Only my uncles would have thought of and found a zither player. Hadn’t Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan taken me to the Franklin Theatre to see Carol Reed’s The Third Man? It was one of those nights when the Franklin was showing a classic. The Third Man, from Graham Greene’s screenplay, was released in 1949, when I would have been too young to see it, but during exam periods at the University of New Hampshire, the Franklin occasionally revived these great old films—the films that everyone should see.

The poor Barlows! How many of their American friends and acquaintances had imposed “The Third Man Theme” on them—or “The Harry Lime Theme,” as the famous zither creation of Anton Karas was also known? For many Americans, as the three little Barlows well understood, The Third Man—that movie with its melancholic music—amounted to all we knew about Vienna. All Little Ray knew about Austria was the skiing and the skiers, but even my mom had heard “The Third Man Theme”—even my mother remembered the scene at the Viennese Ferris wheel (das Wiener Riesenrad, as Uncle Johan would have called it) and those wet sewers under the city, where Harry Lime pays for his terrible crimes.

When the music started in the rehearsal dinner tent, only the little Barlows bowed their heads—not in reverence but out of their painfully repeated exposure to that unhappy song. I’m sure they could have closed their eyes and seen the credits roll over that close-up of a zither’s strings. And who can forget the haunted instrumental playing over that story of doomed love and unspeakable crimes? Just what you want to hear when you’re tying the knot!

“Der Dritte Mann!” Uncle Johan cried—as if Anton Karas himself were playing the zither, or Harry Lime had escaped the sewers and was slithering into our tent. For once, I’m ashamed to say, I had to agree with my aunts.

“What were you thinking, Martin? ‘The Third Man Theme’ isn’t wedding music, you moron!” Aunt Abigail abused Uncle Martin.

“Nobody gets married to a zither, Johan,” Aunt Martha chimed in, but my uncles didn’t hear their disapproving wives. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were doubled over with their typically inappropriate laughter, while the elderly Austrian zither-meister kept playing that inescapably sad song.