Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  Gaia della Gueza’s chair, “la sedia Czgowchwz,” was set in the Palm Court. It was of teak and enamel under a canopy of aureate silk. Cordial intimates sat on divans taking ritual tea in Moravian crystal tumblers, an elegant horde nibbling salmon and charlotte russe, awaiting the lady of the day, who arrived at noon in winter-white linen and sheared beaver, her hair in twists, fringes, guiches, and bangs, all titian flame and fabulously wrought.

  Racks of spring lamb were turning over Sherry’s coals, while pots of sour cream and quantities of pilaf sat chilling and steaming respectively. Casks of Sherry’s sherry were tapped as the early uglies staggered in to lunch on the Guild. Meanwhile, stuffed derma and pastrami washed down with Cel-Ray tonic and seltzer sustained the waiting standees at the long tables of the cafeteria across the street from the old dingy Brewery on Broadway.

  Czgowchwz mounted her chair; the selected bearers took their positions. Many fans charged through the revolving doors, revolving again and frantically spilling out and down the white-marble steps. The Irish straggled on, oblivious. Czgowchwz was carried to the Met in G-G’s chair.

  Giddy multitudes jammed Bill’s Bar to watch the televised press conference Czgowchwz had scheduled for after lunch, on the sidewalk with the standees. Only the anticipation of her next great contrivance mattered; the sole virtue was attendance. Feeling was running high among the outlandish, who had arrived from fastnesses everywhere by turnpike, railroad, air, sea, canal, and on foot to storm the heavy doors and stand guard on the fire escapes hanging over the Yankee Renaissance façades on Thirty-ninth and Fortieth streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue. (The Executive Office was still barricaded day and night.) Police lines—composed entirely of Mott and Mulberry Street Italian rookies humming this or that Verdi/Bellini/Puccini/Ponchielli/Mascagni/ Leoncavallo/dalla Piccola tune, glad to a man to be relieved of the Fifth Avenue detail—stood their silent watch and ward in a gay trapezoidal cordon. Protest did not occur.

  In the Executive Office the gray eminence, the spider of the Escorial come again, squatted immobile, touching no food, splenetic, belching malodorously, breaking ill winds. Beneath the window the fans jeered encamped, while, within, the muted strains of Ein Heldenleben beat against the of-fice panes and, rebounding, froze into paranoid anguish. All outdoors were intent on cramming Czgowchwzin, on storing memories of her against the day of wrath. Time howled at the gates in the guise of a near-cyclone from Hoboken; the gates held. Paranoy, in The Czgowchwz Monthly Newsletter, declared: “Magody, lysody, hilarody, simody, travesty, mimicry, and mad chicane scatter broadcast on the pavement as Czgowchwz goes before the eyes and ears of the world in nervous Pathé urgency.”

  The Secret Seven were on edge. Drinking mulled mead and neat Irish whiskey at the Countess Madge’s druidic hearthside, they witnessed the inwrought splendor of the Czgowchwz curbside interview. Ralph, careening about the oval parlor, ranted, “I can’t believe her! I can’t be-lieeve her!... So I won’t.” Thrust roughly into an overstuffed fauteuil, he lapsed into stunned cataleptic attitudes, gazing into the burning turf, listening absently to the frankly sexual moan of the March wind in the tall sonoric chimney. That same wind had all but blown Czgowchwz out of her baroque sedan at Forty-second Street outside the Crossroads Café. She stood now center-screen, flamboyant in disarray, her hair fallen apart in spiral cascades now blowing over her face like something out of the last reel of A Stolen Life. Closing the interview, summing up, hinting at the future, all the while she welcomed destiny’s career in front of untold numbers through the magical agency of video. Silence blew whispers into forsaken hollow corners all over Gotham as she, in piquant, radiant French, mused: “Je suis encore tout étourdie. Dans ce carrosse d’une vie, c’est mon premier voyage!” The cameras withdrew; the screens all over town went dark or refocused to pick up the last wan brigades of reeling Irish on Fifth Avenue. Ralph, overheated, overcome, sat there murmuring, “Could she be?”

  It became a question of taste, of what to eschew, of how rare to distill, of a taxing if delicious épluchage. In the preserving of certains, day by day, meticulous, fanatic care was of the essence. The Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier said it well: “As the pearl is achieved through the stimulus of finely comminuted particles of silicon and is destined to be worn about the soignée necks of some of the better carcasses in town, we take Czgowchwz out of the thrall of time and cultivate a legend.” Czgowchwz was all in all, and all the while, a person to be preserved.

  A weary odd-thousand maundered in the weirdish twilight outside the opera house after the Czgowchwz interview. Most were ticket holders and/or habitués—hangers-on—used to nothing but waiting, who could not go anywhere else. Yet they lacked that perfection of unity, atonement. They wrangled; they split into factions; they dished. They demonstrated the truth of what Czgowchwz herself had said (in English), watching them one afternoon during her first season: “Two tents don’t make a camp; at least, not any two tents.” They carried on.

  The Irish had retired to Yorkville’s several cellar watering holes. Alice, feeling in her fertile soul that it had turned suddenly fine and mild (a mirage), rushed the season in singular fashion. As Czgowchwz was carried back to the Plaza in the wake of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, she, Alice, fled the Countess’s, sped into Max Schling’s to buy more baskets of jonquils, and danced in the vanguard of the procession singing the whole of “Printemps qui commence” several times through and finishing off with snatches of the Flower Duet and “Alla stagion dei fior.” Mad others had cleaned out several Woolworths’ stocks of orange-crepe-paper streamers and were covering the length of the green line up Fifth Avenue to the Plaza in this, the emblematic Czgowchwz color. At Fiftieth Street His Scarlet Eminence, doting casually on acolytes in the lessening glow of vespers, wondered at the profane fuss outdoors. The disaffected proffered guttersnipe sagacities here and there as the curious procession went its way unmolested (and untelevised).

  At the Ansonia, Neri stood swaying in the throes of a lesson with the Principessa Oriana Incantevole, the ancient of days, known to be stone-deaf since the bombing of Rome. Together they went on with their Marchesi nonetheless. The sun began to set behind Hoboken. At five Czgowchwz went to her bath in mixed spirits, thinking seriously for the first time in her life about Isolde and how to attack the Curse.

  At seven o’clock the floodlights went on outside the Plaza, the opera house, the Crossroads Café, and the Roxy all at once. As hookers hit the big town, Carmen and Annamae were interviewed by CBS, NBC, and ABC as the first ones on line. There were moments in the interim when expectation dealt such austere fatigue that one felt incapable of continuing, and might have crept off to the Roxy were it not for the actual grace of commitment. A coherence was managed ensemble for television. At 7:04 Czgowchwz appeared again on the steps of the Plaza and proceeded with the reassembled Secret Seven and a caravan of twenty-nine hansom cabs across Central Park South, down Seventh Avenue and Broadway, past the Roxy throngs and into the glare of the Rialto. Hookers wondered; the mounted police spoke ill. The crowd at Fortieth Street went fairly berserk. The minion from The Talk of the Town fell into a sewer, which misfortune affected only slightly his exquisite account of the demonstration in the Easter issue. Czgowchwz was safely escorted to her dressing room. She slipped into a black-lace Louis Philippe number, was shackled in rubies and coruscant baguettes, meanwhile vocalizing in ascending whirly spirals while a few of the far-gone ticketless beat their heads against the brick wall beneath the window.

  Meanwhile, up at Sherry’s, they were pouring in. Neri arrived with the Principessa Oriana Incantevole and Rinuccia Bagatelli, that likable drudge whose bovine dispassion and languid tempi were as famous among her detractors as was the rather opulent and even timbre of her instrument among her many immigrant votaries. Neri was grimly, wickedly noblesse oblige, sipping astringent scarlet Camparis and signing autographs for lame geriatrics, pillars of Society and Culture. In a noisy corner Leah Lafin and Moe Mohr, twin stars in the best-sel
ler bookworld, were discussing and signing stray copies of, respectively, The Last Word and Having Had. Dolly Farouche and members of the Broadway circuit were being raucous together on the stairs. Banquo Canelli, Alzira Toscanova, and Zaguina Milanese, with assorted attendants and Maisie Halloran, were at a long table. Thalia Bridgewood stood apart with her retinue. Margo Channing Sampson and her Bill were obvious. Movie stars, concert stars, opera stars, fallen stars sparkled on and off. “There were,” as Paranoy reported, “moments of stillness, and moments of near-sin.” The standees above and below rattled, enmeshed. The Secret Seven and the Countess Madge moved quietly into their box. Jameson O’Maurigan, nephew to the Countess; his twin sister, Lavinia O’Maurigan Stein; her husband, Jonathan; and Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh joined friends in the Dress Circle. At three minutes past eight the lights went down. Many luckless stragglers stumbled outrageously to their seats through thickets of righteous disapproval.

  The prelude rose tier by tier through layers of numb silence. Chiave was in best form. When at

  the curtain flew up revealing Mawrdew Czgowchwz downstage center, in profile, flicking open in a stroke a thrillingly outsize fan depicting Paris laying an orange at the feet of Helen, there were eleven minutes of sustained hysteria. She broke the tableau only once. At the seven-minute mark she turned full-face in a flash, raising her eyes to the top tiers. Confetti and flowers rained on the stage. The Alfredo, Turiddu Stameglio, entered jauntily from the wings stage right, picked a single camellia from the dozens at her feet, and placed it, stunningly, in her hair. She beamed delight. There was some fainting, but it was controlled. Members of the chorus, magnetized by instant triumph, concerted lustily. The diva began to sing.

  Singular departures from house rules occurred; older, wiser, original gestures reasserted the traditions let go by the boards. The brindisi, “Libiamo,” was repeated twice. (Had Czgowchwz herself not spoken that same afternoon of Violetta’s curious obsessive compulsion for putting off indefinitely the success of moment after moment?) Here she was then, Violetta-Camille, returning to the first flush of the occasion in elliptical vortices. Stameglio was in the perfect bloom of lyric tenor youth. One could see through one’s relentless spyglass that Czgowchwz was under great strain; the camellia in her hair had begun to go brown as she fell into the baignoire divan at “Oh, qual pallor!” Her hand mirror caught flickers of spotlight, reflecting eerily through the auditorium. A few thousand eyes hung shut in languid ecstasy only to fly open again in violent longing. A dead hush fell gratefully during Stameglio’s impeccable rendering of the “Un dì felice.” “The actuality of salty tears did nothing to impair the perfect tonality and ardor of this exemplary artist’s plea” (Paranoy, in a reminiscence-review of the recording of the performance that appeared underground some weeks later). At long last Mawrdew Czgowchwz was alone on that vast stage facing the unknown in the artistic crisis of her career (to date), the tormented finale to Act I of La Traviata. Roxanne Sauvage, mezzo, beloved of millions, a household word, was heard to whisper nervously to her companion in the Grand Tier, “Mary, if she brings this off, I’m Galli-Curci!”

  At the words “È strano! è strano!” the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier fainted sideways into Ralph’s lap. Ralph slapped her face and held on to his glasses. Flowers began to fall again, continuing through the scene, but Czgowchwz mused relentlessly, weaving enchantment.

  Bolting from the sofa, silencing the delirious applause at the end of the “Ah, fors’ è lui,” she let out two “follie!” that were “louder and wider than anything heard in Italian opera since Emmy Destinn” (Paranoy, next day in a broadside proclamation distributed everywhere). Shock waves hammered the listening throng. The Principessa Oriana Incantevole heard and fell to her knees in the Neri box raving of miracle cures. The three “gioire’s” were each of them bigger than anyone’s “hojotoho’s.” Disbelief, suspended, choked itself and dissolved. Passionate credence swept the audience like a revival conversion. In the Guild row of the Grand Tier, an Association director, fattened on production kickbacks, died in his seat unnoticed. Backstage, Stameglio had first to be held down, then revived for his cue.

  The “Sempre libera” began; it built. The voice grew; the sides of it fell off, the bottom opened (like the portals of doom), and Czgowchwz soared in flames to B naturals full-voice. There were involuntary screams, shock upon shock, fresh denials from every tier, but Czgowchwz sped forza allegretto, waltzing in circles until there was to be seen but a single swirl of jet lace pinwheeling in dervish abandon. She tore off the baguettes and flung them to the floor like a wanton hysteric at the final “gioir.” There was laughter, a febrile, ghostly cascade of it, answering the echo of Stameglio’s sobbing “croce e delizia.” The final measures were upon her; the optional E flat hung fire. She rose higher and wider by turns. The voice seared, shooting out of the whirling smoke of her consumptive waltz. “Il mio pensier...il mio pensier...ah ...ah...ah!” For an instant there was no sound; then something unheard since the creation—a Czgowchwz fortissimo A natural above high C the color of the core of the sun. Mawrdew Czgowchwz ripped the camellia from her hair, which then cascaded over her face like a flaming veil, threw the Baccarat bell goblet against the wall, and collapsed. The gold drapes fell.

  She appeared for one solo call during which she knelt amid screams for one half hour while many in the audience were removed to the sidewalks and fell about the pavements. Mawrdew Czgowchwz wept.

  The performance redid history. The “Dite alla giovane” seemed to come from a voice within the voice; the “Amami, Alfredo,” from a voice without. The arrival Chez Flora in the third act sent altogether venereal waves of gasping through the theater as the diva swept down the staircase in vermilion and jet brocade, crowned in an awesome mantilla. The “Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core” was so dolce piano that Stameglio, unrestrained, fell at the Czgowchwz feet and had to be dragged from the scene. The reading of the letter in the last act betrayed in its anguished reverie the paradox of angelic victory poised adamant at the threshold of death.

  At Violetta’s dying “Rinasce...m’agita,” Neri was seen running up the side aisle in tears (having crawled down to the standing stalls in a daze for the final scenes). Ralph was running down the same aisle and nearly broke Neri’s leg in the collision. Bagatelli, dethroned, dissolved.

  The performance ended at midnight. There came universal ecstasy. Applause went on in tidal waves for an hour, reaching a furious peak when they tried to ring down the asbestos at half past twelve. A flock of white doves was released from the Family Circle. The house lights stayed on; the electricians mutinied. Czgowchwz was brought back from her dressing room wearing a chintz masterpiece by Framboise. The management was forced to announce that the opera house would remain open for as long a time as the audience wished to stay. Network relay cameras were rolled in and many of the stars were interviewed in the lobbies in a you-are-there marathon which canceled the small-hours showings of The Great Lie, The Great Waltz, Song of Love, and Humoresque. Czgowchwz ordered cases of champagne and baskets of blini, fruit, and cheese. A party was set up onstage in the first-act set. The musicians stayed on to play waltzes and, later, swing numbers and torpid third-stream jazz. Czgowchwz, having changed into a little black dress, danced with everybody. Art and life were fused...

  Gray dawn light, that torment of sleeping soaks, broke on the horizon as scheduled on that morning after of mornings after. The parade Irish pitched and turned one upon another all over town, like groups of weary sots docking at Dublin after a night, any night, on the Irish Sea. In the star dressing room at the opera house, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, hastily repairing her face in make-do fashion, glanced out the window to see the first faint shadows on the sidewalk. They were mopping up at Bill’s across the street. On her dressing table lay the predawn edition of the Times with a glorious front-page review of three acts of her performance. Musing on the relentless, instant processing of gesture into report, she gathered herself to herself and, taking a
nosegay of violets from a box among the dozens in the room, walked dreamily to the stage. Ordering the huge scenery doors in the back wall of the stage opened, she turned to the enchanted throng. The first complete silence since just before midnight fell on the auditorium as the draft swept in. Singing “L’Alba sepàra dalla luce l’ombra” with Dame Sybil at the piano, she announced the evening ended. Then, shrouded in chinchilla, she walked without further ceremony out the great wide gap in the opera-house wall, and up Seventh Avenue through the all-but-deserted Rialto alone, followed at a distance by her retainers, like a star.

  2

  TRUE STARS impel; they need never campaign. What discovery each Czgowchwz stalwart would make—of such mythic inherence, of such erotic dimension, of a duration outside the world’s measure—was to be made in dream time. Thus, to continue the tale of Czgowchwz is to surrender to that impulse that dream logic, dream effect, dream narrative, and dream figures play on, to reveal all there is to reveal in that insistent mode, valence, sequence, and style the Czgowchwz dream saga commands.

  Nine months later in the same year of the oltrano Traviata triumph, some few weeks after what became so well remembered as Neri’s Last November, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, having sung those forty roles, returned to New York to do her season—opening in yet another first attempt, Isolde—but first, in time to attend the annual Winter Solstice Occasion, a grand “do” held at fabled Magwyck, the town-house and back-yard residence herself the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier had purchased and landscaped (the year before the war) (the year she won the Irish Sweepstakes) (the first year of her bereaving widowhood) (the year she gave up the stage).