Nora had reappeared with Em. “Where are the strippers?” Nora whispered in my ear. “Even strippers from Boston would have been better than this.” No one dared to look at Nora—except for Molly, who was looking Nora up and down—and the meek, nonspeaking Em shrank from the looks she was getting, hiding herself behind Nora’s broad back. “Leather shorts with suspenders would never be my choice,” Nora was saying, scrutinizing the old Austrian in the lederhosen with the Tyrolean hat—a green felt hat with a wide brim and a crown that tapered to a point. “I’m betting a pheasant was killed for that fucking feather,” Nora added to her assessment.

As befitted proper wedding protocol, John and Sarah Barlow gave a gracious speech, welcoming my mom and me to the little Barlow family; there were other speeches, but I don’t remember most of them, only that Uncle Johan spoke in German. Henrik grew more profuse in his apologies to me for his formerly loutish behavior. The only signs of the Henrik I remembered were his repeated efforts to get Em’s attention by doing dumb tricks with his lacrosse stick. This included tossing a dinner roll to her, but Nora caught the roll and rifled it back at her cousin. Em, clinging constantly to Nora, showed no interest in Henrik or his stupid lacrosse stick.

The repertoire of the zither-meister was no match for Anton Karas. The only songs I heard, over and over again—I mean, in addition to the countless repetitions of “The Harry Lime Theme”—were also recognizable to me from The Third Man. The slow “Das alte Lied” (“That Dear Old Song”), the more sprightly “The Café Mozart Waltz,” and the most lugubrious “Farewell to Vienna.” That last one plays over the ending of the film, the saddest song of all—when Anna (Alida Valli) leaves the cemetery where Harry (Orson Welles) has been buried, leaving Holly (Joseph Cotten) loveless and alone.

“How are we going to dance to this shit—isn’t there dancing tomorrow?” Nora asked me. Yes, there would be dancing, I knew—after the marriage ceremony, and both during and after the reception dinner—or so I’d been told. I was aware of the infinite preparations: the choreography required to rearrange the folding chairs from the ceremony for the dinner tables; the necessary steps to keep the elevated platform for the dancing accessible under the wedding tent; where the amplifiers for “Here Comes the Bride” should be located; and, now that I knew there was a zither, where the zither-meister should be seated. The thought of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin on a zither concerned me more than what we were going to dance to, but I merely reminded Nora of the waltz in the old Austrian’s repertoire.

“What waltz, Adam? You heard a waltz?” Nora asked me.

I pointed out that the zither man had played “The Café Mozart Waltz.”