Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  Both Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., and Mother St. Mawrdew of the Cenacle of St. Vitus, their offices discharged, were of a mind to return home to their respective cloisters. Not one soul would hear of it. They were prevailed upon, therefore, to stay on as honored guests of the diocese in order to be present at those very occasions they had done everything to...occasion: the matinee of Pelléas et Mélisande and the recital at Carnegie Hall. (As it happened, Mother Maire Dymphna went off with Paranoy, Creplaczx, and Percase to the bash at the Plaza as well, and stayed up, missing matins and lauds; but Mother St. Mawrdew retired with her sisters just before midnight.)

  Laverne Zuckerman triumphed as Amneris. “I never thought of her that way!” Mawrdew Czgowchwz avowed next day at lunch. (She had caught the performance from the wings, skulking in through the Executive Office during the “Celeste Aïda” and leaving by way of that same tunnel after the Judgment Scene.) “How clever you are, Laverne. I think I’ll give up the role!” Which she did do, from that out.

  Next on the agenda came the business of programming the recital. Seeking to avoid that circumstance Laverne Zuc-kerman complained of in song recitals—“A schtickele this, a schtickele that”—Mawrdew Czgowchwz puzzled out a theme. Merovig Creplaczx helped her. Together they devised, over a long, wet weekend on Bank Street, their sequence, the theme of which would be: Revelation.

  The uneventful stretch between the Zuckerman Amneris and the Czgowchwz Mélisande weakened not a few of the staunchest resolves. Torpor, “the canker in that lovely rose, ardour” (Percase), spread fast. It was too soon for the beach. Maytime in Manhattan seemed almost too distant to consider. “The concept of the patient fortnight,” declared Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, preparing her own program for her May 7 harpsichord recital in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, “is one the Yanks—and most especially the New Yorkers—might well attempt considering.”

  The weather did this and that. They all leafed through magazines. They told one another lies.

  There were scandals in the news. Students thought better of work. Box offices bemoaned a general slack intake. The theater hit a new low. A building was erected. All in all it was all...less. There were complaints in columns.

  Recipes stopped turning out. Television disgorged muck. In the Sunday press the squeamish were warned off certain “rebarbative” exhibits in downtown galleries (“The Squeamish! Who are they, a sect?”—Paranoy). People who knew better pretended to know the worst. CinemaScope wrecked pictures. The Pope saw Christ come and go.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz decided. There was but one thing to do. Mélisande must be done blond. She had never in her life done anything like it, and she didn’t quite know how to do it now. She rang up the Countess Madge. “Madge, darling, Mawrdew. Listen...”

  Rehearsals for the Pelléas et Mélisande commenced the following week. At every rehearsal, from those in the piano studio on “the roof” to those onstage in full costume, Mawrdew Czgowchwz appeared sporting a gray jersey turban, borrowed from Rhoe, which she would indicate she wished not to remove. In the dress-rehearsal tower scene, Plonque felt very foolish grasping, plying, fingering empty air, but he understood his colleague’s scheme, as did Creplaczx, the Secret Seven, the Countess Madge, and Dame Sybil, among those in attendance.

  Certain snide recusant layabouts present at that dress rehearsal passed it about town that “la cantatrice chauve” was warming up the interpretation of her career. “Mélisande—bald as a bean, dearie—symbolic!” Others decreed viciously: “It’s the illness, don’tcha know. The Czgowchwz hair fell out! Well, the role for her to try next is Elisabetta d’Inghilterra. Let’s get Neri back to do the Maria Stuarda.” Cackle, cackle, yakkety, yakkety...

  “What’s she got this time up her sleeve, so t’ speak,” they mumbled to one another in the pit, trying meanwhile, crankily, to cope with Creplaczx’s perfectionist demands in the playing of Debussy’s radical harmonies and complex textures, and wishing among themselves that Mawrdew Czgowchwz had chosen something trashy and uncomplicated to come back in, like Salome or Tosca, like Cavalleria or Gioconda.

  It was on the Thursday before the performance, the day before the dress rehearsal, that Morgana Neri, having abandoned any notion of teaching in New Jersey, sailed away at noon on the Andrea Doria—“Per sempre”—carting off back to Catania the goods and chattels, trophies and mementos of an almost four-decade New York career. Squat among her souvenirs, she presided, giving solace and benediction to dozens of desolate “beati.” These swore to the last their eternal fidelity and their several intentions of following her one day before the end of time. Old Mary Cedrioli, in Creedmoor, knew nothing. A sedate patient, she would variously claim to be Ulrica the witch, Mary Magdalen, the Virgin Mary, or Morgana Neri. She was, in her own way, saved.

  On the Friday of the dress rehearsal Dolores ran an entire column paralleling her reading of the story of Mélisande with her understanding of the true story of Mawrdew Czgowchwz (“That woman gives herself airs!”—Dame Sybil, snapping, at lunch).

  Then it turned to Saturday. An immense, cheering crowd saw Mawrdew Czgowchwz pull up at the Metropolitan’s stage door in her black 1947 Packard, wearing Rhoe’s turban and an orange faille coat. She smiled, but she said nothing (“Czgowchwz as the Cheshire Cat!”—Percase). The uproar was amazing. Rhoe took the afternoon off. She would sit in the Secret Seven’s box, up front. She felt a part of it all.

  No sooner had the curtain gone up on the first scene—in the dreamworld forest, somewhere elsewhere—than the paling light, betraying Maeterlinck-Debussy’s weeping soul child at the phrase

  struck shivering chords deep in thousands of perceptive souls. With a single exception, Cio-Cio-San, Mawrdew Czgowchwz had sung every role she had ever sung wearing her own hair. She was doing so again, but on this occasion, for the first time, that hair, now Mélisande’s (“the most fully realized physical attribute in music drama”—Paranoy), was, as if it had always been, so perfect a light translucent gold as to transmogrify the familiar Czgowchwz figure it enclosed, creating the illusion of a tentative presence, so subtly volatile, so transparent in the flesh as might, upon uttering a single piercing, parting phrase, disjoin itself, disperse into force-field opposing tensions, and dissolve in air as tones dissolve in chords.

  “Big deal, she’s a bottle blonde!” the snide recusant lay-abouts told one another in the lobby, the while the rest of the audience, having surrendered space and time and any lurking bargain certainties for...something else, assented to a greater Czgowchwz truth.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz, in the tower, sang Mélisande’s ballade in such a crystal timbre as seemed never to have been heard. Achille Plonque, enmeshed for the first time in its fragrant texture, found Mélisande’s gold hair so silkily tantalizing he commenced singing clarion fortissimo, creating a critical stir (“Pelléas into Siegfried?!”). The Czgowchwz voice (“not projected, more infused”—Percase) charted immense distances at the one and the same time it invited intimate proximity, allowing revelation. “It’s as if we’ve heard this before!” they exclaimed. They were experiencing that wordless...

  “The genius of the woman!” They said it all all again.

  The broadcast that afternoon was heard around the world. At Covent Garden, where they were giving Swan Lake, they drew so few customers they gave up ripping tickets and left the doors wide open, causing draughts. As it was, the prima ballerina, Fandole, pleading “naughty split tendons, darlings,” canceled the performance to go up to a séance at the Suffolk home of Dame Evangeline Tablowe—the former prima donna assoluta of Britain—to listen to Pelléas et Mélisande relayed from New York.

  Present as well at that séance at Tablowe Court, Jacob Beltane, countertenor, sat waiting for the broadcast to begin as if he were waiting to be born. He had stood in queues at Covent Garden time after time, for each Mawrdew Czgowchwz appearance. He loved her—as a singer. When she had fallen ill, he had fasted. He had consulted his wise grandmother, the white Suffolk witch, Maeve Bel
tane, considering he might be able through her agency to assist Czgowchwz anonymously. He remembered he had embraced her once. After a song recital at the Wigmore Hall, he had leaped onto the stage and taken her, for a split instant, into his arms. That precious contact he had thought contract enough for his attempt to help cure her. But Maeve Beltane, gazing into the fire, had told him, “She is in the proper hands.” A week later Maeve Beltane had died.

  While listening to the Pelléas et Mélisande, silently singing both the roles, Jacob Beltane came to the realization: “I am a true oltrano as well.”

  He must meet Mawrdew Czgowchwz. He was scheduled to go to New York for the first time in his life to sing at Town Hall with the Aion Music Consort in late May. He had a friend there waiting: Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh. He felt something of moment must occur.

  In Paris the vast amphitheater of the Palais de Chaillot became the scene of a most extraordinary spectacle pur. A full house sat gazing at a dim-lit, misty, empty stage the while the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Pelléas et Mélisande, relayed and subtly amplified by ORTF, invested voided space with the aerial, mystic, Mawrdew Czgowchwz presence. When it ended they went wild. They raced pell-mell to their telephones to cable hundreds of testimonial extravagances. (“La vérité, c’est Czgowchwz!”) They sat up all night at La Coupole, avowing, never allowing themselves to forget that Providence had landed her on the Champs-Elysées to begin her Western career.

  In certain outposts in the Near East, in Persia, in the Far East, and in Hawaii, where it was “either the day before or the day after, I never can remember” (Mawrdew Czgowchwz), many who had encountered the diva in their respective alien or native Occident—on trips abroad or visits home—donned earphones to plug in to what became that day this weary globe’s ultimate instance of radiophonic musicry.

  So it was that she came back.

  Back in New York the uproar at the final curtain was at once muted to whispers by Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s single solo curtain call. Arms raised as if in apprehensive surrender, head tilting back and to the left (house right) in majestic supplication, she backed away from the ovation, warding off cheering applause (“Blondes are fundamentally recessive—it’s a fact!”—Percase). She bowed, once she inclined her head; but there was a telltale quality in the way she lifted her arms, a eurythmic message that said: “That will do, that is entirely enough!” All over the world listeners joining in halted amazed—and in some instances disconcerted (especially in Italy, in Spain, in Ukraine, and in Prague)—by the sudden cessation of commotion. Max Crux, the Metropolitan Opera radio network announcer, who had set forth the plot, picturized the sets and costumes, and recounted the Czgowchwz recovery during each of the intermissions, tried his level best to explain to the world what was going on in the opera house. He accomplished it quite well. In his familiar charming hushed New Yorkese whisper he announced: “This audience, ladies and gentlemen, is so overcome, they are weak. Men are weeping openly sitting next to women. A precious moment in artistic time is arching. Its falling—let us not say its dying—phase is upon us now. We are wrapt in history!” It was perhaps only in Paris that they fully understood. “Elle est maintenant le silence. C’est ça,” they reasoned, flawlessly.

  Jameson O’Maurigan couldn’t applaud. The mystery of the soul. His agnostic heart pounded. (What was this doing to him?) He could see from his seat Jonathan in his seat sitting immobile. Jonathan, immobile, thought of Novalis, of something he had memorized at school: “Sonst tanzte ich gern; jetz denke ich lieber nach der Musik.” Aesthetic notions danced across his brainpan.

  Jameson had known before anyone had what Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt when it was over. He left the theater without saying anything. He went off to the public library, the Chelsea branch, to write letters to Mawrdew Czgowchwz and to himself, and dropped them at the Old Chelsea P.O. They read:

  Dearest Madame, You, Self!

  Perfection is uneasy in Get a grip on—what? On Self.

  this scheming world. Do please So read this again and then

  proceed cautiously. again. Remember Pelléas was

  Mélisande, you realize, murdered for a truth. Go sit

  died for a truth. Mawrdew down some place and write

  Czgowchwz must live valiant truthfully.

  for one. Yours, whilst this machine

  Yours always, is to him...

  Jameson O’M. Jameson O’M.

  Rhoe wept and wept. “I never in my whole life heard anything so real!” The Secret Seven comforted her. The Countess Madge, Cassia Verde-Dov’è, Gaia della Gueza, Trixie Gilhooley, Paranoy, and Percase took the air. Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, in the powder room at Sherry’s, dried her tears, reapplied her basic afternoon makeup, lit a du Maurier, sipped a little sloe gin on the rocks, and sat down. Suddenly a name flashed into her head. A certain familiar had been eerily present. But how could that have been so? The familiar person was yet in England. Pause, to set this muddle in precise... It was the voice—the fourth voice! It came to her inner ear. The voice of Mawrdew Czgowchwz / the voice of the English familiar. Those voices were congruent! They must meet; she would command it. That shy, lovely, tall, angelic, feral boy.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz drove herself straight back to the Plaza. She took cocktails at her leisure, then ate an avocado stuffed with fresh Maryland crab dressed with tarragon vinegar, washed down with a nice ’47 Pouilly. She took all the vitamins. Then she sat down at her window.

  At 7 p.m. New York time, that same wizard stylist—Cégeste—who had been sent by the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier to make Mawrdew Czgowchwz in one short hour such an eventful blonde arrived at the Plaza to reinstall her former Titian self. (This chemistry was secret.) He accomplished his task and left for Carnegie Hall.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt herself. She felt she was back in performing stride. In her new recital gown—another “knockout” Framboise, gamboge and gray organza—she stood at the long alcove mirror being fussed over by Mrs. Grudget, marveling at the science that had restored her: Gennaio’s/ Cégeste’s/Framboise’s/the Others’. “If you’re going to be a woman, be a strong woman!” she murmured, echoing something Mother Maire Dymphna had recalled Great Flaming Maev Cohalen murmuring in her fatal confinement forty years before.

  Pèlerin Deslieux had arrived to escort her to Carnegie Hall. They would walk over together. “There’s a queue from here to there!” he told her. Thousands of beaming New Yorkers, having heard the Pelléas et Mélisande broadcast, had come out into that fine spring evening, bringing little bunches of flowers with them, bringing Bohemian crepes, bringing miniature needlework masterpieces and what not else. They stood massed in a cordon that stretched from the Plaza fountain, down Fifth Avenue, and west across Fifty-seventh Street all the way to Carnegie Hall, then around Seventh Avenue to the Fifty-sixth Street artists’ entrance.

  “You miscalculated, ma chère,” he whispered warmly as she swept past him to the window. “You should have taken Madison Square Garden.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz hummed a G and smiled. “How amazingly New York!”

  Slipping into a dove-gray silk-velvet opera cloak, wisely lent her by Consuelo Gilligan, pulling on her black silk-velvet evening gloves—a gift from the Countess Madge—she checked her silk pull-string purse for that exquisite gold pen the Secret Seven had given her years ago for a first gift (declaring “You’ll be needing this, Madame”). She said, “Cher Pique, would you phone ahead? I think I am going to be a trifle late.”

  That she was, for certain fact. By the time she had “run the gantlet,” signing pictures, programs, books, and odd scraps of paper (“Some day if she’s not more careful,” Cassia objected, grimacing, “she’s going to have some insane contract or some smart blank check slipped under her all too willing hand!”), it was well past ten o’clock. But nobody seemed to mind.

  Those ardent Czgowchwz dévots who had managed no tickets for Carnegie Hall would go back to their homes to tune in WCZG and listen. (That was why she took her time.) Crepla
czx waited in the wings. Applause and cheering rebounded outside in Fifty-seventh Street—closed to ordinary traffic between Seventh Avenue and Sixth—where a multitude waited to hear the recital monitored by loudspeakers on strategically positioned trucks.

  The program heard that evening (encores carefully listed by Paranoy) was:

  Du bist die Ruh

  Im Abendrot

  Im Frühling

  Der Einsame

  Auf dem See

  An den Mond

  An die Musik Schubert

  Sea Pictures Elgar

  Les Illuminations Britten

  Poèmes pour mi Messiaen

  Encores

  Oh, Had I Jubal’s Lyre Handel

  Cançion de cuna para dormir

  a un negrito

  Montsalvatge

  Vocalise Creplaczx

  Plaisir d’amour Anon.

  (INTERMISSION)

  Nuits d’été Berlioz

  Seven Early Songs Berg

  The Nursery Mussorgsky

  Encores

  Der Erlkönig Schubert

  Kennst du das Land Wolf

  Aus den Hebräischen Gesängen Schumann

  Breit’ über mein Haupt Strauss

  Die Mainacht Brahms

  Marietta’s Lied (“Glück das mir verblieb”),

  from Die Tote Stadt Korngold

  L’Invitation au voyage Duparc

  Chanson d’amour Fauré

  Claire de lune Fauré

  Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye Porter

  Summertime Gershwin

  Songs My Mother Taught Me (in Czech) Dvořák

  My Own Sweet Child in the West

  (in Hibernian Gaelic) Anon.

  The recital was recorded live, as well as taped by many everywhere. Applause, mounting, cascaded. Mawrdew Czgowchwz permitted every ovation. Bouquets past counting fell about the platform. “A radiant enchantress” (Francobolli) bewitched a willing audience. There were to be no more doubts.