In the context of what was going on, it was not clear if their remarks concerned Em’s orgasm or the unbalanced waitress. My grandmother had covered her ears with both hands, her lips silently repeating a passage she’d memorized and only she could hear—from Moby-Dick, I’m certain. The white whale wouldn’t have survived an orgasm of this kind; harpoons were no match for it. At long last there came a gasp, a sorrowful inhalation all of us heard; we held our breath in anticipation of the crescendo, but no cry came. Em had reached her peak. We were surrounded by a shattering silence.

“You should stop thinking about it, sweetie,” my mother whispered to me. I still can’t stop thinking about it. My mom was seated at the dinner table between Molly and me. We were across the table from the Barlows, the three of them. Elliot was the littlest one. He sat, like a happy child, between his parents.

“That was no quickie,” the trail groomer said, to no one in particular. The little English teacher was beaming.

“That’s the kind of thing you would expect to hear more frequently in Italy—on a summer night, with the windows open,” John Barlow said. He spoke as if he had already written these words.

“Oh, once or twice—when we were in Italy,” Sarah Barlow said, with a wave of her small hand. “But, honestly, John, I can’t remember ever overhearing anything quite like that—not even in Italy.”

“Not even in Italy,” the snowshoer repeated reverentially, smiling sweetly across the table at the three of us—my mother and the snowcat operator and me.

All of us were transported in the throes of Em’s orgasm. No one noticed the arrival of the solitary and elderly musician, though someone should have spotted the lederhosen he was wearing—not to mention the Tyrolean hat with the feather—and the instrument the old man was carrying was not your everyday stringed instrument. We should have seen the small table and single chair that stood apart from the dinner tables under the tent; a microphone was affixed to the side of the table facing the dinner guests, and the periphery of our tent was here and there surrounded by amplifiers. Yet not even Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan saw the zither player enter the tent and take his seat at that little table, and those two were expecting him. Those two had found him and hired him. As Uncle Martin would tell me, years later: “You can find anyone you’re looking for in New York, Adam.” Even an old Austrian zither-meister.

“Just the man to entertain the Barlows, with their postwar background in occupied Vienna!” Uncle Johan told me later in the evening. “And who better to play the ‘Bridal Chorus’—‘Treulich geführt’!—at the snowshoer’s wedding? Wagner’s Lohengrin on a zither!” Uncle Johan cried.