Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt Read Free Book Online Page A

rug with arms, embracing a Wurlitzer rainbow jukebox (a numinous icon of wartime) and bleating, “Where-za fuckin’ el gone ta?!” She kept dropping lonely quarters into the slot and playing “Poor Butterfly” six times at a go, until P.J. said he would pull out the plug if she didn’t push off and give somebody a chance to listen to something seasonal, like “Joy to the World.”
    G-G seized Trixie by the shoulder, shaking off layers of snow.
    â€œTheresa, Theresa, calm down! They took the el away , dear— ages ago!”
    Trixie, peering up at that friendly voice through layer upon layer of hazy inebriation, moaned elegiac protests.
    â€œIzzit ahl gone, then, the whole gorgeous contraption? What a thing! What a criminal thing! Jesus Christ, G-G darling—izza whole worl’ comin’ down?”
    Bawling unattractively, Trixie Gilhooley was led out into the increasing snow, across to Madison, and up to Cashel Gueza, the window of which subtly contrived wonderland—brilliantly lit in the crept-on dusk—revealed an immense scarlet-velvet Victorian sofa displayed for Yuletide amid ivy boughs and rings of holly. The white Hispano-Suiza, squat at the curb in a mounting drift, and ticketed, could have been an outsize toy.
    Inside, G-G made fresh Irish breakfast tea rather than fuss with exotics, cut lemons, and unhinged a pot of decent Russian caviar. Noticing Trixie climbing into the display window, she sighed for something precious, long past. They took their tea in the window, lounging on the sofa, scarcely noticed by passing stragglers. (Trixie gave the finger to the few nosy lingerers who presumed to invade their privacy.) Sitting there in the roseate aureole of the Tiffany wisteria lamp, aware by degrees of the passage of time, of place, and of themselves, they bemoaned the dismantling of Gotham. “God! By 1970...”
    G-G’s private collection of china clocks struck four o’clock one after the other in dulcet syncopation. Trixie remembered where it was she’d been going—to Grace Jackson-Haight’s penthouse. G-G remembered herself having been asked, and then remembered forgetting. They agreed to go together for diversion. There were no cabs that day; a taxi strike was in furious progress. Trixie contrived to convince a burly Wicklow man, a truck driver passing time at the Curragh tavern just next door, to dredge the Suiza out of the snow, after which stalwart labor the three of them fumbled off to Grace’s matinee. Trixie had dismissed her ephemeral, mean woes.
    Back at Magwyck, the Countess Madge, having stuffed her crepes every which way, took her tea in the parlor, reading Dolores in the late-afternoon edition of “the wipe.” The column was routinely devoted to the murkiest detractions. One conspicuous aside dealt with the Solstice Dinner.
    ... Tonight at Magwyck, which has over the years since the war become the address on the smart East Side—known incidentally mainly by the noninvited, but to ignore it is pretentiousness itself...
    The Countess shuddered. The prose !
    Halcyon Q. Paranoy has decreed that “only supple souls find their belongings there.” Mysteries abound amid rumors of privately subversive convocations—or is it right to say covens ...
    â€œWhat is that witch saying?” the Countess Madge murmured to herself.
    The giddy H.Q.P. (ask him yourself!) further states, in his recently published pamphlet The Czgowchwz Moment , that “here at Magwyck is a glimpse of the lovely so acute as to reduce all other traffic in the lamely chic parlors about town to the stimulation level of a ride on the IRT shuttle between Times Square and Grand Central Station at the five-o’clock rush hour.” Evidently H.Q.P. (ask him yourself!) has his own ideas about the most stimulating hour to ride the shuttle in!... The latest on straggler-showgirl Trixie (“revolving doors”) Gilhooley is...
    The