impinges!” Jameson decided he could shout disaster down.

  “Jamie, don’t yell! Remember, she’s so ill.” Lavinia remained terrified of an epidemic derangement.

  “I will yell! Don’t you hear what I mean? Farce is killing, as is Fame. The whole radical task is salvaging the woman from her Fame!”

  “But she’ll always be famous!”

  “Of course she will. Let her be. But the Fame is the Fiction. The woman suffers the factual, oppressive weight.”

  Lavinia thought she knew what—

  Jameson hadn’t finished. “She’s got to see Gennaio!” The twins had together reached a certain height. Rocky slopes made small divides. A pond lay frozen over. Tributary streams, ceased rilling, traced gray-webbed veins downhill to it. They talked about the first time they had come to this same spot, in childhood, and about the first time they had taken Mawrdew Czgowchwz there together, in what now seemed, in memory, childhood’s second end. Twice ended, twice bewildered.

  “She loved this pond in the spring.”

  “She gave things to the children.”

  “She came here alone to read.”

  “She wrote letters sitting here.”

  They descended the west slope. They walked all the way to Belvedere Lake, where the deserted Florentine tower stood fast, no longer reflecting. They walked straight across the supporting ice. Jameson continued insisting Czgowchwz see Gennaio.

  Ralph, Alice, Dixie, and the remaining Secret Seven took Laverne Zuckerman back to their regular back table at the Burger Ranch. “A flat medium and a side of French, Rhoe,” Ralph ordered, all gloom-pressed and “very tired.” Alice couldn’t eat: she drank. She ordered three vanilla Cokes, meanwhile fishing around in her black crocodile purse for that necessary pint of something extra she had just purchased up the street. Dixie ordered a white-meat tuna-fish on toast points and a black coffee. The remaining Secret Seven all had hash.

  Laverne Zuckerman could not eat anything either; she asked for lemon tea in a glass. Rhoe nodded commiseratively, chomping Dentyne. She stuck her silver pencil midway back into her champagne-platinum upsweep and schlepped off to the kitchen, scuffing stylish gold sling-back wedgies along the floor. She knew how they all felt; she felt bad enough herself. It was a real crying shame. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was always so damn regular—almost like the girls, considering...

  It was nearing four o’clock. The tables all along the wall were empty, so that when the frightened, disheveled figure made its reckless, headlong way down to the big back banquette table like the lone survivor of a grisly massacre, the Secret Seven and Laverne Zuckerman drew back, disrupted. Then Alice, famously gifted with total recall, blurted, “That’s that same gorgonzola freak, old Luigi—the one that got that gonza cash prize for carving Neri out of provolone cheese at that summer street bazaar, when was it, ten years ago!”

  Ralph knew entirely well who old Luigino Morboso was. Hateful childhood memories of firelight Fascist processions on Grand Street in the thirties invariably featured this same brutal, pig-faced villiacco, rasping off-key choruses of “Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza.” There he stood now, old and ugly in winter: a fat, bald commedia buffoon. “To think,” thought Ralph, “that that one used to claim to be getting it put out regular from Neri, the big opera star—la prima donna di tutt’ il impero, di tutt’ il mondo!—between the acts of Aïda in the days when he walked on a
s a captain in the Egyptian black guard in the Triumphal Scene.” And now he knelt there shivering. Now his thing was on the floor.

  Then they were all shivering. Luigi Morboso, the fear of a vengeful, righteous God upon him, having been commanded by his father confessor, Dom Gesualdo Svelato, O.M.F., in the Church of St. Anthony on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul to make public confession of his part in the perfidy, crossing himself spastically several times a minute, told on his knees, in the back of the Burger Ranch, of his acolyte participation in that black ceremony, “la messa Cedrioli”; how Old Mary Cedrioli had brought down (or up) the devil’s curse on Mawrdew Czgowchwz, after old Mona Cantilena, she whose vocal career had somehow never flourished, had herself cut off a lock of the great diva’s (he had to say so himself) own true hair. “It nevva cudda happen if she wore wigs, but bein’ that she don’t never—”

  Like the lightning in the east in summer, Ralph’s rage shot up (or down). Knocking hamburgers, French fries, spiked vanilla Cokes, coffee, glass tea, tuna on toast-points, hash, and cigarettes all over the orange-Formica table and all over the groveling old Luigi Morboso down on the floor, in such a state as no one in town had ever seen Ralph, he “throttled the miscreant” (Alice) until “the wailing old misery” (Dixie) was dragged away by Rhoe and fat Irving the cook and thrown back into the street, where he for his vileness belonged.

  Ralph fled the premises directly, hailing the first Seventh Avenue uptown cab, and flew hurtling to Magwyck. Laverne Zuckerman passed out. She was gathered together and taken to Alice’s place while Dixie went looking for Paranoy. The others (the remaining Secret Seven) sped fan-vaulting out all over town announcing and denouncing the vilest treason and black voodoo too.