Mawrdew Czgowchwz (11 page)

The bright, vigilant Riverdale student who had answered the telephone in the arcade earlier had returned to his small circle, a party of Czgowchwz activists composed of his classmates and a group of graduate students from Juilliard. The score of
Tristan und Isolde
lay open on a campstool in the covered doorway under the marquee. The Narration and Curse were being analyzed in preparation for a canonic set of variant predictions concerning the Czgowchwz realization. The bright captain-student let his companions know, much to their general delight, that Ralph himself had been the early-morning caller, that the solstice celebration at Magwyck had been “flawless” and was over, and that the lady of the moment would soon be safe home and asleep. Neighboring student delegations and hardy perennials, overhearing, passed the word along the line. Students and teachers of psychology, well aware of the crucial importance of the sleeping diva's dreamwork, chatted knowingly about Isolde, the most potent, magical-archetypal
SHE
in all opera. (“What about Norma!?” “Oh...
well
...”)

A lesser but no less inevitable question being bruited about at the one and the same time was “What would the Tristan [making his debut] do?” He was called Achille Plonque; was, of all things, an actual Norman; and had never been recorded. He had been heard recently in Avignon as Pelléas (“...!”) and was said to have sung in the
Tristan
rehearsals very much like a Massenet tenor (“Head tones that sound like French express-train whistles, but sweet!”—Dixie). It was, of course, the diva herself who had engineered his appearance on the bill: they had sung
Samson et Dalila
together, in Italian, the previous summer at the arena in Verona. No one could say what would be. All that was known for a historical fact was that the aged Fritz Krank, the house Tristan, was enraged at having been politely but firmly chucked out into the cold in favor of “some nasal Frog upstart shit!” (Schwertleite Vogelgesang, secretary of the Fritz Krank Music Society). The Czgowchwz will, adventurous and insistent, had prevailed. The one thing as well that was known
everywhere
about M. Plonque was that he was, as Alice swore again and again, “beyond belief gorgeous!”

Ralph: “He looks just like a della Francesca!”

“He looks
better
!”

“Alice, don't lose your
whole mind
!”

This prospect, having a Tristan and Isolde, each of comely mien, boasting apparent youth (Czgowchwz, nearing forty, looked forever thirty-one; Plonque was said to be just thirty), thrilled the ardent serious-minded. Students, teachers, writers, readers—all awaited, like the rebirth of the solar year, the liberation of their cherished mythic fantasies (“the way you think about opera in the bathtub!”—Ralph) from the cliché perpetrations of humdrum obesity in Wagnerian theater. Visions of erotic display leaped out of the open score that brilliant morning, raising opera-line conversation to a pitch unusual even for Czgowchwz premières. Questions occurred of the evident possibility of a backstage entente between the principals. No information had sped from Verona other than the official record: on stage
Sansone e Dalila
had caused a somewhat extramusical sensation, but scandal never crept behind the painted scene. The loose activity in the scene deck (a corridor dubbed by the Veronese regulars the epithetic Italian equivalent of “Shag Alley”) was evident merely among the native artists. The constant paparazzi had simply turned in action snaps with torrid captions (“
La Czgowchwz ed il suo schiavo!
” etc.) to fatten the summer issues of
Gente, L'Europeo, Oggi
, and
Paris-Match
.

Sanitation Department snowplow trucks were clearing up Broadway, creating snowbanks ten feet high on the sidewalks. Weary casual laborers, recruited at the minimum wage by the opera-house maintenance staff, were pacing now doggedly around the four sides of the block, flinging rock salt carelessly about, oblivious of any impending occasion. Endless coffee-fetching forays began to be made by gathering newcomers. The students at the front, having arrived in the midst of the violent storm equipped with kerosene stoves and knapsacks filled with survival provisions, lounged about drinking their own coffee, much like mountaineers having achieved the lower reaches of some compulsively desired peak. (That peak they would surely ascend, as Paranoy decreed, “to find Czgowchwz already there: her own certain ascent on the darker sheer slope achieved at a bound—thus expressing the perfect relation of the task of performance to the task of audience.”)

Laverne Zuckerman, the debutante Brangäne, arrived at the opera house on the first free-running BMT, for final costume fittings. This young New Yorker had been chosen by Mawrdew Czgowchwz as well (the cooperative Roxanne Sauvage having backed out of the performance only too gladly, the better to be present out front). It was she, Laverne Zuckerman, who had been presented as the properly girlish Adalgisa in the diva's spectacular, “lambent”
Norma
at the Paris Opéra the month before. She as well was a singer of both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles. In the previous half year she had sung Cherubino to Czgowchwz's Countess, Suzuki to her Cio-Cio-San, Elisabetta di Valois to her Eboli, and, most interestingly, Octavian to the Czgowchwz Marschallin at the Vienna Staatsoper, where it was remarked that the American girl's performance uniquely rivaled the earlier Czgowchwz Rosenkavalier. Certain snide asides, references to “the Czgowchwz Traveling Circus,” could be heard thereafter, whispered in reptilian spite, rising out of the odd sewer.

Unaffected, but sensibly nervous, her fittings accomplished, Laverne Zuckerman stopped off at the head of the line to speak to some of the students she knew would be there. She herself had finished up at Juilliard, where Czgowchwz had discovered her singing Monteverdi's
Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
only the year before. When asked for preview hints of the performance to come, she seemed to gape into the middle distance, there seeming to see something perfectly clearly, but because of the rigorous attention demanded in seeing it, to be quite unable to detail it. She could only say that what she had witnessed in the rehearsals was “the music—all the music” and “the story—the whole wonderful story.” After which she glazed over. She was to see Mawrdew Czgowchwz that afternoon to go over some of the Act I business again. She was having a little trouble translating Valerio Vortice's mercurial admonishments into through-lines and motivated angles. She had begun to think again, as she had first thought in the fall, that she was not at all right for Brangäne, but Czgowchwz had told her, “I was a good Brangäne, years ago with Freitag. Let me show you. She's a special sort of fierce Irish old maid.” From that point, they had begun. Czgowchwz confided in Laverne Zuckerman that she had picked her to do the role for a special reason. She, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, must incarnate a woman of Laverne Zuckerman's age, and she would learn to do so by teaching Laverne Zuckerman to be a woman her (Czgowchwz's) own. This was a task directly the reverse of their collaborations in
Norma
and
Der Rosenkavalier
, but it could create the kind of tension out of which a set of memorable performances might spring. Laverne Zuckerman had understood the scheme only slightly at best, but, as always, the Czgowchwz enthusiasm had commanded consent. Laverne finished her coffee, accepted the best wishes of her varsity friends, and made off again for the BMT to the Plaza.

No sooner had she left than Ralph arrived riding shotgun on the gypsy news truck, which parked at the snowdrift slope in front of the marquee. The mute and unconcerned driver and assistant began tossing bundles of
Nericon
s over the top of the bank like late night extras; these fell into the trench-like recess, at the puzzled standees' feet.

Within ten minutes of this wordless delivery, the uproar that was “the
Nericon
explosion” had commenced its public career. Every telephone in the arcade, in the cafeteria, in the Burger Ranch, and down in the BMT was seen manned by someone telling someone to tell everyone. (“Wags will tongue, toots, wags will tongue!”) By noon the minion from The Talk of the Town, Dolores's double agent, Gloria Gotham's secretary, and the Inquiring Fotographer were each and all at work on the sidewalk, going person by person along the length and across the breadth of the line, which had swelled to a thousand before reaching the corner of Thirty-ninth Street, what with guests, stragglers, Neriac agitators, and
tsimmes
freaks padding the numbers. Ralph, hoisted to a position of proper eminence on top of the snowbank by the jubilant hero-worshipping students from Riverdale and Juilliard, surveyed his demesne—a vale of distraction, glee, and torment he had himself created. (He had always believed he had it in him.) Here it now was: rhetoric become action: spontaneous street theater: Ralph's own winter carnival. The Dionysus of Mulberry Street, Winter Gotham's Lord of Misrule, stood on his makeshift alp contented.

Then, as predictably as must, certain denizens of nowhere began throwing things. Ralph was pelted with a nastily jagged hunk of sooty ice before beating a dignified, measured, yet none too tardy retreat to the Burger Ranch on Seventh Avenue and Fortieth Street's northeast corner for an appointment lunch with Rhoe, the waitress, and the remaining Secret Seven, leaving the students, their righteous ire aroused, to return the slush-ice fire in the name of free speech and the Czgowchwz style. The students sent the opposition reeling back down Broadway to Herald Square in no time at all. The line was purified. The
Nericon
began to be delivered by hand messengers all over Manhattan.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz woke at noon. Mrs. Grudget, entering the diva's bedroom purposedly, threw the heavy drapes apart, admitting cascades of what the diva, starting up, protesting, labeled “shrieking dayglare—come too soon!” The Englishwoman seemed disposed to ignore this slander on God's own clear, clean sunlight. She sped about the room throwing windows open, admitting gusty blasts of winter wind off the Park. “Grudget, woman!” wailed Mawrdew Czgowchwz. “If you knew what I was about to
discover
!” Mrs. Grudget, for whom sleep was that balm one purchased—as often as not, dearly—and dreams things best left to the talking pictures on a Saturday night, feigned ignorance of the distressful protestation's point. She brought the breakfast tray in instead, grimacing primly as ever she did at the sight of grilled kippers and Guinness laid on where she firmly believed a coddled egg, perhaps kedgeree now and again, tea, and toast ought quite suffice.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz put her dreams aside. Her involuntary memory revolved, much as it had for years and years been going on revolving... She found herself halfway through a pint pot of stout and a plate of reeking fish, as much on the old
qui vive
as ever she had been, if not more so. The singular intensity of libidinal focus she had come to expect on waking on a performance day was hers—in trust, as she always told herself. This Isolde, this figment, would prevail. Anticipating a triumph in the role (hard-won, she thought, but certain), she succumbed to herself, realizing fearlessly that she still could not discover
how
she would sing the Liebestod.

Deciding to leave it to the midnight moment, the diva turned her mind and morning mezza voce to warming up on the role she had just the week before contracted to record that same winter in New York: Puccini's Minnie, in
La Fanciulla del West
. Weaving dreamily through the Bible lesson in Act I, she reconfirmed her conviction that the sentimental genius of the “
povera faccia
” and the “
occhio mordente
” had never done anything more splendid than this score. She looked forward eagerly to the recording sessions under Giammai, and beyond these to the starry summer revival of the opera set for the Central City Opera House in Colorado. Spinning around at the piano, commanding “
Basta, Rance—ho detto il mio pensier!
” she dived so enrapt into the undulating score that rather than pause she launched straight into a deeply felt contralto rendering of Rance's aria, “
Minnie, dalla mia casa
,” and from there straight into “
Laggiù nel Soledad
,” drawing out every brave and lonely conviction Belasco and Puccini had in their separate and convergent geniuses created—ending in a clarion full-voice C as the doorbell rang. Laverne Zuckerman had arrived to work out the business for the
Tristan
first act. She had waited in wonder in the hall until the end of the
Fanciulla
exercise, ringing the doorbell at last as a kind of private ovation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz ordered lunch sent up for two.

At the Crossroads Café, the Neriac fringe was holding a hectic war council. Old Mary Cedrioli was all for marching in a mob straight to the Burger Ranch “to beat the fucking shit out of them all!” (the Secret Seven and anyone else in the opinionate vicinity). Most others felt that, apart from anything else, the age differential between the two camps made Old Mary Cedrioli's idea impracticable and, moreover, that her serene altezza, Morgana Neri, would doubtless prefer a darker, subtler path to vengeance carved out in her name. The Neriacs puzzled over the text of the
Nericon
itself. Apart from the certainty derived from a knowledge of the work's author—an infamous, “
vergognoso
” turncoat slurring his natal heritage—and a general received impression of the overall tone and intent of the allegory, not one wit present there had the slimmest clue to fathom the imaginative structure or the figurative content inhering therein. The
Nericon
might as well for all of them have been a series of Asian pictograms branded obscene and damaging to the morals and mental health of the city and the nation by some blind geriatric American Legionnaire in a basket on the curb outside Bryant Park. No matter: they might not know at the Crossroads Café what the exact valence of the venom they held like a reeking rag in front of them
was
, but they all guessed well enough they knew what a
conspiracy
was. Conspiracies were after all (in those years) all the same: rotten schemes hatched in and flung out of Eastern Europe, designed to bring the rest of the world, the decent sector, to its knees to do disgusting things you couldn't talk about except in cellars. Well, no one there was ready to go down on that Czgowchwz bitch, whose very name was
known
to be a coded slogan for something foreign and repulsive—only no one around was indecent or disloyal enough to be able to find out exactly what. (Them that touched slime would get infected!) On this sleazy level the Neriac confabs continued, impotent, throughout the afternoon.