Mawrdew Czgowchwz (18 page)

Ralph sat on the floor and cried. The Countess was revived to be informed. All the while, in the library, Jameson read—tears dropping on yellowed pages of
The Fenian Pantheon
—the story of “Great Flaming Maev Cohalen,” she who stood fast, tall, and gorgeous at the ramparts early on in that great struggle Ireland had endured for her own sacred destiny's determination. Jameson had heard the tales before, but never as they now flooded into his inner ear. He read:

Jameson dashed bellowing into the parlor. In the grandest manner the Countess Madge had witnessed since the days of the “Récit de Théramène” from
Phèdre
recited by the great Séverin Oursin-Mahon (her cousin by marriage to the deceased Count Célestin-Marc Gautier) at the Théâtre Guichet in Paris, the poet announced Mawrdew Czgowchwz revealed at that hour on that day, date, and year as the love child of Ireland's Joan of Arc, Great Flaming Maev Cohalen, and the Czech philosopher-poet Jan Motivyk. The details would become apparent later on. The idea may have been bizarre, but the rhetoric was so commanding, and the need for a certain truth so pressing, that the entire company of vigilants assented on the spot. Paranoy said it for all: “The only answer there is, is welcome!” Everyone took it as read, and exulted.

Less than an hour later the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier, Fenian adventuress, actress, priestess, and pal, having cable-phoned her Dublin people, sat chain-smoking Lucky Strikes in the front-right seat of Mawrdew Czgowchwz's black 1947 Packard as it sped along the Van Wyck Expressway (escorted), with Jameson O'Maurigan, poet, delver, and champion, next to her, driving. She was booked outward bound for Shannon Airport on the eleventh-hour, Starlight Stratocruiser, “St. Brendan” flight.

Jameson: left in command...

In four swift days she was back. In the interim, severest strictures, self-imposed, kept Czgowchwz vigilants entirely out of public view. WCZG went off the air. No telephones were answered. A stop-gap system of tight-security messenger services (the Secret Seven's device), complete with prearranged doorbell signals, deft coding formulas, and special knowledge of zigzag back-street routes and rendezvous, kept sacral data out of the profane clutch. Even so—even more so—were Dolores, Gloria Gotham, The Talk of the Town, the dwindling but no kinder Neriacs, the Bagatellieri, vultures on the Rialto, and Knickerbocker desolates disposed to speculate. The closure of Cashel Gueza and of Arpenik's; Paranoy's disappearance from the city room; Percase's cancellation of a week of classes at the New School; Ralph's sudden laryngitis; Laverne Zuckerman's sudden, phoned-in cancellation of Amneris (“A virus, my clavicle!”—Lois the switch-board girl, to Rhoe at the Burger Ranch); the unanswered phones; the obvious avoidances: everything conspired to create unspeakable impressions.

Silence is not New York's game. Nothing said is nothing in fact denied. (Dolores's charming speculation was typical: “She's in the
bins
, but which ones?”)

Jameson sat out the whole interlude at Mawrdew Czgowchwz's bedside. She would awaken (as might Kathleen Mavourneen) talking to the ardent young man as to an elder brother. They would talk about the day. This waiting for her to wake was in those few days Jameson's bliss. He neither needed nor consented to sleep. He would sit in the darkened room, burning a single orange-blossom-scented candle, thinking of what he would sing the next day (for when she was awake she often asked him to sing to her). He dreamed that joy would kill him. Dreaming it awake, he dreamed it fearlessly. She seemed to know he loved her. Then she seemed to know no more.

When Gennaio would come in, Jameson would go downstairs, out into the yard—all mindful of rogation—as if to coax budding relief out of the sudden midwinter spring that had set in after the rain. Meanwhile, upstairs, Gennaio would set about the task of fetching Mawrdew Czgowchwz back into presence.

In four days there was real news. Down out of a clear, decisive sky, the Countess Madge (“Herself! Postquam Rearrived!”—Paranoy) skidded of a weekend afternoon along the runways of marshy Idlewild, escorting the Reverend Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., bearing an answer at last.

“L
A DIVINA
Boema” stood revealed as the orphaned love child of Great Flaming Maev Cohalen, Eire's own Boadicea, gone west into history, and Jan Motivyk, poet-philosopher of the Prague Linguistic Circle, radical democrat, and lyric tenor—he who had set Edwardian-Georgian Cambridge and Dublin parlor society swooning with his lilting, scalpel conversation and with the songs of Janác̆ek, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Hahn, he of whom Yeats is said to have remarked to Lady Gregory, walking into a musicale through the gates of Trinity College: “That Bohemian serpent!”

Mawrdew Czgowchwz lay sleeping, still dreaming on of convent childhood in Connemara. In those first four “grounding” days Gennaio had taken her through her earliest years, memory by crystal memory. Patient and analyst engaged in forging out a new, verified life by a process of psychic synergy. On the day the Countess reappeared, the analyst was able to assure the patient that when she woke that same afternoon for tea, a dear friend from many long years ago would be there to take it with her. The Countess made fresh, dark Irish soda bread.

The vigilants—watchers and warders of the Czgowchwz estate—convened once more full strength, on that riotously mild and sunny day on the East Side, to hear the story all Gotham would hear next day from Paranoy over WCZG, read in
The Czgowchwz Monthly Newsletter
, spread by word of mouth, and finally encounter in its perfect form some time thereafter in Jameson O'Maurigan's ode “Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano.”

Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., nearly as old as was the century, now prioress of the Convent of Mary Reparatrix at Convent-on-the-Rock in Connemara, told the sum and substance of the Czgowchwz/Cohalen nascence in wistful, breathy, whispering Leinster English, the very beat and tune of which dialect made every phrase she uttered fall into such eurythmic and euphonic patterns as to bewitch her listeners, dispelling anguish like grace, inducing sweet narcosis to cure life of complication and dolor. As contained on Ralph's tape, the story she told was this:

There wasn't, for a documented fact, a dry eye in the parlor at that point in the story (Wedgwood having gone off to his quarters, content to read the future reports in his privacy). Some wept openly, like Ralph, all generous, warm Italian response. Others turned their heads away in every direction until there was no place left either to look or not to look. The Countess Madge held on to her composure as fast as ever she was able, tears falling without their sighs. There was still the interview...

That interview, between Mawrdew Czgowchwz—one Maev Cohalen that was—and Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H. (nee Mary O'Moore in the lying-in hospital on Hollis Street in the city of Dublin on the feast of All Saints in 1901), her oldest and newest-found friend in this world, was best described by the mediatrix of the recognition scene, the Countess Madge, in her memoirs
All I May Own
. Another slant vouchsafed the anxious public in the interests of art, science, instruction, and “a swell story, real worthwhile!” (Trixie Gilhooley) was offered in Gennaio's “Notes on the Excavation of the Primal Self of Maev Cohalen,” which paper he read to a packed house at Town Hall on Jung's birthday that year.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz slept again. Gennaio, addressing the vigilants in the parlor, advised them that a complete recovery, with an assured return to “libidinal commitment” (musicry), could be assuredly forecast for sometime soon—provided the patient be allowed “the digestive luxury” of day after day of curative sleep before being confronted with the next task, the most crucial encounter in her psychic journey back through time and forth again to meet herself. The meeting with the abbess of the Cenacle of St. Vitus in Prague, which must yet be effected. (For Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., had gone on in her tale to reveal how, in the period known as “the Troubles,” it had become necessary to spirit Great Flaming Maev Cohalen's love child by Jan Motivyk out of Ireland. This sorry task had been completed by...) Gennaio wished no more be yet revealed.

“This man has,” they said among themselves, “a finger for nuances!”

The Czgowchwz vigilants went home. Mother Maire Dymphna found welcome. She would stay on until the Czgowchwz dawning, naturally enough among the black-bonnet Sisters of Charity. The next decision—“Who for Prague?”—awaited.

Merovig Creplaczx knew Prague, but he almost certainly would never know elsewhere again were he to enter that city. The Countess had never been, but then so unnerved had she become by current revelations that the ready good counsel of the Czgowchwz vigilants, enforced by Jameson and Lavinia, had sent her to her bed. (“Now you
stay
there, and you
rest
!”) It was decided on the Tuesday of the next week: Jameson, Pèlerin Deslieux, and Paranoy must fly to Prague on diplomatic passports, readily available through Consuelo Gilligan's connections. Pèlerin's French and Jameson's Latin would cover the rampant exigencies to expedite crucial matters in the secular and the ecclesiastical sectors respectively. Paranoy would document the mission for WCZG and the
Newsletter
.

They flew out that night to Paris. At dawn the following day in the City of Light, having taxied in from Orly straight to the Place de l'Etoile, they marched grandly three abreast down the Champs-Elysées, commemorating the original Czgowchwz landing in the West. At the Place de la Concorde they parted. Jameson ambled off in a trance to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Paranoy sped off to the Brasserie Lipp. Pierrot, retracing his steps up the majestic boulevard to the Arc, then veering left, wandered into Chaillot, those
marron glacé
environs he had spent a fortunate childhood inhabiting each winter and spring (the family had passed each summer and fall at Turanga, the paternal seat on Madagascar, where Pierrot had been known as Monsieur Pique,
le petit prince
) and never nearly so perfect a manhood recalling and revisiting year after year. He walked past the shut-up Théâtre Guichet, reflecting without pausing, on his way along to meet a woman for lunch at Oblique—his mother, Zuleika Deslieux-Labiche, the vulpine Hebraic beauty who had been the first (woman) to dance the
pavane sauvage
, naked, shackled in a sapphire collar, plying an outsize aigrette fan, in the salons of Montparnasse between the wars.

The afternoon waned, anxious to meet night.

Night met the three Czgowchwz emissaries eagerly as they boarded the Aurore express at the Gare de l'Est. Barreling across Europe to Vienna, they rehearsed themselves. In that imperial city, in the district known as Döbling, they hired a properly daunting Mercedes. Chauffeured by a deaf-mute, ex-Lippizaner groom and accompanied by a high-ranking American mandarin acting as liaison officer, they motored along a course parallel to the route Mozart had once taken through the hills of Bohemia to Prague.

All this while, back at Magwyck, Mawrdew Czgowchwz was dreaming a dream of Prague...