Mawrdew Czgowchwz
Page 21
It was, as luck would have it, Cassia V-D’s gondola the bears capsized. Cassia and her guest, Thalia Bridgewood, lay slouched together, drifting under a discreet willow on the south bank of the Lake near the boathouse, when the two drunken bears took a notion to frolic in the shallows. Donna Elvira and Jack the Ripper were seen together one moment sipping Asti Spumante, listening dreamily to their brazen young boatswain strumming a mandolino and crooning a provocative barcarolle, and the very next flapping about in the brackish waters like a pair of wounded sea lionesses, barking hysterically, deserted by their gallant (glimpsed briefly fleeting past the boathouse in the general direction of Fifth Avenue). Rescued by four sturdy mounted police, each of whom experienced a deal of difficulty keeping a straight face, the sopping dames retired wrapped up in blankets, sipping brandy, dignified, while Bertram and Matilda were led away, and the party went on.
The regatta anchored at the boathouse. Soon the large collection of strange little craft lay bobbing together, awaiting restoration. The maskers made their way back to the Campo Czgowchwz, where the Adorato Opera Company were just opening their gala.
On through the magical night they listened—to Pagliaccio, to Butterfly, to Turandot, to Iago, to Figaro, to Dalila, to Ariadne. The familiar, relaxing music, earnestly if not quite perfectly sung by studious amateurs with hearts aflame, pleased everyone, drawing sincere applause. The midget clowns put on their act, a display of robust agility and comic panache. The flamenco dancers encored, howling once again up at the moon, which now hung smaller and silver in the graying sky. The Armenians and the Irish, finding common ground, danced together. The Italians along the midway went on giving away toys and dolls and hideous plaster statues of the Virgin (whose sign was just then declining). “Wherever we looked, masked faces shone under lights of various colors. ‘Rampant glamour,’ we were informed, ‘in triumph’” (The Talk of the Town).
People were dancing the Madison, all synchronized. Jameson, his masks removed, sat down to look at them. His eyes fixed on Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, laughing, dancing face to face in the two seemingly endless lines—Czgowchwz facing in Jameson’s direction. He began seeing other figures dancing awkwardly in words in the middle distance. Lurking there, glaring past these at his subject (Mawrdew Czgowchwz), he commenced to hear his own voice reading his own ode in his own head, as if it were another voice (on its own). The dancing figures in the words in the middle distance grew even sharper in their definitions. Their movements grew elegant. The colors of their raiments stood out against the ground of the dawn.
The first, in ruby, proclaimed the wedlock of the noun and the verb. The second, veiled in divers tones of the emblematic Czgowchwz color, kept repeating Jameson’s own first words in his own voice. The third, the yellow didact, transformed Jameson’s words into flesh. The fourth shone green, announcing words that contain their opposites, resolving them at the liquid center of formal intention. The fifth, garbed in forthright blue, presented the words in a pattern of intentional sounds, aspiring to the condition of music. The sixth, the indigoferous, the illative, dharma shade, the tantric, insisted the words go galloping—winding on and on until the words said the reader. The majestic, purpled seventh came through at the precise moment of the first light, silent at first, then, assuming audible force, repeating Jameson’s words over and over again until, dissolving into the first dawning mist (the while the other figures fell away in shadows and the unheeding dancers dancing the Madison rollicked on), it chanted: “To turn about, to abstract, to salute, to celebrate.” Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Apostrophe! Jameson began to write, sitting there, looking.
At breakfast, sitting in little groups under the trees in a blissful Libra morning, they listened to Elgar’s Enigma Variations —that music Jacob felt he somehow owned—played in the Music Grove under Creplaczx’s baton, to perfection.
A fleet of hansom cabs drew up at the aforeset time to transport Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Jacob Beltane, and all their friends down Fifth Avenue to the Plaza, then westward along Central Park South to Broadway, then down Broadway to Thirty-ninth Street—circling the opera house—then north again to Forty-second Street, then west to the river, then north again to Pier 92, where the Arcadia sat docked.
They stood together at the stern, watching the city recede on the horizon until it sank like the Kingdom of Ys. The Atlantic, bearing them afloat as if aloft, spread out on all sides. The day drifted along in dream time. At sunset they were seen still together at the oval stern of the Arcadia, leaning on the taffrail, feeling apotheosized, looking back westward.
“You are my whole desire, Maev.”
“And you are Jacob, the supplanter, my own.”
“You speak of experience.”
“As you speak, for the first time.”
The flambant sun slipped into the Atlantic, seemingly benignly, leaving them in the stillness and splendor of a seaborne twilight, awaiting the shadows, the stars, the moon, and the night. They sailed away together.
Their time was time out of mind.
This Is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1971, 1973, 1975 by James McCourt
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Wayne Koestenbaum
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers (detail of Diva), an original mosaic artwork © by Nancy Spero, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts for Transit and owned by MTA New York City Transit.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
McCourt, James, 1941–
Mawrdew Czgowchwz / James Mccourt ; introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-940322-97-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women singers—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3.
Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Contraltos—Fiction.
5. Opera—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A266 M38 2002
813’.54—dc21
2001008126
eISBN 978-1-59017-540-8
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014