Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz put her dreams aside. Her involuntary memory revolved, much as it had for years and years been going on revolving... She found herself halfway through a pint pot of stout and a plate of reeking fish, as much on the old qui vive as ever she had been, if not more so. The singular intensity of libidinal focus she had come to expect on waking on a performance day was hers—in trust, as she always told herself. This Isolde, this figment, would prevail. Anticipating a triumph in the role (hard-won, she thought, but certain), she succumbed to herself, realizing fearlessly that she still could not discover how she would sing the Liebestod.

  Deciding to leave it to the midnight moment, the diva turned her mind and morning mezza voce to warming up on the role she had just the week before contracted to record that same winter in New York: Puccini’s Minnie, in La Fanciulla del West. Weaving dreamily through the Bible lesson in Act I, she reconfirmed her conviction that the sentimental genius of the “povera faccia” and the “occhio mordente” had never done anything more splendid than this score. She looked forward eagerly to the recording sessions under Giammai, and beyond these to the starry summer revival of the opera set for the Central City Opera House in Colorado. Spinning around at the piano, commanding “Basta, Rance—ho detto il mio pensier!” she dived so enrapt into the undulating score that rather than pause she launched straight into a deeply felt contralto rendering of Rance’s aria, “Minnie, dalla mia casa,” and from there straight into “Laggiù nel Soledad,” drawing out every brave and lonely conviction Belasco and Puccini had in their separate and convergent geniuses created—ending in a clarion full-voice C as the doorbell rang. Laverne Zuckerman had arrived to work out the business for the Tristan first act. She had waited in wonder in the hall until the end of the Fanciulla exercise, ringing the doorbell at last as a kind of private ovation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz ordered lunch sent up for two.

  At the Crossroads Café, the Neriac fringe was holding a hectic war council. Old Mary Cedrioli was all for marching in a mob straight to the Burger Ranch “to beat the fucking shit out of them all!” (the Secret Seven and anyone else in the opinionate vicinity). Most others felt that, apart from anything else, the age differential between the two camps made Old Mary Cedrioli’s idea impracticable and, moreover, that her serene altezza, Morgana Neri, would doubtless prefer a darker, subtler path to vengeance carved out in her name. The Neriacs puzzled over the text of the Nericon itself. Apart from the certainty derived from a knowledge of the work’s author—an infamous, “vergognoso” turncoat slurring his natal heritage—and a general received impression of the overall tone and intent of the allegory, not one wit present there had the slimmest clue to fathom the imaginative structure or the figurative content inhering therein. The Nericon might as well for all of them have been a series of Asian pictograms branded obscene and damaging to the morals and mental health of the city and the nation by some blind geriatric American Legionnaire in a basket on the curb outside Bryant Park. No matter: they might not know at the Crossroads Café what the exact valence of the venom they held like a reeking rag in front of them was, but they all guessed well enough they knew what a conspiracy was. Conspiracies were after all (in those years) all the same: rotten schemes hatched in and flung out of Eastern Europe, designed to bring the rest of the world, the decent sector, to its knees to do disgusting things you couldn’t talk about except in cellars. Well, no one there was ready to go down on that Czgowchwz bitch, whose very name was known to be a coded slogan for something foreign and repulsive—only no one around was indecent or disloyal enough to be able to find out exactly what. (Them that touched slime would get infected!) On this sleazy level the Neriac confabs continued, impotent, throughout the afternoon.

  A kindly thaw had set in in the early afternoon. At her long, frosted window, Consuelo Gilligan surveyed “the slumbering, reflecting brilliance of a sheet of melting driven snow, flung haphazardly across the lovingly landscaped divide-expanse of upper midtown: Central Park.” She entered this, her first waking vision, in her verse diary, below a vertically extended legend high on the day’s page:

  T

  H

  E

  F

  I

  R

  S

  T

  C

  Z

  G

  O

  W

  C

  H

  W

  Z

  I

  S

  O

  L

  D

  E

  which she then set about trying to work into an anagramode, meanwhile making herself a lady’s cocktail.

  The Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier woke with a start. The telephone near her head was clanging. (This separate, very private number was never rung without a serious reason.) Thinking it might well be a familiar caller from the Other Side, the former Madge O’Meaghre of the Abbey stage composed herself, in a rattled instant, into a sober Irishwoman (of Connaught). Incredibly, the caller’s voice proclaimed itself that of a seeker after some precious wholesale cosmetic preparations, unavailable at Bloomingdale’s. Evidently a crossed line? Somewhat shaken, the Countess hung up, then rang the bell cord for her overdue morning Gaelic coffee.

  Before Wedgwood had brought it up, the private number rang a second time. This time the caller was the constant Pèlerin. The Countess eased somewhat as Wedgwood entered with the pint-sized beaker of high-spirited Hibernian café-crème. “Pique!” she declared, sipping nicely. “I’ve had such a turn this morning. A male stranger demanding vast quantities of estrogen creams at cost rang up this, our number!”

  There was a pause, then a reply. “This town has had another. The Nericon is published. It looks like there’s coming war.”

  “No! What does one wear to war?” (The very idea of war...)

  Pierrot rumbled a morning chuckle. “Let’s go to lunch in Armenia, woman.”

  “That would be divine, Pique. When?”

  “Could we say one on the dot?”

  “We’d best do, if we’re to get a scrap to eat.”

  Each finished, each contented. “Armenia” was Arpenik’s. It is gone now, like the Met, another lamented casualty in the erasure-parade of Gotham’s most meaningful precincts. The fabulous menu—featuring imam bayildi, madzoon, bulgur pilaf, ekmek kadeyev—could be matched nowhere else in streamlined midtown. Mawrdew Czgowchwz ate there once a week.

  Carmen stirred in the double bed; then she woke. “Mah deah,” she said to herself, “it’s today. How flawless!” She soon dropped her ample self into a running de luxe tub and began to relish the hours to come. (Her ticket was for a box.) Brushing aside the dim recall of some truly hideous dream ballet (“Mah deah, the mind does bourrée!”), she dried her orange-blossom-scented body, slipped into her slippers and a cotton smock, stood herself on perfect point, and bourréed back into her little pullman kitchen. While cooking up a pipérade, she flicked the FM on to WLIB. They were play-ing Bessie Smith. Carmen listened all the while she cooked to this utterly great singing woman, unsurpassed in the expression of “ballsass” defiance, singing the brutal score of her own true story. She wondered if Mawrdew Czgowchwz could.

  Merovig Creplaczx, restless on lower Bank Street, sat score in hand trying to listen to a tape of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Hollenius, he thought, had been a fool to laugh at music of this caliber. But then Hollenius was dead, and Christine Radcliffe... Where had the time... Where would it...A shriek of hollow, bitching laughter rang out from the bedroom. Marooned by the blizzard, Merovig’s caller of the night before had risen up hung over only to commence yakking on the phone all over town all morning long, trying to scare up a free ticket to the Tristan. Merovig had refused outright to sneak Rotten Rodney Bergamot in through the stage door disguised as a doublebass player (in drag). As there were no supers, nor a paid claque to join up with for the evening, there were fewer avenues than usual into the privileged enclosure. “I could always go in on the slip through Ge
orge and hide out in Grace Jackson-Haight’s box, but I hate feeling so cheap! Really, Miro, my long-black-dress drag is very plain Jane! But nobody would read me!”

  Merovig had scowled. Now the raucous voice was babbling scheme after scheme to unwilling listener after unwilling listener (all over town), as the afternoon wore on. “No, dear, really, listen...you’ve taken another of them nasty turns and have got to go in a wheel chair! We’ll do it up in fabulous velvet coverlets much with tinsels and brocade. I just wheel you in—I’m the nurse, y’see—very plain Jane, don’tcha know?—the severe hairnet, the specs, the Red Cross shoes, all starchy-white and saggy tits. They’ll never read me, darling! What? Oh...”

  Merovig was getting more than a little fed up with Rotten Rodney Bergamot’s shenanigans. What with the pressure of conducting the Tristan now upon him, he slumped a little, sighing. What was this day all about? Was there not a point at which one must cry “Halt”? Then why? He went on, trying to listen. He did love Mawrdew Czgowchwz—perhaps violently.

  Grace Jackson-Haight was feeling more at one with herself than she had felt almost since July. “Good old Grace,” a stalwart, had coughed up the cash for a box at the Tristan, yet she wondered why this unwonted composure on an afternoon that should have been fraught with expectation. “It’s very unnerving, Rodney,” she was saying into the phone. “I cannot control this calm!” She listened on dully. “What? As a what!?” she drawled, straining to feel a little something in the way of matey, whorish camaraderie (had they not after all been at Parsons together and shared pizzas at Lodovico’s during the war?). “Well, dear Rod, if you think it will work, yes, of course. I’ll have an extra chair put in and pick you up in the Guild powder room. Be telling your beads or something. Sister Rose who? Wait a minute, hon, I’ll write it down—where’s my m.f. lipstick...”

  The Countess Madge and Pierrot left Arpenik’s and walked north and east toward Cashel Gueza, having phoned ahead. On the way they stopped off at Tiffany to pick up a presentation pendant brooch for Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s first Isolde: a serpentine-wrought, emerald-cluster “Celtic” amulet, designed by Tiffany craftsmen in collaboration with herself, the Countess Madge. Agreeing how well it would look against the white first-act costume, glowing imperiously, offsetting rich flowing waves of Czgowchwz-Titian hair, they took it away. Crossing Fifty-seventh Street they met Laverne Zuckerman, happy and excited, having learned so much more about Brangäne in so short a time. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, she revealed, had just gone off down to the Museum of Modern Art to see a film—The White Rose. There she was now, walking hurriedly down the west side of the avenue past the Baron Shmendrick’s diamond emporium...

  The line stood firm. The management would not sell the standee tickets ahead of time as they had done for the Traviata return. They would get in who got in. The Nericon was everywhere, in fair whole copy and in shreds. Ralph had gone about after lunch signing copies here and there. The entire Secret Seven had now retired for the afternoon to dress and to prepare. Old Mary Cedrioli and the scavenger Neriacs, making little headway accosting the line (had Neri ever sung Wagner?), withdrew to Houston Street and beyond, swearing vengeance on the day.

  G-G received the Countess Madge and Pierrot for a high scone tea in the back of the premises. Trixie Gilhooley came by to sober up a little (taking a private “holy hour”), to bitch Dolores’s column, and to ask what anyway Tristan and Isolde were all about. These four passed that first full afternoon of that year’s winter in diligent, unrecorded conversation. Trixie decided after all to go along to the Tristan with “that bum,” because she thought Mawrdew Czgowchwz “a game girl.” Anyway, she liked going to the Metropolitan. “It’s a long way down Broadway, honey, but when ya get there, inside, it’s real swell, real elegant, the way it makes ya feel!” Enthusing, Trixie tried to decide what to wear. Realizing she owned next to nothing herself but racks of glitzy lamé sheaths in rather forward shades, she took G-G’s kind offer and agreed to borrow a short black cocktail number with spaghetti straps, some plain gold shoes, and an amethyst spray brooch from her hostess, for happily they took all the same sizes. That settled, the little party broke up. G-G turned the several keys in the several locks that sealed Cashel Gueza against elsewhere and took Trixie back to her own place to dress up. The Countess Madge and Pierrot walked back to Magwyck.

  Sitting all alone in the magic gloom of the film theater downstairs at MOMA, Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt completely herself. The continuous play of light and shadow on the screen, accompanied by something wonderful by Liszt on the romantic piano, released the inner springs of fantasy. She kvelled: her whole heart answered her whole mind’s demands. She was, she thought, perhaps if anything too whole, too entirely present to herself, like a rogue friend from youth turned all too suddenly a lover. On the screen Mae Marsh was love. Mawrdew Czgowchwz wondered at the art. This eternal girl, Vachel Lindsay’s madonna, simply and surely the perfect silents actress, held fast in her slanting, misted gaze the certainty that “nothing is lost if one does not try to say the unsayable.” Instead, that which cannot be spoken is—unspeakably—“contained in that which is said.” The truth was, Mawrdew Czgowchwz told herself, her lover-guest, that suddenly she, like any other rather ordinary, lonely woman in the dark at the movies, wanted in some way to be an actress in pictures—all right, a movie star. This libidinal perplex gave her pause to...

  Lavinia O’Maurigan Stein lay naked and trembling in ecstasy in her naked twin brother’s lusting embrace; then Jameson O’Maurigan woke in a cold sweat. The telephone was ringing: reality revenging. Abashed and alone, he rose.

  Lavinia O’Maurigan Stein stood tightly wrapped up in a raccoon at an outdoor wall telephone on the empty cafeteria terrace in the Central Park Zoo. After too many rings her party answered.

  “Hello, this is Jameson—”

  “Jamie, wake up, it’s me, Lavinia.”

  “Vanilla, I was just dreaming.” Mournfully he sank to the floor, covering his wracking nudity with the day-old Post.

  “Dreaming? What were you dreaming?” From the empty windswept cafeteria terrace Lavinia watched a small, somehow unattended child throw a Spalding rubber ball to a seal in the sea-lion pen. The youngest seal took the ball and went under the water. Lavinia shivered; it was freezing cold.

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “O.K. I called to wake you.”

  “Next time, call Meridian...”

  “If I didn’t call, who would?”

  “O.K., that’s swell. I’m awake!”

  “And wearing a nice big chip!”

  “I’m not wearing anything.” He stared down at himself and started reading the Dr. Risë Feckles “Personal Invocation” column covering his privates so as to quell shame.

  “Jamie, go have some coffee, take a shower, get dressed— I’ll do up the tie later on—and come over. Jonathan’s coming home early so we can eat something in before the opera. It’s freezing cold—I’m in the zoo. There’s a lonely little boy at the seals waiting for attention. You sound awful; are you nervous?”

  Jameson stood up in the gray light. Dr. Risë Feckles was no great help. “No, I’ll see you later, old Vanilla.”

  “Be early!” He had hung up. She wandered eastward wondering if she could say to Jonathan this evening yet another time: “I’m worried about Jamie...”

  With the fresh memory of Mae Marsh lying listening to a precious music box in the dramatic climax of The White Rose, Mawrdew Czgowchwz walked east on Fifty-third Street back toward the Plaza. The city’s waves of toiling millions swelled in and against her, unnoticing, unnoticed. She had begun to become the captive Irish princess-witch embarked on the high seas, making for Cornwall.

  On the vast creaky stage of the Old Metropolitan, behind the asbestos curtain, workmen were piecing together (like some berserk, slanting, jigsaw fun-house maze) the ship deck for Act I of the new Vortice production of Tristan und Isolde. In the wardrobe room, Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s costumes were being removed from wrappi
ngs, pressed, brushed, and hung. Wardrobe women passed assurances one to another, promising to stay on together backstage that night listening until the final curtain. And among these same was a traitor. For the Czgowchwz curtain call they had arranged among themselves (the way they always had done) the special presentation of their own flowers—the ones that Mawrdew Czgowchwz never failed to carry home herself, the ones for which she never failed to thank the wardrobe mistress each next day in a note in her own floriate hand.

  Old Mary Cedrioli sat at her very old mother’s immense kitchen table upstairs on Hester Street, raging in obscene Sicilian, dressing a small headless poppet in soiled remnants of cheap rag-cloth bunting stripped off stalls at the previous summer’s San Gennaro street festival. A faceless head fashioned out of a dirty old nylon stocking stuffed with water-soaked newspaper torn out of the same day’s Daily News centerfold section (featuring pictures and commentary on the Tristan opera line) sat grotesquely disproportionate on top of the tin breadbox, nearly covering the four medallion portraits of Mussolini, the Sacred Heart, the Madonna, and Pope Pius XI painted on the sliding lid. The grim Cedrioli curse (“A te, malo Natale! Maledizione dall’ abisso!”) erupted, heralding a litany of loathsome inversions desperately concocted in full, foul, reeking expectation of infernal success. Gibberish-sounding formulas in cabalistic rhymes older than the Vulgate, spewing in a noxious stream on weighty mephitic breath, frightened no one present. The other Neriacs, despising Mawrdew Czgowchwz in mute, servile communion, let Old Mary Cedrioli do her scenes. None of them understood more than roughly what mad wickedness was incubating at the kitchen table. They were all without exception stupid, lonely, tired people who might not, had they known, have cooperated. As it was, shut out of the current fashion as they felt they were (on all sides), they idly consented to consort in rituals they never had nor ever would know more about than they did just then.