Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt Read Free Book Online

out, much with silver bowls, clocks, ribbons, and pianissimi squeezed out of the surgical slits behind her ears, weeping in self-regard and no small satisfaction amid squalid displays of pit-shrieking gaucherie. But Box 7 hovered empty, dark, and desolate...
    On the unclear afternoon of the twenty-first (“overcast skies with manifold linings of cloud”), winter business was being discussed over several lunches, at the Carnegie Tavern, at the Plaza, at Arpenik’s, and at Lodovico’s pizzeria. The Secret Seven sat drinking at the Carnegie, doing the Czgowchwz Christmas Newsletter layouts and parcels of late cards for Czgowchwz stalwarts coast to coast. Alice, royally sozzled on Madeira, kept on repeating at odd intervals, “ Ah, vieni, amor mio, m’inebbria .” She broke off her routine to tell everyone another story they already knew full well—the story of that distant summer night when Czgowchwz had been busted for singing “Ocean, thou mighty monster” from the narrow widow’s walk of Grace Jackson-Haight’s stylish South Shore beach house, after a midnight swim (“Bathing suits in the dark ?”). She had pleaded tipsily guilty—“at some place they insist on calling Yaphank!”—to disturbing “the moronic bourgeois peace,” which quote caused the diva to be suspected of fellow-traveling and worse among the sniveling protectionist elite. Czgowchwz had borne such calumnies lightly, but Alice, politically naïve and fiercely loyal—recalling it all just then, much later—suddenly roared out a few seditious obscenities, spilling Madeira. While dozens of framed sepia photographs of forgotten thirties demireps and chic refugees gazed down impassively from the tavern walls, she was removed to an adjacent Nedicks for black coffee and given a brief, sobering trot. It had begun to snow, quite heavily. Immense leaden clouds covered the island town.
    At Magwyck’s kitchen window, the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier stood watching the sun fade out behind dove-gray muslin as the first thick flakes fell onto the great O’Meaghre dolmen, the flat table stone in the middle of her landscaped, heptagonal back yard. She was griddling crepes by the dozens on a sturdy coal stove. “Mummin’ in the drifts, is it?” she wondered, flipping imperatively, stirring patiently, deftly wielding spatulas, the whole while belting back good cheer in doubles against the coming perishing cold. Magwyck stood decked in full resplendent drape, each room set in appropriate ornamental perspect-best to accommodate the ritual proceedings. At the vast open fireplace, Wedgwood was only just putting to the side the first load of contraband peat arrived that morning “in the nick” from Sligo. The burning of the new-cut peat would in the space of the coming hours fill every room and hallway, investing alcoves with the primal fragrance: life’s initiation. The bursting warmth would fling itself in swirls into the inert chill face of the solstice—against its threats of “Nevermore.” The swelling Vermont pine tree stood bare and yielding in the parlor, relaxing its branches as slowly and as steadily as roses unfold overnight, until it would be ready for communal adornment in the small hours after the dinner, the mumming outdoors, the cavorts, the parodies, the singing, the reading, and the prayers. Animism was the scheme.
    Elsewhere, G-G strode away from an overcrowded midtown auction, up to her own atelier-emporium on Madison Avenue, stopping off at this or that shebeen as the snow fell about in thick flakes over the earth. Thus seeking fortification, she banged into Trixie Gilhooley, showgirl, unescorted and footless in P.J. O’Failte’s, that rendezvous of fakes. She wondered what a girl with Trixie’s savvy was doing in a place like this. Then she wondered what a girl like... Trixie stood draped like an old rolled-up