Mawrdew Czgowchwz (19 page)

In Prague, matters went smoothly, as Paranoy was able to report the next week on WCZG.

Mother St. Mawrdew, her three sister companions of the Cenacle of St. Vitus, and the three Czgowchwz champions, making up the spiritually required party of seven, docked at Pier 88 in the rain. Middle February stressed. Gennaio had set the date for the encounter between Mother St. Mawrdew and Mawrdew Czgowchwz—a date some sixteen days off. Meanwhile the official representative of the diocese, Msgr. Finneagle, was ready on hand at the waterfront to receive the nuns on this occasion, Mother St. Mawrdew being, as Mother General of her order—the Blue Nuns of St. Vitus—a considerably bigger fish in Christendom than simple Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., a provincial. The diocese had taken no official position in terms of “the Czgowchwz complication,” but already in Bohemian parishes in the East Seventies special novenas to St. Mawrdew the Ecstatic were winding into their last weeks, packing these churches with multitudes of devout souls, few of whom had ever seen the diva perform, but most of whom had heard her many Saturday broadcasts from the Metropolitan and cherished her recordings of Czech songs and operas:
The Cunning Little Vixen, Katya Kabanova, Rusalka, The Bartered Bride
. In addition, following Paranoy's astonishing revelations over WCZG on February 12—the Feast of the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites, Confessors—the Metropolitan Irish clergy, a diocesan majority, had been set agog. No such effect had hit the New York Irish laity at large. After all, did they know anything much about Maev Cohalen except that she had been branded a scarlet woman by the Archbishop of Dublin in 1916? Did she even lie in consecrated ground? And what of the bastard daughter? Did they know what the Wexford Festival was? Did they know that Mawrdew Czgowchwz had sung opera at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin? Had the woman ever recorded “Galway Bay”? And what was there in any case to prove that this opera diva
was
in fact the sin child of the Scarlet Joan of Arc of Holy Emerald Ireland—who, as was known to them that knew, had been most cruelly beaten and bruised by the filthy lusting Tommies holding her prisoner, only for her to leap splendidly from their clutches to her holy expiating death—a martyr—from off the high cliffs of Howth Castle and its environs into the purifying Irish Sea rather than yield to their revolting advances. That was a gorgeous story!

Thus do the Irish affirm. Thus do the Irish deny. That is what their obstinate fiction means.

His Scarlet Eminence found it most prudent, in the interests of “committed minorities,” to pontificate (evidently sulkily) at a “High Mass of Invocation” on the feast (replac-ing a ferial day in the local ecclesiastical calendar) of St. Mawrdew in Ecstasy, February 25, Mother St. Mawrdew and her sisters chanting the Gradual responses in the most perfect Latin heard in the New York archdiocese in any prelate's memory. No further would His Grace budge.

So it went: no smoke but there was fire. The Sunday supplements and national newsweeklies, as dedicated to sensation as to survival, featured in many cover stories (“That Mawrdew Czgowchwz Question,” “The Czgowchwz Identity,” “The Quest for the Czgowchwz Truth,” “The File on Mawrdew Czgowchwz”) their angles and approaches. Patchy, potted biographies of the diva. Ditto of her (suddenly) vividly remembered mother, pictured raising money haranguing Edwardian and Yankee throngs at Speakers' Corner, on Boston Common, in Union Square, and on the docks at Liverpool. Ditto (the worst) of her father, replete with ferociously inaccurate précis of his thought, studded with asinine rewrite-desk translations from the Czech, the German, the Russian, and the French of many of his seminal aphorisms, consistently omitting any reference at all to his single great work in English, the short, shattering
Were It But So
(“No one will understand it”). One read quantities of rehash filler copy on the Easter Rising of 1916, of maudlin Fenian rant, of reverent pieties on Czech nationalism, of damning recollections of the Prague defenestration of 1948. Pictures colored presumed concatenations in false verisimilitude. Pictures of Czgowchwz. Pictures of Neri (circa 1940). Pictures of the Secret Seven, hands blocking all their faces. Pictures of Creplaczx. Pictures of the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier (“said to be herself a total wreck!”). Pictures of the front door of Magwyck. Pictures of Wedgwood (“And what did the
butler
see?”) taken from the top of the garden wall one warming afternoon as he sat at his private ease playing solitaire pontoon on the O'Meaghre dolmen. Pictures of Arpenik's restaurant (“where those elite meet to eat”). Pictures of “a certain visitor” (Gennaio) rushing into the black 1947 Packard to be driven home. Pictures of Gennaio's consultation rooms in Morningside Heights. Pictures of the stage door of the old Metropolitan Opera House (“Will she ever cross this threshold again?”).

Wasn't it always the way.

What was ceremony
for
?

Jameson suffered greatly.

So many otiose speculations...

The day of the crucial encounter came. Ecclesiastical formalities (“consisting chiefly of a bijou scarlet high tea taken behind lace curtains in the front parlor—heated to suffocation —of the archiepiscopal mansette”—Paranoy, on the air) having been nicely observed, Mother St. Mawrdew, a tall handsome woman scented delicately in 4711, whose own radiant complexion and brilliant peacock-blue roughspun habit had already occasioned no little appreciative murmur (“Why she looks lit entirely from within!”) in cathedral-close circles, was offered transportation, in Msgr. Finneagle's Mercury, up to Magwyck. “I would much prefer to walk.” Walk she did.

It was one windy March day, a signal day: the calends. Mother St. Mawrdew strode up the length of Madison Avenue, marveling in fluent French—the while Pierrot, Creplaczx, Jameson, and Paranoy tried vainly to keep pace—on the barbaric splendors of “
l'acropole officielle
,” taking in each separate numbered façade seemingly the way film digests: for all time. Her carapace—a collection of matching, draped panels, yokes, tabards, and veils, all blue as is fair weather—yielded in random riot to the wind, as if beckoning in every direction. Neighborhood children, racing home from school, reported “a witch all dressed up in blue” to clucking Irish nannies, to confident Negress cooks, to Jewish candystore ladies, and to weary mothers on the telephone.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke in time for tea.

The wayward, dream-logged patient stared once more through space and time, remembering and disremembering at once. So far she knew who she had been. Who she was (and is) remained just that far out of grasp to tantalize a searching heart, to challenge a steely will. Gennaio knew that to attempt telling her in so many words could occasion nothing but setback reactions. To allow her, constructing by synergy, to discover herself in her inhering structure must guarantee her complete recovery. Such an allowance must be granted slyly, “as it were, on the off hand,” Gennaio told Creplaczx, whom he had chosen to be the interlocutor and “favored erotic catalyst” in that last most crucial trance session, in which he, Creplaczx, speaking Czech, would “fetch out as does an accomplished midwife” Mawrdew Czgowchwz's identity, the while Gennaio controlled the delicate psychic logistics.

They went upstairs together. Mother St. Mawrdew arrived and waited below in the music room, where Dame Sybil, vested in a white silk kimono, her raven hair loose-flowing, sat playing koto rhapsodies (
Chiddri, Rokudan, Midare, Haru-No-Kyoko
), as if the Lady Murasaki had created her. Every vigilant sought formal occupation either in prayer of sorts or in physical exertion. Jameson went out into the yard to sing softly as if to himself the only song in his head, “Machushla,” thereby summoning a convocation of neighborhood cats—led by Bozo and Rose(ncrantz)—who chimed in, causing no small irritation to the Moronican embassy flunkies next door.

Pèlerin Deslieux, standing fixed, supple, at the parlor mantel mirror, chanting “
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo
,” dipped and rose up, dipped and rose up, in perfect pliés (kinesthetic reactions empathetic to those semblable folding-unfoldings of the subconscious Czgowchwz mind), promoting the climax fast being reached upstairs.

“Some ort-welding alchemy,” wrote Percase, “intelligence arcane to those denied personal access—all necessarily—to that great lady in the dark, restored to Mawrdew Czgowchwz each and every faculty she had always commanded, all reinforced, moreover, by that singular perspex armour only the spiritual salvage-few purchase to gird their souls.”

“What Percase perhaps meant,” Consuelo Gilligan dryly remarked some years later in the florescent sixties—by which time “poor darling farouche T.P.” was himself stashed away in some restricted leafy confine in the Berkshires, among other, assorted stylish crazies—“was that she, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, came out of herself a stronger woman.”

Consuelo herself played cards. Carmen knitted comforters. The Countess plied the I Ching. G-G smoked panatelas. Alice did origami. Paranoy worked at phrasing. Ralph fasted and predicted. The remaining Secret Seven bided their time. Laverne Zuckerman and Arpenik discussed the menus they would each construct for “the Supper of the Reclaimed,” the feast of recovery. Mother St. Mawrdew told her beads. Mother Maire Dymphna told herself the truth.

The Czgowchwz Moment drew nigh. In the center of her bursting conscience an imperative summons now to relent, accept, cease barring curing impulse, struck the chord
Om
: harmonic verity plucked by the unchained will. She let herself go: she came to.

Creplaczx, when she recognized him, cried out. Jameson O'Maurigan, singing below, heard his exulting. He knelt on the ground to thank providence. Gennaio ran to the door in triumph. Dashing downstairs, he summoned Mother St. Mawrdew, abbess of the Cenacle of St. Vitus (dancing). Mother St. Mawrdew stood up, as calmly willing as St. Mawrdew Martyr must have been, to face what in her own cloistered heart she so desperately feared—yet no one had thought of
that
!—might prove her own undoing: another interview with that “so wayward russet vixen” she had last encountered decades ago in the postulant's cell in the cathedral close high on the hill near the castle. There the rebel child had knelt, farcing a threadbare carpetbag with contraband scores of
Salome, Wozzeck, Parsifal
, and
La Traviata
. This was the girl she had so cherished, after effecting her smuggled entry into Prague from Dublin in memory of the soul of her own dead twin brother, Jan Motivyk...that perhaps—it nagged her as these terrors must—she had gone too far, all told.

Somehow she walked up those fearful stairs. St. Mawrdew herself prompted. The cries of recognition—of renewal—shooting hallward from the sickroom gave her pause; yet she went up to her task. And then at length she went in.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz, embracing Merovig Creplaczx, shuddering, looked up over his shoulder. There in the doorway she saw—

She leaped out of her bed, massed Titian hair loosed, tumbling. For an instant she stood poised, open-mouthed and breathless, her hands raised head-high in what might have seemed an attitude complected of fear, joy, lust, and interrogative wonder had it been arrested by cameras. By the time Creplaczx had turned and Gennaio had approached her side, she was already kneeling, whispering, “
Ma mère! Nourrice de mon âme!
”

Mother St. Mawrdew raised up the orphan child she had named, the sudden woman who had fled her once too captive thrall (she owned it now).

Mawrdew Czgowchwz's entire Bohemian life up to a crucial point recurred. She began blurting out the story then and there.

She had slipped over the cenacle's cloister wall into the shadows of demimondaine Prague. (That was 1933; she had been kept there ten years.) At first she had taken up with café musicians, singing in art nouveau dance halls and art deco bars in Námes̆tí Republiky; next, with the radical avant-garde in Parizka, singing dodecaphonically in sparsely furnished attics and in the odd shabby-genteel parlor. For seven years thereafter she had lived in Celetna in common-law wedlock with her great love, an obscure patriot-poet-composer called Nepomuk Czgowchwz, bearing him a child, another Nepomuk. The Nazis came and murdered Czgowchwz in the Old Town Square, under the ancient clock opposite the T′yn Church, in the shadow of the Jan Hus monument. They took the son Nepomuk away into their youth corps, where he died of meningitis in a barrack in Silesia. She joined the Czech Resistance. She never sang for Nazis. She hid; she fasted: endured.

She lost her true self to war. In some winter cellar in some dark wartime year she ran herself down so low a fierce fever nearly consumed her. Old peasant women nursed her. When she revived in the countryside near Brno one spring morning, the fever broken, they told her her name, which she did not remember. They could tell her nothing else...

She had forgotten her past. She knew she could sing, she said, and she knew how old she was—and none of the rest mattered. She met a Russian soldier, a deserter, and she loved him a little. When they found him and shot him, she took a lock of his hair and his few effects—a painted icon, a letter, and his worn copy of
Eugene Onegin
—back across borders to a village near Leningrad, making her way as she might, and gave them to his mother. The siege of that city having been lifted, she began to sing there. One thing led to another. Befriended by Tatiana Vitrovna Gehtopfskaya, a young dramatic soprano (“I always envied Tania”), she began touring with pick-up companies, returning finally to Prague early in 1947, where she... It was going blank again.

Now the abbess and the sometime postulant stood face to face, enthralled each one in all each the other said. They spoke—in French, in Czech, in English, in Latin—all they had never spoken. (No word of theirs went on tape.)

Creplaczx stood listening, aghast. He would waver, then grow faint. It was all blowing up in his face.