Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 6

  The cab started up again. Cassia sneezed, and grew sullen.

  In her tower Mawrdew Czgowchwz pondered it. Playing solitaire Scrabble, the new hard way, waiting for Merovig Creplaczx to call up, she hummed the stanzas of the Liebestod like mantras. She was as yet unable to decide. There was something she wanted to remember...

  Meanwhile, Halcyon Q. Paranoy sat at an early-model Dictaphone in an office off the city room. He spoke quickly into the receiver: “I seldom go out—Nobody asks me. Tomorrow or the next day, Nobody Else will do the same. By the end of the holidays, beseeching invites from nobodies everywhere will have piled up in heaps on my desk. But tonight I rush through the biggest blizzard to hit this town since the late forties, to attend the annual...”

  While, alone at her faithful Depression Corona, with a bottle of Rock & Rye and a carton of Luckies, Dolores pounded out her column for a tentative tomorrow:

  Once upon a time, in better days, a regional authority on drop-dead chic, now playing trollopy-doxy-gamine—frantically careening to seed in bugle beads and Place Pigalle sling-backs—the latest shoo-in candidate for permanent gold-star listing in the Gotham Who’s Whorish...

  “Let ’em print that!” she cackled. (They didn’t.)

  While Gloria Gotham walked out of Grace Jackson-Haight’s beige boudoir, having interviewed Thalia Bridgewood, whose fretful search for a new spring vehicle was causing some bizarre ructions on the Rialto. As the reporter walked south down Park Avenue against the blizzard she wondered what to make of things after all. There seemed so little point in recording...

  While Tangent Percase wound up his meditations, tumbled down off his head, sprawling naked on the bare pine floor, and pulled his wits together. Rising to don dinner dress for Magwyck, he collected his thoughts concerning the solstice.

  While Jameson O’Maurigan, chief among those who had followed Mawrdew Czgowchwz out the great doors in the back wall of the Old Met in the dawn following the Traviata triumph, stood in Central Park—at the deserted summer concert bandstand—arm in arm with his twin, Lavinia.

  “What is it, Jamie, are you unhappy?”

  “Yes, Vanilla, but it’s my own fault.”

  “Oh. Is that what’s called ‘self-styled’?”

  “Don’t cooperate, please. This snow is ferocious!”

  “You love the snow—don’t talk down.”

  “What is it I see in you?”

  “Oh, Jamie, why are you so unhappy?”

  While Jonathan Stein sat home reading Leibniz.

  While His Scarlet Eminence and Msgr. Finneagle sat playing their esoteric version of Monopoly, the custom-crafted board for which could be seen to represent the several circles of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, as well as the ground plan of the entire Vatican, both the above-ground palaces’ apartments, closets, and chapels, and those labyrinthine catacomb reaches where Darkest Rumor is said on good authority to repose in thrilling reptile fashion. His Scarlet Eminence snickered in pixyish glee, having caught his opponent in the square of the seventh circle of hell (with four hotels). Monsignor trembled (livid), bankrupt of plenary indulgence.

  While Roxanne Sauvage sat home on Staten Island watching The Ways of Life.

  While Mrs. Grudget of the Plaza staff fretted over Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

  “Madame, your gentleman is ever so past due. Mind you, no telephone call so as we might know what on this earth, or elsewhere, whether this shocking storm, or some sudden turn the gentleman might have took has ever—Gor, the bell! Madame, that’ll be your gentleman. Mind you, bundle now if you must go out in this shocking cyclone.”

  While Frau Langsam sat up late in her studio in Vienna, playing a certain 78 made in 1947, again and again, wondering why in all the years since...

  While in London, Dame Evangeline Tablowe and her last pupil, the mercurial, protean, unknown Jacob Beltane, left the Wigmore Hall with Percival Penpraz and Odo Bost after a strenuous rehearsal, discussing the implications of the term “oltrano”...

  While Lois, working overtime at the Met switchboard, dragged herself over to the Burger Ranch for a take-out cheeseburger and a word of commiseration with Rhoe, the waitress, over winter.

  While Arpenik, the Secret Seven, and the Captain of the Students on Line—the Mawrdew Czgowchwz stalwarts’ sodality—finished their decoration of Arpenik’s restaurant and sat down to a snack of madzoon, stuffed vine leaves, ekmek, and Armenian coffee, secure in their belief that in some ways all was right with the world.

  While Achille Plonque puzzled over Tristan’s monologue.

  While the eminent Dr. Zwischen pulled a switch in a white-tiled room in a clinic up in Dutchess County, and another patient’s mind blew out...

  While a man called Gennaio reasoned well...

  While again in London, the prima ballerina Fandole, back from a luncheon shopping spree in Paris, sat in her home in leafless Regent’s Park, looking out at the black night and at the white and black swans she kept in the little pond at the bottom of the garden, playing M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano, attempting to compare in her mind their two arts.

  While Leda Freitag, recalling her Isolde, claimed...

  While the talk of the town continued.

  Toward the solstice midnight, industry all over town relaxed. The storm’s furor diminished; the night grew steadily tranquil. The persistent delivery of snow fell off. At gentler velocity, it commenced resembling, passed approximating, and at length achieved mimetic perfection, carrying without and beyond the theater the most lavish scenic effect devised under hot lights in Gotham: the forest-snowfall interlude in the second act of the annual Nutcracker at City Center. (Pèlerin Deslieux thought all that, standing in the Fifty-sixth Street stage-door alcove, signing autograph on autograph for gyrating children mimicking the dance.)

  At the hearthside at Magwyck, hanging clusters of golden gorgets, torcs, and crescent lunulae reflected the steady bog-firelight, articulating festive space. Alone in the musky parlor, Rose(ncrantz) the saffron cat lay sloped over the gray-velvet arm of his Regency chair (big enough for two), his bushy tail plumb-hung in the still air, signaling complete repose. The guests were all in at dinner, all but Pèlerin Deslieux, left alone at last to make his anxious way up and over to Seventy-third Street. Shrouded in a sable coat that fell to his shagreen-booted shins, New York’s adopted premier danseur noble plowed around the corner to the Russian Tea Room. There, out front, as the result of an exquisite (if routine) courtesy on the part of the eternally resourceful Mme M. Czgowchwz, oltrano, he was availed of the use of a sled-runnered calèche, a Shetland-pony team, a driver, unperturbed and silent, lap rugs, and a thermos full of hot kvass. Moments later, entering the Park at the top of Sixth Avenue, thoroughly warmed within, and just as erotically chilled the length and width of his sun-child face-and-forehead, Pierrot, experiencing good gestalt, enthused. The shank of the evening split.

  3

  THE COUNTESS Madge O’Meaghre Gautier surveyed her nineteen guests at table at the Solstice Sitting, in almost perfect contentment. (She and Pierrot would make up the twenty-one required for mummers’ winter ritual.) These were, from the hostess’s left: her niece, Lavinia O’Maurigan Stein; Lavinia’s husband, Jonathan Stein; Dixie, Alice, Ralph, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Dame Sybil, Gaia della Gueza, Contessa Cassia, Carmen, Halcyon Paranoy (at the foot), Tangent Percase, Consuelo Gilligan, Merovig Creplaczx, the three remaining Secret Seven, Arpenik, and Jameson O’Maurigan. The place set just at the Countess’s right awaited the eventual, wending Pèlerin Deslieux.

  Dinner had commenced with potage santé. Next, shad roe and sweetbreads Tara, with an iced Bohemian hock. Next, soufflé Gautier (iced Moët, clotted cream, egg yolks, and powdered garlic flowers suspended in pignoli-scented egg-white froths, laced with Cointreau, and presented baked in separate mandala-shaped ramekins). Next, saddle of mutton with roast brown potatoes, mixed sprouts, turnips, parsnips, leek rings, carrots, and cauliflower tops (“Irish ratatouille”), mint sauce, various gravies, and a bra
sh claret. Next, pumpkin soufflé and Vermont rough cider off the wood. Next, Wicklow sausage, black hog-blood pudding, blue and white Stilton, sage Derby, Cheshire, Caerphilly, and Guinness tapped out of the barrel. Last, gâteau Czgowchwz, Armenian coffee, and a selection of private-reserve O’Meaghre Donegal liqueurs—the Countess Madge’s yearly fealty gift from some gracious and talented cousins-distillers in the Emerald regions overseas. An elegant sufficiency having been had (by common consent), conversation began to develop in earnest.

  Halcyon Paranoy opened the bidding, posing questions. These were general, seeking to canvass group attitudes. They were parried in kind, by cross-fire generalities, at that end of the table. Tensions evolved, as they will. Consuelo, feeling somewhat awash, bobbing between Halcyon and Tangent Percase on the one side and Creplaczx and the remaining Secret Seven on the other, sent a folded message across- and up-table to G-G, soliciting no reply. G-G frowned, dragging on a long Sobranie, and made a few mnemonic notes. Arpenik slanted her own wary, Caspian opinions across the table to Ralph and Alice. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil concurred. G-G, glancing vis-à-vis, advised Merovig to press less. Cassia fell out (predictably) with Carmen over a minuscule mimic detail while recalling a Neri fiasco. The remaining Secret Seven ratified contentions at random, playing politics. Lavinia leaned toward Jonathan, who seemed elsewhere.

  Pierrot arrived, to a lustily concerted welcome. The parvenu took his place; he feasted. Réchauffé “flashback” courses were delivered to the top of the table, reinforcing communal delight (“Ensemble anamnesis”—Paranoy). Ralph was promptly voracious all over again. He commenced spinning the cheese wheel and cracking walnuts. Pierrot, devouring sweetbreads, watched Ralph manipulate the Walachian-oakwood nutcracker. Joviality burgeoned.

  Despite the Countess Madge’s outright interdict, Pierrot was besieged while savoring his meal. Tangent Percase demanded to know whether Arpenik’s repeated, “feeling” pronouncements did not seem to the “disinterested audient” to contradict what Dixie and the remaining Secret Seven had made known to the company. Pierrot, on the soufflé, asked Tangent what he and Consuelo thought. Percase offered his opinion, the Gilligan woman hers. “How do you suddenly arrive at that—or THAT?” Carmen interrupted, proceeding to outline the real story, while Cassia, attempting to press her sotto voce reservations upon G-G, was airily misunderstood. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil concurred, happily. Merovig brooded the more. Pierrot’s meal went forward amid a general rehash tutti of opinion and information, habitual attitudes and idiosyncratic expression.

  The Countess Madge ran over her cue lines, there at table, and yet not at all there—drinking whiskey and gobbling walnuts. Meanwhile, the company zoom-focused on Tangent Percase urging some metaphoric congruence between Neri’s fans anticipating the Norma farewell and the perennially fated Scandinavian lemmings on their frantic progress to the sea (“oblivion-as-mendacious-memory,” in Tangent’s tortuous analogy). Eyes were suddenly seen shifting in varying directions all about the table. Everyone seemed to be trying to look elsewhere. (Consequently, in the given limits of the spatial district, there were collisions.) Murmurs developed; there were yawns, scarcely stifled. Paranoy pressed Percase to change the subject.

  Ralph seemed to be mouthing silent oaths, but not in any protestation against the Percase rhetoric. His thoughts fled all the while to a certain patiently wrought manuscript (unilluminated just as yet, but not forever) which now lay on an occasional table in the parlor. The time would come. Ralph munched walnuts, preparing.

  Lavinia and Jameson communed across the table. The Countess continued mumbling mummers’ imprecations. Pierrot sampled the Stilton and the sage Derby. Sipping Guinness, he relaxed in ruminative bliss.

  Sooner than had been expected, the snow stopped falling. The sky cleared to a stagy indigo. “Argent moonglow” (Percase) split through spaces created by flung-open drapes. The common session ceased. Everyone made for one window or another, colliding each with each in room-to-room progresses, causing gentle routs and reconnoiters. What Alice somewhat awkwardly described as “a rash of stars” burst out in deliberate earnest, driving the company, sooner than had been planned, into Magwyck’s back yard. Somewhere on high, as Consuelo Gilligan observed, Sagittarius was giving way to Capricorn. G-G reared her head in thoroughbred fashion. Alice shrugged and went back indoors to the oval mirror in the parlor, stopping off at the sideboard to pour herself a “who cares?” bourbon and spritz, no ice.

  Lavinia, Jameson, Carmen, and the remaining Secret Seven set about building some sort of snow totem in hilarious secrecy behind the tall hedgerow of yew directly behind the O’Meaghre dolmen. Their giddy, screened labors continued in noisy concert, to some moment...

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh retired to the music room with Merovig Creplaczx, Arpenik, Dixie, Contessa Cassia, Pierrot, and the Countess Madge. The Countess took up the psaltery, but did not play. She continued mumbling odd old fragments of ritual responses. Merovig did play: a thing of his own: strophic, nocturnal, sarabandic, fugal. Coming back indoors, Carmen took out her knitting and sat Calypso-like in a cozy cocoa baignoire fauteuil opposite the door. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil listened (standing) to Cassia’s ironic kvetch on the subjects of finance, politics, gossip, and fiction (its demise). Dixie and Arpenik exchanged knowing notions relative to the concoction of herbal soups, antelope stews, aphrodisiacs, and flower wines.

  Merovig finished. He rose to accept a genial if distracted applause from the select audience in the music room, and paused. Feverish laughter could be heard quite clearly through shut windows all the way from behind the yew hedge behind the O’Meaghre dolmen. Carmen giggled, “Mah deah, the carryings-on!” The Countess wondered if again: the neighbors ...the police... Memories of former encounters over the years flooded in from the same back yard. One from the summer just past demanded special review. At the summer-solstice back-yard amateur night, Ralph, forecasting the eventual Neri collapse, had plunged into a travesty rendition of Morgana’s “D’amor sull’ ali rosee,” accompanying himself on the hurdy-gurdy barrel organ (some actual cousin’s workaday instrument), while a very clever little monkey, got up in Leonora drag, made the appropriate Neridic gestures (amazingly, thrust for thrust). He (Ralph) had been sublime, yes, but scarcely had he finished when a horde of nasty, thirsty cops spilled through Magwyck and into the Countess’s private arena, bleating like a pick-up Barese chorus that a frantic complaint had been received at the station: a woman was being strangled to death! (“Nonsense, dahlings,” Alice had interposed, boozily. “Thash Azhuchena, dahlings, being burnt atha shtake!”) Nasty possibilities had threatened, but salvation arrived in the form of an earnest, black-eyed (“altogether Pompeian”— Paranoy), Neapolitan rookie, who explained the situation to his superiors. “Itz opra!”—which pithy address to the slapstick mob of New York’s finest (“Finest what? Finest Falange!?” “Oh, shut up, it’s damp in jail!” “I’m a woman of some means...”) saved the company of guests the embarrassment of arraignment, but left the Countess Madge a case of bonded Irish whiskey less in her store beneath the back cellar stairs (“They have noses like Satan!”).

  The Countess, sighing, permitted...

  Deliberately wordlessly, Merovig Creplaczx approached Mawrdew Czgowchwz, now seated near Carmen in the shadows. Throwing out his shapely, manicured right hand—a hand accustomed neither to refusal nor to too much in the way of tender requital, the perfect hand for his purposes heretofore (Mawrdew Czgowchwz thought of Tristan, the man)—he offered a challenge: to take hers. She took his in one svelte parry. They walked into the parlor, where Alice sat groggy on the hearthrug with Rose(ncrantz) snoring in her lap. They stood by the French window talking now and again in Czech. Merovig heard new music (widening) in his mind. It was operatic; it was his own. He had always been afraid...

  The Countess Madge silenced the Contessa Cassia with neither much malice nor much tact: “Finance is matutinal!” Dame Sybil, lighting a du Maurier, ag
reed. Cassia, in her best unruffled society manner, rallied, laughed, and made one final fiscal-cum-political observation. The company in the music room dispersed but for Carmen, who kept to herself, musing darkly on the activity behind the yew hedge, and took the opportunity left by the midnight lull to round off the foot on one leg of some particularly brilliant wool pajama set meant for a nephew or a niece a few days hence at Christmas.

  Outdoors, Jameson and Lavinia stood apart, with Jonathan. The remaining Secret Seven set about dressing the snow totem in strip-lengths of pilfered remnant fabric. He and she, the twins, looked toward the embrasure wherein was framed the most discussed couple in that talky town (always believing itself), Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, and Merovig Creplaczx, conductor, composer, and exclusive accompanist.

  Jameson decided he could kill them both. He suffered, thinking what he could do. He said as much to his twin. His ebriate passion flared in Irish words. Jonathan and Lavinia restrained him, talking sense. “Sense,” he wondered, “where is the sense?” He loved Mawrdew Czgowchwz—that was all.

  What was it to be alive?

  Many similar viewings occurred, each and all obviously fulcrate upon the display of Mawrdew and Merovig standing together in a French window. Jameson walked away behind the yew hedgerow.

  The solstice came silently. The nadir of the northern year occurred. A mortal hush of petrifying neglect struck cold symbolic terror into the wary, doubting hearts of the elect. Mithras walked nowhere nearby. Ouranos trembled fiercely in the distant bowels of trackless space. Most of Gotham pitched about in nameless, anguished distress—sleeping, chartless, unaware. Some died, most restlessly. Mawrdew Czgowchwz spoke equivocally, in E minor. Every light at Magwyck was put out. While a skeptical Wedgwood judiciously smothered the last of the Old Year’s peat fire, then opened every window but those in his own quarters “to the vapours of the night,” the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier, carrying a blazing torch—the last-lit votive flame in religious Gotham—led her quorum of guests into the back yard, to the O’Meaghre dolmen. Ritual mumming commenced.