Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 14

  When Gennaio would come in, Jameson would go downstairs, out into the yard—all mindful of rogation—as if to coax budding relief out of the sudden midwinter spring that had set in after the rain. Meanwhile, upstairs, Gennaio would set about the task of fetching Mawrdew Czgowchwz back into presence.

  In four days there was real news. Down out of a clear, decisive sky, the Countess Madge (“Herself! Postquam Rearrived!”—Paranoy) skidded of a weekend afternoon along the runways of marshy Idlewild, escorting the Reverend Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., bearing an answer at last.

  6

  “LA DIVINA Boema” stood revealed as the orphaned love child of Great Flaming Maev Cohalen, Eire’s own Boadicea, gone west into history, and Jan Motivyk, poet-philosopher of the Prague Linguistic Circle, radical democrat, and lyric tenor—he who had set Edwardian-Georgian Cambridge and Dublin parlor society swooning with his lilting, scalpel conversation and with the songs of Janác̆ek, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Hahn, he of whom Yeats is said to have remarked to Lady Gregory, walking into a musicale through the gates of Trinity College: “That Bohemian serpent!”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz lay sleeping, still dreaming on of convent childhood in Connemara. In those first four “grounding” days Gennaio had taken her through her earliest years, memory by crystal memory. Patient and analyst engaged in forging out a new, verified life by a process of psychic synergy. On the day the Countess reappeared, the analyst was able to assure the patient that when she woke that same afternoon for tea, a dear friend from many long years ago would be there to take it with her. The Countess made fresh, dark Irish soda bread.

  The vigilants—watchers and warders of the Czgowchwz estate—convened once more full strength, on that riotously mild and sunny day on the East Side, to hear the story all Gotham would hear next day from Paranoy over WCZG, read in The Czgowchwz Monthly Newsletter, spread by word of mouth, and finally encounter in its perfect form some time thereafter in Jameson O’Maurigan’s ode “Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano.”

  Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., nearly as old as was the century, now prioress of the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Convent-on-the-Rock in Connemara, told the sum and substance of the Czgowchwz/Cohalen nascence in wistful, breathy, whispering Leinster English, the very beat and tune of which dialect made every phrase she uttered fall into such eurythmic and euphonic patterns as to bewitch her listeners, dispelling anguish like grace, inducing sweet narcosis to cure life of complication and dolor. As contained on Ralph’s tape, the story she told was this:

  I remember as well as I remember yesterday the very Spy Wednesday before the Easter Sunday of nineteen hundred and sixteen A.D., when the lovely “fallen” Maev Cohalen came to the Convent of Mary Reparatrix —our mother house—in King Street opposite the Gaiety Theater, where it was she had made her last great flaming speech, the very one for which she was heckled so cruelly by the old haters of Parnell and a Free Holy Ireland with the taunt that “Judas was a redhead as well!”

  Well, she came in, and the young porteress—that was myself—could tell at a wink that she was perilously near to her time and that were she to have that child in Dublin itself, wouldn’t those selfsame haters crucify her in their hearts and do the Holy Cause of Ireland no good at all into the bargain. So the porteress made her realize the truth of the situation and took her herself—that was myself—on the Holy Thursday morning at dawn, after matins and lauds, down to Kingsbridge station, and the two rode together across the breadth of Holy Ireland to Galway and from there to Mary Reparatrix at Convent-on-the-Rock in majestic Connemara in the horse-drawn fiacree, as they called them in those days, where we had the mass in the evening and the Office of the Tenebrae.

  So it was then that in our convent of which by the grace of God and many curious turns the Dublin porteress—that was myself—has come to be elected prioress in these later years, was born on the very day of the Great Rising the child we called Maev Cohalen. We knew as did everyone else who the father was, of course, but wasn’t he shot through the heart the next day by the British infernals and didn’t Great Flaming Maev herself—after seeing the wee dote of girl-child that was theirs together—heave her great heart apart and take her soul off to God in heaven, where it prevails this day, Glory be to Himself in His Trinity and to His Blessed Virgin Mother Reparatrix, who watch and wait and forgive and cherish and wash away love’s sins—if such they ought be called and I for one doubt as much—leaving little Maev to be with us until...

  There wasn’t, for a documented fact, a dry eye in the parlor at that point in the story (Wedgwood having gone off to his quarters, content to read the future reports in his privacy). Some wept openly, like Ralph, all generous, warm Italian response. Others turned their heads away in every direction until there was no place left either to look or not to look. The Countess Madge held on to her composure as fast as ever she was able, tears falling without their sighs. There was still the interview...

  That interview, between Mawrdew Czgowchwz—one Maev Cohalen that was—and Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H. (nee Mary O’Moore in the lying-in hospital on Hollis Street in the city of Dublin on the feast of All Saints in 1901), her oldest and newest-found friend in this world, was best described by the mediatrix of the recognition scene, the Countess Madge, in her memoirs All I May Own. Another slant vouchsafed the anxious public in the interests of art, science, instruction, and “a swell story, real worthwhile!” (Trixie Gilhooley) was offered in Gennaio’s “Notes on the Excavation of the Primal Self of Maev Cohalen,” which paper he read to a packed house at Town Hall on Jung’s birthday that year.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz slept again. Gennaio, addressing the vigilants in the parlor, advised them that a complete recovery, with an assured return to “libidinal commitment” (musicry), could be assuredly forecast for sometime soon—provided the patient be allowed “the digestive luxury” of day after day of curative sleep before being confronted with the next task, the most crucial encounter in her psychic journey back through time and forth again to meet herself. The meeting with the abbess of the Cenacle of St. Vitus in Prague, which must yet be effected. (For Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., had gone on in her tale to reveal how, in the period known as “the Troubles,” it had become necessary to spirit Great Flaming Maev Cohalen’s love child by Jan Motivyk out of Ireland. This sorry task had been completed by...) Gennaio wished no more be yet revealed.

  “This man has,” they said among themselves, “a finger for nuances!”

  The Czgowchwz vigilants went home. Mother Maire Dymphna found welcome. She would stay on until the Czgowchwz dawning, naturally enough among the black-bonnet Sisters of Charity. The next decision—“Who for Prague?”—awaited.

  Merovig Creplaczx knew Prague, but he almost certainly would never know elsewhere again were he to enter that city. The Countess had never been, but then so unnerved had she become by current revelations that the ready good counsel of the Czgowchwz vigilants, enforced by Jameson and Lavinia, had sent her to her bed. (“Now you stay there, and you rest!”) It was decided on the Tuesday of the next week: Jameson, Pèlerin Deslieux, and Paranoy must fly to Prague on diplomatic passports, readily available through Consuelo Gilligan’s connections. Pèlerin’s French and Jameson’s Latin would cover the rampant exigencies to expedite crucial matters in the secular and the ecclesiastical sectors respectively. Paranoy would document the mission for WCZG and the Newsletter.

  They flew out that night to Paris. At dawn the following day in the City of Light, having taxied in from Orly straight to the Place de l’Etoile, they marched grandly three abreast down the Champs-Elysées, commemorating the original Czgowchwz landing in the West. At the Place de la Concorde they parted. Jameson ambled off in a trance to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Paranoy sped off to the Brasserie Lipp. Pierrot, retracing his steps up the majestic boulevard to the Arc, then veering left, wandered into Chaillot, those marron glacé environs he had spent a fortunate childhood inhabiting each winter and spring (the family had passed each summer and
fall at Turanga, the paternal seat on Madagascar, where Pierrot had been known as Monsieur Pique, le petit prince) and never nearly so perfect a manhood recalling and revisiting year after year. He walked past the shut-up Théâtre Guichet, reflecting without pausing, on his way along to meet a woman for lunch at Oblique—his mother, Zuleika Deslieux-Labiche, the vulpine Hebraic beauty who had been the first (woman) to dance the pavane sauvage, naked, shackled in a sapphire collar, plying an outsize aigrette fan, in the salons of Montparnasse between the wars.

  The afternoon waned, anxious to meet night.

  Night met the three Czgowchwz emissaries eagerly as they boarded the Aurore express at the Gare de l’Est. Barreling across Europe to Vienna, they rehearsed themselves. In that imperial city, in the district known as Döbling, they hired a properly daunting Mercedes. Chauffeured by a deaf-mute, ex-Lippizaner groom and accompanied by a high-ranking American mandarin acting as liaison officer, they motored along a course parallel to the route Mozart had once taken through the hills of Bohemia to Prague.

  All this while, back at Magwyck, Mawrdew Czgowchwz was dreaming a dream of Prague...

  In Prague, matters went smoothly, as Paranoy was able to report the next week on WCZG.

  Mother St. Mawrdew, her three sister companions of the Cenacle of St. Vitus, and the three Czgowchwz champions, making up the spiritually required party of seven, docked at Pier 88 in the rain. Middle February stressed. Gennaio had set the date for the encounter between Mother St. Mawrdew and Mawrdew Czgowchwz—a date some sixteen days off. Meanwhile the official representative of the diocese, Msgr. Finneagle, was ready on hand at the waterfront to receive the nuns on this occasion, Mother St. Mawrdew being, as Mother General of her order—the Blue Nuns of St. Vitus—a considerably bigger fish in Christendom than simple Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., a provincial. The diocese had taken no official position in terms of “the Czgowchwz complication,” but already in Bohemian parishes in the East Seventies special novenas to St. Mawrdew the Ecstatic were winding into their last weeks, packing these churches with multitudes of devout souls, few of whom had ever seen the diva perform, but most of whom had heard her many Saturday broadcasts from the Metropolitan and cherished her recordings of Czech songs and operas: The Cunning Little Vixen, Katya Kabanova, Rusalka, The Bartered Bride. In addition, following Paranoy’s astonishing revelations over WCZG on February 12—the Feast of the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites, Confessors—the Metropolitan Irish clergy, a diocesan majority, had been set agog. No such effect had hit the New York Irish laity at large. After all, did they know anything much about Maev Cohalen except that she had been branded a scarlet woman by the Archbishop of Dublin in 1916? Did she even lie in consecrated ground? And what of the bastard daughter? Did they know what the Wexford Festival was? Did they know that Mawrdew Czgowchwz had sung opera at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin? Had the woman ever recorded “Galway Bay”? And what was there in any case to prove that this opera diva was in fact the sin child of the Scarlet Joan of Arc of Holy Emerald Ireland—who, as was known to them that knew, had been most cruelly beaten and bruised by the filthy lusting Tommies holding her prisoner, only for her to leap splendidly from their clutches to her holy expiating death—a martyr—from off the high cliffs of Howth Castle and its environs into the purifying Irish Sea rather than yield to their revolting advances. That was a gorgeous story!

  Thus do the Irish affirm. Thus do the Irish deny. That is what their obstinate fiction means.

  His Scarlet Eminence found it most prudent, in the interests of “committed minorities,” to pontificate (evidently sulkily) at a “High Mass of Invocation” on the feast (replac-ing a ferial day in the local ecclesiastical calendar) of St. Mawrdew in Ecstasy, February 25, Mother St. Mawrdew and her sisters chanting the Gradual responses in the most perfect Latin heard in the New York archdiocese in any prelate’s memory. No further would His Grace budge.

  So it went: no smoke but there was fire. The Sunday supplements and national newsweeklies, as dedicated to sensation as to survival, featured in many cover stories (“That Mawrdew Czgowchwz Question,” “The Czgowchwz Identity,” “The Quest for the Czgowchwz Truth,” “The File on Mawrdew Czgowchwz”) their angles and approaches. Patchy, potted biographies of the diva. Ditto of her (suddenly) vividly remembered mother, pictured raising money haranguing Edwardian and Yankee throngs at Speakers’ Corner, on Boston Common, in Union Square, and on the docks at Liverpool. Ditto (the worst) of her father, replete with ferociously inaccurate précis of his thought, studded with asinine rewrite-desk translations from the Czech, the German, the Russian, and the French of many of his seminal aphorisms, consistently omitting any reference at all to his single great work in English, the short, shattering Were It But So (“No one will understand it”). One read quantities of rehash filler copy on the Easter Rising of 1916, of maudlin Fenian rant, of reverent pieties on Czech nationalism, of damning recollections of the Prague defenestration of 1948. Pictures colored presumed concatenations in false verisimilitude. Pictures of Czgowchwz. Pictures of Neri (circa 1940). Pictures of the Secret Seven, hands blocking all their faces. Pictures of Creplaczx. Pictures of the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier (“said to be herself a total wreck!”). Pictures of the front door of Magwyck. Pictures of Wedgwood (“And what did the butler see?”) taken from the top of the garden wall one warming afternoon as he sat at his private ease playing solitaire pontoon on the O’Meaghre dolmen. Pictures of Arpenik’s restaurant (“where those elite meet to eat”). Pictures of “a certain visitor” (Gennaio) rushing into the black 1947 Packard to be driven home. Pictures of Gennaio’s consultation rooms in Morningside Heights. Pictures of the stage door of the old Metropolitan Opera House (“Will she ever cross this threshold again?”).

  Wasn’t it always the way.

  What was ceremony for?

  Jameson suffered greatly.

  So many otiose speculations...

  The day of the crucial encounter came. Ecclesiastical formalities (“consisting chiefly of a bijou scarlet high tea taken behind lace curtains in the front parlor—heated to suffocation —of the archiepiscopal mansette”—Paranoy, on the air) having been nicely observed, Mother St. Mawrdew, a tall handsome woman scented delicately in 4711, whose own radiant complexion and brilliant peacock-blue roughspun habit had already occasioned no little appreciative murmur (“Why she looks lit entirely from within!”) in cathedral-close circles, was offered transportation, in Msgr. Finneagle’s Mercury, up to Magwyck. “I would much prefer to walk.” Walk she did.

  It was one windy March day, a signal day: the calends. Mother St. Mawrdew strode up the length of Madison Avenue, marveling in fluent French—the while Pierrot, Creplaczx, Jameson, and Paranoy tried vainly to keep pace—on the barbaric splendors of “l’acropole officielle,” taking in each separate numbered façade seemingly the way film digests: for all time. Her carapace—a collection of matching, draped panels, yokes, tabards, and veils, all blue as is fair weather—yielded in random riot to the wind, as if beckoning in every direction. Neighborhood children, racing home from school, reported “a witch all dressed up in blue” to clucking Irish nannies, to confident Negress cooks, to Jewish candystore ladies, and to weary mothers on the telephone.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke in time for tea.

  The wayward, dream-logged patient stared once more through space and time, remembering and disremembering at once. So far she knew who she had been. Who she was (and is) remained just that far out of grasp to tantalize a searching heart, to challenge a steely will. Gennaio knew that to attempt telling her in so many words could occasion nothing but setback reactions. To allow her, constructing by synergy, to discover herself in her inhering structure must guarantee her complete recovery. Such an allowance must be granted slyly, “as it were, on the off hand,” Gennaio told Creplaczx, whom he had chosen to be the interlocutor and “favored erotic catalyst” in that last most crucial trance session, in which he, Creplaczx, speaking Czech, would “fetch out as does an ac
complished midwife” Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s identity, the while Gennaio controlled the delicate psychic logistics.

  They went upstairs together. Mother St. Mawrdew arrived and waited below in the music room, where Dame Sybil, vested in a white silk kimono, her raven hair loose-flowing, sat playing koto rhapsodies (Chiddri, Rokudan, Midare, Haru-No-Kyoko), as if the Lady Murasaki had created her. Every vigilant sought formal occupation either in prayer of sorts or in physical exertion. Jameson went out into the yard to sing softly as if to himself the only song in his head, “Machushla,” thereby summoning a convocation of neighborhood cats—led by Bozo and Rose(ncrantz)—who chimed in, causing no small irritation to the Moronican embassy flunkies next door.

  Pèlerin Deslieux, standing fixed, supple, at the parlor mantel mirror, chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” dipped and rose up, dipped and rose up, in perfect pliés (kinesthetic reactions empathetic to those semblable folding-unfoldings of the subconscious Czgowchwz mind), promoting the climax fast being reached upstairs.

  “Some ort-welding alchemy,” wrote Percase, “intelligence arcane to those denied personal access—all necessarily—to that great lady in the dark, restored to Mawrdew Czgowchwz each and every faculty she had always commanded, all reinforced, moreover, by that singular perspex armour only the spiritual salvage-few purchase to gird their souls.”