Mawrdew Czgowchwz (10 page)

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; Mawrdew 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...

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

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.

A
S 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.”