Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 17

  A monteith bowl full of slipper orchids (pale white with mauve tracings), sent in homage by the Secret Seven, was the single trophy Mawrdew Czgowchwz elected to carry back to the reception in her own hands. The rest took up all the rest. She rode to the Plaza in an open caleche, in the company of the Countess Madge, Mother St. Mawrdew, and Mother Maire Dymphna, the avant-garde clearing the way. Then the Czech nun went to pray.

  The Grand Ballroom lay waiting. Gay ornament of every sort beggared description. There hung contrived pavillon arrangements of drapery. There were in splendid evidence such borealis illuminations as had not been seen in town since the more flamboyant backstage bashes in the days of the Scandals’ and the Follies’ zenith. Cynthia Bombazine, Elegant’s fashion maven, considered some of the gewgaws and getups, the baubles and ornate paste on people now sweeping into that posh arena just too flashy. (She detected here and there “a pyorrhoeic vulgarity.”) Some she found chic.

  Dolly Farouche did her first show in the Persian Room that evening, but canceled the second. She was not about to miss out on this occasion (“Tell them to refund the fucking money!”). Margo and Bill Sampson arrived, having spent the long day at the Metropolitan and at Carnegie. Margo had simply canceled her matinee and evening performances of Some Are Born, thereby causing a stir on the Rialto.

  There was singing and dancing. The Countess Madge, who had always celebrated the first of May, the Feast of Beltane, at Magwyck, had the time of her life at the Plaza.

  The big participation dance was the Madison. Trixie Gilhooley, footless, found it a drag. The songs, so many and various, included: G-G’s set of torchy numbers, “The Man I Love,” “Why Was I Born?,” “The Right Time,” and “He Was Too Good to Me,” accompanied by a combo featuring Consuelo Gilligan blowing a mournful alto saxophone; Dolly Farouche and Trixie Gilhooley duetting in “Sisters,” “Friendship,” “A Couple of Swells,” and “Anything You Can Do”; Laverne Zuckerman—moaning low—in renditions of “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “I Cried for You,” “Stardust,” and “As Time Goes By” (the way she once had sung in neighborhood cabaret on Jamaica Avenue); the Countess Madge and Jameson wailing away in “Make Believe,” “You’re Just in Love,” “If I Loved You,” and “Strange Music.” Cassia sang “Lazy Afternoon,” “Suddenly” (stunningly), “Life upon the Wicked Stage,” and “Get out of Town.” Consuelo sang “When Love Beckons on Fifty-second Street,” “I Happen to Like New York,” “It’s a Wishing World,” and “My Old Flame.” Mother Maire Dymphna sang—as she had done forty years since—“A Little of What Y’Fancy Does Y’Good,” “A Long Way from Tipperary,” “Faery Song” from The Immortal Hour, and an astonishing rendition of Musetta’s Waltz Song, in perfect Italian.

  Dame Sybil played four evening ragas on the sitar. Pierrot and Carmen electrified the place with their apache-dance party turn, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Ralph and Alice did an exhibition jitterbug, complete with a Jersey Bounce variation. Paranoy squired Consuelo Gilligan across the floor in a slick peabody, the pair executing deft box turns. Gloria Gotham sang “Once in a While.” Dolores sang “Mean to Me” and then passed out. The remaining Secret Seven did a precision tap routine to “Me and My Shadow.”

  Closing down the carnival in yet another dizzy-vivid dawn, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, having protested (vainly), sang (perfectly) “Love for Sale,” “Miss Otis Regrets,” “Do I Love You?,” and “Glitter and Be Gay.”

  That fete would be written about and written about, to excess. (Ralph said it all, finally: “It’s too much to remember!”)

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz retired. Everybody else went home. A fine May Day blossomed in New York.

  7

  THE HEROIC conduct of life is absolute.

  The mystery of character, destiny, and worth, pondered by Paranoy in Mawrdew Czgowchwz: Beyond the Contours of Legend, remained for some time shrouded in the murk churned up by the illative-convective forces of radical gossip, compounded of veiled opinion, random surmise, claimed cognizance, and downright mendacity. (There was far too much to tell.)

  The watchword was momentum. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, on the Tuesday following the Pelléas et Mélisande/Carnegie Recital syzygy comeback, broadcast with Paranoy over WCZG. Four separate projects were announced that evening:

  A new music drama to be composed for Czgowchwz by Merovig Creplaczx, his first such work.

  The American première of a forgotten masterpiece, recently unearthed (“Tablowe found the thing up in Rutland. The Garden won’t touch it. No spunk!”—Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, to Merovig Creplaczx), Handel’s Oberon and Titania (1717), libretto by Colley Cibber, after Shakespeare. This opulent piece would be mounted outdoors in Central Park by Valerio Vortice for the summer solstice of the following year. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Laverne Zuckerman would alternate the principals.

  A television special, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz at Random,” to be telecast on the upcoming Midsummer Night.

  A film, Pilgrim Soul, to be scripted by Jameson O’Maurigan, in which Mawrdew Czgowchwz would make her screen debut playing her own mother, under the pantheon director Orphrey Whither (The Day That Dawns, The Night of the End of Time, Ominous).

  The cinematic enterprise was trumpeted to the industry the next week on the front page of Variety: CZGOWCHWZ CZECHS INTO PIX. A headline first for the oltrano diva.

  Her work with Gennaio progressed entirely surely.

  Fixated, enslaved waking and sleeping, ceaselessly composing a music drama for the woman he desired more than he desired his life, his genius, his fame, or his sanity, Creplaczx had already gone into a kind of febrile trance, which Paranoy described as “close on to catatonic.”

  Arpenik began arriving at Bank Street daily with provisions: delicately brewed infusions whose varied herbal essences were meant to nourish the alchemic gestation of telling musical subjects; and more substantial solid-food preparations, strong on cardamom, thyme, garlic, and fresh tarragon, wrapped in vine leaves and in silken envelopes of sheerest pastry; quantities of raw spinach and fresh goat’s-milk cheese; bowls of stewed lamb, onions, and prunes; ramekins of bulgur pilafs and eggplant sautés; pots of perfect madzoon—all these intended to nourish the orchestration.

  The composer’s own Czech text, once translated by Mawrdew Czgowchwz, would be set into English blank verse by Jameson O’Maurigan, certain intermediary editorial tasks to be assumed by the able and ever-willing Tangent Percase. The production of the unnamed work, under the titular supervision of the Secret Seven and the Countess Madge, operating for the Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust (CELT), was entrusted to Percase, and its funding to the double agency of the poet-dramatist Isosceles Litotes and his sister, the sculptor Calypso Litotes-Stein, Jonathan’s sister-in-law. This team succeeded in raising $43,731.34 in pledges on a tour of the country, exhibiting and reading, respectively, Calypso’s sheer crystal object “In Terms of Mawrdew Czgowchwz” (a luminous ellipse through the center of which was worked a dazzling, symbolic emerald vein), and Isosceles’ elaborate and stately ode “Mawrdew Czgowchwz: Salvage Muse.”

  Valerio Vortice refused payment for undertaking the design and direction of the work, announcing, “Prezzo di moneta? Onorario? No. Per l’amore!”

  The vexing question of a theater arose (“But where, carissimi, under the big top?”—Czgowchwz, to the Secret Seven and the Countess Madge one lazy afternoon). Central Park was suggested, but flatly dismissed by Creplaczx without any explanation. The contract to begin shooting Pilgrim Soul in October had been signed. Heads came together in séance after séance until out of the blue that majestic scheme that created a whole new extravagant dimension in the realm of philanthropic legend was announced. Plans were made, and wheels did turn...

  The special on Midsummer Night glorified prime time, its wise novelty the taunting absence of the singing Czgowchwz. For one stunning hour the living, personal Mawrdew Czgowchwz, displayed as she is in life, in perfect relation to that city she had come to cherish, enchanted the nation. Segments shot at Cashe
l Gueza, at Arpenik’s, at the Plaza, at the Old Metropolitan, in the Park, at Magwyck, on St. Marks Place—here and there—captured the “progresses at liberty” (Percase) of the restored diva.

  It was, however, some weeks before the telecast, more weeks before the majestic scheme solving the problem of the theater in which to mount Creplaczx’s music drama went into effect, months before the filming of Pilgrim Soul, and more than a year before the Central Park Handel première that fate at long last dealt Mawrdew Czgowchwz her (over) due—a life as distinct from a career.

  The lady had begun to prepare Oberon. To sing him, to become him: an intricate business. Her approach to Titania presented no problem (“an unambiguous libidinous hoyden”), but she must conceive both roles in order to meet with Laverne and exchange notions. She must capture the scheming Fairy King. She decided she must consult someone. Sybilla.

  They worked through the score together one afternoon at Magwyck. Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt a strange, untoward uneasiness. She demanded to know what was wrong. Dame Sybil decreed bluntly: “My darling, you are making him just too butch!”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz guffawed in lusty, frank agreement. “Well, toots, what’s a girl to do?”

  Dame Sybil thought it all through, methodically. The correct method was, of course, most likely syllogistic, but where to roam to ferret the premises? It was indeed a demanding perplex. Then one afternoon, playing Poulenc’s “Mouvements Perpétuels,” she felt it hit her between the ears. Of course! It was so boldly simple! Sybil dashed over to the Plaza. She and Czgowchwz took afternoon cocktails together. The Englishwoman outlined her practical, volatile scheme.

  “My darling, there is a boy possessed of a voice of elfin majesty. He arrives tomorrow to debut Tuesday night. The voice! The voice! Not more than a scattering of us have heard him. He is the latest Evangeline Tablowe protégé. He is to sing Monteverdi, Byrd, Dowland, and something of Mozart’s, I can’t discover what. I haven’t heard a word of advance publicity on Fifty-seventh Street—other than the brochure on the ensemble—which I find ominous.”

  “Ominous! I’m curious.”

  “Yes. Of course, I feel the omens entirely positive, the portents nervously appetizing. Ah, but then, you see, I’ve heard him!”

  “You have some scheme. That’s quite clear.”

  “Now just listen to me, my darling. The voice contains something of the spattered dazzle of pale moonlight on spreading, undulating glimpses of a worried sea. It is the voice of silver nightshade. And, oh yes—he’s a certified warlock.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz leaned forward. “Then one must go to hear him.”

  So fate dealt that on the Whit Tuesday of that original year of her salvaged life, Mawrdew Czgowchwz met her match in Jacob Beltane, oltrano.

  When at Town Hall she opened the program of the Aion Music Consort to read “Jacob Beltane, oltrano,” she flushed scarlet. (It was trite, but it was true.) Caught unguarded, she felt menaced and compromised. Then the young oltrano began to sing...

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz had in her time on this earth heard all the important and spectacular voices of the century, either in the (as it were) flesh or as recorded on cylinder, disc, and tape for (as it may be) posterity. This time she heard Mercury in song. Horripilation occurred, that sensation of being utterly vanquished. The Byrd was predictably dulcet, the Dowland downright unearthly, the Monteverdi seraphic, and the Mozart—Idamante’s arias “Non ho colpa” and “No, la morte,” sung in the intended notation for “the fourth voice”—detonated a furore somewhat less in scale but altogether equal in hysterical intensity to that raised when Mawrdew Czgowchwz sang the Erwartung at her debut, at Carnegie Hall.

  The Secret Seven made immediate, decisive plans. Paranoy proclaimed triumph in the frantic lobby. Creplaczx, hauled out of sulking, restless seclusion by Percase, had listened incredulously and had panicked, stunned out of torpor into a state of exaltation, lust, outrage, and shame, as if life were again at stake. In the airtight silence just before the explosion of thunderous applause, he could be seen by curious hookers lounging outside the Hotel Diplomat, and by first-nighters at the Henry Miller, lunging into a taxi to speed off back down to lower Bank Street—to compose. Mawrdew Czgowchwz knew exactly what had happened, to herself as well as to Creplaczx, to the Secret Seven as well as to the town, the night of that sorcerer’s debut at Town Hall. She told herself: “This is invincible love.”

  The curious hookers outside the Hotel Diplomat and the swank first-nighters at the Henry Miller—these fatigued and rather cranky for having been so far obliged in the interests of what they considered chic form to sit through two of the three acts of Apart from Anything Else, the latest Thalia Bridgewood vehicle, a whimsical, conversational nothing not destined to be fondly recalled on the Rialto—grew collectively amazed at the uproar across the street. They wondered jealously what they were missing. Then Mawrdew Czgowchwz herself appeared, bounding from the auditorium, evidently in some sort of a daze—had she come unstrung again, they wondered—and, surrounded by her stalwarts, similarly struck, led them (the very way her mother, Maev Cohalen, had once in 1916 led a band of roaring Fenians from her lecture at the Gaiety Theatre to Jackie Farrell’s pub in the back alley off Grafton Street) around to hail young Jacob Beltane, oltrano indeed!

  Jacob Beltane stood trembling, Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s brief note clutched in hand, the note of a passionate admirer cordially requesting an interview at his convenience. It was now suddenly far less a question of “his convenience” than of his careening joy. He must contrive to sustain some control. Having taken the appalling risk of announcing himself as “oltrano,” he could not quite believe how that risk had inflamed his singing, how that risk had summoned exalted success. He had leaped beyond himself, there to... He gathered himself to himself, to admit...

  Oltrano faced oltrano: singing woman/singing man. (Jameson O’Maurigan saw it happen, like the silent shriek of a fateful recognition scene, and disappeared from town for weeks, retreating, like Tristan felled, up to Jonathan and Lavinia’s beach house at Neaport on the island of Manitoy.)

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane became friends. They took a loft. Their lives became the one same life. Jacob Beltane began teaching Mawrdew Czgowchwz everything he had so far realized about Oberon—almost more than she was able to take in, but more than enough to assure her a success. All the same while Mawrdew Czgowchwz commenced teaching Jacob Beltane everything she had realized about musicry, a project to be considered in terms of the years of their lives rather than in terms of the weeks or months of Jacob’s sojourn in New York. They began to scheme their friendly years. Love’s intelligence, gathered at leisure, wedded them.

  Creplaczx composed in silence, incessantly, incommunicado. He refused Arpenik’s food, embracing a diet of Vichy water, his own prune crepes, cabbage boiled in sea-salt water, and pure grain alcohol flavored with orange juice.

  Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, Cassia Verde-Dov’è, Consuelo Gilligan (done up proud in the New Look), and Gaia della Gueza convened once again at the old New Weston for another tactical hat-lunch. A keen observer must discern from the severe angles at which the four hats were worn in that salle that afternoon that this party could not be considered composite merely of four modish dames tumbling into cocktails while taking a casual breather from a busy Tuesday ransack of the better shops. They each ordered the same cocktail, an oltrano, for this was a serious moment in a turbulent time.

  Cassia pounced, demanding. “Allora, Sybil, as the architectrix of this farrago perhaps you are privy to where that lofty love nest all Gotham babbles about—to the virtual exclusion of all other constructive speculation—is perched. I needn’t, I suppose, vow to the several avenging furies and to the sacred muses nine not to spill the chick-peas to Dolores!”

  Consuelo sat open-mouthed. “V-D, that is more mouth out of you at a single clip than anyone has heard since the election of 1940. You care!”

  Cassia snorted, insisting.

  G-G toasted empt
y space. “I think the boy sounds fucking divine!”

  “I can’t say,” Cassia snorted on. “Unhappily I wasn’t there and Mawrdew snatched him straight out of circulation. I hear she actually seized him—as if he were just that hat. As I say, I wasn’t there. I was actually across the street, at that god-awful comedy at the Miller—merely out of loyalty. I did witness the Czgowchwz attack, however. She looked like Phèdre lunging, fierce. Enfin, La Farewell, how’s about some straight answers to some direct, simple questions? First off, where is that love nest? Next, what is this paragon and how does he make his noise? I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but from what sly gossips have certified to me—well, from what I’ve heard, I hear most of the audience spent most of the evening looking—speculatively—at the creature’s crotch!”

  (A creature less than a lady, eavesdropping from an adjacent table, lost control, choking convulsively on a morsel of white truffle.)

  Consuelo felt offended, implicated. “Why not go on talk shows, V-D. Then at least the rest of us would be spared the chagrin of being exposed for what we probably at all events are—vicious calumniating old bags!”

  “Ladies, ladies, the cocktails!” Sybil composed her reply. “Since you come straight to the usual vulgar query—unfortunate word—that I’m sure persons of the ilk of Dolores and Dolly Farouche and Gloria Gotham and that Bergamot item are cackling about in innuendo all over town, Jacob Beltane is wholly, entirely a man!”

  G-G toasted empty space. “You always could take the measure of a man, toots.”

  “Indeed,” Cassia mewed, “head to foot, shoulder to shoulder, stem to stern, and elsewhere...”

  “You are a silly old bitch, Cass!”