Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  “Magda? It’s G-G.”

  More than just a suspensory pause occurred.

  “Where are you, darlin’? McCrory’s bargain basement? The noise!”

  “I’m at Grace Jackson-Haight’s matinee.”

  “Who’s she got, Ringling Brothers?”

  “Trixie Gilhooley is pouring bourbon in both ears. Dolly Farouche dropped her earrings in the blancmange. Rotten Rodney Bergamot made a fuss. See you for dinner.”

  “Darling, was there anything special you called for?”

  “No, toots, only Dolly’s earrings. And by the way, who the hell is ‘Poofie de Chavannes’?” She hung up the phone; two of the Broadway ladies had entered the beige boudoir. One was wailing desolately, “I’m not a nice person at all!”

  New York prepared for a snow emergency. The mayor drank Four Roses, on his winter vacation somewhere in Mexico.

  The Countess Madge turned three-quarter profile from the ebony telephone table toward her guest, Pèlerin (Pierrot) Deslieux. He himself was fumbling busily into a cache in the great tree’s back-top underbranch, tucking away the first, the unfound, Yuletide ornament—a dazzling Bohemian spunglass orange globe, centuries old.

  “Pierrot, G-G and her protégée—that poor drunken Theresa Gilhooley: you remember the story: she was born almost literally in the wings between numbers at Dubuque on that first national Show Boat tour—they’re up there in the stratosphere in Grace Jackson-Haight’s pinnacle parlor. I heard somebody in the background sounding like Paranoy saying, ‘In this crowd of noisy outrés arrivistes?’ It sounds what Wedgwood might describe—as did he once, if you remember, that unfortunate Jackson-Haight beach fete—as a ‘rawly secular affair’ altogether. Dolly Farouche’s diamond earbobs contrived to plop into a blancmange, evidently necessitating a dire scene.”

  Pierrot held the ball suspended in his tense hand, at length affixing the steely hook to a firm branch, deep in at the trunk. “Well! One can’t be everywhere.”

  The Countess thought it over. “Magdalen,” continued Pierrot, the way he thought perhaps he ought, the way a careful French curé might, “don’t you think this habit of people knowing where people are at all hours all season long—well, apart from anything else—well, just that.”

  “Uh-oh,” worried the Countess Madge. Whenever addressed by her saint’s name, she seemed to feel starched shifts, icy douches, and furtive subcellar scents threatening all over again —memory’s imperishable dues. She was holding Rose(ncrantz) absently. She dropped him in an ample Regency chair. He bristled; he yawned; he preened. He found accommodation.

  “This only ever happens in dead winter, Pique. Sibyl and G-G seem to practice it absolutely necessarily. It becomes tantamount to a ritual for lasting.”

  “Tantamount. It can’t amount!” His heavily accented baritone growled. Rose(ncrantz) shot a single-amber-eyed glance toward the speaker; a paw splayed measuredly. Pierrot gazed not that carelessly at his black aspect bloated in a silver ornament. He laughed—a laugh, they said, like treacle bursting from barrels—misting the surface of the perfect globe. He laid the bauble aside.

  “Do you recall that time last winter—at that mobbed opening of Rotten Rodney Bergamot’s thieves-carnival boutique downtown? That Paranoy wordman said, as I remember, it looked like ‘Animated Brueghel Damnation.’ Something as dense as all that. Sybil left hurriedly to search out a phone box, and you called after her: ‘Don’t phone me, toots, I’m with you!’” He chuckled. (Chuckling, treacle turned to tar.)

  The Countess Magdalen (Madge) O’Meaghre Gautier did sigh. “Rotten Rodney is also there. De plus en plus! Plus tax. He’s making a scene, that is...”

  “That one pictureman, he is a scene. But somewhere backstage they lost the rest of the farce.”

  “Truth to tell... Cher Pique, you are a delver. Who is Poovie de Chavannes?”

  “Ah...!”

  Rose(ncrantz) yawned. The Countess retired to the generous front window to look out: to consider what toll the storm might take by and by. She brooded—Celticly, Pierrot supposed—on the number and the diversity of snowflakes. She ruminated, wondering in terms of ratio, quotient, multiplicand, root, power, infinity, surd. She ceased, turning to Pierrot.

  “Pique?”

  “Comment?”

  “What about this Neri scene?”

  Pierrot shrugged. “Mawrdew will carry it off. I do believe she feels that that old vide somehow warrants sending off—a proper tribute. You mind, I for myself on a night off these feet would so far rather to go over to Brooklyn in this blizzard to hear that singing woman Trina Galuppi sing her lunatic Santuzza. But there you are; there it is. Someday myself I may dance in the Nutcracker, like I must tonight, and dance alone.” He mocked a flour-whiteface crumpled Pierrot, incapable of ronds de jambe. He crumpled to the floor. He laughed again. Rose(ncrantz) opened two eyes.

  The Countess beamed—a frank delight. Then she joined him on the floor. They looked back up at the tree.

  “Pique, I hate missing it all tonight—you, the Tree, the children’s gasps!”

  “Tonight you shall regale your guests, officiate, and in the meanwhile keep the supper warm for—”

  “The man I love.”

  They paused, at a sudden time. “Pique, you saw Mawrdew today. You left her in high spirits?”

  Pierrot, rising, stood in the overhanging mirror’s path. “‘Pierrot?—our moods,’ she asked. ‘Are they perhaps something like thrusts—rhapsodic ones—toward stasis: self-finale?’ Well, her English is not mine. ‘What is laughter, for instance,’ she asked, ‘but somehow the cabaletta to grief?’ Così diceva Czgowchwz!”

  The Countess could tell quite certainly well, scanning the oval mirror, that Pierrot was tired of that day. A mask of vague tristesse sat awkward on the ripening face. He paced a length, and in that exercise as well betrayed fatigue: something twilight-heavy in the lissome gait. A sudden remembrance—a phrase in the music belonging to Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, Act I, from one of the Czgowchwz Bayreuth tapes—stirred up a narky draft in her mind. The wrenched apostrophe (endlose Angst!) from Waltraute’s narrative poured once again out of the Czgowchwz heart, as it were, from shadows deep in the Festspielhaus summer stage straight across space-time to the Foyer Gautier on this same winter solstice evening. Time’s threats redoubled, and then...the Countess recalled herself in Pierrot’s vast liquid eyes. Then a fleeting comic memory. The coda to reverie, the cabaletta to grief. Magdalen guffawed. Pierrot—Caliban—wondered at the brazen report. She sailed on gaily back toward the watching, weary tree, throwing the first few strands of silver ice-foil on the highest branches, turning—again the magic actress—three-quarter profile toward her younger, lordly paramour.

  “I was only after thinking of that amazing notion of Consuelo’s—of staging the Ride of the Valkyries on an actual carrousel.”

  The two lovers laughed themselves toward distraction.

  The Function of Laughter was at that same moment being analyzed by no one else but Tangent Percase, “the darling of all downtown.” On three afternoons a week at the New School, the modish academic, philosophe, “man of the theater” (“lobbies mostly”—Paranoy), and tender angel of mercy among the distressed genteel south and west of Fourteenth Street and University Place (“Boundaries are everything”) held forth on this or that received notion, as if holding back nightfall with a hurricane lamp (of some number of which he was possessed at home on Waverly Place, the Percase family fortune having been based on whale-oil interests up in Ipswich). Percase was telling his class of mainly listless pregnant Village mothers, worn out from their Christmas shopping excursions, that the funniest evening he had ever spent in a theater...

  Consuelo Gilligan, sometime seeress and dedicated self-styled diarist, sat at home just then, sixteen stories up on Central Park South, ruminating on the obituaries and the Dakota—whose imposing gables seemed to have been beckoning for years—and listening to the afternoon opera broadcast on WCZG-FM, the newly released
Czgowchwz Salammbô. (“Lord, what next—Monna Vanna?” “No, hon, Genoveva!”) At her idle feet, opened to a middle page, lay Come and Gone, the memoirs of the fabled “Aigrette”—that Edward-ian amorist-become-evangelist, Margot Chalouie-Duletz (nee Daisy Drear), mistress of kings, lover of queens, and late Founding Abbess of the Holy Brood of the Fortuitous Anointed of St. Mary Moresow at Neasden—whose motto, “A little something daily”...

  Consuelo brooded, restless, perplexed. Having long since noon lost track of the tumbling arc of the winter sun, she suffered the gloaming storm, meditating on the frangibility of one’s vows to the one sex or the other or the other, passing thence to the pluribo-uniquity (proposing the word, she ratified it at once) of a snowflake among snowflakes; thence to cold conceptual rigors, speculating on monologistics; thence to haywire syntax; thence to lacecraft...

  Moments later, veering back, Consuelo slipped herself her late-afternoon Veronal and summoned her rational forces to focus on the central dilemma she felt her heart bound to parse: Would she attend the Solstice Feis at Magwyck or no? The “qua” of her pointed, unadvertised hesitation being not so much a disaffection for as a nagging disinclination to opt absolutely in favor of those persons (many in number and as aleatorily diverse in style and aspect as so many fabrics’ shades and tones in some bazaar heralding anarchy) lately, and she did fear hastily, enfeoffed through the overgenerous agencies of the Secret Seven and the Countess Madge to Czgowchwz and the Czgowchwz movement, she tumbled into a noded thicket, ending enmeshed in pro- and contra-distinctions. Nor were these footling concerns. An open door was more to be questioned than the thickest drape three-quarter drawn. Briefly, Consuelo considered, there were at latest count entirely too many hack taxis cluttering the Czgowchwz Way; the sedans and coupes de ville were being obliged to remain in the outer park, making and remaking their ways in ever-diminishing concentricities unto some sinister midpoint, some obscure terminus at dead center; perhaps (she shuddered) to oblivion.

  Her distress decided it: she rose to dress. She would attend —as she wrote—“festooned in the heroic fardels of the Byzantine forties (no mean gauds) and carrying a beaded bag. And just let anyone say...” She ran a scalding tub, tossing in quantities of mimosa bath salts and restorative dried herbs. She then disappeared into the wardrobe as Salammbô finished blazingly on the wireless, all the while racking her now superbly focused brains in order to concoct the best mélange of heady scents to overcome the inevitable soupçon of mothballs and faded musk-rose sachet that would linger in the fabric of her getup.

  Merovig Creplaczx, composer (the apparent Hollenius heir), conductor, virtuoso pianoforte soloist, and unique accompanist (exclusive to Czgowchwz), sat poised in a state something akin to terror over the keyboard of a Steinway grand in a certain sublet pied-à-terre on lower Bank Street, near the river. In no time he commenced indulging his genius, hammering out frantic note clusters of the “Amen de la consommation” from Messiaen’s Visions de l’amen. Outside everywhere the snow went on hurtling down at the same dizzying velocity (precisely) at which the notes rose, concomitant as well in density—relentlessly metaphoric—until, as the doorbell rang, cutting through the din like a shaft of platinum light through murk, he broke off and rose in a profound sweat to open the door. Echoes of overwrought Messiaen vibrated suicidally against the smokeglass hall mirror as Rotten Rodney Bergamot staggered in, caked like the Golem or the Thing in the blizzard’s officially noted torrential droppings, which presently fell melting in inch-thick lumps on the durable Azerbaijan carpets.

  “So. How did you arrive here?” demanded Merovig, somewhat dully.

  “I came all the way down Second Avenue on a troika, hooked to the rear axle of a scarlet snow truck, Mona! I burrowed across Houston Street with a purpose demented. It’s the end of the world out there! It’s ending in ICE—they were ALL WRONG!”

  “Not all,” snapped Merovig grimly. “I am going out quite soon!”

  “Oh? Who’s taking you, the Snow Queen? There are no taxis. There aren’t even any more snow trucks. They’ve surrendered! It’s no flurry o’ feathers out there, Hilda, it’s the steppes!”

  “I am to call for Mawrdew Czgowchwz at half past seven at the Plaza,” Merovig rejoined, unconcerned.

  “Skip it, you’re late now. And what was that unearthly noise you were making when I rang the bell? Thanks, I’d love a bowl of the best bourbon. Have you got a bathrobe? Shit, how I hate winter!”

  “That was Messiaen. I adore Messiaen. I must dress.”

  “But I’ve brought you my libretto!”

  “You were due for after lunch; you are past late. Leave me what you have; I will think on it.”

  “Do me a smart favor, buster! Get me a drink or I’ll get myself another, shall we admit lesser, composer. And a word to the wise, Solange: Hollenius wasn’t plugged in his high smart prime for no smart reason! Here I come through a holocaust to offer you on a silver cocktail tray the kickiest toy idea since Benvenuto Cellini. And you treat me like—like Scribe! You try to toss me out in—”

  “Pour yourself what you like; I must dress.”

  Creplaczx disappeared into the bedroom. Rotten Rodney Bergamot, undressed, prowling about nastily naked, made up a sarong out of an overused leopard-print sheet (the actual tenant’s) retrieved from the back of the linen closet. He slipped a worn recording cut by the late Clichette, supreme diseuse, onto the Victrola, poured a brimful snifter of the most expensive Scotch he thought he recognized, and lay back on the indigo suede couch to brood. The record finished in three minutes plus, anguish-ridden, lost. Rotten Rodney loped over to the Steinway in character, sat down to pluck out “Stormy Weather” with two fingers, and moaned along, the way he thought a body should. At length he broke off, thick-voiced and Dexamyl-omnipotent, shouting at Merovig, rooms away: “I swear anything you like, Miro, Puvis de Chavannes has the makings of a fucking glorious opera!”

  Merovig’s rotary electric razor droned from the bathroom like a wasp at a distant window. He himself was humming one of the Ondes Martenot lines in Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, sounding mystically elsewhere and thinking of Mawrdew Czgowchwz under another name: Mawrdew Creplaczx!

  Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh and the Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov’è sat slumped together in a stalled gypsy taxi on their mutual way to the Solstice Feis at Magwyck. They had planned on arriving very early. Their furtive driver had disappeared unencouragingly some moments since, leaving the cab close by the park drive exit behind the zoo, with the hood up. Through thickly falling snow, sportive bears could be heard in mildly ferocious sibling frolic (Sybil decided) in the nearby caged recesses. On and on...

  Dame Sybil, never having got used to the vagaries of manner New York taxi drivers consider it their stylish duty to perpetrate (she announced), fulminated, outraged.

  “Cassia, it’s outrageous!”

  Cassia grimaced. “It is. I’m very annoyed!”

  Sybil decided on a statement. “If something doesn’t occur—quite soon—I shall relapse.” She declared it with finality. They waited some minutes. There was no remarkable change. Things seemed the same, yet more so. Sybil, spying neither horizon nor relief in the grim prospect (Gotham’s winter world, which lay like lacy-shrouded death in frenzied disrepose, she fancied, stretched out beyond the windshield—a vision, she thought, of a Turner tempest viewed in kaleidoscope, counterclockwise, frozen, blanched, like some wickedly animate ice-mirror universe out of a childhood Christmas nightmare), marveled: “How treacherously unlike it is to the gracile abandon of, say, falling russet leaves in Somerset at All Souls’! Can it be merely snow? It has the definite, sinister look of something fabulously chaotic and wanton—something scientific, like atomic fission, something galactic, like stars’ demises, something redolent of systematic cataclysms—”

  Cassia sneezed furiously, dampening her silver fox and the fragile mood in a single convulsive, economic gesture. (In her economy, talk was costly, and small talk, even exquisite small talk,
cheap.)

  “This is not the kind of gonza mess you can talk down, La Farewell, not even with your fabulous lethal tongue. What we need basically is a phone. I’m very annoyed. I can’t stand not being very early for these performances—especially now, after having scratched Grace Jackson-Haight’s cocktail dance off my calendar so as to be the very first chez Gautier. Of course, that would have been death-on-stilts to attend—Jackson-Haight’s collection of nobodies that perhaps only the Christian god in his misery could corral...I can’t stand not being very early. I’m very annoyed!”

  Her dauntlessly comely face set deep inside the raven pagoda of an opulently decked coiffure, Dame Sybil shot ironic sidelong glances at unpresent cameras. (The losses were the cameras’.) Lighting a tipped du Maurier (“They remind me of someone”), drawing her sable closer to a pearl-girdled, swan-white neck, she studied by the frail light of a silver wax match those quattrocento, Cima fingers that were her own, whose deceptively slender, tapered lengths concealed such sensual delicacy locked in docile, tensile mystery: a consummate technique commanding definitive mastery of the arts of the piano, the harpsichord, the psaltery, the lute, the oud, the sitar, and the koto. A small drop of hot silver wax slipped off the spent match onto a star sapphire adorning the left forefinger, recalling her to the swirl of the moment. “What was it you were saying, Cassia?”

  Cassia, gathering dismay, turned fully around to face Dame Sybil for emphasis. “I merely said, my dear, that I loathe and detest the idea of being late! Even among friends, my dear, tongues will wag, you know, tongues will wag!”

  Sybil, turning again to look into the storm, blew two thin streams of nostril smoke against the windowpane in which she saw herself, and through which she saw one faithful cabby returning with a large can of something effective-looking. She thought briefly about windows.

  “Yes, I suppose so, toots, and wags will tongue!” She smirked, only a little. “But what of it when nature is so busily vocative, denouncing every scheme? One feels—out-classed—from the start!”