Mawrdew Czgowchwz (6 page)

G-G seized Trixie by the shoulder, shaking off layers of snow.

“Theresa, Theresa, calm down! They took the el
away
, dear—
ages
ago!”

Trixie, peering up at that friendly voice through layer upon layer of hazy inebriation, moaned elegiac protests.

“Izzit
ahl
gone, then, the whole gorgeous contraption? What a thing! What a criminal thing! Jesus Christ, G-G darling—izza whole worl' comin' down?”

Bawling unattractively, Trixie Gilhooley was led out into the increasing snow, across to Madison, and up to Cashel Gueza, the window of which subtly contrived wonderland—brilliantly lit in the crept-on dusk—revealed an immense scarlet-velvet Victorian sofa displayed for Yuletide amid ivy boughs and rings of holly. The white Hispano-Suiza, squat at the curb in a mounting drift, and ticketed, could have been an outsize toy.

Inside, G-G made fresh Irish breakfast tea rather than fuss with exotics, cut lemons, and unhinged a pot of decent Russian caviar. Noticing Trixie climbing into the display window, she sighed for something precious, long past. They took their tea in the window, lounging on the sofa, scarcely noticed by passing stragglers. (Trixie gave the finger to the few nosy lingerers who presumed to invade their privacy.) Sitting there in the roseate aureole of the Tiffany wisteria lamp, aware by degrees of the passage of time, of place, and of themselves, they bemoaned the dismantling of Gotham. “God! By 1970...”

G-G's private collection of china clocks struck four o'clock one after the other in dulcet syncopation. Trixie remembered where it was she'd been going—to Grace Jackson-Haight's penthouse. G-G remembered herself having been asked, and then remembered forgetting. They agreed to go together for diversion. There were no cabs that day; a taxi strike was in furious progress. Trixie contrived to convince a burly Wicklow man, a truck driver passing time at the Curragh tavern just next door, to dredge the Suiza out of the snow, after which stalwart labor the three of them fumbled off to Grace's matinee. Trixie had dismissed her ephemeral, mean woes.

Back at Magwyck, the Countess Madge, having stuffed her crepes every which way, took
her
tea in the parlor, reading Dolores in the late-afternoon edition of “the wipe.” The column was routinely devoted to the murkiest detractions. One conspicuous aside dealt with the Solstice Dinner.

The Countess shuddered. The
prose
!

“What
is
that witch saying?” the Countess Madge murmured to herself.

The Countess recounted grimly to herself the hosts of reasons for her own steadfast refusal to invite this Dolores woman into Magwyck for so much as a cup of tea. Bohemian church bells down the street rang out a chilly Angelus. Shivering, the Countess Madge reached for a thimble of whiskey.

G-G and Trixie finished powdering at Trixie's and went up with the Wicklow teamster in the elevator to Grace Jackson-Haight's penthouse (for Trixie and Grace, resident at the same tony address, were by the way of being back-parlor neighbors in Gotham). The officially confirmed blizzard seemed to have swelled the ranks; thus generous Grace's minions, most of them sneezing, were dispatched to minister to everyone without being either too casual or too obvious about checking names. The word had sped about town, at midafternoon gallery openings and holiday hat-lunches, that this was a bash to be at. Grace was feeling desired. When the bulk of the gang had settled in, wolfing down the buffet and the drinks, they set about keeping tabs, as Paranoy observed, “on one another's joys, jeux, and bijoux.” Grace favored a lot of glitter: it seemed to make her see more. That way she developed an authentic taste. People liked her; she was cultivated, nice.

The Baron Shmendrick, the provident diamond peddler, arrived after curtain call with a dozen-odd Broadway doxies hired for the occasion, all of them tarted up like Waldorf hookers but in the actual merchandise (and covered by security dicks like guardian angels packing rods) and all looking, as Paranoy reported, “painfully like naked trees in hibernal Tiffany windows—drenched in alien tinsel.” There they all stood in Valentine-bodice taffeta décolleté, none of them young, really. Dolly Farouche, the society chanteuse and now-and-then Rialto star, whose modest diamond earbobs were her own to wear, stood aside slapping
pâté lapin
on a Ry-Krisp when Thalia Bridgewood whispered thickly from across the buffet, “Ever see so much diamond dust in one
room
, dahling?” Dolly swung around, biting into her canapé, pulled one earbob off, and held it out, snapping acidly, “Whaddya think
these
the fuck are, Bridgewood—
chicken livers
!?” It was that sort of occasion.

Rotten Rodney Bergamot sauntered into the foyer in playful high spirits. Had he not just come from his publisher with the kicky news that his warmed-over Master's thesis—a trenchant study of the life, work, anguish, and hierophantic genius of Puvis de Chavannes—would be out “this time next year,” with polychrome plates? It would consequently be being found on the best coffee tables and in book bins in the smartest toilets in Gotham by Christmas, by which time Rotten Rodney would be in the Bahamas, deserving...

G-G and Trixie had lost track of their Wicklow trucker. G-G pointed out, “His eyes, toots, are
lupine
-blue!” They nursed bourbon Manhattans with their hostess, Grace, and Boni de Chalfonte at a window apart, gazing through the snow-cyclone toward the invisible East River. Boni, having done up a social-arbiter's treatise on penthouse landscaping as an urban ecological duty, was trying off and on to sell Grace on an Inca scheme for spring. G-G avowed she would prefer mazes of box hedge to terraced limestone at a height of forty stories. Boni switched to a carefully-broken-English rhapsody on the theme of their city (out there) as Atlantis in a glass ball, with snow whirling “a silent, incessant concerto.” Trixie farted absently. Grace, yawning, signaled a butler for more sauce. Trixie saw Dolly Farouche's other earbob fall into the blancmange across the room. The solstice drew on. Rotten Rodney Bergamot guffawed, plunging a fist into the same blancmange. Dolly slapped his mocking face. Boni de Chalfonte, bounding entrechats the length of the living room, intervened judiciously to prevent a slapstick incident, while one of the Broadway mannequins wailed over the general observant silence, “There ain't no fuckin' pastrami!” Grace mediated splendidly: soon there were multiple ardent embraces, laughing tears everywhere, and hasty kisses all around.

G-G lit up a perfecto. She crossed directly to a beige boudoir to phone the Countess Madge.

The phone rang at Magwyck. Wedgwood answered. The Countess was “in reverie.” While the cat, Rose(ncrantz), pawed Wedgwood's impeccably turned trouser cuffs, the Countess sensed her summons and came to the phone. She inquired: “Hello?”

“Magda? It's G-G.”

More than just a suspensory pause occurred.

“Where are you, darlin'? McCrory's bargain basement? The noise!”

“I'm at Grace Jackson-Haight's matinee.”

“Who's she got, Ringling Brothers?”

“Trixie Gilhooley is pouring bourbon in both ears. Dolly Farouche dropped her earrings in the blancmange. Rotten Rodney Bergamot made a fuss. See you for dinner.”

“Darling, was there anything special you called for?”

“No, toots, only Dolly's earrings. And by the way, who the hell is ‘Poofie de Chavannes'?” She hung up the phone; two of the Broadway ladies had entered the beige boudoir. One was wailing desolately, “I'm not a nice person at all!”

New York prepared for a snow emergency. The mayor drank Four Roses, on his winter vacation somewhere in Mexico.

The Countess Madge turned three-quarter profile from the ebony telephone table toward her guest, Pèlerin (Pierrot) Deslieux. He himself was fumbling busily into a cache in the great tree's back-top underbranch, tucking away the first, the
unfound
, Yuletide ornament—a dazzling Bohemian spunglass orange globe, centuries old.

“Pierrot, G-G and her protégée—that poor drunken Theresa Gilhooley: you remember the story: she was born almost literally in the wings between numbers at Dubuque on that first national
Show Boat
tour—they're up there in the
stratosphere
in Grace Jackson-Haight's pinnacle parlor. I heard somebody in the background sounding like Paranoy saying, ‘In
this
crowd of noisy
outrés arrivistes
?' It sounds what Wedgwood might describe—as did he once, if you remember, that unfortunate Jackson-Haight beach fete—as a ‘rawly secular affair' altogether. Dolly Farouche's diamond earbobs contrived to plop into a blancmange, evidently
necessitating
a dire scene.”

Pierrot held the ball suspended in his tense hand, at length affixing the steely hook to a firm branch, deep in at the trunk. “Well! One can't be everywhere.”

The Countess thought it over. “Magdalen,” continued Pierrot, the way he thought perhaps he ought, the way a careful French curé might, “don't you think this habit of people knowing where people are at all hours all season long—well, apart from anything else—well, just that.”

“Uh-oh,” worried the Countess Madge. Whenever addressed by her saint's name, she seemed to feel starched shifts, icy douches, and furtive subcellar scents threatening all over again —memory's imperishable dues. She was holding Rose(ncrantz) absently. She dropped him in an ample Regency chair. He bristled; he yawned; he preened. He found accommodation.

“This only ever happens in dead winter, Pique. Sibyl and G-G seem to practice it absolutely necessarily. It becomes tantamount to a ritual for lasting.”

“Tantamount. It
can't
amount!” His heavily accented baritone growled. Rose(ncrantz) shot a single-amber-eyed glance toward the speaker; a paw splayed measuredly. Pierrot gazed not that carelessly at his black aspect bloated in a silver ornament. He laughed—a laugh, they said, like treacle bursting from barrels—misting the surface of the perfect globe. He laid the bauble aside.

“Do you recall that time
last
winter—at that mobbed opening of Rotten Rodney Bergamot's thieves-carnival boutique downtown? That Paranoy wordman said, as I remember, it looked like ‘Animated Brueghel Damnation.' Something as dense as all that. Sybil left hurriedly to search out a phone box, and you called after her: ‘Don't
phone
me, toots, I'm
with
you!'” He chuckled. (Chuckling, treacle turned to tar.)

The Countess Magdalen (Madge) O'Meaghre Gautier did sigh. “Rotten Rodney is
also
there. De plus en plus! Plus tax. He's making a scene, that is...”

“That one pictureman, he
is
a scene. But somewhere backstage they lost the rest of the farce.”

“Truth to tell... Cher Pique, you are a delver.
Who
is Poovie de Chavannes?”

“Ah...!”

Rose(ncrantz) yawned. The Countess retired to the generous front window to look out: to consider what toll the storm might take by and by. She brooded—
Celticly
, Pierrot supposed—on the number and the diversity of snowflakes. She ruminated, wondering in terms of ratio, quotient, multiplicand, root, power, infinity, surd. She ceased, turning to Pierrot.

“Pique?”

“
Comment?
”

“What about this Neri scene?”

Pierrot shrugged. “Mawrdew will carry it off. I do believe she feels that that old
vide
somehow warrants sending off—a proper tribute. You mind, I for myself on a night off these feet would so far rather to go over to Brooklyn in this blizzard to hear that singing woman Trina Galuppi sing her lunatic Santuzza. But there you are; there it is. Someday myself I may dance in the
Nutcracker
, like I must tonight, and dance alone.” He mocked a flour-whiteface crumpled Pierrot, incapable of ronds de jambe. He crumpled to the floor. He laughed again. Rose(ncrantz) opened two eyes.

The Countess beamed—a frank delight. Then she joined him on the floor. They looked back up at the tree.

“Pique, I hate missing it all tonight—you, the Tree, the children's gasps!”

“Tonight you shall regale your guests, officiate, and in the meanwhile keep the supper warm for—”

“The man I love.”

They paused, at a sudden time. “Pique, you saw Mawrdew today. You left her in high spirits?”

Pierrot, rising, stood in the overhanging mirror's path. “‘Pierrot?—our moods,' she asked. ‘Are they perhaps something like
thrusts
—rhapsodic ones—toward stasis: self-finale?' Well, her English is not mine. ‘What is laughter, for instance,' she asked, ‘but somehow the cabaletta to grief?'
Così diceva Czgowchwz!
”

The Countess could tell quite certainly well, scanning the oval mirror, that Pierrot was tired of that day. A mask of vague tristesse sat awkward on the ripening face. He paced a length, and in that exercise as well betrayed fatigue: something twilight-heavy in the lissome gait. A sudden remembrance—a phrase in the music belonging to Waltraute in
Götterdämmerung
, Act I, from one of the Czgowchwz Bayreuth tapes—stirred up a narky draft in her mind. The wrenched apostrophe (
endlose Angst!
) from Waltraute's narrative poured once again out of the Czgowchwz heart, as it were, from shadows deep in the Festspielhaus summer stage straight across space-time to the Foyer Gautier on this same winter solstice evening. Time's threats redoubled, and then...the Countess recalled herself in Pierrot's vast liquid eyes. Then a fleeting comic memory. The coda to reverie, the cabaletta to grief. Magdalen guffawed. Pierrot—Caliban—wondered at the brazen report. She sailed on gaily back toward the watching, weary tree, throwing the first few strands of silver ice-foil on the highest branches, turning—again the magic actress—three-quarter profile toward her younger, lordly paramour.