Mawrdew Czgowchwz (5 page)

The performance ended at midnight. There came universal ecstasy. Applause went on in tidal waves for an hour, reaching a furious peak when they tried to ring down the asbestos at half past twelve. A flock of white doves was released from the Family Circle. The house lights stayed on; the electricians mutinied. Czgowchwz was brought back from her dressing room wearing a chintz masterpiece by Framboise. The management was forced to announce that the opera house would remain open for as long a time as the audience wished to stay. Network relay cameras were rolled in and many of the stars were interviewed in the lobbies in a you-are-there marathon which canceled the small-hours showings of
The Great Lie, The Great Waltz, Song of Love
, and
Humoresque
. Czgowchwz ordered cases of champagne and baskets of blini, fruit, and cheese. A party was set up onstage in the first-act set. The musicians stayed on to play waltzes and, later, swing numbers and torpid third-stream jazz. Czgowchwz, having changed into a little black dress, danced with everybody. Art and life were fused...

Gray dawn light, that torment of sleeping soaks, broke on the horizon as scheduled on that morning after of mornings after. The parade Irish pitched and turned one upon another all over town, like groups of weary sots docking at Dublin after a night, any night, on the Irish Sea. In the star dressing room at the opera house, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, hastily repairing her face in make-do fashion, glanced out the window to see the first faint shadows on the sidewalk. They were mopping up at Bill's across the street. On her dressing table lay the predawn edition of the
Times
with a glorious front-page review of three acts of her performance. Musing on the relentless, instant processing of gesture into report, she gathered herself to herself and, taking a nosegay of violets from a box among the dozens in the room, walked dreamily to the stage. Ordering the huge scenery doors in the back wall of the stage opened, she turned to the enchanted throng. The first complete silence since just before midnight fell on the auditorium as the draft swept in. Singing “
L'Alba sepàra dalla luce l'ombra
” with Dame Sybil at the piano, she announced the evening ended. Then, shrouded in chinchilla, she walked without further ceremony out the great wide gap in the opera-house wall, and up Seventh Avenue through the all-but-deserted Rialto alone, followed at a distance by her retainers, like a star.

T
RUE STARS
impel; they need never campaign. What discovery each Czgowchwz stalwart would make—of such mythic inherence, of such erotic dimension, of a duration outside the world's measure—was to be made in dream time. Thus, to continue the tale of Czgowchwz is to surrender to that impulse that dream logic, dream effect, dream narrative, and dream figures play on, to reveal all there is to reveal in that insistent mode, valence, sequence, and style the Czgowchwz dream saga commands.

Nine months later in the same year of the oltrano
Traviata
triumph, some few weeks after what became so well remembered as Neri's Last November, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, having sung those forty roles, returned to New York to do her season—opening in yet another first attempt, Isolde—but first, in time to attend the annual Winter Solstice Occasion, a grand “do” held at fabled Magwyck, the town-house and back-yard residence herself the Countess Madge O'Meaghre Gautier had purchased and landscaped (the year before the war) (the year she won the Irish Sweepstakes) (the first year of her bereaving widowhood) (the year she gave up the stage).

The wheel had come another full circle. All over town the preparations for the solstice, for the new production of
Tristan und Isolde
, for smart Yule show-biz/society cocktail fetes, and for another year of the century took on the studied, quasi-hieratic characteristics of elegant secular pageantry. Columns in the press betrayed diverse attitudes.

As Gotham's strange festive ludi commenced their progress, Mawrdew Czgowchwz remained cloistered at the Plaza, secure high up in her tower suite.

The select number of those who had been, were, would become, and were to continue being part of the Czgowchwz pageant, all the while having gone about and continuing to go about their separate lives, their full careers, assembled at a point Paranoy would later call “the nexus of memory and expectation.” They came together there, if necessarily not all in any one of the same actual geographic or temporal environs, then more significantly, from the point of view of telling participation, in the same state of belonging (to Czgowchwz). They were all in the same boat. Thus the imaginative gathering of these principals, supporting players, featured players, and selected extras in the dream play that is the Czgowchwz tale was best described as “a brilliant procession of the willing elect, boarding a fantasy ark of wild delight—its own discrete realm, perfectly constructed to achieve buoyant salvation from space-time's torrent deluge” (Paranoy, in “The Importance of Analogy in Celebrating Czgowchwz,” a lecture). For reasons of their own, often infernal, other persons who played crucial roles in the Czgowchwz saga cannot be numbered among the willing elect. These are condemned to merely historic function.

Meanwhile, outside the collective mind recalling Czgowchwz—that first winter week of that same year in and out of the town where it had all, in its way, begun—life as it is revealed, in fragments of ordinary and extraordinary happenstance, spun kaleidoscopically on. All over everywhere persons were behaving characteristically...

The staging of the new production of
Tristan
, described as “resembling nothing so much as some Alma-Tadema/Burne-Jones exotic landscape in the Land of the Lost and Forlorn, rethought in a somewhat prophylactic idiom by some Guignol-funhouse fetishist, in terms of Piscator's best excesses” (Paranoy to Tangent Percase, in utter confidence), progressed. A number of “Tod und Verklärung” special effects were being conceived in secret in the last week before the opening in a lighting studio on the Upper West Side. The entire production was rumored to be “epic, hydraulic, stark,
new.
” (“
Nude!
” shrieked Dolores, aghast. “No, Dolores, not nude—
new
.” “Oh, all right then, what about the details...”) Valerio Vortice was keeping himself entirely to himself in his role as designer-regisseur, for this was the brilliant young Sicilian's first Metropolitan production.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz declined to rehearse the Liebestod, with a shadowy statement: “It must not be practiced, but perfect.”

The while these immediate Czgowchwz concerns were being felt, darker circumstances, reeking of undoing, were being suffered, and the toxic atmosphere of envy was beginning to occasion cries for revenge.

I Neriani lay about disheveled, in states of bitter, abject, mean remorse, for rumor on that side of the hill had it (a dead certainty) that Morgana l'Ultima would at last announce her retirement on Christmas Eve, going out (naturally) as Norma (“in a box—simple pine,” Paranoy cackled privately, to hundreds). Roxanne Sauvage, the volunteer Adalgisa (“Not my stuff, really, but what the...”), had confirmed it all. The Secret Seven were about evenly divided on the tricky question of Czgowchwz's attending the farewell. Czgowchwz herself seemed inclined to do it, but Ralph observed somewhat venomously that were the platform shoe on the other foot, Neri would arrive at a Czgowchwz farewell only if it were
Götterdämmerung
and the old
pescecane
herself were catering the matches and the kerosene. (The fact that Neri had attempted suing Czgowchwz over her collision with Ralph at the
Traviata
added, as it were, fuel to the furious December wrangle.)

Meanwhile, like a four-a-day burlesk, Alice would regale all comers with her total-recall remembrances—including her own favorite: how the initial enmity had arisen from an unfortunate impromptu turn in the second act of the Czgowchwz debut. Many of the younger fans had never heard the precise details of that bout in the boudoir scene, when Czgowchwz, in an access of violent fury apposite to her conception of the overwrought Amneris (“calculatedly berserk” —Paranoy, in
Czgowchwz Rampant
), had torn Neri's wig right off and thrown it in the prompter's face. Neri, in an outraged
anatema
frenzy, had fled the scene, bolted the door of the star dressing room, and refused outright to go on with the opera, spitting every vile hermetic Sicilian curse and oath, while the resourceful Chiave bridged the murky gap with thrilling renditions of the overtures to
Forza, Aroldo, Stiffelio
, and
I Vespri Siciliani
. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, brought to herself, had apologized outside the bolted door in many tongues, while the Countess Madge, her then-new fierce friend, kept feeding her restorative brandies fetched from Sherry's one by one, and counseling, “
Aw, Mawr-dew
, you didn't know what you were doing!” Neri had given in at last, and Czgowchwz had then won her over somewhat, making a few lewd cracks in Calabrese about the improbable doings indulged in by the corps de ballet in the Triumphal Scene. They might just conceivably have become friends of a sort had it not been for the noisy and obvious fact that all the critics in town had quit the theater at a gallop directly after the Judgment Scene to make the early editions of their rags with the blast on the Czgowchwz triumph, leaving Neri's own name (some of them) to passing also-ran references in their closing paragraphs.

Ultimately, the combination of the
Traviata
coup and the release the following June of
M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano
had forced Neri's hand—or, as Paranoy would whimsically insist, her foot. Facing Czgowchwz competition in the portioning of broadcasts, the old woman had set outrageous terms, while drunk and distasteful on vintage Bardolino, and rather than retrench, had retired. She said, “My life is over! I've been everything, and what's the use?”

Ralph and Alice, having bribed Lois the switchboard girl with a tape of the Czgowchwz Bayreuth Erda, had listened in on the final conversation with the Executive Office, peppered as it was with ravings, maledictions, and pleas. They had the news of the confirmed retirement to the rest of the Secret Seven and to the Countess Madge that same early afternoon. Then, generously, Box 7 was hired for a distinctly non-Czgowchwz performance.

Then again, as it fell out, Neri went on and out, much with silver bowls, clocks, ribbons, and pianissimi squeezed out of the surgical slits behind her ears, weeping in self-regard and no small satisfaction amid squalid displays of pit-shrieking gaucherie. But Box 7 hovered empty, dark, and desolate...

On the unclear afternoon of the twenty-first (“overcast skies with manifold linings of cloud”), winter business was being discussed over several lunches, at the Carnegie Tavern, at the Plaza, at Arpenik's, and at Lodovico's pizzeria. The Secret Seven sat drinking at the Carnegie, doing the
Czgowchwz Christmas Newsletter
layouts and parcels of late cards for Czgowchwz stalwarts coast to coast. Alice, royally sozzled on Madeira, kept on repeating at odd intervals, “
Ah, vieni, amor mio, m'inebbria
.” She broke off her routine to tell everyone another story they already knew full well—the story of that distant summer night when Czgowchwz had been busted for singing “Ocean, thou mighty monster” from the narrow widow's walk of Grace Jackson-Haight's stylish South Shore beach house, after a midnight swim (“Bathing suits in the
dark
?”). She had pleaded tipsily guilty—“at some place they insist on calling Yaphank!”—to disturbing “the moronic bourgeois peace,” which quote caused the diva to be suspected of fellow-traveling and worse among the sniveling protectionist elite. Czgowchwz had borne such calumnies lightly, but Alice, politically naïve and fiercely loyal—recalling it all just then, much later—suddenly roared out a few seditious obscenities, spilling Madeira. While dozens of framed sepia photographs of forgotten thirties demireps and chic refugees gazed down impassively from the tavern walls, she was removed to an adjacent Nedicks for black coffee and given a brief, sobering trot. It had begun to snow, quite heavily. Immense leaden clouds covered the island town.

At Magwyck's kitchen window, the Countess Madge O'Meaghre Gautier stood watching the sun fade out behind dove-gray muslin as the first thick flakes fell onto the great O'Meaghre dolmen, the flat table stone in the middle of her landscaped, heptagonal back yard. She was griddling crepes by the dozens on a sturdy coal stove. “Mummin' in the drifts, is it?” she wondered, flipping imperatively, stirring patiently, deftly wielding spatulas, the whole while belting back good cheer in doubles against the coming perishing cold. Magwyck stood decked in full resplendent drape, each room set in appropriate ornamental perspect-best to accommodate the ritual proceedings. At the vast open fireplace, Wedgwood was only just putting to the side the first load of contraband peat arrived that morning “in the nick” from Sligo. The burning of the new-cut peat would in the space of the coming hours fill every room and hallway, investing alcoves with the primal fragrance: life's initiation. The bursting warmth would fling itself in swirls into the inert chill face of the solstice—against its threats of “Nevermore.” The swelling Vermont pine tree stood bare and yielding in the parlor, relaxing its branches as slowly and as steadily as roses unfold overnight, until it would be ready for communal adornment in the small hours after the dinner, the mumming outdoors, the cavorts, the parodies, the singing, the reading, and the prayers. Animism was the scheme.

Elsewhere, G-G strode away from an overcrowded midtown auction, up to her own atelier-emporium on Madison Avenue, stopping off at this or that shebeen as the snow fell about in thick flakes over the earth. Thus seeking fortification, she banged into Trixie Gilhooley, showgirl, unescorted and footless in P.J. O'Failte's, that rendezvous of fakes. She wondered what a girl with Trixie's savvy was doing in a place like this. Then she wondered what a girl like... Trixie stood draped like an old rolled-up rug with arms, embracing a Wurlitzer rainbow jukebox (a numinous icon of wartime) and bleating, “Where-za fuckin' el gone ta?!” She kept dropping lonely quarters into the slot and playing “Poor Butterfly” six times at a go, until P.J. said he would pull out the plug if she didn't push off and give somebody a chance to listen to something seasonal, like “Joy to the World.”