Read Online Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt - Free Book Online Page B

of being late ! Even among friends, my dear, tongues will wag , you know, tongues will wag !”
    Sybil, turning again to look into the storm, blew two thin streams of nostril smoke against the windowpane in which she saw herself, and through which she saw one faithful cabby returning with a large can of something effective-looking. She thought briefly about windows.
    â€œYes, I suppose so, toots, and wags will tongue !” She smirked, only a little. “But what of it when nature is so busily vocative, denouncing every scheme? One feels—out-classed—from the start!”
    The cab started up again. Cassia sneezed, and grew sullen.
    In her tower Mawrdew Czgowchwz pondered it. Playing solitaire Scrabble, the new hard way, waiting for Merovig Creplaczx to call up, she hummed the stanzas of the Liebestod like mantras. She was as yet unable to decide. There was something she wanted to remember...
    Meanwhile, Halcyon Q. Paranoy sat at an early-model Dictaphone in an office off the city room. He spoke quickly into the receiver: “I seldom go out—Nobody asks me. Tomorrow or the next day, Nobody Else will do the same. By the end of the holidays, beseeching invites from nobodies everywhere will have piled up in heaps on my desk. But tonight I rush through the biggest blizzard to hit this town since the late forties, to attend the annual...”
    While, alone at her faithful Depression Corona, with a bottle of Rock & Rye and a carton of Luckies, Dolores pounded out her column for a tentative tomorrow:
    Once upon a time, in better days, a regional authority on drop-dead chic, now playing trollopy-doxy-gamine—frantically careening to seed in bugle beads and Place Pigalle sling-backs—the latest shoo-in candidate for permanent gold-star listing in the Gotham Who’s Whorish ...
    â€œLet ’em print that !” she cackled. (They didn’t.)
    While Gloria Gotham walked out of Grace Jackson-Haight’s beige boudoir, having interviewed Thalia Bridgewood, whose fretful search for a new spring vehicle was causing some bizarre ructions on the Rialto. As the reporter walked south down Park Avenue against the blizzard she wondered what to make of things after all. There seemed so little point in recording...
    While Tangent Percase wound up his meditations, tumbled down off his head, sprawling naked on the bare pine floor, and pulled his wits together. Rising to don dinner dress for Magwyck, he collected his thoughts concerning the solstice.
    While Jameson O’Maurigan, chief among those who had followed Mawrdew Czgowchwz out the great doors in the back wall of the Old Met in the dawn following the Traviata triumph, stood in Central Park—at the deserted summer concert bandstand—arm in arm with his twin, Lavinia.
    â€œWhat is it, Jamie, are you unhappy?”
    â€œYes, Vanilla, but it’s my own fault.”
    â€œOh. Is that what’s called ‘self-styled’?”
    â€œDon’t cooperate, please. This snow is ferocious!”
    â€œYou love the snow—don’t talk down.”
    â€œWhat is it I see in you?”
    â€œOh, Jamie, why are you so unhappy?”
    While Jonathan Stein sat home reading Leibniz.
    While His Scarlet Eminence and Msgr. Finneagle sat playing their esoteric version of Monopoly, the custom-crafted board for which could be seen to represent the several circles of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio , and Paradiso , as well as the ground plan of the entire Vatican, both the above-ground palaces’ apartments, closets, and chapels, and those labyrinthine catacomb reaches where Darkest Rumor is said on good authority to repose in thrilling reptile fashion. His Scarlet Eminence snickered in pixyish glee, having caught his opponent in the square of the seventh circle of hell (with four hotels). Monsignor trembled (livid), bankrupt of plenary indulgence.
    While Roxanne Sauvage sat home on Staten Island watching The Ways of Life .
    While Mrs.