Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 4

  The wheel had come another full circle. All over town the preparations for the solstice, for the new production of Tristan und Isolde, for smart Yule show-biz/society cocktail fetes, and for another year of the century took on the studied, quasi-hieratic characteristics of elegant secular pageantry. Columns in the press betrayed diverse attitudes.

  As Gotham’s strange festive ludi commenced their progress, Mawrdew Czgowchwz remained cloistered at the Plaza, secure high up in her tower suite.

  The select number of those who had been, were, would become, and were to continue being part of the Czgowchwz pageant, all the while having gone about and continuing to go about their separate lives, their full careers, assembled at a point Paranoy would later call “the nexus of memory and expectation.” They came together there, if necessarily not all in any one of the same actual geographic or temporal environs, then more significantly, from the point of view of telling participation, in the same state of belonging (to Czgowchwz). They were all in the same boat. Thus the imaginative gathering of these principals, supporting players, featured players, and selected extras in the dream play that is the Czgowchwz tale was best described as “a brilliant procession of the willing elect, boarding a fantasy ark of wild delight—its own discrete realm, perfectly constructed to achieve buoyant salvation from space-time’s torrent deluge” (Paranoy, in “The Importance of Analogy in Celebrating Czgowchwz,” a lecture). For reasons of their own, often infernal, other persons who played crucial roles in the Czgowchwz saga cannot be numbered among the willing elect. These are condemned to merely historic function.

  Meanwhile, outside the collective mind recalling Czgowchwz—that first winter week of that same year in and out of the town where it had all, in its way, begun—life as it is revealed, in fragments of ordinary and extraordinary happenstance, spun kaleidoscopically on. All over everywhere persons were behaving characteristically...

  The staging of the new production of Tristan, described as “resembling nothing so much as some Alma-Tadema/Burne-Jones exotic landscape in the Land of the Lost and Forlorn, rethought in a somewhat prophylactic idiom by some Guignol-funhouse fetishist, in terms of Piscator’s best excesses” (Paranoy to Tangent Percase, in utter confidence), progressed. A number of “Tod und Verklärung” special effects were being conceived in secret in the last week before the opening in a lighting studio on the Upper West Side. The entire production was rumored to be “epic, hydraulic, stark, new.” (“Nude!” shrieked Dolores, aghast. “No, Dolores, not nude—new.” “Oh, all right then, what about the details...”) Valerio Vortice was keeping himself entirely to himself in his role as designer-regisseur, for this was the brilliant young Sicilian’s first Metropolitan production.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz declined to rehearse the Liebestod, with a shadowy statement: “It must not be practiced, but perfect.”

  The while these immediate Czgowchwz concerns were being felt, darker circumstances, reeking of undoing, were being suffered, and the toxic atmosphere of envy was beginning to occasion cries for revenge.

  I Neriani lay about disheveled, in states of bitter, abject, mean remorse, for rumor on that side of the hill had it (a dead certainty) that Morgana l’Ultima would at last announce her retirement on Christmas Eve, going out (naturally) as Norma (“in a box—simple pine,” Paranoy cackled privately, to hundreds). Roxanne Sauvage, the volunteer Adalgisa (“Not my stuff, really, but what the...”), had confirmed it all. The Secret Seven were about evenly divided on the tricky question of Czgowchwz’s attending the farewell. Czgowchwz herself seemed inclined to do it, but Ralph observed somewhat venomously that were the platform shoe on the other foot, Neri would arrive at a Czgowchwz farewell only if it were Götterdämmerung and the old pescecane herself were catering the matches and the kerosene. (The fact that Neri had attempted suing Czgowchwz over her collision with Ralph at the Traviata added, as it were, fuel to the furious December wrangle.)

  Meanwhile, like a four-a-day burlesk, Alice would regale all comers with her total-recall remembrances—including her own favorite: how the initial enmity had arisen from an unfortunate impromptu turn in the second act of the Czgowchwz debut. Many of the younger fans had never heard the precise details of that bout in the boudoir scene, when Czgowchwz, in an access of violent fury apposite to her conception of the overwrought Amneris (“calculatedly berserk” —Paranoy, in Czgowchwz Rampant), had torn Neri’s wig right off and thrown it in the prompter’s face. Neri, in an outraged anatema frenzy, had fled the scene, bolted the door of the star dressing room, and refused outright to go on with the opera, spitting every vile hermetic Sicilian curse and oath, while the resourceful Chiave bridged the murky gap with thrilling renditions of the overtures to Forza, Aroldo, Stiffelio, and I Vespri Siciliani. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, brought to herself, had apologized outside the bolted door in many tongues, while the Countess Madge, her then-new fierce friend, kept feeding her restorative brandies fetched from Sherry’s one by one, and counseling, “Aw, Mawr-dew, you didn’t know what you were doing!” Neri had given in at last, and Czgowchwz had then won her over somewhat, making a few lewd cracks in Calabrese about the improbable doings indulged in by the corps de ballet in the Triumphal Scene. They might just conceivably have become friends of a sort had it not been for the noisy and obvious fact that all the critics in town had quit the theater at a gallop directly after the Judgment Scene to make the early editions of their rags with the blast on the Czgowchwz triumph, leaving Neri’s own name (some of them) to passing also-ran references in their closing paragraphs.

  Ultimately, the combination of the Traviata coup and the release the following June of M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano had forced Neri’s hand—or, as Paranoy would whimsically insist, her foot. Facing Czgowchwz competition in the portioning of broadcasts, the old woman had set outrageous terms, while drunk and distasteful on vintage Bardolino, and rather than retrench, had retired. She said, “My life is over! I’ve been everything, and what’s the use?”

  Ralph and Alice, having bribed Lois the switchboard girl with a tape of the Czgowchwz Bayreuth Erda, had listened in on the final conversation with the Executive Office, peppered as it was with ravings, maledictions, and pleas. They had the news of the confirmed retirement to the rest of the Secret Seven and to the Countess Madge that same early afternoon. Then, generously, Box 7 was hired for a distinctly non-Czgowchwz performance.

  Then again, as it fell out, Neri went on and out, much with silver bowls, clocks, ribbons, and pianissimi squeezed out of the surgical slits behind her ears, weeping in self-regard and no small satisfaction amid squalid displays of pit-shrieking gaucherie. But Box 7 hovered empty, dark, and desolate...

  On the unclear afternoon of the twenty-first (“overcast skies with manifold linings of cloud”), winter business was being discussed over several lunches, at the Carnegie Tavern, at the Plaza, at Arpenik’s, and at Lodovico’s pizzeria. The Secret Seven sat drinking at the Carnegie, doing the Czgowchwz Christmas Newsletter layouts and parcels of late cards for Czgowchwz stalwarts coast to coast. Alice, royally sozzled on Madeira, kept on repeating at odd intervals, “Ah, vieni, amor mio, m’inebbria.” She broke off her routine to tell everyone another story they already knew full well—the story of that distant summer night when Czgowchwz had been busted for singing “Ocean, thou mighty monster” from the narrow widow’s walk of Grace Jackson-Haight’s stylish South Shore beach house, after a midnight swim (“Bathing suits in the dark?”). She had pleaded tipsily guilty—“at some place they insist on calling Yaphank!”—to disturbing “the moronic bourgeois peace,” which quote caused the diva to be suspected of fellow-traveling and worse among the sniveling protectionist elite. Czgowchwz had borne such calumnies lightly, but Alice, politically naïve and fiercely loyal—recalling it all just then, much later—suddenly roared out a few seditious obscenities, spilling Madeira. While dozens of framed sepia photographs of forgotten thirties demireps and chic refugees gazed down impassively from the tavern walls, she was removed to an adjacent Ne
dicks for black coffee and given a brief, sobering trot. It had begun to snow, quite heavily. Immense leaden clouds covered the island town.

  At Magwyck’s kitchen window, the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier stood watching the sun fade out behind dove-gray muslin as the first thick flakes fell onto the great O’Meaghre dolmen, the flat table stone in the middle of her landscaped, heptagonal back yard. She was griddling crepes by the dozens on a sturdy coal stove. “Mummin’ in the drifts, is it?” she wondered, flipping imperatively, stirring patiently, deftly wielding spatulas, the whole while belting back good cheer in doubles against the coming perishing cold. Magwyck stood decked in full resplendent drape, each room set in appropriate ornamental perspect-best to accommodate the ritual proceedings. At the vast open fireplace, Wedgwood was only just putting to the side the first load of contraband peat arrived that morning “in the nick” from Sligo. The burning of the new-cut peat would in the space of the coming hours fill every room and hallway, investing alcoves with the primal fragrance: life’s initiation. The bursting warmth would fling itself in swirls into the inert chill face of the solstice—against its threats of “Nevermore.” The swelling Vermont pine tree stood bare and yielding in the parlor, relaxing its branches as slowly and as steadily as roses unfold overnight, until it would be ready for communal adornment in the small hours after the dinner, the mumming outdoors, the cavorts, the parodies, the singing, the reading, and the prayers. Animism was the scheme.

  Elsewhere, G-G strode away from an overcrowded midtown auction, up to her own atelier-emporium on Madison Avenue, stopping off at this or that shebeen as the snow fell about in thick flakes over the earth. Thus seeking fortification, she banged into Trixie Gilhooley, showgirl, unescorted and footless in P.J. O’Failte’s, that rendezvous of fakes. She wondered what a girl with Trixie’s savvy was doing in a place like this. Then she wondered what a girl like... Trixie stood draped like an old rolled-up rug with arms, embracing a Wurlitzer rainbow jukebox (a numinous icon of wartime) and bleating, “Where-za fuckin’ el gone ta?!” She kept dropping lonely quarters into the slot and playing “Poor Butterfly” six times at a go, until P.J. said he would pull out the plug if she didn’t push off and give somebody a chance to listen to something seasonal, like “Joy to the World.”

  G-G seized Trixie by the shoulder, shaking off layers of snow.

  “Theresa, Theresa, calm down! They took the el away, dear—ages ago!”

  Trixie, peering up at that friendly voice through layer upon layer of hazy inebriation, moaned elegiac protests.

  “Izzit ahl gone, then, the whole gorgeous contraption? What a thing! What a criminal thing! Jesus Christ, G-G darling—izza whole worl’ comin’ down?”

  Bawling unattractively, Trixie Gilhooley was led out into the increasing snow, across to Madison, and up to Cashel Gueza, the window of which subtly contrived wonderland—brilliantly lit in the crept-on dusk—revealed an immense scarlet-velvet Victorian sofa displayed for Yuletide amid ivy boughs and rings of holly. The white Hispano-Suiza, squat at the curb in a mounting drift, and ticketed, could have been an outsize toy.

  Inside, G-G made fresh Irish breakfast tea rather than fuss with exotics, cut lemons, and unhinged a pot of decent Russian caviar. Noticing Trixie climbing into the display window, she sighed for something precious, long past. They took their tea in the window, lounging on the sofa, scarcely noticed by passing stragglers. (Trixie gave the finger to the few nosy lingerers who presumed to invade their privacy.) Sitting there in the roseate aureole of the Tiffany wisteria lamp, aware by degrees of the passage of time, of place, and of themselves, they bemoaned the dismantling of Gotham. “God! By 1970...”

  G-G’s private collection of china clocks struck four o’clock one after the other in dulcet syncopation. Trixie remembered where it was she’d been going—to Grace Jackson-Haight’s penthouse. G-G remembered herself having been asked, and then remembered forgetting. They agreed to go together for diversion. There were no cabs that day; a taxi strike was in furious progress. Trixie contrived to convince a burly Wicklow man, a truck driver passing time at the Curragh tavern just next door, to dredge the Suiza out of the snow, after which stalwart labor the three of them fumbled off to Grace’s matinee. Trixie had dismissed her ephemeral, mean woes.

  Back at Magwyck, the Countess Madge, having stuffed her crepes every which way, took her tea in the parlor, reading Dolores in the late-afternoon edition of “the wipe.” The column was routinely devoted to the murkiest detractions. One conspicuous aside dealt with the Solstice Dinner.

  ... Tonight at Magwyck, which has over the years since the war become the address on the smart East Side—known incidentally mainly by the noninvited, but to ignore it is pretentiousness itself...

  The Countess shuddered. The prose!

  Halcyon Q. Paranoy has decreed that “only supple souls find their belongings there.” Mysteries abound amid rumors of privately subversive convocations—or is it right to say covens...

  “What is that witch saying?” the Countess Madge murmured to herself.

  The giddy H.Q.P. (ask him yourself!) further states, in his recently published pamphlet The Czgowchwz Moment, that “here at Magwyck is a glimpse of the lovely so acute as to reduce all other traffic in the lamely chic parlors about town to the stimulation level of a ride on the IRT shuttle between Times Square and Grand Central Station at the five-o’clock rush hour.” Evidently H.Q.P. (ask him yourself!) has his own ideas about the most stimulating hour to ride the shuttle in!... The latest on straggler-showgirl Trixie (“revolving doors”) Gilhooley is...

  The Countess recounted grimly to herself the hosts of reasons for her own steadfast refusal to invite this Dolores woman into Magwyck for so much as a cup of tea. Bohemian church bells down the street rang out a chilly Angelus. Shivering, the Countess Madge reached for a thimble of whiskey.

  G-G and Trixie finished powdering at Trixie’s and went up with the Wicklow teamster in the elevator to Grace Jackson-Haight’s penthouse (for Trixie and Grace, resident at the same tony address, were by the way of being back-parlor neighbors in Gotham). The officially confirmed blizzard seemed to have swelled the ranks; thus generous Grace’s minions, most of them sneezing, were dispatched to minister to everyone without being either too casual or too obvious about checking names. The word had sped about town, at midafternoon gallery openings and holiday hat-lunches, that this was a bash to be at. Grace was feeling desired. When the bulk of the gang had settled in, wolfing down the buffet and the drinks, they set about keeping tabs, as Paranoy observed, “on one another’s joys, jeux, and bijoux.” Grace favored a lot of glitter: it seemed to make her see more. That way she developed an authentic taste. People liked her; she was cultivated, nice.

  The Baron Shmendrick, the provident diamond peddler, arrived after curtain call with a dozen-odd Broadway doxies hired for the occasion, all of them tarted up like Waldorf hookers but in the actual merchandise (and covered by security dicks like guardian angels packing rods) and all looking, as Paranoy reported, “painfully like naked trees in hibernal Tiffany windows—drenched in alien tinsel.” There they all stood in Valentine-bodice taffeta décolleté, none of them young, really. Dolly Farouche, the society chanteuse and now-and-then Rialto star, whose modest diamond earbobs were her own to wear, stood aside slapping pâté lapin on a Ry-Krisp when Thalia Bridgewood whispered thickly from across the buffet, “Ever see so much diamond dust in one room, dahling?” Dolly swung around, biting into her canapé, pulled one earbob off, and held it out, snapping acidly, “Whaddya think these the fuck are, Bridgewood—chicken livers!?” It was that sort of occasion.

  Rotten Rodney Bergamot sauntered into the foyer in playful high spirits. Had he not just come from his publisher with the kicky news that his warmed-over Master’s thesis—a trenchant study of the life, work, anguish, and hierophantic genius of Puvis de Chavannes—would be out “this time next year,” with polychrome plates? It would consequently be being found on the best coffee tables and in b
ook bins in the smartest toilets in Gotham by Christmas, by which time Rotten Rodney would be in the Bahamas, deserving...

  G-G and Trixie had lost track of their Wicklow trucker. G-G pointed out, “His eyes, toots, are lupine-blue!” They nursed bourbon Manhattans with their hostess, Grace, and Boni de Chalfonte at a window apart, gazing through the snow-cyclone toward the invisible East River. Boni, having done up a social-arbiter’s treatise on penthouse landscaping as an urban ecological duty, was trying off and on to sell Grace on an Inca scheme for spring. G-G avowed she would prefer mazes of box hedge to terraced limestone at a height of forty stories. Boni switched to a carefully-broken-English rhapsody on the theme of their city (out there) as Atlantis in a glass ball, with snow whirling “a silent, incessant concerto.” Trixie farted absently. Grace, yawning, signaled a butler for more sauce. Trixie saw Dolly Farouche’s other earbob fall into the blancmange across the room. The solstice drew on. Rotten Rodney Bergamot guffawed, plunging a fist into the same blancmange. Dolly slapped his mocking face. Boni de Chalfonte, bounding entrechats the length of the living room, intervened judiciously to prevent a slapstick incident, while one of the Broadway mannequins wailed over the general observant silence, “There ain’t no fuckin’ pastrami!” Grace mediated splendidly: soon there were multiple ardent embraces, laughing tears everywhere, and hasty kisses all around.

  G-G lit up a perfecto. She crossed directly to a beige boudoir to phone the Countess Madge.

  The phone rang at Magwyck. Wedgwood answered. The Countess was “in reverie.” While the cat, Rose(ncrantz), pawed Wedgwood’s impeccably turned trouser cuffs, the Countess sensed her summons and came to the phone. She inquired: “Hello?”