Mawrdew Czgowchwz (17 page)

A crazed, furious rattling-banging on the restaurant's front door at once torpedoed this and every other private notion in the place. The late-luncheon foursome had been sitting waiting, pooling the losses they had each and all felt at, all the while since Mawrdew Czgowchwz had—in Paranoy's considered verdict—“deserted the arduous Now for an ever more serene, embracing Then.” Pierrot was outraged, as if injured in limb; Paranoy, febrile and talky, as if the solution lay in some entangled, talismanic syntax; Percase, missing articulation time and time again trying to... Creplaczx was near again to having to be seen to.

Then, suddenly, Creplaczx fell to the floor. The commotion at the front door echoed such brutal Gestapo noises, decades past, it tipped the nervous balance. Pierrot saw to him while Percase and Paranoy assumed control of the projected interview up front, and Arpenik, gathering up a proprietor's command, marched in common time behind the two. (For some time now, assorted pompous bureaucratic mandarins had been nosing about the neighborhood announcing the city's nasty plans to raze this and that sturdy old building. Among those threatened with demolition was that premise the restaurant occupied. Arpenik was having none of it.) The three unlatched the front door together. There stood Dixie, panting in the darkening, chill forecourt, beside a gaily decorated potted holly bush. “It's about Mawrdew! She's been ambushed,
hexed
!”

Of the “Great ‘Somehow' of Dreams,” the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier knew past her share. Lately having heard repeated so many newly recollected dreams on mornings after Mawrdew Czgowchwz had just awakened from having dreamed them, she had herself begun recalling her own girlhood (“As I look back through the years”—she chuckled), from which era so many “expansive confession fests” reechoed, yielding numberless nubile and suchlike fantasies. Rambling: the mind would do so, as the Countess had been warned, and of that wan condition had been made piercingly aware. There was, however, a “graydle” of difference between the unwanted rambling of a mind and the free, loose play of the faculties that irrigate fiction. (Life warranting the fiction.)

But the issue was the care of the mind of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. What of that? Jameson had begun to insist more and more that his man, Gennaio, ought—
must
—be consulted. The Countess was of two minds. Jameson was a frantic boy, all nerves. Yet the mere fact that, fraught as he was with whatnot, he was still walking around standing up was indeed testimony sufficient to its end of this man Gennaio's peculiar expertise and therapeutic savvy. The improvement in Jameson since the last feast of Samhain was indeed... All the same, as far as the Countess Madge could make out, her nephew had brought to Gennaio in fantasy and dark dream so many fable versions of his one confessed obsession—Mawrdew Czgowchwz—that for that same Gennaio to attempt to deal with the confessed obsessions, dreams, and suchlike of the
real
Mawrdew Czgowchwz—and always in broad translation from the Irish—how
could
it come to eventual success?

Someone or something was pounding at the front door with a force the Countess had not heard since—
Numi!
—the troubled days of rifle butts banging in Mountjoy and Merrion squares! Wedgwood paddled impassively through the foyer like a poised karate champion, docile on sake, to answer the clubbing summons. Moments later, Ralph, admitted gasping, dry-throated, freezing yet feverish, was accepting restorative pourings of whiskey and water (the one and then the other), the better to tell what he had been told. The whole while the central subject of these same acute concerns lay upstairs dreaming who knew what key dream, which, when fathomed, translated, taped, and replayed to the dreamer awakened, would awaken the conscious wellspring: the memory that forget that gleaming key that opened the lock to reveal the thing in itself that was the truth of Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

Why do I stand at these cliffs?

Where am I from in this world?

Whose voices are those back inside, chanting?

Have I no mother or no father?

Why is it I love to sing?

Am I pretty—am I lovely—me?

Must I be mad—they say so
...

The swirl of interrogations, incidents, fugues, and wretchedness descended cyclone-like upon the patient, carrying her away to—Where? Where she was, where could that be.

Jameson left Lavinia in front of the Dakota and took an uptown taxi to Gennaio's consultation rooms in Morningside Heights. He reckoned his session that day would be turbulent. He sat watching block after flashback block of winter Central Park reel past the window on his right, revealing “pageants in series, chain-connected in casual review, identically managed: children under supervision plotting anarchy, behaving. Animals on leashes; running free; ferreting. Single figures seeking more.” (He noted down what he saw.) At length the taxi swung left along Cathedral Parkway, leaving

Leisure's landscaped prospects to diminish

To anxious vanishing point

In the rearview mirror—one's idle mind's eye
.

He sat up, rummaging pockets. There was now a fare to pay, then time for preparation. Sorting dollar bills from a clutch of messy lists, notes, clippings (“Is Mawrdew Czgowchwz Insane? The weeks go by unanswered.” “What went on backstage that night?” “Did she dare to go
too far
?” “When will Gotham know the
truth
?”), Jameson, tipping absurdly, absently, got out on Morningside Drive. Finding a vacant bench overlooking the desolate, steep-gorged park that tumbles from the Heights down to “fabulous,” dismal Harlem, he went over his dream notes, shivering, remembering...

No sleep again...yet dreams...waking nightmares. Myself against the city, always New York... New York/ Nineveh, the fortified city remade... Must find out more... Why do I love her this way? Mother gone. Aunt Madge...bound to her. Can't be bound to her, only dreams...sleeping the sleep of the accursed infernal?

Meanwhile, old name, childhood name. Lavinia/Vanilla ... But I must always call her that. Dreaming around a circle
...

Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, the Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov'è, Consuelo Gilligan, Gaia della Gueza, Pèlerin Deslieux, Merovig Creplaczx (readmitted, trust pending), Halcyon Paranoy, Tangent Percase, Arpenik, Carmen, Dixie, Alice, Laverne Zuckerman, and the remaining Secret Seven, all converging, swept into Magwyck. Zwischen arrived upon the jostling scene moments after everyone else, protesting: this was not one of his regular consultation days. Dame Sybil, huffed, outraged at this footling nicety: “
Sod
your bleeding regular consultation days, you mucky formalist Hun quack!” Zwischen gasped in umlauts, cowering backward up the grand staircase to the Czgowchwz sickroom. Sloshing neat tequila into a handy snifter, Dame Sybil fumed: “Officious little bugger!” Swallowing gulps of firewater, she loped into the music room “to play the shit out of something demonic by Scriabin” to achieve release (
Vers la flamme
, op. 72).

To the tune of Dame Sybil's “catatonic rhapsody” (Percase), each and all beside themselves and one another, anguished, beset, the vigilants stood and sat about that afternoon. The doorbell rang. What else now? After an irregular length of time spent in the vestibule, Wedgwood approached Pèlerin Deslieux (the chatelaine's lieutenant) to announce a hand messenger from the Russian embassy nearby. At the mere mention of “Russian,” Creplaczx turned chalk-white. He dashed into the music room, slamming the door behind. He demanded Dame Sybil cease playing Scriabin. “Don't be a twit, Miro, he influenced Messiaen. You're deathly pale, my darling!” She played on. He screamed at her, “You have brought the
Russians
in here!”

Meanwhile in the parlor, the hand messenger, rewarded by Pierrot with a little niccups cocktail, thanked everyone profoundly and went away, leaving behind a most passionately worded communiqué sent by the already legendary Soviet soprano, People's Artist Tatiana Gehtopfskaya (“darling Tania Vitrovna”), pleading and demanding “full accurate report in realist truth, not mince words, on state of mind and body health of most beloved former Vitebsk comrade, contralto Mawrdew Czgowchwz.” (“Do we have news for
that
girl!” Ralph blurted.) It turned out that Isvestia's
Illustrated Yznayou
had published a feature on the stricken diva, a cautionary tale proclaiming in turgid neobiblical fiats the certain, just, and tragic fate awaiting renegades in the unspeakably decadent, dying West, “where the sun sets with every reason” (trans. Creplaczx).

Pierrot set about composing as much of an answer as he or they could spare the prima donna assoluta of all the Russias. Meanwhile in the music room Dame Sybil had segued compassionately into some dulcet Janác̆ek sonata.

Upstairs, by that time, a crisis point was being reached and turned. Having translated and notated the Irish dreams of Mawrdew Czgowchwz for Zwischen, who snorted, unremitting, the Countess Madge sat weakly awaiting his next technical proposal. When it came, she bolted, horrified. Zwischen, exasperatedly deriding “the continued indulgence” shown the patient, had announced his intention: the patient's head must be shaved—she then to be removed to a private clinic in Dutchess County, near the Connecticut border, there to undergo electroshock therapy.

Downstairs, they heard a wild druidic shriek. (They had heard of the fabled banshee.) They trembled in confusion. Creplaczx, tearing up the stairs, was thrown aside by the snorting Zwischen, storming out. He had been disemployed at a stroke.

Jameson rode back downtown. The taxi, swerving sharply eastward at the mid-park intersection, made for Magwyck in all haste. Jameson urged it on triumphantly, feeling omnipotent. Having phoned, he had been informed.

All was confusion. Silent gloom deadened resolve. Impotent torpor, larding disheartened rumblings with despair, freighted deliberation. Tactics, solutions, proposed, failed. Worse than anything, it began to rain; a sudden unwelcome thaw sent torrents of sooty downpour to drench the sullen town.

They sent out for Chinese food. Not even Arpenik could face a kitchen now. (The restaurant lay dark and bolted, causing frequent concern that evening in midtown.) Bozo, sensing an emergency, had followed Arpenik uptown, using the back-yard/alley/fencetop route to reach the Countess Madge's own garden. He sat in the warm kitchen now, drying off, waiting for Chinese food, while Rose(ncrantz), his snarky twin, lapped up top cream for all the world as if there were no crisis in the house.

Jameson loathed Chinese food. He and the Countess, who was prevailed upon for her own sake to take along a cup of clear chicken broth, shut themselves up upstairs in the solarium, where they sat in the half-light while sleeting rain (“
en jouant des tristes chamades
”) showered down much like assaulting gravel on the long, slanting studio windows above them, muting somewhat the intense colloquy the nephew and the aunt sustained for well over an hour—held from the outset, in tacit complicity, entirely in the Irish.

At its conclusion, that decision Jameson demanded be taken was taken. Jameson rang Gennaio up at once on the solarium extension phone. After a hushed, taut, somewhat studied pause, he whispered thanks rather conspiratorially, hung up the phone, and rose. “He's on his way. Where is she?” Jameson was taken in to see the sleeping Mawrdew Czgowchwz for the first time since her collapse. He sat there by her bedside in the carved cherry-wood, art nouveau Ondine chair (whose circular back came down to make a table top for sickroom ministrations) he had so loved since childhood, and which his aunt had promised him should be his when she died or when he married, whichever, gazing at the woman he adored past help. She was almost forty; he, almost twenty-five (oh,
that
—but it was the truth). He thought: She
must
remember!

The Countess Madge called Lavinia and Jonathan, who rushed across town, arriving at Magwyck only just before Gennaio did.

Gennaio's entrance was impressive. Paranoy said it best (in
Czgowchwz Unbound
): “He strode in as if he knew.” He was small, compact, reserved and commanding. He accepted a cocktail. Then, gravely, he went upstairs.

Nobody knew what went on. It wasn't taped, but it worked: Mawrdew Czgowchwz came around...

There
was
more to it than that. The cocktail, for instance, was a stiff Negroni. “He wore the most gorgeous, magical ring!” (Alice, telling “the whole story”). Others preferred to recall his “Svengali expertise” (Percase), or “his radiant complexion” (Cassia). “The point is, he did the trick” (Ralph, in interview).

After spending something like ten minutes alone with the patient (“What's ten minutes? Some
lives
are that!”—Jameson), Gennaio, leaving the diva sleeping quite as soundly as she had so long since slept in—Connemara!, came down into the parlor to meet the anguished vigilants.

“We have made a beginning; we trust.”

When he said it, they murmured. They all asked every question. “Is Mawrdew Czgowchwz
insane
?”

“The woman is
not
insane.”

“Why does she speak in the Irish?”

A dead hush of petrified attention.

“Because,” Gennaio declared, almost flatly, “Mawrdew Czgowchwz
is
Irish.”

The Countess Madge passed right out.

What had happened was just this: Gennaio, an analyst of genius, had plumbed those fathoms of the Czgowchwz mind where ultimate secrets lay locked away from all eyes, and most of all from their possessor's. When he had, after preliminary soothing, asked “Who are you?” she had replied in Gaelic, as if by rote: