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'And how many acts of love did Schnitzler and his "Sweet Girl" make between 1888 and 1889?' Franny asked.

'Jesus,' said Frank. 'A lot! I forget.'

'Four hundred and sixty-four!' cried Max Urick, who'd been present at all the historical readings, and never forgot a fact. Like Ronda Ray, Max had never been educated before; it was a novelty for Max and Ronda; they paid better attention at Frank's lessons than the rest of us.

'I've got another one for Father!' Franny said. 'Who was Mitzi Caspar?'

'Mitzi Caspar?' Father said. 'Jesus God.'

'Jesus God,' said Frank. 'Franny only remembers the sexual parts.'

'Who was she, Frank?' Franny asked.

'I know!' said Ronda Ray. 'She was Rudolf's "Sweet Girl"; he spent the night with her before killing himself, with Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling.' Ronda had a special place in her memory, and in her heart, for Sweet Girls.

'I'm one, aren't I?' she had asked me, after Frank's rendering of Arthur Schnitzler's life and work.

'The sweetest,' I had told her.

'Phooey,' said Ronda Ray.

'Where did Freud live beyond his means?' Frank asked, to any of us who knew.

'Which Freud?' Lilly asked, and we all laughed.

"The Suhnhaus,' Frank said, answering his own question. Translation?' he asked. 'The Atonement House,' he answered.

'Fuck you, Frank,' said Franny.

'Not about sex, so she didn't know it,' Frank said to me.

'Who was the last person to touch Schubert?' I asked Frank; he looked suspicious.

'What do you mean?' he asked.

'Just what I said,' I said. 'Who was the last person to touch Schubert?' Franny laughed; I had shared this story with her, and I didn't think Frank knew it -- because I had taken the pages out of Frank's book. It was a sick story.

'Is this some kind of joke?' Fr

ank asked.

When Schubert had been dead, for sixty years, the poor hick Anton Bruckner attended the opening of Schubert's grave. Only Bruckner and some scientists were allowed. Someone from the mayor's office delivered a speech, going on and on about Schubert's ghastly remains. Schubert's skull was photographed; a secretary took notes at the investigation -- noting that Schubert was a shade of orange, and that his teeth were in better shape than Beethoven's (Beethoven had been resurrected for similar studies, earlier). The measurements of Schubert's brain cavity were recorded.

After nearly two hours of 'scientific' investigation, Bruckner could restrain himself no longer. He grabbed the head of Schubert and hugged it until he was asked to let it go. So Bruckner touched Schubert last. It was Frank's kind of story, really, and he was furious not to know it.

'Bruckner, again,' Mother answered, quietly, and Franny and I were amazed that she knew; we went from day to day thinking that Mother knew nothing, and then she turned up knowing it all. For Vienna, we know, she had been secretly studying -- knowing, perhaps, that Father was unprepared.

'What trivia!' said Frank, when we had explained the story to him. 'Honestly, what trivia!'

'All history is trivia,' Father said, showing again the Iowa Bob side of himself.

But Frank was usually the source of trivia -- at least concerning Vienna, he hated to be outdone. His room was full of drawings of soldiers in their regimentals: Hussars in skin-tight pink pants and fitted jackets of a sunny-lake blue, and the officers of the Tyrolean Rifle in dawn-green. In 1900, at the Paris World's Fair, Austria won the Most Beautiful Uniform Prize (for Artillery); it was no wonder that the fin de siecle in Vienna appealed to Frank. It was only alarming that the fin de siecle was the only period Frank really learned -- and taught to us. All the rest of it was not as interesting to him.

'Vienna won't be like Mayerling, for Christ's sake,' Franny whispered to me, while I was lifting weights. 'Not now.'

'Who was the master of the song -- as an art form?' I asked her. 'But his beard was plucked raw because he was so nervous he never let the hairs alone.'

'Hugo Wolf, you asshole,' she said. 'Don't you see? Vienna isn't like that anymore.'