Franny was singing the song Susie could make her sing, so I tried to concentrate on the fight in the lobby. It was an easy fight for Jolanta, I could tell. All the pain came from the man.
“You got a cock like a wet sock and you tell me it’s my fault?” Jolanta was saying. This was followed by the sound of the man absorbing a blow—the heel of the hand into the jowl? I guessed. Hard to be sure, but there was the sound of the man falling again—that was clear. He said something, but his words seemed strangled. Was Jolanta choking him? I wondered. Should I interrupt Franny’s song? Was this a job for Susie the bear?
And then I heard Screaming Annie. I think everyone on the Krugerstrasse heard Screaming Annie. I think that even some fashionable people who’d been to the Opera, and who were just leaving the Sacher Bar and walking home along the Kärntnerstrasse, must have heard Screaming Annie.
One November day in 1969—five years after we left Vienna—two seemingly unrelated bits of news made morning headlines in the city. As of the seventeenth of November, 1969, it was announced, prostitutes were to be barred from strolling on the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse—and from all the side streets off the Kärntnerstrasse, too, except the Krugerstrasse. The whores had owned these streets for 300 years, but after 1969 they would be given only the Krugerstrasse. In my opinion, the people in Vienna gave up on trying to save the Krugerstrasse before 1969. In my opinion, it was Screaming Annie’s fake orgasm on the night the New Hampshire family was staying with us that determined the official decision. That particular fake orgasm finished the Krugerstrasse.
And on the same day in 1969 when the Austrian officials made their announcements about limiting the Kärntnerstrasse prostitutes to the Krugerstrasse, the newspapers also revealed that a new bridge over the Danube had cracked ; a few hours after the ceremonies that opened the bridge, the bridge cracked. The official word on the fault of the crack put the blame on the poor sun. In my opinion, the sun was not to blame. Only Screaming Annie could crack a bridge—even a new bridge. There must have been a window open somewhere where she was working.
I believe that Screaming Annie faking an orgasm could raise the corpses of the heartless Hapsburgs out of their tombs.
And that night when the timid New Hampshire family was visiting us, Screaming Annie got off what was surely the record fake orgasm for the duration of our stay in Vienna. It was a seven-year orgasm. It was followed so closely by the single short yelp of her male companion that I reached a hand out of my bed and grabbed one of my barbells for support. I felt the dressmaker’s dummy in Frank’s room fly off the wall, and Frank himself stumbled clumsily toward his door. Franny’s fine song was nipped in the upswing and Susie the bear, I knew, would be frantically searching for her head. For all the growing Lilly might have accomplished before she turned out her light, I knew she probably lost an inch in the single moment of recoiling from Screaming Annie’s terrible sound.
“Jesus God!” Father called out.
The man Jolanta was beating up in the lobby found the sudden strength necessary to break free and lunge out the door. And other prostitutes passing by on the Krugerstrasse—I can only imagine them reconsidering their profession. Whoever called this “the gentle occupation”? they must have been thinking.
Someone was whimpering. Babette, frightened, and thrown out of rhythm with Freud? Freud, seeking his baseball bat, as a weapon? Dark Inge, finally afraid for her mother? And it seemed that one of the radicals” typewriters way up on the fifth floor—all by itself moved itself off a typing table and crashed to the floor.
In less than a minute, we were in the lobby, moving up the stairs to the second floor. I had never seen Franny look so deeply disturbed; Lilly went to her and hung on her hip. Frank and I fell in line, like soldiers, wordlessly drawn to the devastating cry. It was over now, and the silence Screaming Annie left behind was almost as bloodcurdling as her bellow. Jolanta and Susie the bear led the way upstairs—like bouncers moving in, grimly, on some unsuspecting rowdies.
“Trouble,” Father was muttering. “That sounded like trouble.”
On the second-floor landing we met Freud and his baseball bat, leaning on Babette.
“We can’t have any more of that,” Freud was saying. “No hotel can survive it, no matter what class of clientele—that’s too much, it’s just more than anyone can bear.”
“Earl!” said Susie, bristling for a fight. Jolanta had her hands in her purse again. The whimpering continued and I realized it was Dark Inge, too frightened even to investigate her mother’s incredible noise.
When we got to Screaming Annie’s door, we saw that the New Hampshire family were not as timid as they had first appeared. The daughter certainly looked half-dead with fright, but she was standing almost on her own, leaning only slightly on her trembling father. He was in his pajamas and a red-and-black-striped robe. He held the shaft of a bedside lamp in his hand, the electrical cord wrapped around his wrist, the light bulb and shade removed—to make it a more efficient weapon, I suppose. The woman from New Hampshire stood closest to the door.
“It came from there,” she announced to us all, pointing to Screaming Annie’s door. “Now it’s stopped. They must be dead.”
“Stand back,” her husband said to her, the lamp leaping up and down in his hand. “It’s not a sight for women or children, I’m sure.”
The woman glared at Frank, because—I guess—he had been the man at the desk who had officially admitted her to this madhouse. “We’re Americans,” she said, defiantly. “We’ve never been exposed to anything this sordid before, but if one of you doesn’t have the guts to go in there, I will.”
“You will?” Father said.
“It’s clearly a murder,” the husband said. “Nothing could be clearer,” the woman said.
“With a knife,” the daughter said, and cringed, involuntarily—she twitched against her father. “It must have been a knife,” she almost whispered.
The husband dropped the lamp, then snatched it up again.
“Well?” the woman said to Frank, but Susie the bear pushed forward.
“Let the bear in!” Freud said. “Don’t mess with the guests, just let the bear in!”
“Earl!” said Susie. The husband, thinking Susie might attack him and his family, poked the lamp, threateningly, in Susie’s face.
“Don’t make the bear hostile!” Frank warned him, and the family retreated.
“Be careful, Susie,” Franny said.
“Murder,” murmured the New Hampshire woman.
“Something unspeakable,” her husband said.
“A knife,” the daughter said.
“It was just a fucking orgasm,” Freud said. “Haven’t you ever had one, for Christ’s sake?” Freud blundered forward with his hand on Susie’s back; he struck the door a blow with his baseball bat, then fumbled for the knob. “Annie?” he called. I noticed Jolanta close behind Freud, like his larger shadow—her fierce hands in her dark purse. Susie made a convincing snorfle at the base of the door.
“An orgasm?” said the woman from New Hampshire—her husband automatically covered the daughter’s ears.
“My God,” Franny would say later. “They would bring their daughter to see a murder, but they wouldn’t even let her hear about an orgasm. Americans sure are strange.”
Susie the bear shouldered the door, knocking Freud off balance. The end of his Louisville Slugger skidded along the hall floor, but Jolanta caught the old man and propped him up against the doorjamb, and Susie roared into the room. Screaming Annie was naked, except for her stockings and her garter belt; she was smoking a cigarette, and she leaned over the completely unmoving man on his back on the bed and blew smoke into his face; he didn’t flinch, or cough, and he was naked except for his ankle-length dark green socks.
“Dead!” gasped the woman from New Hampshire.
“Tod?” whispered Freud. “Somebody tell me!”
Jolanta took her hands out of her purse and sunk a fist in the man’s groin. His knees snapped up all by themselves and he coughed; then he went flat again.
“He’s not dead,” Jolanta said, and muscled her way out of the room.
“He just passed right out on me,” Screaming Annie said. She seemed surprised. But I would think, later, that there was no way you could keep both sane and conscious when you were deluded into thinking that Screaming Annie was coming. It was probably safer to pass out than to hang on and go home crazy.
“Is she a whore?” the husband asked, and this time it was the woman from New Hampshire who covered her daughter’s ears; she tried to cover the girl’s eyes, too.
“What are you, blind?” Freud asked. “Of course she’s a whore!”
“We’re all whores,” Dark Inge said, coming from nowhere and hugging her mother—glad to see she was all right. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Okay, okay,” Father said. “Everyone back to bed!”
“These are your children?” the New Hampshire woman asked Father; she wasn’t sure which of us to indicate with her sweep of the hand.
“Well, some of them are,” Father said, amiably.
“You should be ashamed,” the woman told him. “Exposing children to this sordid life.”
I don’t think it had occurred to Father that we were being “exposed” to anything particularly “sordid.” Nor was the New Hampshire woman’s tone of voice anything Father ever would have heard from my mother. But nonetheless my father seemed suddenly stricken by this accusation. Franny said later that she could see in the genuine bewilderment on his face—and then the growing look of something as close to guilt as we would ever see in him—that despite the sorrow Father’s dreaming might cause us, we would always prefer him dreamy to guilty; we could accept him as being out of it, but we couldn’t like him as much if he were truly a worrier, if he had been truly “responsible” in the way that fathers are expected to be responsible.
“Lilly, you shouldn’t be here, darling,” Father said to Lilly, turning her away from the door.