Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt

heaven, Mawrdew, that woman’s bawling is the racking nightmare of hell!” She brooded about destiny. It was very difficult. One must do battle against all nightmares. One must be rigorous and deplore outrage. One must stand up and be enlisted. The Nericon was ending...
    It finished. The snow-monster effigy of Neri had melted into the tin washtub; the solstice fireside blaze had seen to that. Wedgwood was summoned and given succinct directions by the chatelaine: “Take these slops away, please, and have them dumped into the East River.” He complied matter-of-factly.
    Suspicions of dawn were on that occasion first felt by Arpenik and Pierrot, in conference at the French window concerning the former’s prognostic on the latter’s eventual achievement. As the world turns, so it did. Subtle alterations occurred in the pattern apparent on the darkened window-panes reflecting the indoors. Subfusc influence wrought steady increase in the middle atmosphere, illuming from ink-black to cold slate-gray the alley separating Magwyck from the Moronican embassy next door. A back-yard cityscape began to be discernible in
    Snow-fraught ambuscade, white-as-white glaze ground
    Reflecting starlight, gathered brilliance as the sun rose
    Unhindered somewhere out at sea beyond
    The serried canyons of a winterset Gotham .
    Jameson O’Maurigan:
    A Mawrdew Czgowchwz Morning
    (fragment)
    Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, was to give a performance on the evening of that same new day. Not merely a performance, a première. She would require food, sleep, food again, and no small degree of self-gathering repose achieved in wakeful meditation. Then food again, and whiskey. As it dawned upon the guests that this was so, that that coming evening intended presenting a select audience with the first-ever Czgowchwz Isolde, rushes of protective concern and apprehension vied one with another among the great admirers. Back in the dining room, at a light breakfast of kippers, sherry and eggs, Arpenik’s ekmek with orange Cointreau marmalade, coffee, and croissants, each in his own way and all in their common lauding office urged the diva to return in sensible good time to the Plaza to prepare. She promised to do so, all in good time.
    Ralph dialed the number of the public telephone in the end booth in the gallery of shops close to the southwest corner of Fortieth Street and Broadway. After a dozen or more rings, an executive voice replied: “Hello, Tristan opera line!” So the waiting had begun.
    â€œGlory t’ God in a shift!” exclaimed the broguey Countess Madge. “A queue in this perishin’ cowld mornin’, is it? What with snow stacked fair up t’ the tits on the Statue uv Liberty! Sure there’s sinners turnin’ inta saints on Broadway this day! God forbid the day t’ come, Mawrdew, when yourself quits the operatic singin’ profession—there’s sure a career lurkin’ for you in the leadin’ of worthy causes (should one worthier than musicry get itself discovered, as seems hard enough t’ vision). A queue on this same mornin’!” Like sentiments to these, voiced in polyphonic consensus, sped their way around the breakfast table. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, savoring her kippers, joined readily in the furious appreciation, for all the world as if its axis were some quite distant, other enchantress than she. The Countess Madge, resuming her cultivated middle-Atlantic, adjourned breakfast.
    As the first Capricorn sunlight advanced, disrupting the early gray calm of that winter dawn, another weary Gotham awoke. At Magwyck, the parting toasts were proclaimed in the music room to the tune of Schumann’s Davidsbünd-lertänze , rendered by Dame Sybil. The company called it a night, drinking deep to itself and to the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier, hostess, priestess, chatelaine, and pal, then dispersed.
    Twenty elegant stragglers, chilling, bearing an