Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  In the immediate days to come, a quantity of bilge came to be scribbled and spoken by the least aware in that same town, “concerning” (but in no way doing so) “the private ceremonies composing the Winter Solstice Occurrence at Magwyck.” They who felt they must would rant. New York can be a low town.

  Halcyon Paranoy (“your correspondent, himself present”) sent his now-classic dispatches to the Times and The Talk of the Town (“On Mummery at Magwyck”) shortly after the evening in question began to be alluded to in hooded reference after hooded reference: streams of gutter-press obloquy purporting to connect the “mysterious rondo” to the fateful Czgowchwz collapse. Without revealing a single secret word, “On Mummery at Magwyck” succeeded in raising the level of discussion so far above Gotham’s sob-freaks as to neutralize the worst of the sleazy tabloid mind-rot. It sketched the background of the Countess’s rituals in properly ratifiable geographic terms, tracing the influence on her household rubrics of mummings in the north, west, and southeast of Ireland, with pointed reference to the celebrations at Dervock and Glenarm in Antrim, at Beltany in Donegal, at Holywood in Down, in Dublin, at Dromore in Tyrone, and at Kilmore in Wexford. It demonstrated how “the action shows that this linked circle (circumferencing the dolmen) is a perfect mandala representation of the marriage house in which the life-cycle drama is performed, without the censorship imposed by a more polite society.” It mined the origins of mummery, drawing on the reports of Wace, on the misted pasts of Thessaly, of the Balkans, and of Thrace. Most cogently, it touched upon the core of the issue in relation to Mawrdew Czgowchwz—the uncanny way in which the perennial elements of the Hero-Conflict Play and the Countess’s trope prefigured the events in historical time which on that night crouched poised “like ready leopard furies,” about to leap into the Czgowchwz life story before another night thereafter had been lived through. It charted the ritual’s main argument: the combatant protagonist overcome by the antagonist, thereafter revived by a doctor figure. It included a selection of typical character designates to be found in any careful investigation into mummery and folklore: the Black Prince (or Queen); Devil-Doubt; Beelzebub, the Stooge Betrayer; the Great-Headed One; and the usually eponymous hero and/or heroine. Thus, for those who knew Czgowchwz...

  Reviewing the Paranoy dispatches in his own column, Francobolli commended the seriousness and the style as well: “Not so much written as wrung in earnest anguish out of the troubled heart and fervent soul of this most gallant Czgowchwz cavalier, whose defiantly prolix fealty presents a kind of running-neon paradigm of the quintessence—the veriest it—of divadienst.”

  Twenty-one celebrants, observed in unruffled bewilderment by Wedgwood, stationed behind the frosted window in his quarters at the top back, stood grouped in a second circle around the O’Meaghre well, ending the evening’s mumming. The circle whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere was (and was not) described. The frozen, suspect depth of the well called forth, demanding token appeasement. Tokens were dispensed into the void, wherein none was heard to echo hitting bottom. Sluggish rumbles from Lexington Avenue subway and New York Central railroad tunnels hit sympathetic chords below written staves. These issued eerily from the forbidding recesses. Lavinia sought certain phrases; others sought certain others. Everyone felt very cold. The Countess flung her torch into the well; then struck a flint on the O’Meaghre dolmen, assisted with profound determination by Jameson. Apt presences responded. The participation mystique obtained. (“In the accomplishment of domestic ritual, the rubric panache of the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier’s Winter Solstice Tenebrae can have few rivals in the urban West”—Paranoy, “On Mummery at Magwyck.”)

  The newly struck fire was carried by the Countess inside to the parlor, where the newly stacked andirons were cordially addressed by herself in the tongue of Fergus, Finn MacCool, and Maev, of Cuchulainn, of O’Logaire, of Deirdre and Naoise. Many exploits of the fabled bygone Fenian bands were referred to in passing couplets as the Countess took up the psaltery to play and sing, the while Wedgwood went about Magwyck shutting windows and doors and the twenty guests disposed themselves at will to listen.

  The Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier was complete mistress of her art. Sitting centered in the glowing room, she evinced a quiddative presence which the term “hostess” could never suffice to represent. She became in her own home her own most brilliant guest. She personified her own great flaming hearth. She reigned, yet she need not rule. The bardic sidereal invocation, now keening, now exulting, swept on in melismatic quavers, vaulting thrusts, and cadent torrents, spellbinding the warming assembly. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was especially affected. She had been present on former Winter Solstice Occasions, but had never until then been so enraptured or seen so many others so much so. There did seem something numinous inherent in the wrung vocalics of this sacral Erse the Countess employed when the Orphic rhythms of the earth, the heavens, and the collective self required affirmation and salutation, commemoration and respect. In other, better-known (if not more vivid) tongues, she had herself impersonated countesses lamenting this and that. (Did not the “Dove sono” voice the entire sum of loss?) The diva, finally holding each of her own hands in the other, sought either some sure response or some relief from nagging suspicion, from postulant Devil-Doubt. The Countess Madge continued all the while.

  Consuelo Gilligan, seated, surveyed herself reflected in the long mirror, head to foot. The long mirror reflected the oval mirror over the mantel. In the luminant visual surround she took in certain of the Countess Madge’s guests. “I know what they’re thinking,” she thought. “They’re thinking, ‘She thinks if she wears that shit long enough, somebody will decree the forties back in fashion.’” She thought they might just as well. Yes, let them. This defiance had commenced to take on the overtones of nearly outright supplication. She drew the veil of her smart toque (a 1947 Théophile Plafond) down over her shifting eyes, concealing somewhat the conflicting play of attitudes across the planes of that severely taut Hispano-Celtic face. She listened on, thinking now and again more about table tops and flamenco than about the Pythian twists and turns of the Countess Madge’s mounting gradual.

  Halcyon Paranoy caught Dame Sybil’s eye in the same moment Consuelo caught him doing so. Paranoy looked toward Carmen. The concurrent, unspoken rumble seemed to say: “She (Consuelo) is a silly old bag even if we love her.” There wasn’t another hat being worn indoors that year in social Gotham, but so what? Percase approved. He considered her hats “valiant against the wind and the sky and the years.” Consuelo worried on.

  Sooner than it might have done, the Ceremony of the Newborn Hearth finished. The Countess laid the psaltery aside. Wedgwood announced the champagne sufficiently chilled and the restorative caviar and crepes laid on.

  To some deliberate eyes, twenty-one of even the most devout sybarites might seem a meager collection to come to terms with the volume and bulk of champagne and caviar and crepes dispensed that night at Magwyck. These, however, succeeded. Corks, popping, flew in fugitive parabolas and interlacing arcs as magnums of white-gold Moët spilled into shell-thin lotus-blossom kylikes. Hilarity restored the atmosphere. A ritual solemnity had purchased indulgent license from whatever unseen forces legislate the world at night. Continuance was granted. It was taken for granted. The evening went on and on...

  All the while they drank champagne and feasted, the deep, green expanse of the tree in the parlor, redolent of splendor, love, eternity, and good fortune, enjoyed countless sallies, yielding in its patient way to rococo ornamental decking. From steamer trunks Wedgwood had carted upstairs from storage, cornucopian varieties of those spun-glass, metal, and paper constructs the Yuletide requires were gingerly removed, then placed in depth under depth of challenging needle evergreen. Every last arboreal niche was invested by someone with a textured network-within-networks of light and color: apt schematic evidence of an opulent season.

  Removing at a careful distance to survey the tree, Jameson
O’Maurigan seemed to discern the absence of a “missing something.” Pressed by all to discover what exactly was the element lacking, he blurted all at once: “Hanging gingerbread figures!” He was absolutely right, the cry went up at once. Jameson acknowledged same. A minor crisis (“Where, at this time of the night...”) was squelched by Arpenik (the wise, kind, and resourceful). Leaving her few ancient ornate Armenian rings in a Beleek seashell dish next to Ralph’s manuscript, she marched straight into the Countess’s kitchen, pulled an ocher linen apron off the apron rack, ransacked the adjacent pantry for the necessary makings, and set straight about confecting gingerbread cut into likenesses. She toiled in enforced secrecy for an interval during which seductive scents kept drifting from the kitchen toward the parlor, from the pitched nomadic domain of this great white cooking-witch—fabled everywhere in town as the deviser of erotic repasts past counting—toward the greater camp within.

  Old songs were sung, once again. At the spinet in the parlor, Jameson accompanied Lavinia in very pretty renderings of “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,” “O for the Wings of a Dove,” and “The Last Rose of Summer.”

  A game of attitude charades began to be played among the Secret Seven, which soon captured the attention of the entire company. It began as usual with Alice striking an attitude, then holding it, then arching it, sketching a kind of mimetic précis that was soon discovered to be the emblem of a certain role as characteristically performed by a certain major artist or comprimario star. Thus Neri’s decrepit Aïda, Bagatelli’s horsy Manon Lescaut, Roxanne Sauvage’s matey Carmen, Toscanova’s gamy Santuzza were all cartooned in flashes. When Ralph, Dixie, and the remaining Secret Seven joined in, the game grew into something raunchier and more challenging. Their complex dumb show illustrated entire scenes featuring jumbled front- and back-bench Metropolitan personnel, some of them most improbably cast. When a scene was guessed, the guest who guessed it must go to the spinet and either play it outright (a point) or parody it to the general satisfaction of the guests who had not guessed so quickly or had not wished to do so (two points).

  Thus a crowd of boundlessly merry amateurs cavorted, entirely awash in champagne, tears of hilarity, and altogether impenitent excess. The proceedings, however, were not taped, as revels often had been on St. Marks Place and on Mulberry Street.

  Fullest marks went in the end to Ralph for his “production number” involving Alice as Neri as Cio-Cio-San in her frail encounter with the Bonze—Ralph himself in a busy chintz wrap-around snatched from the broom closet—with the remaining Secret Seven as attendants grasping festooned umbrellas, poised looking on in horror, while Wedgwood as Banquo Canelli as Pinkerton in an angel-hair fright wig (Wedgwood enjoyed all this “kit”) yawned on cue downstage. The tableau was tagged by Merovig Creplaczx, mincing on that so fine line between hilarity and savagery, venting his loathing of Puccini in a nastily ingenious keyboard pastiche, a dexterous and hideous, accidental-ridden fantasia. (His own continuing manic laughter meanwhile threw more than a slight chill into the farce. Mawrdew Czgowchwz wondered: What kind of vocal line would this strange pursuer himself devise?)

  Arpenik’s gingerbread arrived. On ten large earthenware plates lay arranged forty gingerbread figures, each hand-cut and decorated in a sugar-icing costume: heroes and heroines of opera: Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s forty roles. And on a separate silver dish the figure of Isolde, wearing an Armenian amulet in confectionery miniature, for good measure and good fortune. Each cookie was crowned in orange-flavored, orange-tinted Mawrdew Czgowchwz hair, tied up or flowing. This amazing presentation was received in astonished gratitude by the diva, who then rose up to place the one and forty gingerbread figures on the dazzling tree herself.

  The lady Czgowchwz then moved naturally into position alongside the spinet as Merovig Creplaczx, still seated at the keyboard, began to play. She sang four Mahler songs so profoundly that the spontaneous quality of the act itself was subsumed in a longing moment that seemed to have been absolutely destined to occur, to be accomplished only and for all time then and there in merely that way. Most listeners felt quite unable to open their eyes when the singer had surrendered the final phrases. Jameson walked out alone into the back yard, forbidding even Lavinia to follow. Jonathan wanted at first to go directly home. Consuelo Gilligan removed her toque and went away upstairs to take down her upsweep. The Countess Madge stoked the peat fire in devout silence. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Merovig Creplaczx went and stood together in the French window again, leaving each of the others to his own reflection.

  Ralph, Alice, Dixie, and the remaining Secret Seven decided the time had come. Ralph went to the occasional table and took up the manuscript lying there. He cleared his throat and opened it to the first page. Casual inquisitive glances passed from one to the next. Meanwhile, the remaining Secret Seven had been dispatched. At the well they passed Jameson standing shivering in the cold, and went on at a march behind the yew hedge behind the O’Meaghre dolmen. Consuelo Gilligan saw them from the upstairs bedroom window: they were mounting an enormous snow figure onto a kind of palanquin set over what appeared to be a wide, deep washtub. Consuelo hurried back downstairs, hatless, with her back hair down. Jameson followed the procession back indoors.

  Alice had gone to the spinet to play a less than Creplaczxy pastiche of the Meditation from Thaïs. She switched on cue to a rather better barroom take-off on the Triumphal Scene from Aïda (more her style), while the procession from the back yard entered in stately gait. The snow monster over the washtub was set in the center of the parlor floor. Puzzled looks shot back and forth for a brief interval until a shrieking outburst from Dame Sybil set the entire room gasping and falling about: “La vecchia! La stessa!” The snow monster was indeed a totem of Neri dressed in fragments of costumes meant to represent her several starring roles. It glowered.

  Commanding a sort of frantic, piecemeal attention in the uproar, Ralph began to read his manuscript. All the while he delivered couplet upon mocking couplet, Alice went on spacing the stanzas, pounding out parodies of the Entrance of the Priests from Norma, the Miserere from Il Trovatore, the Convent Scene from La Forza del Destino, and the death of Liù from Turandot—each of them mangled and augmented by fist- and elbow-banging clusters. At length Ralph paused, turned, looked stiletti, and wordlessly reduced the percussive din to a tolerable warble, saving the keyboard from destruction and “facilitating the continuance” of his inspired work: the Nericon.

  This work requires no extended description. It was to be recited, privately printed, read by thousands, excerpted, issued on pirate records, taped, and litigated over for an age. It has been called, variously, the most brilliant piece of verse-polemic bawdry in the history of Gotham operaphilia, and the meanest low-down kick in the gut ever dealt a decent woman of the lyric theater. On its account Mawrdew Czgowchwz was accused of being many times more wicked, treacherous, and vile than sin and death themselves, combined. While it was being read the next day on the opera line (having been delivered to the sidewalk in stacks by a gypsy news truck commandeered by Ralph for the purpose), black rosaries of blood curses and Mafioso oaths were to be heard searing the bleak December air. Shredded, spat-upon copies soon accumulated in the gutter, clogging the sewers, while elsewhere (everywhere that mattered more) gleeful amazement pierced winter, acclaiming Ralph’s genius (“The verbal dexterity!” “The Nericon, entwining as it does myth and moment...”—Paranoy).

  At Magwyck its first audience demanded encores of phrases, verses, pages. Strands of the narrative fabric were disentangled, uncloaked of their fictive devices, and recalled in their factual happenstances. Chill memories of avant-Czgowchwz, Neriac excesses and fiaschi were unearthed like the undead, providing a grisly running commentary on the Nericon’s merciless allegory. Thus the entire career of “the Old Foghorn” was reviewed at once in fiction and in too-true fact (“There’s fiction; also faction”—Percase).

  The Countess Madge and almost everyone else considered the Nericon a triumph; Mawrde
w Czgowchwz didn’t know. Not having witnessed the full parade of Morgana Neri’s career, she felt a strange, rather unwelcome condition envelop her: being implicated without being involved. Ever wary of vendetta, she laughed at the others’ laughter, but, disinclined to enter in, stayed just outside the thicket of vitriolic testimony pullulating in her presence. Whenever she herself thought about Neri (regularly once a day in New York, elsewhere never), she saw the same sad, vain, stupid old woman staggering about in fits and starts across the Metropolitan stage, garishly costumed in her own realizations, unaware of the simplest canons of stage deportment, seemingly serenely lost in another world-maze: of scenery to which she could relate only by a kind of darting escape downstage, eyes riveted by turns on the wizened prompter and on the Family Circle’s yielding fastnesses, emitting underpitched sounds always resembling most of all those strange equipage instruments Czgowchwz had first heard the last summer on a visit to Ireland with the Countess Madge—those ancient, unearthly ...bagpipes. In any case, was not the continued baiting of Morgana Neri perhaps the flogging of a dead horse? She did hope it would cease once the old woman had removed herself at last from the waspish arena of the opera. (How could a “singing woman,” in Pierrot’s phrase, go so far past her prime? When could the Neri prime have been?) At the same time, Czgowchwz remembered having once been advised, when questioning the febrile animosity Neri’s protracted career provoked: “If your singing is the dream of heaven, Mawrdew, that woman’s bawling is the racking nightmare of hell!” She brooded about destiny. It was very difficult. One must do battle against all nightmares. One must be rigorous and deplore outrage. One must stand up and be enlisted. The Nericon was ending...