Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 13

  Arpenik had a “feeling.”

  It was nearly four o’clock. She had locked the front door of the restaurant, put up the OUT TO LUNCH sign, and returned to her kitchen to furnish late-afternoon Armenian nosh for a small party of present regulars: Pierrot, Paranoy, Percase, and the hapless, distracted Creplaczx. Dressing immense portions of succulent imam bayildi with sesame oil and fresh lemon juice, checking the madzoon to see had it made up its mind to take, rendering thick clotted cream for ekmeks, she had been fully occupied. The eminent long-haired Persian orange cat, Bozo, lay stretched along a widened windowsill at his accustomed ease. All was tranquil in her mind—at least insofar as conditions permitted in situ Czgowchwz. (Arpenik was in some ways the seeing eye at the center of the tempest.) And then this sudden feeling...

  A crazed, furious rattling-banging on the restaurant’s front door at once torpedoed this and every other private notion in the place. The late-luncheon foursome had been sitting waiting, pooling the losses they had each and all felt at, all the while since Mawrdew Czgowchwz had—in Paranoy’s considered verdict—“deserted the arduous Now for an ever more serene, embracing Then.” Pierrot was outraged, as if injured in limb; Paranoy, febrile and talky, as if the solution lay in some entangled, talismanic syntax; Percase, missing articulation time and time again trying to... Creplaczx was near again to having to be seen to.

  Then, suddenly, Creplaczx fell to the floor. The commotion at the front door echoed such brutal Gestapo noises, decades past, it tipped the nervous balance. Pierrot saw to him while Percase and Paranoy assumed control of the projected interview up front, and Arpenik, gathering up a proprietor’s command, marched in common time behind the two. (For some time now, assorted pompous bureaucratic mandarins had been nosing about the neighborhood announcing the city’s nasty plans to raze this and that sturdy old building. Among those threatened with demolition was that premise the restaurant occupied. Arpenik was having none of it.) The three unlatched the front door together. There stood Dixie, panting in the darkening, chill forecourt, beside a gaily decorated potted holly bush. “It’s about Mawrdew! She’s been ambushed, hexed!”

  Of the “Great ‘Somehow’ of Dreams,” the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier knew past her share. Lately having heard repeated so many newly recollected dreams on mornings after Mawrdew Czgowchwz had just awakened from having dreamed them, she had herself begun recalling her own girlhood (“As I look back through the years”—she chuckled), from which era so many “expansive confession fests” reechoed, yielding numberless nubile and suchlike fantasies. Rambling: the mind would do so, as the Countess had been warned, and of that wan condition had been made piercingly aware. There was, however, a “graydle” of difference between the unwanted rambling of a mind and the free, loose play of the faculties that irrigate fiction. (Life warranting the fiction.)

  But the issue was the care of the mind of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. What of that? Jameson had begun to insist more and more that his man, Gennaio, ought—must—be consulted. The Countess was of two minds. Jameson was a frantic boy, all nerves. Yet the mere fact that, fraught as he was with whatnot, he was still walking around standing up was indeed testimony sufficient to its end of this man Gennaio’s peculiar expertise and therapeutic savvy. The improvement in Jameson since the last feast of Samhain was indeed... All the same, as far as the Countess Madge could make out, her nephew had brought to Gennaio in fantasy and dark dream so many fable versions of his one confessed obsession—Mawrdew Czgowchwz—that for that same Gennaio to attempt to deal with the confessed obsessions, dreams, and suchlike of the real Mawrdew Czgowchwz—and always in broad translation from the Irish—how could it come to eventual success?

  Someone or something was pounding at the front door with a force the Countess had not heard since—Numi!—the troubled days of rifle butts banging in Mountjoy and Merrion squares! Wedgwood paddled impassively through the foyer like a poised karate champion, docile on sake, to answer the clubbing summons. Moments later, Ralph, admitted gasping, dry-throated, freezing yet feverish, was accepting restorative pourings of whiskey and water (the one and then the other), the better to tell what he had been told. The whole while the central subject of these same acute concerns lay upstairs dreaming who knew what key dream, which, when fathomed, translated, taped, and replayed to the dreamer awakened, would awaken the conscious wellspring: the memory that forget that gleaming key that opened the lock to reveal the thing in itself that was the truth of Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

  Why do I stand at these cliffs?

  Where am I from in this world?

  Whose voices are those back inside, chanting?

  Have I no mother or no father?

  Why is it I love to sing?

  Am I pretty—am I lovely—me?

  Must I be mad—they say so...

  The swirl of interrogations, incidents, fugues, and wretchedness descended cyclone-like upon the patient, carrying her away to—Where? Where she was, where could that be.

  Jameson left Lavinia in front of the Dakota and took an uptown taxi to Gennaio’s consultation rooms in Morningside Heights. He reckoned his session that day would be turbulent. He sat watching block after flashback block of winter Central Park reel past the window on his right, revealing “pageants in series, chain-connected in casual review, identically managed: children under supervision plotting anarchy, behaving. Animals on leashes; running free; ferreting. Single figures seeking more.” (He noted down what he saw.) At length the taxi swung left along Cathedral Parkway, leaving

  Leisure’s landscaped prospects to diminish

  To anxious vanishing point

  In the rearview mirror—one’s idle mind’s eye.

  He sat up, rummaging pockets. There was now a fare to pay, then time for preparation. Sorting dollar bills from a clutch of messy lists, notes, clippings (“Is Mawrdew Czgowchwz Insane? The weeks go by unanswered.” “What went on backstage that night?” “Did she dare to go too far?” “When will Gotham know the truth?”), Jameson, tipping absurdly, absently, got out on Morningside Drive. Finding a vacant bench overlooking the desolate, steep-gorged park that tumbles from the Heights down to “fabulous,” dismal Harlem, he went over his dream notes, shivering, remembering...

  No sleep again...yet dreams...waking nightmares. Myself against the city, always New York... New York/ Nineveh, the fortified city remade... Must find out more... Why do I love her this way? Mother gone. Aunt Madge...bound to her. Can’t be bound to her, only dreams...sleeping the sleep of the accursed infernal?

  Meanwhile, old name, childhood name. Lavinia/Vanilla ... But I must always call her that. Dreaming around a circle...

  Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, the Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov’è, Consuelo Gilligan, Gaia della Gueza, Pèlerin Deslieux, Merovig Creplaczx (readmitted, trust pending), Halcyon Paranoy, Tangent Percase, Arpenik, Carmen, Dixie, Alice, Laverne Zuckerman, and the remaining Secret Seven, all converging, swept into Magwyck. Zwischen arrived upon the jostling scene moments after everyone else, protesting: this was not one of his regular consultation days. Dame Sybil, huffed, outraged at this footling nicety: “Sod your bleeding regular consultation days, you mucky formalist Hun quack!” Zwischen gasped in umlauts, cowering backward up the grand staircase to the Czgowchwz sickroom. Sloshing neat tequila into a handy snifter, Dame Sybil fumed: “Officious little bugger!” Swallowing gulps of firewater, she loped into the music room “to play the shit out of something demonic by Scriabin” to achieve release (Vers la flamme, op. 72).

  To the tune of Dame Sybil’s “catatonic rhapsody” (Percase), each and all beside themselves and one another, anguished, beset, the vigilants stood and sat about that afternoon. The doorbell rang. What else now? After an irregular length of time spent in the vestibule, Wedgwood approached Pèlerin Deslieux (the chatelaine’s lieutenant) to announce a hand messenger from the Russian embassy nearby. At the mere mention of “Russian,” Creplaczx turned chalk-white. He dashed into the music room, slamming the door behind. He demand
ed Dame Sybil cease playing Scriabin. “Don’t be a twit, Miro, he influenced Messiaen. You’re deathly pale, my darling!” She played on. He screamed at her, “You have brought the Russians in here!”

  Meanwhile in the parlor, the hand messenger, rewarded by Pierrot with a little niccups cocktail, thanked everyone profoundly and went away, leaving behind a most passionately worded communiqué sent by the already legendary Soviet soprano, People’s Artist Tatiana Gehtopfskaya (“darling Tania Vitrovna”), pleading and demanding “full accurate report in realist truth, not mince words, on state of mind and body health of most beloved former Vitebsk comrade, contralto Mawrdew Czgowchwz.” (“Do we have news for that girl!” Ralph blurted.) It turned out that Isvestia’s Illustrated Yznayou had published a feature on the stricken diva, a cautionary tale proclaiming in turgid neobiblical fiats the certain, just, and tragic fate awaiting renegades in the unspeakably decadent, dying West, “where the sun sets with every reason” (trans. Creplaczx).

  Pierrot set about composing as much of an answer as he or they could spare the prima donna assoluta of all the Russias. Meanwhile in the music room Dame Sybil had segued compassionately into some dulcet Janác̆ek sonata.

  Upstairs, by that time, a crisis point was being reached and turned. Having translated and notated the Irish dreams of Mawrdew Czgowchwz for Zwischen, who snorted, unremitting, the Countess Madge sat weakly awaiting his next technical proposal. When it came, she bolted, horrified. Zwischen, exasperatedly deriding “the continued indulgence” shown the patient, had announced his intention: the patient’s head must be shaved—she then to be removed to a private clinic in Dutchess County, near the Connecticut border, there to undergo electroshock therapy.

  Downstairs, they heard a wild druidic shriek. (They had heard of the fabled banshee.) They trembled in confusion. Creplaczx, tearing up the stairs, was thrown aside by the snorting Zwischen, storming out. He had been disemployed at a stroke.

  Jameson rode back downtown. The taxi, swerving sharply eastward at the mid-park intersection, made for Magwyck in all haste. Jameson urged it on triumphantly, feeling omnipotent. Having phoned, he had been informed.

  All was confusion. Silent gloom deadened resolve. Impotent torpor, larding disheartened rumblings with despair, freighted deliberation. Tactics, solutions, proposed, failed. Worse than anything, it began to rain; a sudden unwelcome thaw sent torrents of sooty downpour to drench the sullen town.

  They sent out for Chinese food. Not even Arpenik could face a kitchen now. (The restaurant lay dark and bolted, causing frequent concern that evening in midtown.) Bozo, sensing an emergency, had followed Arpenik uptown, using the back-yard/alley/fencetop route to reach the Countess Madge’s own garden. He sat in the warm kitchen now, drying off, waiting for Chinese food, while Rose(ncrantz), his snarky twin, lapped up top cream for all the world as if there were no crisis in the house.

  Jameson loathed Chinese food. He and the Countess, who was prevailed upon for her own sake to take along a cup of clear chicken broth, shut themselves up upstairs in the solarium, where they sat in the half-light while sleeting rain (“en jouant des tristes chamades”) showered down much like assaulting gravel on the long, slanting studio windows above them, muting somewhat the intense colloquy the nephew and the aunt sustained for well over an hour—held from the outset, in tacit complicity, entirely in the Irish.

  At its conclusion, that decision Jameson demanded be taken was taken. Jameson rang Gennaio up at once on the solarium extension phone. After a hushed, taut, somewhat studied pause, he whispered thanks rather conspiratorially, hung up the phone, and rose. “He’s on his way. Where is she?” Jameson was taken in to see the sleeping Mawrdew Czgowchwz for the first time since her collapse. He sat there by her bedside in the carved cherry-wood, art nouveau Ondine chair (whose circular back came down to make a table top for sickroom ministrations) he had so loved since childhood, and which his aunt had promised him should be his when she died or when he married, whichever, gazing at the woman he adored past help. She was almost forty; he, almost twenty-five (oh, that—but it was the truth). He thought: She must remember!

  The Countess Madge called Lavinia and Jonathan, who rushed across town, arriving at Magwyck only just before Gennaio did.

  Gennaio’s entrance was impressive. Paranoy said it best (in Czgowchwz Unbound): “He strode in as if he knew.” He was small, compact, reserved and commanding. He accepted a cocktail. Then, gravely, he went upstairs.

  Nobody knew what went on. It wasn’t taped, but it worked: Mawrdew Czgowchwz came around...

  There was more to it than that. The cocktail, for instance, was a stiff Negroni. “He wore the most gorgeous, magical ring!” (Alice, telling “the whole story”). Others preferred to recall his “Svengali expertise” (Percase), or “his radiant complexion” (Cassia). “The point is, he did the trick” (Ralph, in interview).

  After spending something like ten minutes alone with the patient (“What’s ten minutes? Some lives are that!”—Jameson), Gennaio, leaving the diva sleeping quite as soundly as she had so long since slept in—Connemara!, came down into the parlor to meet the anguished vigilants.

  “We have made a beginning; we trust.”

  When he said it, they murmured. They all asked every question. “Is Mawrdew Czgowchwz insane?”

  “The woman is not insane.”

  “Why does she speak in the Irish?”

  A dead hush of petrified attention.

  “Because,” Gennaio declared, almost flatly, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz is Irish.”

  The Countess Madge passed right out.

  What had happened was just this: Gennaio, an analyst of genius, had plumbed those fathoms of the Czgowchwz mind where ultimate secrets lay locked away from all eyes, and most of all from their possessor’s. When he had, after preliminary soothing, asked “Who are you?” she had replied in Gaelic, as if by rote:

  “I’m little Maev Cohalen,

  I live with the good sisters

  At Convent-on-the-Rock

  Away in Connemara—

  Far west in Holy Ireland—

  Up the Republic, Amen!”

  (Jameson’s translation)

  Ralph sat on the floor and cried. The Countess was revived to be informed. All the while, in the library, Jameson read—tears dropping on yellowed pages of The Fenian Pantheon—the story of “Great Flaming Maev Cohalen,” she who stood fast, tall, and gorgeous at the ramparts early on in that great struggle Ireland had endured for her own sacred destiny’s determination. Jameson had heard the tales before, but never as they now flooded into his inner ear. He read:

  Then on the holy Easter Sunday when the nation rose, she who had awakened them was not to be found among their number. Nor was she ever seen or heard of again in Ireland or in the world. No British or Irish intelligence efforts have ever been able to track her down. The one forlorn clew to the Cohalen mystery was found on Easter Monday 1916, 24 April, when in the breast pocket of one Jan Motivyk, a Czech philosopher-poet resident at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in that Lenten term, who had somehow become enrapt in the cause for Ireland, was found the framed portrait in miniature of Maev Cohalen, together with a lock of her eternal hair, pierced through by the bullet that had gone on to pierce his own same heart. There was also found a short exquisite love poem, in the hand of Maev Cohalen, pledging eternal...

  Jameson dashed bellowing into the parlor. In the grandest manner the Countess Madge had witnessed since the days of the “Récit de Théramène” from Phèdre recited by the great Séverin Oursin-Mahon (her cousin by marriage to the deceased Count Célestin-Marc Gautier) at the Théâtre Guichet in Paris, the poet announced Mawrdew Czgowchwz revealed at that hour on that day, date, and year as the love child of Ireland’s Joan of Arc, Great Flaming Maev Cohalen, and the Czech philosopher-poet Jan Motivyk. The details would become apparent later on. The idea may have been bizarre, but the rhetoric was so commanding, and the need for a certain truth so pressing, that the entire company of vigilants asse
nted on the spot. Paranoy said it for all: “The only answer there is, is welcome!” Everyone took it as read, and exulted.

  Less than an hour later the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier, Fenian adventuress, actress, priestess, and pal, having cable-phoned her Dublin people, sat chain-smoking Lucky Strikes in the front-right seat of Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s black 1947 Packard as it sped along the Van Wyck Expressway (escorted), with Jameson O’Maurigan, poet, delver, and champion, next to her, driving. She was booked outward bound for Shannon Airport on the eleventh-hour, Starlight Stratocruiser, “St. Brendan” flight.

  Jameson: left in command...

  In four swift days she was back. In the interim, severest strictures, self-imposed, kept Czgowchwz vigilants entirely out of public view. WCZG went off the air. No telephones were answered. A stop-gap system of tight-security messenger services (the Secret Seven’s device), complete with prearranged doorbell signals, deft coding formulas, and special knowledge of zigzag back-street routes and rendezvous, kept sacral data out of the profane clutch. Even so—even more so—were Dolores, Gloria Gotham, The Talk of the Town, the dwindling but no kinder Neriacs, the Bagatellieri, vultures on the Rialto, and Knickerbocker desolates disposed to speculate. The closure of Cashel Gueza and of Arpenik’s; Paranoy’s disappearance from the city room; Percase’s cancellation of a week of classes at the New School; Ralph’s sudden laryngitis; Laverne Zuckerman’s sudden, phoned-in cancellation of Amneris (“A virus, my clavicle!”—Lois the switch-board girl, to Rhoe at the Burger Ranch); the unanswered phones; the obvious avoidances: everything conspired to create unspeakable impressions.

  Silence is not New York’s game. Nothing said is nothing in fact denied. (Dolores’s charming speculation was typical: “She’s in the bins, but which ones?”)

  Jameson sat out the whole interlude at Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s bedside. She would awaken (as might Kathleen Mavourneen) talking to the ardent young man as to an elder brother. They would talk about the day. This waiting for her to wake was in those few days Jameson’s bliss. He neither needed nor consented to sleep. He would sit in the darkened room, burning a single orange-blossom-scented candle, thinking of what he would sing the next day (for when she was awake she often asked him to sing to her). He dreamed that joy would kill him. Dreaming it awake, he dreamed it fearlessly. She seemed to know he loved her. Then she seemed to know no more.