Mawrdew Czgowchwz (20 page)

Merovig Creplaczx had met Mawrdew Czgowchwz in Prague at Easter 1947. He had known nothing of her origins. The name Czgowchwz... Had he heard of her lover? He racked his memory now. No: at the conservatory he had been too young, too involved in the surreptitious perusal of Messiaen, Berg, and Webern scores alone in his rooms at night, meanwhile scornfully tossing off the diurnal academic mechanics demanded by a faculty holding him ransomed as the Wunderkind of Prague. He had been too young as well to take part in the Resistance except by praying each night to St. Vitus and St. John of Nepomuk—the last prayers he was ever to utter until the Czgowchwz crisis, for Prague had passed from German into Russian bondage. When Creplaczx heard of the Czgowchwz liaison with the Russian soldier—and the Russian experience! But had she not fled Prague on account of the coup? What
were
those reckless politics she'd played?

He himself had fled to the West because of Mawrdew Czgowchwz! In the winter of 1947/48, hearing her sing in the Verdi Requiem at the Church of Svatey Jakub, he had bound his musical soul to her genius for life. (What was it to live a life?) He had not flown out of Prague. At the age of twenty-one he had walked, crawled, swum, and run (along and beside that road Mozart had taken to and from Prague) to reach the West, and Czgowchwz. Now to discover her the former mistress of one of his country's unsung martyrs; the mother of a martyred son; the mistress of an unknown Russian soldier—and all the while the daughter of two fated lovers, one Irish, one Czech. It was too much. He broke down.

Gennaio tended to him. Mawrdew Czgowchwz comforted: “It was so long ago, Miro, and so wasting. I was another woman!” Gennaio corrected her. “There can be no such other woman. You are all there ever was. Mawrdew Czgowchwz will endure being Mawrdew Czgowchwz.”

She went on and on and on. Creplaczx was led from the room. She was remembering more...

The vigilants were admitted upstairs, crowding into the room while she continued telling. She had begun to live again solely in music, at first on the Russian tours with Gehtopfskaya and then most vividly in Prague, in the recitals. While doing the recitals she had studied with Frau Langsam, the great Jewess who had survived the Nazi occupation hidden under a cowl in the monastery of St. John of Nepomuk on an island in the Vltava. Then Frau Langsam had gone back to Vienna, in haste, explaining to Mawrdew Czgowchwz: “There comes now I see another putsch!” Left depleted and anxious, Mawrdew Czgowchwz had verged again on collapse. Frau Langsam had been like another mother. Another teacher. Another...but all was blank.

Other nervous musicians had recommended a rest cure at Ewigsbaden under the Swiss mesmerist Seligst. (At this point Gennaio frowned angrily. He knew of Seligst and his methods: “Sleazy peace through denial!”) Seligst had seemed to erase, Mawrdew Czgowchwz told them, all the residual anguish churned up by scattered recollections of her past. She remembered mists of steaming camphor, the erotic scent of patchouli on Seligst's body, strong doses of Oblivol (Gennaio recoiled, enraged), and comforting lotus tea. She had returned to Prague strengthened. She learned of the coup to come. She gave one last private recital in Parizka. She took flying instruction. People thought her eccentric. Then she fled late one midsummer's night.

But where had she landed after all? She asked them: where in the West? It was quite impossible, she thought, to have flown the Atlantic.

“Would it have been, indeed,” mused Paranoy, later on, “for Mawrdew Czgowchwz?”

“There are
limits
, Paranoy!” (Percase, in dialogue).

“No, Czgowchwz is unbounded!” (Jameson O'Maurigan, intervening unbidden).

“To believe that is to
burst
!” (Gennaio, adjudicating the discussion).

Mawrdew Czgowchwz avowed the next thing in her (then) present recall was memory's onrush backstage before her third-act entrance as Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera. But what had she been doing then and there—and what year were they in now?—singing Isolde?! Was she not a contralto? Frau Langsam had insisted! How had she come to New York? And who were all these people? She knew Merovig Creplaczx. She knew the Countess Madge. She knew Jameson. She knew Ralph. Who were the rest—all the rest? She grew drowsy once more. Rest, yes, she thought she must rest...

Gennaio commanded it. She lay back as if burdened and went off to sleep at once in front of everyone. Gennaio, Mother St. Mawrdew, the Countess Madge, and Merovig Creplaczx crept downstairs to piece out the patchwork consequence of the Mawrdew Czgowchwz life.

The vigilants, following, spoke among themselves. “She knows everything now except the flight to Paris and its aftermath—in sum, everything to do with us. But are we not her whole world, her life?”

“You are not her world, her life, her meaning or salvation,” Gennaio countered in commanding tones. “Performative utterance, her libidinal life's task, describes her destiny. If you love her, let her rest!” He then explained to them the congruence between the Cedrioli curse's taking effect—which he assured them it certainly had—with that time within herself, the fortieth living year, when such a curse was most surely apt to take effect. “Everything happened at once.” The interview was over.

They let her rest: they waited patiently.

Day upon day she knew more: flashes out of sequence darting into her whirling mind. Thus she remembered first of all the day she woke from dreaming she had sung her first F sharp in alt—to sing it on the spot, exactly so. She remembered Paris...being there. But how? Then the next night, watching the final sequence of
Casablanca
on the Late Show, she cried out: “I flew! I flew there—
myself
!” The next day Ralph came with tapes.

From that day on (the seventh of March, the feast of Aquinas, as Mothers St. Mawrdew and Maire Dymphna duly noted), the pieces fell together at the same astonishing, insistent pace at which she had conned all her roles. Her greatest role, her won life, neared final realization. These were full days of swell joy.

Delving, never such delving...

The Irish and the Czech segments of the Czgowchwz life fused once and for all. Day upon day the vigilants came back to Magwyck to meet this Mawrdew Czgowchwz. She began to write—page after page of new-found English, reflective and interpretive, lucid and analytical. It read like the Book of Life.

She set about planning her return.

The Irish went on their march. Because Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., had never seen a New York St. Pat-rick's Day Parade, and because “herself that was the young Maev” felt obliged to, the Countess Madge did what she had never done. She booked herself and her party into the reserved enclosure near the Plaza. That morning Mawrdew Czgowchwz returned, escorted, to her suite at the hotel. Mrs. Grudget wept, chiding: “Wotchew want forgettin' us?!” She gathered pent-up outrage. “Barmy in the crumpet, they called yew!
I
gave them what-for!” Mawrdew Czgowchwz embraced her.

The weather dealt wind: raw wind. The vast turnout, unprecedented as expected, made loud green 72-point banners on front pages all over Gotham. Even Dame Sybil was there (“Mind
you
, they have their just grievance”). It all moved Mawrdew Czgowchwz to remark, “They commemorate in key!” A small delegation from the Irish Embassy to the United Nations and a reporter from the
Irish Echo
(“From their point of view, of course,” Paranoy observed, “it was tantamount to approaching the woman who has claimed to be the surviving Romanov tsarevna”) made their presence felt in the ribboned grandstand parquet, near the Countess Madge, the Secret Seven, the other Czgowchwz vigilants, and their protégée. Not knowing quite what they wished to hear, Mawrdew Czgowchwz/Maev Cohalen met their evasive overtures in kind, causing them to murmur among themselves, “She takes after the father.” (They
thought
they knew what they meant.)

She was photographed, of course. The late edition of the
Post
spread her across the front page, captioned: “The Return of the Native.” (The serious-minded winced.) Dolores, all agog, and routinely woozy, scribbled lachrymose tributes to “a woman you feel you know” in a center-spread rotogravure feature on the notables assembled. Many marchers took snapshots.

His Scarlet Eminence, drafty in taffeta on the steps of the Cathedral at Fiftieth Street, that day learned a lesson in humility. (He filed it under “Secular Neglect.”)

March winded on. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, keeping mainly to the leeward sides of streets, walked all over town, coming to know New York better than she ever had before.

Soon April Fools' arrived. What with tonics, food, and love, the patient Czgowchwz bloomed as jonquils do in their beds in the Plaza fountain square. She was ready for action.

“A meaning beyond blank recognition and mournful retrospect”—Mawrdew Czgowchwz sought that meaning. Easter came. They all went along to the Cathedral. Laverne Zuckerman sang Mass; Dame Sybil played Messiaen on the organ. The Countess Madge considered. Jameson stayed home, writing.

They celebrated the Czgowchwz birthday on Easter Day, in the right symbolic way. The Secret Seven hid eggs; the rest of the gang found them. Mawrdew Czgowchwz found her own by chance (“It was orange, naturally, and hard-boiled”—Dolores, reporting the event the way she thought it must have occurred).

There were masses of jonquils everywhere, and hundreds of Fifth Avenue promenaders in hot pink, sporting exuberant mushroom hats, bursting into the Palm Court to offer Best Wishes and to fetch hints (“They're as
coy
as carrion crows” —Cassia Verde-Dov'è).

A public notice in the
Times
on Easter Monday read:

It hit the afternoon editions. “
A CZGOWCHWZ DOUBLE-HEADER
.” “
SHE'S COMING BACK A NEW STAR
.” “
FOR THESE TICKETS THEY COULD KILL
.” “
CZGOWCHWZ/COHALEN RETURNS
.” Paranoy proclaimed the day “an occasion for new and splashy frocks.” Dolores and Gloria Gotham proffered their loves. The Talk of the Town the next week ran to four columns of succinct reportage on the whole saga, for all the world as if nobody in Gotham had followed it day in day out (the way they certainly had).

The weather turned out—gorgeous (“Well,
you
find a better word!”—Ralph, to Percase, in argument). Mawrdew Czgowchwz now became her own woman; as before, but reinforced. She resumed her gorgeous life. But the life had a new pattern.

Four mornings a week she drove herself in her black 1947 Packard up to Morningside Heights to consult Gennaio. Having salvaged her, he had enthralled her. She had come to realize that in order for the eventual descendent phase of her life and her career to inherit any great value at all, she owed it to herself, no less than to her intimates, to undertake analysis. Nor was this task a penance. She had had enough of those. Difficult, quite perilous: she knew as much. A demanding enterprise. But, at last, a salvation!

The remainder of each week she spent immersed in the score of
Pelléas et Mélisande
, and in conversation with her intimates.

Puzzling out her life, she soon came to recognize with Gennaio that there were conflicts inherent in the linkings of its several lately revealed phases: the Irish, the Czech, the Russian, the Metropolitan New Yorkish. Some identity crisis—overdue, a lag perhaps hitched to that much-bruited deference “maturity” had shown in its incursions upon the body physical—seemed definitely in the cards. How to meet and resolve such a wrestle without undue jeopardy to the operative talent—the temperament, the great voice—this was the task now set forth. These were the politics of personal endurance to command.

Respect. She needed respect.

Meanwhile there was Mélisande. This wraith, this specter, this
évanouie
creation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz took counsel: she examined her stage self. “Wraithlike” she had never been. Never had she looked spectral. As for being, or seeming,
evanescent
...

It seized upon her, like a command. She had
been
her own
self's
wraith. She had met her own self's
ghost
. She had
disappeared herself
. She spoke to her voice, in French. That was that: she was on to Mélisande.

The music was no problem; it was perfect, all perfect. Mary Garden had said that very thing. She would use the “fourth voice” Calvé spoke of once.

Jameson O'Maurigan walked along the muddy shore of Belvedere Lake. He stopped to gaze at placid water. “Against extravagant skies,” he thought—but the rest he had forgotten. So: she would sing Mélisande, the role of roles he loved best. He must sit alone somewhere. He knew where now, looking at placid water. In the end seat on the horseshoe, house left, Grand Tier.

Both Mother Maire Dymphna, O.A.O.H., and Mother St. Mawrdew of the Cenacle of St. Vitus, their offices discharged, were of a mind to return home to their respective cloisters. Not one soul would hear of it. They were prevailed upon, therefore, to stay on as honored guests of the diocese in order to be present at those very occasions they had done everything to...occasion: the matinee of
Pelléas et Mélisande
and the recital at Carnegie Hall. (As it happened, Mother Maire Dymphna went off with Paranoy, Creplaczx, and Percase to the bash at the Plaza as well, and stayed up, missing matins and lauds; but Mother St. Mawrdew retired with her sisters just before midnight.)