Mawrdew Czgowchwz (15 page)

She heard no music in the theater. She heard nothing but voices, telling her in the preterite:

Tristan lay at Tintagel, waiting. She must go to him, forever damned. No, where there was sin, salvation followed. They were in truth the one act. Furiously willing that salvation, Mawrdew Czgowchwz,
hearing
, plunged, bounding onstage.

Looking back later, no one remembered much. Achille Plonque's reactions were, in this instance, never recorded, although he later recalled how he would come to wake up screaming for weeks afterward, remembering what he did.

Laverne Zuckerman remembers that during the long scene in which Tristan lay lamenting, while the shepherd's horn announced no sail in elegiac wail, Mawrdew Czgowchwz leaned weakly against the backcloth backstage looking, as the young mezzo told the Secret Seven and the press next day, “like someone being
sentenced
!!”

The Countess Madge point-blank refuses to remember.

In any case it happened. During the last moments of Tristan's scene, at “
Die mir die Wunde ewig schliesse
,” Mawrdew Czgowchwz suddenly bolted from her waiting position backstage, jumping her entrance cue as if possessed. This hurtling precipitance left Laverne Zuckerman completely stunned, and drew a most inopportune, unwelcome gasp from Creplaczx on the podium. Achille Plonque sat up aghast. Murmuring spread up and out over the shocked audience. Those who might not have known the score were made aware of the frightening disruption in seconds, encountering the mournful display of a disoriented woman lurching quite obviously out of sorts about the center stage. The coldest terror he had ever known in fact or fantasy gripped Merovig Creplaczx's heart. The distracted lady tottered, then dropped to her knees. She began to sing—a kind of
Sprechstimme
declamation—“
Tristan! Geliebter!
” Creplaczx dropped his baton; the orchestra droned off.

Achille Plonque took the initiative. He exclaimed “
Isolde!
” in key, and sank to his supposed death. Mawrdew Czgowchwz flung herself on top of him. Creplaczx then took the cue, hissing “Liebestod!” at the distracted players in the pit. King Marke and his retainers stared from the wings in dismay. Mawrdew Czgowchwz began to sing the Liebestod.

Francobolli avowed next day it was “simply the greatest piece of singing” he had ever heard. There was no disputation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz that night sang the most oracular Liebestod the world has ever heard.

It was not sung in German. Francobolli first supposed it to be Czech—and wondered why—until he was carried away elsewhere with the rest by the “utterly incredible avalanche of regal tone this majestic goddess unleashed.” Next to nobody in the Metropolitan Opera House audience in these moments knew anything more, or could know more, than that a voice beyond voices (the oltrano) was singing a passage beyond passage.

Ralph saw the Countess Madge O'Meaghre Gautier begin to stand at the very beginning of the ecstatic finale. She stood supported for a second or two, and then fell back into her chair again, fainting away at once. Ralph, who had been at her same side at the
Traviata
, shook her gently. She revived, enough to murmur. Ralph listened very closely, his ears meanwhile so full of Mawrdew Czgowchwz's pealing voice he feared paralysis. The Countess gasped and whispered, “My life, she's singing in the
Irish
!” Then she fell down on the floor.

It was true. Mawrdew Czgowchwz that night sang the Liebestod for once and for all time in that same tongue the Irish once sang in of love and death in the Western World.

It was over; it began. The noise they heard backstage sounded like only one thing: Revolution in the Streets. The curtain had gone up and down three times before what had happened to Mawrdew Czgowchwz became apparent. Each time the same love-death tableau revealed itself, the roar increased in mounting, detonating frenzies, until Achille Plonque and Laverne Zuckerman realized together that the curtain must not go up again.

Merovig Creplaczx bolted from the stage-right wings as the curtain came down for the third and last time—in a state compounded of a boiling rage and a wild desire—to be confronted with the spectacle of Mawrdew Czgowchwz lying outstretched, senseless, in Achille Plonque's embrace. Plonque held her against himself; her hair fell over his shoulder and down both sides of him like heraldic raiment. He turned away stage left still holding her, as if he had just rescued her off a torpedoed ship at sea, and took her back to the star dressing room, while Creplaczx—wailing piteously—was at first restrained by King Marke's retainers, but then let free to race across the stage and down the same long hall in Yseult's tragic wake.

Laverne Zuckerman ran distracted, fully costumed, through the side pass door into the Thirty-ninth Street lobby and then into the auditorium, climbing the first flight of stairs at a bounding stride to reach the boxes, where the word had just arrived that Mawrdew Czgowchwz had collapsed. The Countess Madge had just revived. The cheering had already begun to break off into wailing everywhere as the news of the disaster wove at the speed of sound through rows and tiers. Laverne Zuckerman led the way downstairs as Ralph guided the Countess through twisting, despairing crowds and the remaining Secret Seven fought their way along in file behind, until they all approached the star-dressing-room door to find Pèlerin Deslieux already standing guard. The old house doctor was announcing “a total nervous collapse.” The Countess was admitted. Others began their vigil.

As it had done before, joyously, now again the opera house remained, in sorrow, peopled and lit after midnight. This time, reporters dispatched to the scene worked at their missions in hushed voices while the grim, appalled audience—old-guard Wagnerites among the rest—awaited developments.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz was taken back to the Plaza after several doctors had examined her. “She requires complete rest.” Nothing more or less was said. She was dressed warmly and carried to her car—again by Achille Plonque. When the crowds in the street cheered “Brava Czgowchwz,
divina
!” in tears, she looked up at the tenor in a dreamy questioning way the while she wondered where she was. By the time she was back uptown, the late edition of the
Times
had come out on Forty-third Street with the front-page shocker: “
MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ IN COLLAPSE
/ Diva Suffers Nervous Prostration/ After Stunning Isolde Triumph at the Met.” The
News
and
Mirror
hit the city streets a few hours later with identical lurid front-page pictures of the final
Tristan
tableau and centerfolds of the diva in Achille Plonque's arms on the stagedoor steps, of Merovig Creplaczx lunging in fury at an inquiring photographer, and of assorted faces and figures in the vivid crowd—including a study of the sobbing Trixie Gilhooley being comforted with a flask by what looked to be a nursing nun wearing nothing on her head but netted, short-cropped platinum hair.

With Mawrdew Czgowchwz removed, gloom set in in dead cold earnest. Grace Jackson-Haight invited as many as she knew would come back with her to her place. Nobody wanted to go home and face facts. A large assorted group decided to try breakfasting at Reuben's and hanging about the Plaza hoping for further word. “She'll snap out of it,” they said to one another. “She'll wake up feeling flawless, and come to the window and wave. Come on!” Most Czgowchwz intimates had already taken cars to the hotel, where they sat up in absolute silence through the hours before dawn.

The news had reached Casa Cedrioli in a flash. Neriac confederates backstage had got on the telephone down in the boiler room just after the collapse, during the early confusion. Old Mary Cedrioli shrieked out loud over the phone in (what one supposes she supposed) triumph. She began to dance up and down, shouting pig-Italian dithyrambs, waking the neighbors, until something made her stop a second to check in on her mother, whom she hadn't thought about all night. Suddenly, all the other desolate hate freaks huddled together in the reeking Cedrioli kitchen heard first another shriek and then a howling canine wail. Then she herself, Old Mary Cedrioli, dashed out like the demented thing she was into the cold deserted streets, waking the neighborhood. She had found her sainted ancient mother dead.

Jameson O'Maurigan woke in a strange bed. He shivered, naked again. He thought it must be morning.

Moments later, he was on the street, in day-old clothes, still shivering. He went into a diner on West Houston Street for coffee and, while waiting, picked up the
Daily News
. The next thing he knew, he felt ice picks lancing his brains. He fled into the street. He tripped and fell, cutting his face on an icy fender. He hailed an early scab taxi and staggered in. “The Plaza! Please, the Plaza!” He heard an early-morning news flash on the cab radio: Nothing was changed; Mawrdew Czgowchwz was asleep. He rode north in agony. Reaching the Plaza fountain, the cab skidded to a halt. Jameson flung bills at the driver, leaped out of the taxi, and fell again on the ice. He looked at the imperious Plaza façade. It stood there; it didn't care. He staggered forward against morning; he cared. He found his sister asleep in a chair in the crowded Palm Court. The entire lobby had the look of some improbably posh evacuation center or some other-worldly steamship lounge adrift in a doldrum latitude. Outdoors, a brilliant sun melted layers of sooted snow in Central Park. Indoors, overwrought Christmas decorations reinforced the gloom. The hotel staff were being solemnly generous with quantities of cushions and fresh coffee, but there could be little question of the vigil's going on much longer into the morning.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke early. She sat up in bed and looked. The Countess Madge came closer...

The eminent Dr. Zwischen arrived at the Plaza just after nine o'clock. Less than an hour later, the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier came down into the Palm Court to deliver a message to the press and the public (“in a low-pitched, steady, nearly abstract declamation which cut through the listeners' continuous breathy rumbles of shock and dismay like alto plain song over creaks and soughing wind in desolate haunted rooms and corridors”—Paranoy, in his diary, that somber afternoon):

Then it was really over. The silence of the crowd's breaking up seemed to Percase and Paranoy (and to those few others who found themselves able at all to stand away the smallest distance from dire circumstance to formulate analogies) more memorably
frappant
than any Czgowchwz ovation they had ever heard or heard of. There was nothing further to be said. The city went its way to work. The Countess Magdalen took Mawrdew Czgowchwz home.

Dolores's column headlined that afternoon: “
IS MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ INSANE
?” At the Crossroads Café, the Neriacs, reading, merely transposed the subject and the verb into a stiff, sure exclamation of their own wicked conclusions. Not only was Mawrdew Czgowchwz “abbatz” as sure as there was vengeance, but there was “also no true justice either meanwhile anyway.” There
she
was, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, allowed to rest up quite comfortable in that old pagan Irish biddy's fortress uptown, while meanwhile poor Old Mary Cedrioli was even now laid up tied to an old iron bed in Bellevue just because some Irish cops found her last night on the Bowery clawing her shriveled tits—you almost had to laugh, though—screaming “
Ho
‘
mazzata la mamma!
” It was just proof of how the fuckin' Irish still ran New York the same as always. Well, it was all very sad. Maybe it was just as well Morgana was retiring. So they all went to the fare-well...

Christmas that year never came to much among the more simpatico Met regulars. Attendance fell off severely in the New Year; more and more people stayed home playing records. The weary winter set in for keeps.

T
HE WONDROUS
saga of the second Czgowchwz return, in the psychic pannage season, that return from regions all too few have ever charted, is many sagas' interweaving. The vast unraveled display of all the versions, points of view, convictions, and testimonies of so many compulsive seekers after Czgowchwz truth suggests the spectacle of some ticker-tape parade's litter-choked aftermath, supposing the triumphant Czgowchwz comeback's wake papered with incessant strips of pertinent leading-clue material: depositions, letters, reports, ad hoc, ad lib, ad nauseam, ad infinitum...(But no sentence in fact or fiction could convey the discrete truth, or for a certain fact get nearer to that shifting mystery than any words get to the true fulfillment of that unique resolve the Shadow in the recess of the mind resolves.)