Mawrdew Czgowchwz (22 page)

 

Rhoe wept and wept. “I never in my whole life heard
anything
so real!” The Secret Seven comforted her. The Countess Madge, Cassia Verde-Dov'è, Gaia della Gueza, Trixie Gilhooley, Paranoy, and Percase took the air. Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, in the powder room at Sherry's, dried her tears, reapplied her basic afternoon makeup, lit a du Maurier, sipped a little sloe gin on the rocks, and sat down. Suddenly a name flashed into her head. A certain familiar had been eerily present. But how could that have been so? The familiar person was yet in England. Pause, to set this muddle in precise... It was the voice—the fourth voice! It came to her inner ear. The voice of Mawrdew Czgowchwz / the voice of the English familiar. Those voices were congruent! They must meet; she would command it. That shy, lovely, tall, angelic, feral boy.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz drove herself straight back to the Plaza. She took cocktails at her leisure, then ate an avocado stuffed with fresh Maryland crab dressed with tarragon vinegar, washed down with a nice '47 Pouilly. She took all the vitamins. Then she sat down at her window.

At 7 p.m. New York time, that same wizard stylist—Cégeste—who had been sent by the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier to make Mawrdew Czgowchwz in one short hour such an eventful blonde arrived at the Plaza to reinstall her former Titian self. (This chemistry was secret.) He accomplished his task and left for Carnegie Hall.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt herself. She felt she was back in performing stride. In her new recital gown—another “knockout” Framboise, gamboge and gray organza—she stood at the long alcove mirror being fussed over by Mrs. Grudget, marveling at the science that had restored her: Gennaio's/ Cégeste's/Framboise's/the Others'. “If you're going to be a woman, be a
strong
woman!” she murmured, echoing something Mother Maire Dymphna had recalled Great Flaming Maev Cohalen murmuring in her fatal confinement forty years before.

Pèlerin Deslieux had arrived to escort her to Carnegie Hall. They would walk over together. “There's a queue from here to there!” he told her. Thousands of beaming New Yorkers, having heard the
Pelléas et Mélisande
broadcast, had come out into that fine spring evening, bringing little bunches of flowers with them, bringing Bohemian crepes, bringing miniature needlework masterpieces and what not else. They stood massed in a cordon that stretched from the Plaza fountain, down Fifth Avenue, and west across Fifty-seventh Street all the way to Carnegie Hall, then around Seventh Avenue to the Fifty-sixth Street artists' entrance.

“You miscalculated,
ma chère
,” he whispered warmly as she swept past him to the window. “You should have taken Madison Square Garden.”

Mawrdew Czgowchwz hummed a G and smiled. “How amazingly New York!”

Slipping into a dove-gray silk-velvet opera cloak, wisely lent her by Consuelo Gilligan, pulling on her black silk-velvet evening gloves—a gift from the Countess Madge—she checked her silk pull-string purse for that exquisite gold pen the Secret Seven had given her years ago for a first gift (declaring “You'll be needing this, Madame”). She said, “Cher Pique,
would
you phone ahead? I think I am going to be a trifle late.”

That she was, for certain fact. By the time she had “run the gantlet,” signing pictures, programs, books, and odd scraps of paper (“Some day if she's not more careful,” Cassia objected, grimacing, “she's going to have some insane contract or some smart blank check slipped under her all too willing hand!”), it was well past ten o'clock. But nobody seemed to mind.

Those ardent Czgowchwz
dévots
who had managed no tickets for Carnegie Hall would go back to their homes to tune in WCZG and listen. (That was why she took her time.) Creplaczx waited in the wings. Applause and cheering rebounded outside in Fifty-seventh Street—closed to ordinary traffic between Seventh Avenue and Sixth—where a multitude waited to hear the recital monitored by loudspeakers on strategically positioned trucks.

The program heard that evening (encores carefully listed by Paranoy) was:

 

 

(INTERMISSION)

 

The recital was recorded live, as well as taped by many everywhere. Applause, mounting, cascaded. Mawrdew Czgowchwz permitted every ovation. Bouquets past counting fell about the platform. “A radiant enchantress” (Francobolli) bewitched a willing audience. There were to be no more doubts.

A monteith bowl full of slipper orchids (pale white with mauve tracings), sent in homage by the Secret Seven, was the single trophy Mawrdew Czgowchwz elected to carry back to the reception in her own hands. The rest took up all the rest. She rode to the Plaza in an open caleche, in the company of the Countess Madge, Mother St. Mawrdew, and Mother Maire Dymphna, the avant-garde clearing the way. Then the Czech nun went to pray.

The Grand Ballroom lay waiting. Gay ornament of every sort beggared description. There hung contrived
pavillon
arrangements of drapery. There were in splendid evidence such borealis illuminations as had not been seen in town since the more flamboyant backstage bashes in the days of the Scandals' and the Follies' zenith. Cynthia Bombazine,
Elegant
's fashion maven, considered some of the gewgaws and getups, the baubles and ornate paste on people now sweeping into that posh arena just
too
flashy. (She detected here and there “a pyorrhoeic vulgarity.”) Some she found chic.

Dolly Farouche did her first show in the Persian Room that evening, but canceled the second. She was not about to miss out on
this
occasion (“Tell them to refund the fucking money!”). Margo and Bill Sampson arrived, having spent the long day at the Metropolitan and at Carnegie. Margo had simply canceled her matinee and evening performances of
Some Are Born
, thereby causing a stir on the Rialto.

There was singing and dancing. The Countess Madge, who had always celebrated the first of May, the Feast of Beltane, at Magwyck, had the time of her life at the Plaza.

The big participation dance was the Madison. Trixie Gilhooley, footless, found it a drag. The songs, so many and various, included: G-G's set of torchy numbers, “The Man I Love,” “Why Was I Born?,” “The Right Time,” and “He Was Too Good to Me,” accompanied by a combo featuring Consuelo Gilligan blowing a mournful alto saxophone; Dolly Farouche and Trixie Gilhooley duetting in “Sisters,” “Friendship,” “A Couple of Swells,” and “Anything You Can Do”; Laverne Zuckerman—moaning low—in renditions of “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “I Cried for You,” “Stardust,” and “As Time Goes By” (the way she once had sung in neighborhood cabaret on Jamaica Avenue); the Countess Madge and Jameson wailing away in “Make Believe,” “You're Just in Love,” “If I Loved You,” and “Strange Music.” Cassia sang “Lazy Afternoon,” “Suddenly” (stunningly), “Life upon the Wicked Stage,” and “Get out of Town.” Consuelo sang “When Love Beckons on Fifty-second Street,” “I Happen to Like New York,” “It's a Wishing World,” and “My Old Flame.” Mother Maire Dymphna sang—as she had done forty years since—“A Little of What Y'Fancy Does Y'Good,” “A Long Way from Tipperary,” “Faery Song” from
The Immortal Hour
, and an astonishing rendition of Musetta's Waltz Song, in perfect Italian.

Dame Sybil played four evening ragas on the sitar. Pierrot and Carmen electrified the place with their apache-dance party turn, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Ralph and Alice did an exhibition jitterbug, complete with a Jersey Bounce variation. Paranoy squired Consuelo Gilligan across the floor in a slick peabody, the pair executing deft box turns. Gloria Gotham sang “Once in a While.” Dolores sang “Mean to Me” and then passed out. The remaining Secret Seven did a precision tap routine to “Me and My Shadow.”

Closing down the carnival in yet another dizzy-vivid dawn, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, having protested (vainly), sang (perfectly) “Love for Sale,” “Miss Otis Regrets,” “Do I Love You?,” and “Glitter and Be Gay.”

That fete would be written about and written about, to excess. (Ralph said it all, finally: “It's
too
much to remember!”)

Mawrdew Czgowchwz retired. Everybody else went home. A fine May Day blossomed in New York.

T
HE HEROIC
conduct of life is absolute.

The mystery of character, destiny, and worth, pondered by Paranoy in
Mawrdew Czgowchwz: Beyond the Contours of Legend
, remained for some time shrouded in the murk churned up by the illative-convective forces of radical gossip, compounded of veiled opinion, random surmise, claimed cognizance, and downright mendacity. (There was far too much to tell.)

The watchword was
momentum
. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, on the Tuesday following the
Pelléas et Mélisande
/Carnegie Recital syzygy comeback, broadcast with Paranoy over WCZG. Four separate projects were announced that evening:

A new music drama to be composed for Czgowchwz by Merovig Creplaczx, his first such work.

The American première of a forgotten masterpiece, recently unearthed (“Tablowe found the thing up in Rutland. The Garden won't touch it. No spunk!”—Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, to Merovig Creplaczx), Handel's
Oberon and Titania
(1717), libretto by Colley Cibber, after Shakespeare. This opulent piece would be mounted outdoors in Central Park by Valerio Vortice for the summer solstice of the following year. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Laverne Zuckerman would alternate the principals.

A television special, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz at Random,” to be telecast on the upcoming Midsummer Night.

A film,
Pilgrim Soul
, to be scripted by Jameson O'Maurigan, in which Mawrdew Czgowchwz would make her screen debut playing her own mother, under the pantheon director Orphrey Whither (
The Day That Dawns, The Night of the End of Time, Ominous
).

The cinematic enterprise was trumpeted to the industry the next week on the front page of
Variety
: CZGOWCHWZ CZECHS INTO PIX. A headline first for the oltrano diva.

Her work with Gennaio progressed entirely surely.

Fixated, enslaved waking and sleeping, ceaselessly composing a music drama for the woman he desired more than he desired his life, his genius, his fame, or his sanity, Creplaczx had already gone into a kind of febrile trance, which Paranoy described as “close on to catatonic.”

Arpenik began arriving at Bank Street daily with provisions: delicately brewed infusions whose varied herbal essences were meant to nourish the alchemic gestation of telling musical subjects; and more substantial solid-food preparations, strong on cardamom, thyme, garlic, and fresh tarragon, wrapped in vine leaves and in silken envelopes of sheerest pastry; quantities of raw spinach and fresh goat's-milk cheese; bowls of stewed lamb, onions, and prunes; ramekins of bulgur pilafs and eggplant sautés; pots of perfect madzoon—all these intended to nourish the orchestration.

The composer's own Czech text, once translated by Mawrdew Czgowchwz, would be set into English blank verse by Jameson O'Maurigan, certain intermediary editorial tasks to be assumed by the able and ever-willing Tangent Percase. The production of the unnamed work, under the titular supervision of the Secret Seven and the Countess Madge, operating for the Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust (CELT), was entrusted to Percase, and its funding to the double agency of the poet-dramatist Isosceles Litotes and his sister, the sculptor Calypso Litotes-Stein, Jonathan's sister-in-law. This team succeeded in raising $43,731.34 in pledges on a tour of the country, exhibiting and reading, respectively, Calypso's sheer crystal object “In Terms of Mawrdew Czgowchwz” (a luminous ellipse through the center of which was worked a dazzling, symbolic emerald vein), and Isosceles' elaborate and stately ode “Mawrdew Czgowchwz: Salvage Muse.”