Mawrdew Czgowchwz (16 page)

All the intimate vigilants met and kept on meeting all through the early “coaxing” period, during which time their hunches, their insights, their desperate recollections, and the rest of it required (as it were) committee-pooling, thrashing out, distillation, and delivery-in-redaction up to the Countess Madge for Celtic transmission, all which while the work kept going on under the supervision of the autocratic Zwischen. It was in this agonizing way that Mawrdew Czgowchwz came at first to understand—and in quick time, it seemed, to accept—the fact that she was “a person to be preserved,” someone some incalculable number of other persons cared so much for and about, they were now living their own lives in suspension—interluded—on spare time. The mail pouring in at WCZG stacked to the ceilings. The Secret Seven tried their best to deal with much of it, but the pressures attendant upon their watch at Magwyck left them sore and exhausted. Paranoy broadcast a plea that all correspondence cease. He promised faithful daily reports between the playing of Czgowchwz records, tapes, and conversations—the station's continuous vigil demanded by short-wave listeners coast to coast, in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Montreal, New Orleans, and in towns and villages past counting. From Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, and San Juan came pleas for daily Spanish broadcasts of the Czgowchwz news. Consuelo Gilligan agreed to prepare these. The BBC, RAI, ORTF, and Radio Éireann each sent a special correspondent to monitor developments.

Having at the outset appeared giddy—like a child relieved of an oppressive weight laid upon her by dim previsions of the life lying ahead—soon Mawrdew Czgowchwz, in the New Year, after waking in the dark to the sounds of revel in the freezing streets, experienced a dim gestalt-recall: of that very thing's happening somewhere, sometime before. “She remembers singing Violetta!” Ralph attempted insisting. But the recall vanished in gray dawn. Thereafter the patient grew ever more grave. Under Zwischen's efficient tyranny, recollections, precognitions, simultaneous delusions and clarifications wracked a foundering mind. Co-efforts redoubled in two directions, the prognosticative and the animadversive. Trying to see some possible way ahead, trying to look back for a reason to, Mawrdew Czgowchwz fought hardest of all to retain as best she might her own unmoving center.

So far as the public world's appreciation of the Czgowchwz collapse was affected, it seemed most to be so by overloads of perspectives. (Hence the mails: all the frantic demands.) The intense shock and continuing bewilderment resulting from the patient's insistent employment of faultless Hibernian Gaelic—for no question put in English, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish, or Russian registered—boggled the common mind. (“On top of everything else!” people said.) This very same exotic consequence was at the same time of course the primary empathetic aggravation among the Secret Seven, not the least because of the wearing effect the diurnal struggles began to have on the unflinching Countess Madge. Known for years to be able to talk any number of various gossips hoarse in a marathon, she began to be too weary by each nightfall to tell anybody anything, and by and by even less able each long day to complete to Zwischen's satisfaction the constant strophic-antistrophic interlocutory sessions with the supine diva (whose own energies, so far as talking in circles went, seemed boundless, grounded as they were in the subpersonal abyss, source of demonic power).

Then one morning in darkest early January, Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke and spoke Italian. Ralph was summoned in prompt haste. For days thereafter they sat talking together. (It's all still there on Ralph's tapes.) Most of the Czgowchwz dialogue was monologue—long, winding, lyric, plaintive cavatinas whose impact left Ralph emotionally spent by every noontime, never able to eat much lunch. He lost all the sturdy weight he had regained in that year since the strike, and when asked after, would invariably respond, “I'm wrecked! Meanwhile the tapes are
flawless
!”

Merovig Creplaczx insisted something be done to enable the diva to refind her native tongue, and Zwischen attempted a bolder sort of commanding hypnosis: a fondling induction (Creplaczx fondling physically) into automatic trance, a technique he had been avoiding, he announced sternly, for fear of “disequilibriating the balance.” The results were amazing, and for Creplaczx dismaying. Ordered in trance to utter something in her own first language, she simply nodded, relieved, and commenced to go on and on again in Erse—describing, the bewildered Countess Madge explained, idyllic scenes of childhood and mumbling snatches of old ballads, canticles, keenings, and prayers—so that Merovig Creplaczx tore at his graying hair and fell down weeping out loud, moaning, “She
is
insane! She
must
be insane!” The Countess Madge put him out.

“Well,
where
did she learn it, and
when
?” demanded Cassia Verde-Dov'è, sporting an officious
phoque
, sitting finishing a second vaporetto cocktail at a serious hat-lunch at the old New Weston in the company of Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, Consuelo Gilligan, and Gaia della Gueza. “Madge never uses it except when she's three sheets to the wind, or in ceremony! Oh, waiter...”

Dame Sybil wondered herself. “Well,” she said to herself, “she has
sung
in Dublin, and at Wexford.” She pondered the evidence. “No,” she told herself, “two week-long seasons singing Carmen, Amneris, Dalila, and Katisha” (at the Gaiety Theatre) “and one long weekend in Wexford” (that mad weekend after which, on the Monday, they had sailed across to Cornwall, to Tintagel) “could leave one little time apart to master that cryptic offshoot lingo, Hibernian, even supposing—as is not the case—the tongue to be in current common use.” There must exist some unsuspected
forthright
answer.

Consuelo thought it through. It had to do, she suspected, with forces lying elsewhere...

G-G thought it was ugly, black witchcraft.

Jameson O'Maurigan walked slowly along, arm in arm with Lavinia, through those tortuous lanes traversing landscaped hillocks, dark tunnels, lakeside byways, and meadow downs that all extend (all intertwining) up through the charted Cytherean reaches in lower-mid Central Park known as the Rambles, an area valued in certain quarters as the perfect Gotham rendezvous for languorous Maytime trysts and recognized in certain others as the perfect Gotham repository for select victims of sudden and violent deaths.

Now in winter nothing was so certain. The snow lay blanketed and clean in hollows. Granite slab stones, snow-crested, thrust, rose, creating angular, sheer precipices. Amazing icicled configurations hung, fell apart, and splintered, on and from leafless branches “in piercing crystal distress,” as Jameson put it into words that afternoon. (His verse was considered “bruised.”)

They spoke of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. (“All radically depends on so much else.”) They shrugged, walking from plane to plane in slanting spirals, but they could not, nor would they, shrug off the weight of their anguish.

“I think it's obvious,” said Jameson deliberately coldly, “this Gestapo quack, Zwischen, is just no good with her.”

Lavinia wanted to cry. “But, Jamie, he's eminent!”

“Eminent? Eminent! Shit!”

“Well, you'll get nowhere shouting!”

“Eminence! ‘Eminence' is like ‘Fame,' ‘Farce,' ‘Camp'!”

“I don't know. Is it really?” Lavinia shivered a bit.

“Don't cry, Vanilla. It's fake; it wastes.”

“It's easier than thinking...” She nodded; she got a grip.

Jameson put his arm around his twin. “I know what you're thinking. Mawrdew Czgowchwz is Famous. Is that a Farce? Well, you realize it often is, just. Of course it's High Farce, but think. Think back to those collisions. It's fantastically cast, the chases are electric, and disaster impinges!” Jameson decided he could shout disaster down.

“Jamie, don't
yell
! Remember, she's so
ill
.” Lavinia remained terrified of an epidemic derangement.

“I
will
yell! Don't
you
hear what I mean? Farce is killing, as is Fame. The whole radical task is salvaging the woman from her Fame!”

“But she'll always be famous!”

“Of course she will. Let her be. But the Fame is the Fiction. The woman suffers the factual, oppressive weight.”

Lavinia thought she knew what—

Jameson hadn't finished. “She's got to see Gennaio!” The twins had together reached a certain height. Rocky slopes made small divides. A pond lay frozen over. Tributary streams, ceased rilling, traced gray-webbed veins downhill to it. They talked about the first time they had come to this same spot, in childhood, and about the first time they had taken Mawrdew Czgowchwz there together, in what now seemed, in memory, childhood's second end. Twice ended, twice bewildered.

“She loved this pond in the spring.”

“She gave things to the children.”

“She came here alone to read.”

“She wrote letters sitting here.”

They descended the west slope. They walked all the way to Belvedere Lake, where the deserted Florentine tower stood fast, no longer reflecting. They walked straight across the supporting ice. Jameson continued insisting Czgowchwz see Gennaio.

Ralph, Alice, Dixie, and the remaining Secret Seven took Laverne Zuckerman back to their regular back table at the Burger Ranch. “A flat medium and a side of French, Rhoe,” Ralph ordered, all gloom-pressed and “very tired.” Alice couldn't eat: she drank. She ordered three vanilla Cokes, meanwhile fishing around in her black crocodile purse for that necessary pint of something extra she had just purchased up the street. Dixie ordered a white-meat tuna-fish on toast points and a black coffee. The remaining Secret Seven all had hash.

Laverne Zuckerman could not eat anything either; she asked for lemon tea in a glass. Rhoe nodded commiseratively, chomping Dentyne. She stuck her silver pencil midway back into her champagne-platinum upsweep and schlepped off to the kitchen, scuffing stylish gold sling-back wedgies along the floor. She knew how they all felt; she felt bad enough herself. It was a real crying shame. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was always so damn regular—almost like the girls, considering...

It was nearing four o'clock. The tables all along the wall were empty, so that when the frightened, disheveled figure made its reckless, headlong way down to the big back banquette table like the lone survivor of a grisly massacre, the Secret Seven and Laverne Zuckerman drew back, disrupted. Then Alice, famously gifted with total recall, blurted, “That's that same gorgonzola freak, old Luigi—the one that got that gonza cash prize for carving Neri out of provolone cheese at that summer street bazaar, when was it, ten years ago!”

Ralph knew entirely well who old Luigino Morboso was. Hateful childhood memories of firelight Fascist processions on Grand Street in the thirties invariably featured this same brutal, pig-faced
villiacco
, rasping off-key choruses of “
Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza
.” There he stood now, old and ugly in winter: a fat, bald
commedia
buffoon. “To think,” thought Ralph, “that
that
one used to claim to be getting it put out regular from Neri, the big opera star—
la prima donna di tutt' il impero, di tutt' il mondo!
—between the acts of
Aïda
in the days when he walked on as a captain in the Egyptian black guard in the Triumphal Scene.” And now he knelt there shivering. Now his thing was on the floor.

Then they were all shivering. Luigi Morboso, the fear of a vengeful, righteous God upon him, having been commanded by his father confessor, Dom Gesualdo Svelato, O.M.F., in the Church of St. Anthony on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul to make public confession of his part in the perfidy, crossing himself spastically several times a minute, told on his knees, in the back of the Burger Ranch, of his acolyte participation in that black ceremony, “
la messa Cedrioli
”; how Old Mary Cedrioli had brought down (or up) the devil's curse on Mawrdew Czgowchwz, after old Mona Cantilena, she whose vocal career had somehow never flourished, had herself cut off a lock of the great diva's (he had to say so himself) own true hair. “It nevva cudda happen if she wore wigs, but bein' that she don't never—”

Like the lightning in the east in summer, Ralph's rage shot up (or down). Knocking hamburgers, French fries, spiked vanilla Cokes, coffee, glass tea, tuna on toast-points, hash, and cigarettes all over the orange-Formica table and all over the groveling old Luigi Morboso down on the floor, in such a state as no one in town had ever seen Ralph, he “throttled the miscreant” (Alice) until “the wailing old misery” (Dixie) was dragged away by Rhoe and fat Irving the cook and thrown back into the street, where he for his vileness belonged.

Ralph fled the premises directly, hailing the first Seventh Avenue uptown cab, and flew hurtling to Magwyck. Laverne Zuckerman passed out. She was gathered together and taken to Alice's place while Dixie went looking for Paranoy. The others (the remaining Secret Seven) sped fan-vaulting out all over town announcing and denouncing the vilest treason and black voodoo too.

Arpenik had a “feeling.”

It was nearly four o'clock. She had locked the front door of the restaurant, put up the
OUT TO LUNCH
sign, and returned to her kitchen to furnish late-afternoon Armenian nosh for a small party of present regulars: Pierrot, Paranoy, Percase, and the hapless, distracted Creplaczx. Dressing immense portions of succulent imam bayildi with sesame oil and fresh lemon juice, checking the madzoon to see had it made up its mind to take, rendering thick clotted cream for ekmeks, she had been fully occupied. The eminent long-haired Persian orange cat, Bozo, lay stretched along a widened windowsill at his accustomed ease. All was tranquil in her mind—at least insofar as conditions permitted
in situ
Czgowchwz. (Arpenik was in some ways
the
seeing eye at the center of the tempest.) And then this sudden feeling...