Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt Page A

unmistakable if invisible standard—“We didn’t get up, we stayed up!”—made for Central Park in a phalanx. (“Look,” people said, “a phalanx!”) They looked like the Lost Battalion, better dressed. Traffic was at a standstill, which happy fact occasioned a lovely, leisurely progress down the center of Fifth Avenue to the zoo, amid tank formations of snowplow trucks warming up. Then through the zoo, and on down to the Plaza...
    The Plaza itself was fairly agog at the prospect of the diva Czgowchwz presenting herself as Isolde. Deals of varying sorts and degrees of apprehension, tension, ecstasy, and bilious envy in this separate quarter and that made their marks on that contingent of hotel personnel devoted to the personal comfort and security of the lady under discussion. Mrs. Grudget in particular had sat up through the night, and decided at the end that this was “a fine time for her to come in!” The Englishwoman was particularly put off by what she considered the typically Irish excess of the Countess Madge’s idea of a party. Why “that one” could not celebrate Christmas like a decent Christian woman, indoors , and on the appointed day ... And here now suddenly was this noisy company escorting the diva in, and tracking snow and slush across the carpets in the lobby, demanding brandies off-hours, deriding the pretty pink and silver seasonal trappings in the Palm Court, and hanging about altogether like a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, behaving in a manner less suggestive of companions of a legendary lady than the sorts of ruffians that might have been tossed out of the Persian Room during one of, say, Dolly Farouche’s cabaret turns. Mrs. Grudget disapproved.
    Mawrdew Czgowchwz shrugged it off. Taking affectionate leave of her friends, the dozy diva swerved into an elevator, nodding absently at some last urgent attention of Merovig Creplaczx’s, and was carried up to her suite, where, as Mrs. Grudget emphatically drew the gamboge damask drapes against the brilliant winter morning, she fell, scarcely aware, out of her furs and dinner dress, her famous loosed hair falling about everywhere, into an opulent, cool, welcome double bed, to sleep. Everybody else went home.

4
    A S MAWRDEW Czgowchwz lay so fast asleep, the day that had so happily dawned so bloomed. Agitated Gotham seized a grip on itself. Events and situations recommenced all over town to be regarded in the variegated, interlocking contexts of all their precedents. Yesterday’s memories, reactivated, revealed. In politics, as elsewhere, forces were being regrouped. Prognosticators waited, alert. Few could say what would come next. The watchword seemed to be “Next?”
    While the Secret Seven slept, the Nericon , stacked up hot off a certain hand press housed in a faceless brownstone’s basement in the old Trotskyite neighborhood near Union Square, waited (as if patiently) to be delivered uptown to the opera line as soon as Broadway was sufficiently snow-cleared. Meanwhile, the garment district lay stranded in turmoil. Ready-to-wear merchants, furriers, and their vassal cutters and models were for the most part unable to arrive from Scarsdale and from Bensonhurst respectively. The area therefore belonged entirely to the Tristan opera line.
    Paranoy once called the Old Met opera line the “ne plus ultra of ‘plus ça change.’” Like the more heroic, if not necessarily more valiant, bread lines, soup lines, and picket lines of the venerable prewar urban populist network, the postwar opera line stood for something. What this same something was, was style . Elegant stylists animated the line. Entire two- and three-week winter and spring vacations came to be spent along the waiting wall, now and again with bed and breakfasts thrown into the package by the Ansonia, the older inner sanctum; the flashier, grander, murkier Plaza; or the hidden fortress, the Chelsea. Now and