Mawrdew Czgowchwz (13 page)

Old Mary Cedrioli cut the face of Mawrdew Czgowchwz out of that afternoon's
Journal-American
. She covered the back of the cutout with Lepage's glue and stuck the picture on the outsize dirty nylon-stocking head. She was finished for the moment. The rest of the curse would depend for its working on that other one uptown at the opera house—who in the darkness in the wings would...

Jameson O'Maurigan stood in front of a full-length door mirror in near-darkness. His father's tuxedo, he thought, fit him entirely well; his sister would tie the tie. Ridiculous; but so, it seemed, was living in a nearly lightless loft on Twenty-eighth Street, over a wholesale florist. Thinking about nothing more, he put on a heavy camel's-hair coat and went out to find a vehicle going uptown.

Merovig Creplaczx sat (at last) alone. The obnoxious, intrepid Rotten Rodney Bergamot had sped off uptown some time before to visit a creature he had called “the gayest nun in Gotham.” All was silent, vacant, still. Merovig realized that he was almost entirely...

Ralph's tuxedo was quite new, “trimline made-to-measure” (the new Ralph), elegant. It accomplished everything; Ralph was entirely pleased. The phone was left off the hook—too many anonymous threats might dampen the hearty joy of the nearly weightless moments yet to be spent preparing for events to come. Ralph swayed, humming the Liebesnacht:
Tristan und Isolde
was the dynamic end.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz sat puzzling. Parked at the Fifty-eighth Street entrance to the Plaza, the black Packard she had bought when she first came to town waited formally, as machines will. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was to drive herself downtown that evening, left all to herself and to her own devices. She poured herself a stiff drink.

The whiskey warmed the woman. Fantasies, given free rein, gave full play. Clear memories of Prague drifted along like winter dreams: Yuletide illuminations in the dark voided spaces out beyond the Plaza suite's tall windowpanes. Then in that measureless night surrounding these same phantasmic tableaux, Mawrdew Czgowchwz came to think she saw, then came to
see
(she thought), from time to time a kind of peopled chaos: a thickly veiled, tumbling pageant of fragment visions, seemingly anterior to those earliest-treasured, comforting, and thoroughly rehearsed scenes of her life in Bohemia. Without exactly fearing their appearance, she felt nonetheless reluctant to summon these lurkings into full play (would they come) in place of the radiant foreground scenes of Prague she always doted on. They, for their part, like so many constant embers set behind the loveliest of painted fire screens, urged nothing immediate; they merely smoldered the while.

Laverne Zuckerman stood at the front of the line, outside the swelling canvas-cord barrier, schmoozing with the Juilliard crowd. Scarcely able to take in the fact of her own actual Metropolitan debut (“My mother is carrying
on
!”), she kept staring through the bobbing heads at the old brown-brick wall against which the line leaned, at the poster for that
Tristan und Isolde
(printed up in orange for a new Czgowchwz production), with the date of the day clearly marked, advertising them all: Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Achille Plonque, Merovig Creplaczx, Valerio Vortice, and, among others (with “debut” in parentheses after it), Laverne Zuckerman—her own name. She said she felt “slap-happy.” The Juilliard contingent had their group picture taken with the elated blond mezzo just before the line began to move into the lobby to file past the ticket window and go in. Realizing the
time
, Laverne Zuckerman dashed, like the basketball forward she also had been at school, around the corner to Fortieth Street, past the upstairs (Family Circle) standees, past an enormous black Packard parked in the middle of the block, to the stage door and inside around the hall to the mezzo dressing room. As she crept stealthily down the narrow corridor past the star dressing room, she heard the sound of sounds vibrating from behind the Czgowchwz door: the diva oltrano of the century vocalizing on “Oh, I see this is easyyyy...”

The Family Circle standing-room mob, tickets crushed in tightened fists (poised ready to pummel), embedded-crowded like a throng of massed extras in a Bolshevik silent epic. Pressing heavily in on the far heavier Family Circle doors, they seemed prepared more for siege than for attendance upstairs, strung along the top ridge of the great horseshoe, spaced out in silence and stillness. Agitated, always infuriated by the trammels of house discipline, the mob turned raucous, in no time seeming to threaten (as it had before, time and again) to perish by implosion. Pained, violent oaths spat out from numbers one through ten, pressed nearly dangling on the top steps, backs hard up against the harder panels of the (double-bolted) double doors. Outrage stifled in the cold night air. People ordered people off their fucking feet, off their backs, out of their...

The voice of Mawrdew Czgowchwz vocalizing on “Oh, I see this is easyyyy...” carried out through open windows into Fortieth Street—as no other voice had done since Freitag's—sweeping up on the prevailing west wind off the Hudson toward Broadway and the East Side. Tortured Family Circle standees, hearing awesome vowels trumpeting that way in open air, broke rank, fell back off one another, off the sidewalk into the middle of the street, looking up, looking around —for the sound was everywhere—as if awaiting bullhorn-broadcast emergency orders from Civil Defense. Hardly a moment later, the inner bolts unshot; the Family Circle's doors opened outward against the wavering masses. With an outrageous collective yelp (never even nearly matching the focused torrent Czgowchwz, warming up, sent skyward), ticket holders, pummeling, rushed the entrance, finishing their tense vigil, tearing breakneck up uncounted flights of back stairs to “paradise,” leaving assaulted hall porters mumbling, “Animals ...animals...,” reeling, panting in shock.

Doors flew open into the auditorium's top tier. Standees dashed jumping across empty rows of Family Circle seats to reach the “far side” positions banked along the Thirty-ninth Street, “house left” wall of the tarnished-gilt arena. Others behind flew straight to the “near side,” Fortieth Street, “house right” bank. The take-over accomplished within seconds, breathless, wheezing fans threw outer clothing over iron railings and collapsed like unstrung puppets for the duration of the half hour left until curtain, while the standard procession of subscribers filled up the Family Circle in orderly fashion.

In the lower, stylishly loftier regions, among Balcony, Dress Circle, and Orchestra standees, a more studied outward calm prevailed, masking no less a tendency to frenzy all the while, but masking frenzy in varieties of token theatrical attitudes (“Been seeing this same raddled old army of operatic Annies for
years
, both here and at Carnegie Hall”— Paranoy, on the grand staircase outside Sherry's). They wore slightly smarter clothes, as well.

A handful of the very most serious persons in the opera house sat at score desks, set back behind the Dress Circle rows in almost totally obstructed viewing positions. They would hear through reading. See through inner eyes.

The diamanté crowds surged in. Against these, the tone-controlling Wagnerite wing let it be known in neither uncertain nor succinct terms that it had come for “Kunst.” Consequently the bar at Sherry's buzzed at a discernibly lower voltage than was usual at Czgowchwz premières. Trixie Gilhooley noticed the difference right away (“Whadda we here for, a
wake
?”).

The Countess Madge went straight to her box with the Secret Seven. Pierrot took his single seat alone in the Dress Circle. Lavinia, Jonathan, Jameson, and Arpenik sat together left center in the Grand Tier. Dame Sybil, Cassia, Halcyon Paranoy, Consuelo, Thalia Bridgewood and her nephew, and Tangent Percase (somehow) made up a party in the box opposite the Countess's. Trixie Gilhooley swaggered down to Row G in the Orchestra—on the aisle—arm in steady arm with “that bum.” The critics took their places. Grace Jackson-Haight went up to the Guild powder room at 7:45 and returned to her box some minutes later in the company of a tallish nun, who, she explained to her guests, was under a strict “Advent” vow of silence (Rotten Rodney Bergamot hadn't counted on that little announcement. Oh well: “
Che fareste
...”). Sister was given a front-box chair. Eyes downcast, she bowed, thanking. (So
this
was the religious life. Well!) G-G joined this same party, warily.

Merovig Creplaczx closed the score of
Tristan und Isolde
. Leaving it behind on the table in the conductor's reception room, he crossed the Act I ship-deck set (“What in hell
is
this design?”) and turned down along the slanting hallway off stage left, approaching the closed dressing room where Mawrdew Czgowchwz sat alone, fully made up—wearing her Celtic brooch—a fantastically true Isolde: ivory-complected, costumed in “captive” roughspun white, her loosened hair “blown” off the face, the cheeks aflame against a high sea wind, the eyes shaded in emerald and violet, gray-defiant, fated, and betrayed. She kept looking at herself. “
Frau Minnes Macht!
” she murmured.

Merovig Creplaczx rapped on the star-dressing-room door in sharply formal style, then entered without waiting—something no single other person of Mawrdew Czgowchwz's acquaintance would have done in any circumstance. Mawrdew Czgowchwz heard him rapping from without as if from within sleep. She heard the door fly open. “It's either Miro, or a paid assassin,” she told herself. She saw Merovig Creplaczx's ever-demanding face drift up behind her own— Isolde's—in the savage glare of a dressing-table mirror ringed with a dozen blazing theatrical light bulbs. The assault the searching light made on Merovig Creplaczx's squinting gaze broke Mawrdew Czgowchwz's concentration, and she had to laugh. Merovig Creplaczx was displeased, and Mawrdew Czgowchwz was distracted. He remonstrated; she objected. They spoke Czech. Precious backstage pre-performance moments went the way of wasteful at-odds complaint. He found her wanting in seriousness, she him in manners. He declared such “manners” the sham tactics of seekers after favors. She called his notion of seriousness “clerical” and told him to go away before she sat him in front of the mirror and made up his eyes—a thing she had been wanting to do for years. Pulling rank, he declared her tempo in the Narration and Curse “erratic—verging on vulgarity.” Looking him gimlet-straight in his flashing eye, Mawrdew Czgowchwz advised him, in a raised fishwife voice she had learned to copy from Rhoe: “Then sing it yourself, buster!”

Dead silence prevailed inside and outside the star dressing room for the next several minutes. The Czgowchwz voice had carried well beyond the visible walls. Laverne Zuckerman heard it down the hall and felt her stomach flip over like a blintz one time more. Debut nerves, compounded by vibrations of wrangling at the top, unsteadied her. It was not until she—and other anxious personnel backstage—heard fresh, frank peals of underisive laughter from the star dressing room that a general relief broke out.

Minutes went on passing, silently; curtain time approached as if unbidden. Members of the huge orchestra filled up the pit, tuning up dutifully and yet distractedly. Members of the backstage staff called out the diminishing minutes urgently. Silence prevailed behind the star-dressing-room door. No one would knock; no one dared.

It was nearly curtain time. Laverne Zuckerman wondered: What were they
doing
in there? They weren't—were they?! (They were.)

Ralph returned to Box 7 out of breath. Having gone down to the pit, he had been told all. He told the remaining Secret Seven and the Countess Madge: “They're carrying
on
back there!” Meanwhile, the news was spreading from the pit up the four aisles. Rumor (painted with tongues) published it all. Wagnerites gasped, outraged. The standees opined: “Flawless!” Consuelo Gilligan could not agree; Merovig Creplaczx had gone entirely too far. Not even Tramontini...! Jameson O'Maurigan, head in hand, looked away.

The star-dressing-room door opened at 7:59 and 30 seconds. Thirty seconds later, Merovig Creplaczx strode into the pit to meet the greeting of his career—a rush of roar and clatter, sensuous buzz and raucous whistle, so unlike any, however enthusiastic, anticipatory applause in a theater, so like the hot yelps of the corrida, when the principal bull, loosed from his pen, charges the picadors, so like the cockpit, so like the prize ring, that the hero of the moment, unsuspecting of the real cause of the commotion, naïvely supposed the “Dionysian” display induced by the enthralling spirit of Wagner hovering over the orchestra seven tiers up. Stagehands and wardrobe assistants scattered hurriedly behind the gold curtain. Mawrdew Czgowchwz took her position on the dream-wrought ship deck. Vortice arranged the tableau, himself desiring Mawrdew Czgowchwz nearly uncontrollably, as the orchestra beyond the curtain struck A. “
Domani
,” Vortice told himself. “
Domani la prenderò!
” Mawrdew Czgowchwz heard nothing. Her eyes seemed (to Laverne Zuckerman) to betray untold depths of sensation. Could any man so perform as to...

The Vorspiel dissolved the silence; Creplaczx had seized full control. Separated from the audience and borne aloft in rapture, the Titian heroine's soul swelled to bursting like the full sails of her imaginary prison ship. Pythian chords wrenched her heart, cleaving a secret chamber in it open. She began to wrest control.

Just then, unnoticed, a bent figure crept out of the wings and knelt in the dark behind her back, seemingly arranging Isolde's white gown. At the precise moment of the Vorspiel's great crescendo, when Mawrdew Czgowchwz's heart's rapture reached its second crest of the evening, the pseudo-dresser crone, wielding a pair of gleaming stainless-steel cosmetic scissors,
snipped off
a certain length of Mawrdew Czgowchwz's very hair. Then, slithering away like a shadow into primal dawn, the betraying agent fled the premises. She made her way into the street and quickly to the downtown BMT, as the full glare of the spotlights fell through the opening curtains on Isolde, turned upstage, gazing enrapt at the screen-projected Irish Sea. A heavy ominous calm...