Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  “What Percase perhaps meant,” Consuelo Gilligan dryly remarked some years later in the florescent sixties—by which time “poor darling farouche T.P.” was himself stashed away in some restricted leafy confine in the Berkshires, among other, assorted stylish crazies—“was that she, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, came out of herself a stronger woman.”

  Consuelo herself played cards. Carmen knitted comforters. The Countess plied the I Ching. G-G smoked panatelas. Alice did origami. Paranoy worked at phrasing. Ralph fasted and predicted. The remaining Secret Seven bided their time. Laverne Zuckerman and Arpenik discussed the menus they would each construct for “the Supper of the Reclaimed,” the feast of recovery. Mother St. Mawrdew told her beads. Mother Maire Dymphna told herself the truth.

  The Czgowchwz Moment drew nigh. In the center of her bursting conscience an imperative summons now to relent, accept, cease barring curing impulse, struck the chord Om: harmonic verity plucked by the unchained will. She let herself go: she came to.

  Creplaczx, when she recognized him, cried out. Jameson O’Maurigan, singing below, heard his exulting. He knelt on the ground to thank providence. Gennaio ran to the door in triumph. Dashing downstairs, he summoned Mother St. Mawrdew, abbess of the Cenacle of St. Vitus (dancing). Mother St. Mawrdew stood up, as calmly willing as St. Mawrdew Martyr must have been, to face what in her own cloistered heart she so desperately feared—yet no one had thought of that!—might prove her own undoing: another interview with that “so wayward russet vixen” she had last encountered decades ago in the postulant’s cell in the cathedral close high on the hill near the castle. There the rebel child had knelt, farcing a threadbare carpetbag with contraband scores of Salome, Wozzeck, Parsifal, and La Traviata. This was the girl she had so cherished, after effecting her smuggled entry into Prague from Dublin in memory of the soul of her own dead twin brother, Jan Motivyk...that perhaps—it nagged her as these terrors must—she had gone too far, all told.

  Somehow she walked up those fearful stairs. St. Mawrdew herself prompted. The cries of recognition—of renewal—shooting hallward from the sickroom gave her pause; yet she went up to her task. And then at length she went in.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz, embracing Merovig Creplaczx, shuddering, looked up over his shoulder. There in the doorway she saw—

  She leaped out of her bed, massed Titian hair loosed, tumbling. For an instant she stood poised, open-mouthed and breathless, her hands raised head-high in what might have seemed an attitude complected of fear, joy, lust, and interrogative wonder had it been arrested by cameras. By the time Creplaczx had turned and Gennaio had approached her side, she was already kneeling, whispering, “Ma mère! Nourrice de mon âme!”

  Mother St. Mawrdew raised up the orphan child she had named, the sudden woman who had fled her once too captive thrall (she owned it now).

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s entire Bohemian life up to a crucial point recurred. She began blurting out the story then and there.

  She had slipped over the cenacle’s cloister wall into the shadows of demimondaine Prague. (That was 1933; she had been kept there ten years.) At first she had taken up with café musicians, singing in art nouveau dance halls and art deco bars in Námes̆tí Republiky; next, with the radical avant-garde in Parizka, singing dodecaphonically in sparsely furnished attics and in the odd shabby-genteel parlor. For seven years thereafter she had lived in Celetna in common-law wedlock with her great love, an obscure patriot-poet-composer called Nepomuk Czgowchwz, bearing him a child, another Nepomuk. The Nazis came and murdered Czgowchwz in the Old Town Square, under the ancient clock opposite the T′yn Church, in the shadow of the Jan Hus monument. They took the son Nepomuk away into their youth corps, where he died of meningitis in a barrack in Silesia. She joined the Czech Resistance. She never sang for Nazis. She hid; she fasted: endured.

  She lost her true self to war. In some winter cellar in some dark wartime year she ran herself down so low a fierce fever nearly consumed her. Old peasant women nursed her. When she revived in the countryside near Brno one spring morning, the fever broken, they told her her name, which she did not remember. They could tell her nothing else...

  She had forgotten her past. She knew she could sing, she said, and she knew how old she was—and none of the rest mattered. She met a Russian soldier, a deserter, and she loved him a little. When they found him and shot him, she took a lock of his hair and his few effects—a painted icon, a letter, and his worn copy of Eugene Onegin—back across borders to a village near Leningrad, making her way as she might, and gave them to his mother. The siege of that city having been lifted, she began to sing there. One thing led to another. Befriended by Tatiana Vitrovna Gehtopfskaya, a young dramatic soprano (“I always envied Tania”), she began touring with pick-up companies, returning finally to Prague early in 1947, where she... It was going blank again.

  Now the abbess and the sometime postulant stood face to face, enthralled each one in all each the other said. They spoke—in French, in Czech, in English, in Latin—all they had never spoken. (No word of theirs went on tape.)

  Creplaczx stood listening, aghast. He would waver, then grow faint. It was all blowing up in his face.

  Merovig Creplaczx had met Mawrdew Czgowchwz in Prague at Easter 1947. He had known nothing of her origins. The name Czgowchwz... Had he heard of her lover? He racked his memory now. No: at the conservatory he had been too young, too involved in the surreptitious perusal of Messiaen, Berg, and Webern scores alone in his rooms at night, meanwhile scornfully tossing off the diurnal academic mechanics demanded by a faculty holding him ransomed as the Wunderkind of Prague. He had been too young as well to take part in the Resistance except by praying each night to St. Vitus and St. John of Nepomuk—the last prayers he was ever to utter until the Czgowchwz crisis, for Prague had passed from German into Russian bondage. When Creplaczx heard of the Czgowchwz liaison with the Russian soldier—and the Russian experience! But had she not fled Prague on account of the coup? What were those reckless politics she’d played?

  He himself had fled to the West because of Mawrdew Czgowchwz! In the winter of 1947/48, hearing her sing in the Verdi Requiem at the Church of Svatey Jakub, he had bound his musical soul to her genius for life. (What was it to live a life?) He had not flown out of Prague. At the age of twenty-one he had walked, crawled, swum, and run (along and beside that road Mozart had taken to and from Prague) to reach the West, and Czgowchwz. Now to discover her the former mistress of one of his country’s unsung martyrs; the mother of a martyred son; the mistress of an unknown Russian soldier—and all the while the daughter of two fated lovers, one Irish, one Czech. It was too much. He broke down.

  Gennaio tended to him. Mawrdew Czgowchwz comforted: “It was so long ago, Miro, and so wasting. I was another woman!” Gennaio corrected her. “There can be no such other woman. You are all there ever was. Mawrdew Czgowchwz will endure being Mawrdew Czgowchwz.”

  She went on and on and on. Creplaczx was led from the room. She was remembering more...

  The vigilants were admitted upstairs, crowding into the room while she continued telling. She had begun to live again solely in music, at first on the Russian tours with Gehtopfskaya and then most vividly in Prague, in the recitals. While doing the recitals she had studied with Frau Langsam, the great Jewess who had survived the Nazi occupation hidden under a cowl in the monastery of St. John of Nepomuk on an island in the Vltava. Then Frau Langsam had gone back to Vienna, in haste, explaining to Mawrdew Czgowchwz: “There comes now I see another putsch!” Left depleted and anxious, Mawrdew Czgowchwz had verged again on collapse. Frau Langsam had been like another mother. Another teacher. Another...but all was blank.

  Other nervous musicians had recommended a rest cure at Ewigsbaden under the Swiss mesmerist Seligst. (At this point Gennaio frowned angrily. He knew of Seligst and his methods: “Sleazy peace through denial!”) Seligst had seemed to erase, Mawrdew Czgowchwz told them, all the residual anguish churned up by scattered recollections of her past. She remembered mists
of steaming camphor, the erotic scent of patchouli on Seligst’s body, strong doses of Oblivol (Gennaio recoiled, enraged), and comforting lotus tea. She had returned to Prague strengthened. She learned of the coup to come. She gave one last private recital in Parizka. She took flying instruction. People thought her eccentric. Then she fled late one midsummer’s night.

  But where had she landed after all? She asked them: where in the West? It was quite impossible, she thought, to have flown the Atlantic.

  “Would it have been, indeed,” mused Paranoy, later on, “for Mawrdew Czgowchwz?”

  “There are limits, Paranoy!” (Percase, in dialogue).

  “No, Czgowchwz is unbounded!” (Jameson O’Maurigan, intervening unbidden).

  “To believe that is to burst!” (Gennaio, adjudicating the discussion).

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz avowed the next thing in her (then) present recall was memory’s onrush backstage before her third-act entrance as Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera. But what had she been doing then and there—and what year were they in now?—singing Isolde?! Was she not a contralto? Frau Langsam had insisted! How had she come to New York? And who were all these people? She knew Merovig Creplaczx. She knew the Countess Madge. She knew Jameson. She knew Ralph. Who were the rest—all the rest? She grew drowsy once more. Rest, yes, she thought she must rest...

  Gennaio commanded it. She lay back as if burdened and went off to sleep at once in front of everyone. Gennaio, Mother St. Mawrdew, the Countess Madge, and Merovig Creplaczx crept downstairs to piece out the patchwork consequence of the Mawrdew Czgowchwz life.

  The vigilants, following, spoke among themselves. “She knows everything now except the flight to Paris and its aftermath—in sum, everything to do with us. But are we not her whole world, her life?”

  “You are not her world, her life, her meaning or salvation,” Gennaio countered in commanding tones. “Performative utterance, her libidinal life’s task, describes her destiny. If you love her, let her rest!” He then explained to them the congruence between the Cedrioli curse’s taking effect—which he assured them it certainly had—with that time within herself, the fortieth living year, when such a curse was most surely apt to take effect. “Everything happened at once.” The interview was over.

  They let her rest: they waited patiently.

  Day upon day she knew more: flashes out of sequence darting into her whirling mind. Thus she remembered first of all the day she woke from dreaming she had sung her first F sharp in alt—to sing it on the spot, exactly so. She remembered Paris...being there. But how? Then the next night, watching the final sequence of Casablanca on the Late Show, she cried out: “I flew! I flew there—myself!” The next day Ralph came with tapes.

  From that day on (the seventh of March, the feast of Aquinas, as Mothers St. Mawrdew and Maire Dymphna duly noted), the pieces fell together at the same astonishing, insistent pace at which she had conned all her roles. Her greatest role, her won life, neared final realization. These were full days of swell joy.

  Delving, never such delving...

  The Irish and the Czech segments of the Czgowchwz life fused once and for all. Day upon day the vigilants came back to Magwyck to meet this Mawrdew Czgowchwz. She began to write—page after page of new-found English, reflective and interpretive, lucid and analytical. It read like the Book of Life.

  She set about planning her return.

  The Irish went on their march. Because Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., had never seen a New York St. Pat-rick’s Day Parade, and because “herself that was the young Maev” felt obliged to, the Countess Madge did what she had never done. She booked herself and her party into the reserved enclosure near the Plaza. That morning Mawrdew Czgowchwz returned, escorted, to her suite at the hotel. Mrs. Grudget wept, chiding: “Wotchew want forgettin’ us?!” She gathered pent-up outrage. “Barmy in the crumpet, they called yew! I gave them what-for!” Mawrdew Czgowchwz embraced her.

  The weather dealt wind: raw wind. The vast turnout, unprecedented as expected, made loud green 72-point banners on front pages all over Gotham. Even Dame Sybil was there (“Mind you, they have their just grievance”). It all moved Mawrdew Czgowchwz to remark, “They commemorate in key!” A small delegation from the Irish Embassy to the United Nations and a reporter from the Irish Echo (“From their point of view, of course,” Paranoy observed, “it was tantamount to approaching the woman who has claimed to be the surviving Romanov tsarevna”) made their presence felt in the ribboned grandstand parquet, near the Countess Madge, the Secret Seven, the other Czgowchwz vigilants, and their protégée. Not knowing quite what they wished to hear, Mawrdew Czgowchwz/Maev Cohalen met their evasive overtures in kind, causing them to murmur among themselves, “She takes after the father.” (They thought they knew what they meant.)

  She was photographed, of course. The late edition of the Post spread her across the front page, captioned: “The Return of the Native.” (The serious-minded winced.) Dolores, all agog, and routinely woozy, scribbled lachrymose tributes to “a woman you feel you know” in a center-spread rotogravure feature on the notables assembled. Many marchers took snapshots.

  His Scarlet Eminence, drafty in taffeta on the steps of the Cathedral at Fiftieth Street, that day learned a lesson in humility. (He filed it under “Secular Neglect.”)

  March winded on. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, keeping mainly to the leeward sides of streets, walked all over town, coming to know New York better than she ever had before.

  Soon April Fools’ arrived. What with tonics, food, and love, the patient Czgowchwz bloomed as jonquils do in their beds in the Plaza fountain square. She was ready for action.

  “A meaning beyond blank recognition and mournful retrospect”—Mawrdew Czgowchwz sought that meaning. Easter came. They all went along to the Cathedral. Laverne Zuckerman sang Mass; Dame Sybil played Messiaen on the organ. The Countess Madge considered. Jameson stayed home, writing.

  They celebrated the Czgowchwz birthday on Easter Day, in the right symbolic way. The Secret Seven hid eggs; the rest of the gang found them. Mawrdew Czgowchwz found her own by chance (“It was orange, naturally, and hard-boiled”—Dolores, reporting the event the way she thought it must have occurred).

  There were masses of jonquils everywhere, and hundreds of Fifth Avenue promenaders in hot pink, sporting exuberant mushroom hats, bursting into the Palm Court to offer Best Wishes and to fetch hints (“They’re as coy as carrion crows” —Cassia Verde-Dov’è).

  A public notice in the Times on Easter Monday read:

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, expressing fondest gratitude to all who have assisted her recovery, announces her return to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera on the afternoon of the 30th of April. She will offer her first Mélisande, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, singing opposite M. Achille Plonque, tenor, under the baton of Merovig Creplaczx. A song recital will be given that evening at Carnegie Hall, with Maestro Creplaczx at the piano, followed by a reception in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel (dress optional).

  It hit the afternoon editions. “A CZGOWCHWZ DOUBLE-HEADER.” “SHE’S COMING BACK A NEW STAR.” “FOR THESE TICKETS THEY COULD KILL.” “CZGOWCHWZ/COHALEN RETURNS.” Paranoy proclaimed the day “an occasion for new and splashy frocks.” Dolores and Gloria Gotham proffered their loves. The Talk of the Town the next week ran to four columns of succinct reportage on the whole saga, for all the world as if nobody in Gotham had followed it day in day out (the way they certainly had).

  The weather turned out—gorgeous (“Well, you find a better word!”—Ralph, to Percase, in argument). Mawrdew Czgowchwz now became her own woman; as before, but reinforced. She resumed her gorgeous life. But the life had a new pattern.

  Four mornings a week she drove herself in her black 1947 Packard up to Morningside Heights to consult Gennaio. Having salvaged her, he had enthralled her. She had come to realize that in order for the eventual descendent phase of her life and her career to inherit any great value at all, she owed it to herself, no less than to h
er intimates, to undertake analysis. Nor was this task a penance. She had had enough of those. Difficult, quite perilous: she knew as much. A demanding enterprise. But, at last, a salvation!

  The remainder of each week she spent immersed in the score of Pelléas et Mélisande, and in conversation with her intimates.

  Puzzling out her life, she soon came to recognize with Gennaio that there were conflicts inherent in the linkings of its several lately revealed phases: the Irish, the Czech, the Russian, the Metropolitan New Yorkish. Some identity crisis—overdue, a lag perhaps hitched to that much-bruited deference “maturity” had shown in its incursions upon the body physical—seemed definitely in the cards. How to meet and resolve such a wrestle without undue jeopardy to the operative talent—the temperament, the great voice—this was the task now set forth. These were the politics of personal endurance to command.

  Respect. She needed respect.

  Meanwhile there was Mélisande. This wraith, this specter, this évanouie creation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz took counsel: she examined her stage self. “Wraithlike” she had never been. Never had she looked spectral. As for being, or seeming, evanescent...

  It seized upon her, like a command. She had been her own self’s wraith. She had met her own self’s ghost. She had disappeared herself. She spoke to her voice, in French. That was that: she was on to Mélisande.

  The music was no problem; it was perfect, all perfect. Mary Garden had said that very thing. She would use the “fourth voice” Calvé spoke of once.

  Jameson O’Maurigan walked along the muddy shore of Belvedere Lake. He stopped to gaze at placid water. “Against extravagant skies,” he thought—but the rest he had forgotten. So: she would sing Mélisande, the role of roles he loved best. He must sit alone somewhere. He knew where now, looking at placid water. In the end seat on the horseshoe, house left, Grand Tier.