Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  It finished. The snow-monster effigy of Neri had melted into the tin washtub; the solstice fireside blaze had seen to that. Wedgwood was summoned and given succinct directions by the chatelaine: “Take these slops away, please, and have them dumped into the East River.” He complied matter-of-factly.

  Suspicions of dawn were on that occasion first felt by Arpenik and Pierrot, in conference at the French window concerning the former’s prognostic on the latter’s eventual achievement. As the world turns, so it did. Subtle alterations occurred in the pattern apparent on the darkened window-panes reflecting the indoors. Subfusc influence wrought steady increase in the middle atmosphere, illuming from ink-black to cold slate-gray the alley separating Magwyck from the Moronican embassy next door. A back-yard cityscape began to be discernible in

  Snow-fraught ambuscade, white-as-white glaze ground

  Reflecting starlight, gathered brilliance as the sun rose

  Unhindered somewhere out at sea beyond

  The serried canyons of a winterset Gotham.

  Jameson O’Maurigan:

  A Mawrdew Czgowchwz Morning

  (fragment)

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, was to give a performance on the evening of that same new day. Not merely a performance, a première. She would require food, sleep, food again, and no small degree of self-gathering repose achieved in wakeful meditation. Then food again, and whiskey. As it dawned upon the guests that this was so, that that coming evening intended presenting a select audience with the first-ever Czgowchwz Isolde, rushes of protective concern and apprehension vied one with another among the great admirers. Back in the dining room, at a light breakfast of kippers, sherry and eggs, Arpenik’s ekmek with orange Cointreau marmalade, coffee, and croissants, each in his own way and all in their common lauding office urged the diva to return in sensible good time to the Plaza to prepare. She promised to do so, all in good time.

  Ralph dialed the number of the public telephone in the end booth in the gallery of shops close to the southwest corner of Fortieth Street and Broadway. After a dozen or more rings, an executive voice replied: “Hello, Tristan opera line!” So the waiting had begun.

  “Glory t’ God in a shift!” exclaimed the broguey Countess Madge. “A queue in this perishin’ cowld mornin’, is it? What with snow stacked fair up t’ the tits on the Statue uv Liberty! Sure there’s sinners turnin’ inta saints on Broadway this day! God forbid the day t’ come, Mawrdew, when yourself quits the operatic singin’ profession—there’s sure a career lurkin’ for you in the leadin’ of worthy causes (should one worthier than musicry get itself discovered, as seems hard enough t’ vision). A queue on this same mornin’!” Like sentiments to these, voiced in polyphonic consensus, sped their way around the breakfast table. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, savoring her kippers, joined readily in the furious appreciation, for all the world as if its axis were some quite distant, other enchantress than she. The Countess Madge, resuming her cultivated middle-Atlantic, adjourned breakfast.

  As the first Capricorn sunlight advanced, disrupting the early gray calm of that winter dawn, another weary Gotham awoke. At Magwyck, the parting toasts were proclaimed in the music room to the tune of Schumann’s Davidsbünd-lertänze, rendered by Dame Sybil. The company called it a night, drinking deep to itself and to the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier, hostess, priestess, chatelaine, and pal, then dispersed.

  Twenty elegant stragglers, chilling, bearing an unmistakable if invisible standard—“We didn’t get up, we stayed up!”—made for Central Park in a phalanx. (“Look,” people said, “a phalanx!”) They looked like the Lost Battalion, better dressed. Traffic was at a standstill, which happy fact occasioned a lovely, leisurely progress down the center of Fifth Avenue to the zoo, amid tank formations of snowplow trucks warming up. Then through the zoo, and on down to the Plaza...

  The Plaza itself was fairly agog at the prospect of the diva Czgowchwz presenting herself as Isolde. Deals of varying sorts and degrees of apprehension, tension, ecstasy, and bilious envy in this separate quarter and that made their marks on that contingent of hotel personnel devoted to the personal comfort and security of the lady under discussion. Mrs. Grudget in particular had sat up through the night, and decided at the end that this was “a fine time for her to come in!” The Englishwoman was particularly put off by what she considered the typically Irish excess of the Countess Madge’s idea of a party. Why “that one” could not celebrate Christmas like a decent Christian woman, indoors, and on the appointed day... And here now suddenly was this noisy company escorting the diva in, and tracking snow and slush across the carpets in the lobby, demanding brandies off-hours, deriding the pretty pink and silver seasonal trappings in the Palm Court, and hanging about altogether like a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, behaving in a manner less suggestive of companions of a legendary lady than the sorts of ruffians that might have been tossed out of the Persian Room during one of, say, Dolly Farouche’s cabaret turns. Mrs. Grudget disapproved.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz shrugged it off. Taking affectionate leave of her friends, the dozy diva swerved into an elevator, nodding absently at some last urgent attention of Merovig Creplaczx’s, and was carried up to her suite, where, as Mrs. Grudget emphatically drew the gamboge damask drapes against the brilliant winter morning, she fell, scarcely aware, out of her furs and dinner dress, her famous loosed hair falling about everywhere, into an opulent, cool, welcome double bed, to sleep. Everybody else went home.

  4

  AS MAWRDEW Czgowchwz lay so fast asleep, the day that had so happily dawned so bloomed. Agitated Gotham seized a grip on itself. Events and situations recommenced all over town to be regarded in the variegated, interlocking contexts of all their precedents. Yesterday’s memories, reactivated, revealed. In politics, as elsewhere, forces were being regrouped. Prognosticators waited, alert. Few could say what would come next. The watchword seemed to be “Next?”

  While the Secret Seven slept, the Nericon, stacked up hot off a certain hand press housed in a faceless brownstone’s basement in the old Trotskyite neighborhood near Union Square, waited (as if patiently) to be delivered uptown to the opera line as soon as Broadway was sufficiently snow-cleared. Meanwhile, the garment district lay stranded in turmoil. Ready-to-wear merchants, furriers, and their vassal cutters and models were for the most part unable to arrive from Scarsdale and from Bensonhurst respectively. The area therefore belonged entirely to the Tristan opera line.

  Paranoy once called the Old Met opera line the “ne plus ultra of ‘plus ça change.’” Like the more heroic, if not necessarily more valiant, bread lines, soup lines, and picket lines of the venerable prewar urban populist network, the postwar opera line stood for something. What this same something was, was style. Elegant stylists animated the line. Entire two- and three-week winter and spring vacations came to be spent along the waiting wall, now and again with bed and breakfasts thrown into the package by the Ansonia, the older inner sanctum; the flashier, grander, murkier Plaza; or the hidden fortress, the Chelsea. Now and then the Hotel Earle... Frequent waspish verbal collisions between style and fashion—style’s own slower-witted stepchild—became the general attractive outdoor participation sport. Participation package tours were bought and sold coast to coast to broadcast listeners. Worthies, stationed the seasons through, backs to the wall or backs now and then to the passing, staring, shopping ordinaries, codified stylish behavior. Thus the more the nightly billing changed, the more the pliant, stoic endurance evidenced by these waiting stylists remained the secular discipline it had set out to be. Now and again “the spastic quasi-dactylic squabbles of vagrant hairburners, unsought decorator would-be’s, washout theatricalists, and nowhere display types rent the seams of decorous patience” (as Paranoy observed sourly time and again), but for the best part of the era there was evident, along the length of shopfront and marquee esplanade that made up the precinct of the standing line at that original Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, a kind of solid, committed bearing that gave a
dimension far beyond throwaway swank to the politic style of that same town around it, which since the demolition of the Old Met has forever and for ill been lost, forgotten, even forsworn. Paranoy himself decreed: “The end of the Old Met marked the decisive end of Gotham as it was, when it was truly fabulous.”

  The bright, vigilant Riverdale student who had answered the telephone in the arcade earlier had returned to his small circle, a party of Czgowchwz activists composed of his classmates and a group of graduate students from Juilliard. The score of Tristan und Isolde lay open on a campstool in the covered doorway under the marquee. The Narration and Curse were being analyzed in preparation for a canonic set of variant predictions concerning the Czgowchwz realization. The bright captain-student let his companions know, much to their general delight, that Ralph himself had been the early-morning caller, that the solstice celebration at Magwyck had been “flawless” and was over, and that the lady of the moment would soon be safe home and asleep. Neighboring student delegations and hardy perennials, overhearing, passed the word along the line. Students and teachers of psychology, well aware of the crucial importance of the sleeping diva’s dreamwork, chatted knowingly about Isolde, the most potent, magical-archetypal SHE in all opera. (“What about Norma!?” “Oh...well...”)

  A lesser but no less inevitable question being bruited about at the one and the same time was “What would the Tristan [making his debut] do?” He was called Achille Plonque; was, of all things, an actual Norman; and had never been recorded. He had been heard recently in Avignon as Pelléas (“...!”) and was said to have sung in the Tristan rehearsals very much like a Massenet tenor (“Head tones that sound like French express-train whistles, but sweet!”—Dixie). It was, of course, the diva herself who had engineered his appearance on the bill: they had sung Samson et Dalila together, in Italian, the previous summer at the arena in Verona. No one could say what would be. All that was known for a historical fact was that the aged Fritz Krank, the house Tristan, was enraged at having been politely but firmly chucked out into the cold in favor of “some nasal Frog upstart shit!” (Schwertleite Vogelgesang, secretary of the Fritz Krank Music Society). The Czgowchwz will, adventurous and insistent, had prevailed. The one thing as well that was known everywhere about M. Plonque was that he was, as Alice swore again and again, “beyond belief gorgeous!”

  Ralph: “He looks just like a della Francesca!”

  “He looks better!”

  “Alice, don’t lose your whole mind!”

  This prospect, having a Tristan and Isolde, each of comely mien, boasting apparent youth (Czgowchwz, nearing forty, looked forever thirty-one; Plonque was said to be just thirty), thrilled the ardent serious-minded. Students, teachers, writers, readers—all awaited, like the rebirth of the solar year, the liberation of their cherished mythic fantasies (“the way you think about opera in the bathtub!”—Ralph) from the cliché perpetrations of humdrum obesity in Wagnerian theater. Visions of erotic display leaped out of the open score that brilliant morning, raising opera-line conversation to a pitch unusual even for Czgowchwz premières. Questions occurred of the evident possibility of a backstage entente between the principals. No information had sped from Verona other than the official record: on stage Sansone e Dalila had caused a somewhat extramusical sensation, but scandal never crept behind the painted scene. The loose activity in the scene deck (a corridor dubbed by the Veronese regulars the epithetic Italian equivalent of “Shag Alley”) was evident merely among the native artists. The constant paparazzi had simply turned in action snaps with torrid captions (“La Czgowchwz ed il suo schiavo!” etc.) to fatten the summer issues of Gente, L’Europeo, Oggi, and Paris-Match.

  Sanitation Department snowplow trucks were clearing up Broadway, creating snowbanks ten feet high on the sidewalks. Weary casual laborers, recruited at the minimum wage by the opera-house maintenance staff, were pacing now doggedly around the four sides of the block, flinging rock salt carelessly about, oblivious of any impending occasion. Endless coffee-fetching forays began to be made by gathering newcomers. The students at the front, having arrived in the midst of the violent storm equipped with kerosene stoves and knapsacks filled with survival provisions, lounged about drinking their own coffee, much like mountaineers having achieved the lower reaches of some compulsively desired peak. (That peak they would surely ascend, as Paranoy decreed, “to find Czgowchwz already there: her own certain ascent on the darker sheer slope achieved at a bound—thus expressing the perfect relation of the task of performance to the task of audience.”)

  Laverne Zuckerman, the debutante Brangäne, arrived at the opera house on the first free-running BMT, for final costume fittings. This young New Yorker had been chosen by Mawrdew Czgowchwz as well (the cooperative Roxanne Sauvage having backed out of the performance only too gladly, the better to be present out front). It was she, Laverne Zuckerman, who had been presented as the properly girlish Adalgisa in the diva’s spectacular, “lambent” Norma at the Paris Opéra the month before. She as well was a singer of both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles. In the previous half year she had sung Cherubino to Czgowchwz’s Countess, Suzuki to her Cio-Cio-San, Elisabetta di Valois to her Eboli, and, most interestingly, Octavian to the Czgowchwz Marschallin at the Vienna Staatsoper, where it was remarked that the American girl’s performance uniquely rivaled the earlier Czgowchwz Rosenkavalier. Certain snide asides, references to “the Czgowchwz Traveling Circus,” could be heard thereafter, whispered in reptilian spite, rising out of the odd sewer.

  Unaffected, but sensibly nervous, her fittings accomplished, Laverne Zuckerman stopped off at the head of the line to speak to some of the students she knew would be there. She herself had finished up at Juilliard, where Czgowchwz had discovered her singing Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda only the year before. When asked for preview hints of the performance to come, she seemed to gape into the middle distance, there seeming to see something perfectly clearly, but because of the rigorous attention demanded in seeing it, to be quite unable to detail it. She could only say that what she had witnessed in the rehearsals was “the music—all the music” and “the story—the whole wonderful story.” After which she glazed over. She was to see Mawrdew Czgowchwz that afternoon to go over some of the Act I business again. She was having a little trouble translating Valerio Vortice’s mercurial admonishments into through-lines and motivated angles. She had begun to think again, as she had first thought in the fall, that she was not at all right for Brangäne, but Czgowchwz had told her, “I was a good Brangäne, years ago with Freitag. Let me show you. She’s a special sort of fierce Irish old maid.” From that point, they had begun. Czgowchwz confided in Laverne Zuckerman that she had picked her to do the role for a special reason. She, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, must incarnate a woman of Laverne Zuckerman’s age, and she would learn to do so by teaching Laverne Zuckerman to be a woman her (Czgowchwz’s) own. This was a task directly the reverse of their collaborations in Norma and Der Rosenkavalier, but it could create the kind of tension out of which a set of memorable performances might spring. Laverne Zuckerman had understood the scheme only slightly at best, but, as always, the Czgowchwz enthusiasm had commanded consent. Laverne finished her coffee, accepted the best wishes of her varsity friends, and made off again for the BMT to the Plaza.

  No sooner had she left than Ralph arrived riding shotgun on the gypsy news truck, which parked at the snowdrift slope in front of the marquee. The mute and unconcerned driver and assistant began tossing bundles of Nericons over the top of the bank like late night extras; these fell into the trench-like recess, at the puzzled standees’ feet.

  Within ten minutes of this wordless delivery, the uproar that was “the Nericon explosion” had commenced its public career. Every telephone in the arcade, in the cafeteria, in the Burger Ranch, and down in the BMT was seen manned by someone telling someone to tell everyone. (“Wags will tongue, toots, wags will tongue!”) By noon the minion from The Talk of the Town, Dolores’s double agent, Gloria Got
ham’s secretary, and the Inquiring Fotographer were each and all at work on the sidewalk, going person by person along the length and across the breadth of the line, which had swelled to a thousand before reaching the corner of Thirty-ninth Street, what with guests, stragglers, Neriac agitators, and tsimmes freaks padding the numbers. Ralph, hoisted to a position of proper eminence on top of the snowbank by the jubilant hero-worshipping students from Riverdale and Juilliard, surveyed his demesne—a vale of distraction, glee, and torment he had himself created. (He had always believed he had it in him.) Here it now was: rhetoric become action: spontaneous street theater: Ralph’s own winter carnival. The Dionysus of Mulberry Street, Winter Gotham’s Lord of Misrule, stood on his makeshift alp contented.

  Then, as predictably as must, certain denizens of nowhere began throwing things. Ralph was pelted with a nastily jagged hunk of sooty ice before beating a dignified, measured, yet none too tardy retreat to the Burger Ranch on Seventh Avenue and Fortieth Street’s northeast corner for an appointment lunch with Rhoe, the waitress, and the remaining Secret Seven, leaving the students, their righteous ire aroused, to return the slush-ice fire in the name of free speech and the Czgowchwz style. The students sent the opposition reeling back down Broadway to Herald Square in no time at all. The line was purified. The Nericon began to be delivered by hand messengers all over Manhattan.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke at noon. Mrs. Grudget, entering the diva’s bedroom purposedly, threw the heavy drapes apart, admitting cascades of what the diva, starting up, protesting, labeled “shrieking dayglare—come too soon!” The Englishwoman seemed disposed to ignore this slander on God’s own clear, clean sunlight. She sped about the room throwing windows open, admitting gusty blasts of winter wind off the Park. “Grudget, woman!” wailed Mawrdew Czgowchwz. “If you knew what I was about to discover!” Mrs. Grudget, for whom sleep was that balm one purchased—as often as not, dearly—and dreams things best left to the talking pictures on a Saturday night, feigned ignorance of the distressful protestation’s point. She brought the breakfast tray in instead, grimacing primly as ever she did at the sight of grilled kippers and Guinness laid on where she firmly believed a coddled egg, perhaps kedgeree now and again, tea, and toast ought quite suffice.