The Last Chairlift

16. WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT

I once asked Nora if she brought her girlfriend, Em, to my mother’s wedding to create a distraction—to overshadow the evident incredulity toward the unlikely lovers who were getting married. The circulating gossip, which was started by my aunts—namely, that my mom was Elliot Barlow’s beard—was not as obvious as Nora’s decision to be publicly out as a lesbian at a family wedding in her hometown. The submissive demeanor of the dollish and anxious-looking Em was belied by the reputation of her unruly and clamorous orgasms; as Nora had plainly put it, “Each orgasm sounds like it’s her first or last time.” The wedding guests who were staying at the Exeter Inn were visibly changed by the experience of overhearing Em’s ridiculously loud and hysterical orgasms, particularly a contingent of the North Conway Norwegians. The girly-girl blondes, the ones Nora used to beat up, were looking at Nora with newly frightened eyes.

But Nora denied there was any willfulness behind her bringing Em to the wedding. “I don’t have that kind of foresight, kiddo,” Nora said. She told me she made an easy choice: her childhood bed in Uncle Martin and Aunt Abigail’s faculty apartment or a bigger bed at the Exeter Inn, where Nora could have noisy sex with Em. In retrospect, I might have been wrong to ask if Nora had purposely shortened Emily’s name to Em—as a rough but abbreviated way of dominating her. So much was violently expended in a single one of Em’s orgasms, it’s possible to imagine that the last three letters of Emily’s name had been lost in the climaxing process.

That the bride wore white did not escape my aunts’ condemnation. They were quick to judge both real and imagined violations of Little Ray’s virginity and purity.

“A bride who’s had a child does not wear white, Rachel,” Aunt Abigail told my mother.

“Not to mention a bride who had a child the way you did, Ray,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Baloney,” my mom told them. “I’m wearing a white wedding dress. Molly helped me pick it out.”

The wedding was the first occasion any of us had to meet Molly, the trail groomer. If it came to a showdown, the snowcat operator looked as if she could go toe-to-toe with Nora. In the little snowshoer’s estimation, Molly and Nora each weighed 175 pounds. They were two big and strong young women. Over the course of the wedding weekend, those two kept eyeing each other—as if they were dying to get into a fight, or into some other trouble.

The sleeping arrangements for the wedding weekend were too confusing for scrutiny; not even my aunts could be bothered with who slept where, or with whom. Those girl jocks from Stowe, used to dormitory living, pitched three tents in the backyard of the Front Street house. My grandmother felt their tents were too near the garden, where the wedding tent was. One of the girl jocks brought her boyfriend; their tent, nearest the ornamental birdbath in the garden, was the smallest one. Two of the girl jocks—the same two who took showers together—had their own tent, too. The biggest tent was for the rest of the girl jocks from Stowe; there were three or four of them, and they pitched their tent on the former croquet court, unused for years. Nana said the tent wasn’t safe on the old croquet court, where she predicted someone would come to harm or be killed.

Yes, the croquet court had been improperly cared for, but I doubted it was capable of murder. A mishap had once caused a gardener to quit: an old wicket, lurking just above ground, had wrecked his lawn mower. Years ago, someone had used a croquet mallet to hammer the stakes and the wickets into the lawn. Principal Brewster had been blamed for this, but I’ll bet the pounder was Nora, not the principal emeritus—not even before he was in diapers, when he was capable of wielding a mallet. Over time, a few of the wickets had worked their way back above ground—or someone had pulled them level to the lawn. I’ll bet the wicket-puller was the diaper man; the infant emeritus was the only member of the family who’d played croquet on the backyard lawn.

My grandmother was distraught over the excessive bathroom use by what she called “the tent dwellers,” but what were the girl jocks supposed to do—go in the garden? Nana had already accused the boyfriend of peeing in the birdbath, solely on the grounds that she’d seen no birds bathing there since he’d arrived.

I’ll admit that the boyfriend, in the tent nearest the birdbath, was a dipshit ski bum. He was a worthless whiner who struck me as too lazy to look very far for a bathroom. He obviously thought I was older than fourteen, because he complained to me about his girlfriend’s yeast infection. “I didn’t come all this way to sleep in a tent with a girl who can’t or won’t do it,” he told me. “She should have said she had a friggin’ yeast infection!”

Naturally, I asked Nora what a yeast infection was. I must have been concerned that I could catch it. Nora made me tell her who had one, and how I’d heard about it. “The girl jock with the boyfriend who pees in the birdbath—she has it. He told me,” I confided to Nora. I could see that Em was as fearful of the yeast infection as I was; she buried her face in Nora’s boobs and shook against her. That was how the yeast infection made me feel, too.

“Relax, you wimps—you’re safe,” Nora told us. She then told Molly and my mom about the incident.

The night groomer said she’d handle it. I didn’t realize Molly meant she would handle the boyfriend—the alleged birdbath pisser—but Molly dragged him out of his small tent when he had only his boxers on, and she held his head underwater in the birdbath. Whatever was in the birdbath, it was clear the ski bum couldn’t breathe in it. The girl jock with the yeast infection halfheartedly protested the snowcat operator’s way of handling the situation. “You may tell everyone you know about your yeast infection, Nelly,” the trail groomer said, “but I don’t want Adam the Kid hearing about it.” Nelly didn’t know her boyfriend had been advertising her yeast infection; she wandered off in the garden, seemingly indifferent to the prospect of the ski bum dying in the birdbath, but Molly had made her point and stopped drowning him. This was the afternoon of the day before the wedding, and Nelly’s boyfriend packed up the small tent and his other belongings and left, unceremoniously, before the festivities started. There were two stone sparrows, permanently perched on the rim of the birdbath; throughout my childhood, one of those never-singing songbirds had a chipped beak. Only those sparrows made of stone knew for sure if the ski bum had ever peed in the birdbath. Nelly moved into the big tent on the former croquet court with her fellow girl jocks.

My grandmother was right: the girl jocks took over the bathrooms in the Front Street house. There were wet towels everywhere; those vigorous girls were always taking a bath or a shower. My mom had designated my attic bathroom, adjoined to my bedroom, off-limits. She’d moved her things into my bedroom and was sleeping (as usual) in my bed with me. Molly was sleeping in my mother’s bedroom on the second floor.

“I’m not antisocial, Kid,” the night groomer told me. “I’m just too big to sleep on the ground in a tent with a bunch of women—talking all night about women’s stuff.” In the terrifying context of the unexplained yeast infection—its cause, its consequences, its potential as a contagion—my fourteen-year-old imagination would make too much of what Molly meant by women’s stuff. I’m not saying it’s the sole reason I waited so long to get married—almost as long as I put off going to Aspen—but, for some years, the repercussions of women’s stuff seriously affected my imagination.

My mom could sense I was disquieted by these things I was hearing about but not understanding: for starters, the wedding guests whose sleep and peace of mind were disturbed by Em’s soul-searching orgasms. And now came the dark and undisclosed mysteries and ramifications of Nelly’s yeast infection—the near drowning of the boyfriend who dared to speak of it, and Molly’s decision not to sleep in the tent with the girl jocks and their women’s stuff.

“In the first place, sweetie, you should stop thinking about Em—most of all, the unusual sounds she makes,” my mother advised me. “I can only speculate that Nora could be a somewhat traumatizing girlfriend experience—especially if Nora were your first girlfriend.” I could see this point, of course, though this did not relieve me from hearing Em’s unusual sounds in my imagination.

In a similarly dismissive fashion, my mom tried to reassure me about Nelly’s yeast infection. “Nelly’s going to be okay, sweetie—yeast infections usually aren’t life-threatening. Nelly just goes on and on about hers, but every woman has had one or will have one. It’s not a big deal,” my mother told me. “Okay, there’s pain, there’s itching, there’s the cottage-cheese discharge.”

“The what?” I asked her.

“From your vagina—you should stop thinking about it, sweetie.”

“I can see why Molly doesn’t want to sleep in the tent with the jocks, talking all night about the cottage-cheese stuff,” I told my mom.

“I need Molly near me, sweetie—not in the tent. I can’t get into or out of my wedding dress if Molly doesn’t help me,” my mother said.

I had seen the white wedding dress. It was hanging from the shower rod in my attic bathroom. My mom said the steam from the shower would keep it wrinkle-free. Yes, it was a complicated dress, but I hadn’t realized it was a two-woman job—just to put on the dress and take it off. The business about the girl jocks taking showers day and night—not to mention the two girl jocks who slept in a separate tent and took their showers together—didn’t enter into our conversation. My mother could see I was struggling to understand the complexities of her wedding dress.

“The dress has to be laced up at the back, sweetie—it has to be as tightly laced as a corset,” my mom tried to explain.

I must have nodded, or otherwise pretended to understand. I refrained from asking what a corset was. I decided I should stop thinking about all of it. I would stop asking questions; I would not look puzzled. I decided to adopt an uncharacteristic nonchalance. I would henceforth appear to understand, or be indifferent to, everything.

Yes, it was a pose. It went on for years. In truth, I understood very little; I rarely felt indifferent (or impartial, or unconcerned) about anything. Maybe you’re not supposed to be fourteen when your mother gets married for the first time, and of course there were contributing factors, but that wedding weekend, on the evening before the marriage ceremony, I made a choice. I came to a very conscious decision. I would be aloof, detached—even incurious and uninterested—before I would allow myself to be condescended to. Heretofore, only the snowshoer had never condescended to me. Surely, this was a big part of the reason I wanted Elliot Barlow to marry my mom. Henceforth, I decided, I would only be myself—that is, truthful about who I was and all the things I was curious about—in my imagination. This meant, of course, that I could only be myself—this uncool and searching person—in my writing.

What a turning point that wedding weekend was—a watershed weekend for me. My grandmother had asked me to flood the birdbath to overflowing with the garden hose. I knew Nana was hell-bent on ridding her garden of the bad boyfriend’s urine, real or imagined. The silent stone sparrows were as disinclined to sing as ever. Whatever they’d seen, there would be no songs about it.

After I flooded the birdbath, I took a closer look at my mom’s white wedding dress when I moved it from the shower rod. This was when I was showering and getting dressed for the rehearsal. I could see the row of eyelets, which were loosely laced together at the back of the dress; it appeared that the laces ran along her spine, all the way from her waist to where they were tied between her shoulder blades. Even wrinkle-free and at rest on the coat hanger, it did not look like a comfortable dress. I noted that my mother’s shoulders would be bare; I worried that everybody would see the straps of her bra, but I could see there were cups for her breasts in the front of the dress. Did the dress have a kind of built-in bra? Given my newly acquired composure, my adopted insouciance, I was determined not to ask my mom how she would manage her bust in the viselike grip of such a dress.

We spoke instead of the diminishing water pressure we had noticed in our respective showers. My mother had showered and dressed for the rehearsal in her bathroom and bedroom on the second floor; Molly had prevented the girl jocks from using that bathroom. Her shower, my mom told me, had “piss-poor” water pressure, and she had run out of hot water. I was tempted to ask why the girl jocks were always showering, but I resolved to be steadfast in my indifference. I was making up myself, like a fictional character. I was creating the adult I wanted to become, which I saw as inseparable from my becoming a fiction writer. In longing for the infinite powers of detached observation, I was becoming a third-person omniscient narrator—if only in my mind.

No, I hadn’t written anything—hence the only fiction I was composing was myself. I’m not generalizing. I don’t know if other writers, when they’re growing up, go through a similar disconnect between the hesitant teenagers they are and the all-knowing narrators they seek to become.

I practiced my new persona on Henrik at the rehearsal. In my grandmother’s garden, the wedding tent was set up for the marriage ceremony—the aisle was the path between the flower beds, and the folding chairs circled the sacred spot where the vows would be exchanged. Henrik was slouched in two chairs—khakis, a blue blazer, a blue button-down shirt, the top button of the shirt unbuttoned, his loosened necktie a statement of indolence. Henrik had his lacrosse stick with him, as if it were needed at the rehearsal.

“The ring bearer is supposed to be a child, Adam—the best man is rarely the offspring of the bride,” Henrik informed me.

Never an original boy, Henrik. He had somehow managed to graduate from Exeter. In the fall, he would be attending one of those second-choice schools in the South. Henrik had based his college choice on where he wanted to play lacrosse—his foremost consideration concerned where the weather was warm in the spring. There was no spring to speak of in New Hampshire. At Exeter, at the start of our season for spring sports, the track team had to share the Thompson Cage with the baseball and lacrosse teams. Outdoors, on the playing fields, there was often snow or thawing mud.

As for wedding protocol, Henrik had been listening to Aunt Abigail and his mother—Aunt Martha’s perpetual chiming-in.

I sighed—as Nora would have sighed, I hoped. Even Henrik’s disapproval was conventional. I tried to convey this in a single sigh. “Oh, Henrik, don’t you see? I am the best man because I brought them together,” I told him. “I am the ring bearer because I’m the youngest child in the immediate family, aren’t I?” I asked him. “Even you, Henrik, treat me as if I were still a child.”

We were both stunned. Henrik had never heard me speak this way, and I didn’t recognize my tone of voice, though I liked the sound of it. The lacrosse stick slipped from Henrik’s hands, unbefitting of the tireless midfielder he imagined he was.

“I’m sorry!” Henrik suddenly said, recovering his lacrosse stick but not his jockish self-confidence. “I regret how I treated you, Adam—how I bullied you, when you were a child.” I was unprepared for my doltish cousin to be contrite. Contrition was as new to Henrik as the new me was to me. Yet I’d managed to channel Nora’s sigh. Luckily, Molly reminded me of my role in the rehearsal in progress. Henrik had distracted me, and I was holding things up.

“Is this Adam the Kid—Ray’s one and only—or is this some other Adam, up to no good?” the snowcat operator suddenly said in my ear, bending over me.

“It’s Adam the Kid, Molly,” I answered her, as I was used to answering her on the phone.

“Well, Kid, if I’m the maid of honor and you’re the best man, we have some rehearsing to do,” Molly reminded me. I’m guessing that the dick-shrinking look the trail groomer gave to Henrik and his irrelevant lacrosse stick only further contributed to Henrik’s transformative act of contrition. Molly could shrink your dick with a look.

As for wedding protocol, there were many more bridesmaids than there were groomsmen. I’m sure Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had something to say about the inappropriateness of this imbalance, but I never heard what those two had to say. One of the things I most enjoyed about my mother’s wedding was that my aunts were rendered relatively speechless—no doubt they were aghast that the wedding was happening at all, whatever the protocol.

Molly was the maid of honor, but all the girl jocks were bridesmaids. My mom had asked Nora to be a bridesmaid, but Nora declined. All Nora said about it was: “I better not leave Em alone. She gets a little strange in a crowd, when she’s not with me.”

“Then it’s best not to leave her alone, dear,” my mother told Nora. In time, I would see how Em behaved in a crowd when she wasn’t with Nora.

There were only three groomsmen. My aunts, I’m sure, were critical of the snowshoer’s choices. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha probably thought that Mr. Barlow was ingratiating himself to the Brewster family by choosing Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, but the snowshoer genuinely liked my uncles, and they liked him. I did not yet understand why Elliot chose the academy wrestling coach as his third groomsman. I didn’t know the snowshoer was a wrestler. The coach was a handsome, wavy-haired man with a winning smile. He and Elliot seemed to be good friends. The wrestling coach was broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and bull-necked. Nelly, the girl jock with the yeast infection, mistook him for the wedding bouncer.

“Do you have yeast on the brain, Nelly?” Molly asked her. “Nora and I are the wedding bouncers.” I noticed this made Nora smile, and Em clung all the closer to her.

When I asked my mom if she thought the wrestling coach was handsome, I already knew what she would say.

“Yes, but…”

“But he’s too big?” I asked her.

“Yes,” Little Ray said softly.

We got our first look at Elliot’s parents, John and Susan Barlow, at the rehearsal. “Handsome and small,” my mother whispered to me.

“You mean him?” I asked her, with a nod to John Barlow.

“I mean both of them,” my mom whispered.

We couldn’t have cared less about Nana’s opinion—namely, that the Barlows were a fine old Bostonian family. I knew my mother was infatuated with anything or anyone Austrian; there was more about the Barlows that was European than anything that spoke of Boston. I knew Elliot had distanced himself from his parents’ crime and spy novels, but the Barlows’ Foreign Service training—their diplomatic schooling and international experience—stood out. An aura of intrigue emanated from them. A mountaineering life had made them fit and permanently tanned.

Not even my aunts could have bitched about the Barlows’ embrace of wedding protocol. It was completely appropriate that the groom’s parents were hosting the rehearsal dinner at the Exeter Inn. Nor could the Barlows be blamed for Uncle Johan’s insistence in speaking German to them, or Uncle Martin’s incessant admiration (and reiteration) of the plot of The Kiss in Düsseldorf. It wasn’t the Barlows who were lecturing nonstop about Kriminalliteratur and the underappreciated brilliance of the modern espionage novel.

That I was both the best man and the ring bearer was a mere glitch in wedding protocol. The real problem was the infantile father of the bride. How could the diaper man manage to give the bride away? The phony emeritus appeared not to know that Little Ray was getting married, or even what a wedding was.

My grandmother had hired a live-in nurse. Dottie was no fool. A flinty woman my aunts’ age or older, Nurse Dottie was from New Hampshire’s neighboring state of Maine; yet the way Dottie spoke of her home state made us feel there was an ocean and a different language between us. The idea that the diaper man could fulfill his function as father of the bride was not to Dottie’s liking.

“Could a baby give a bride away, Mrs. Brewster?” the nurse had asked my grandmother. I took Dottie’s side. I was also grateful to Dottie that (in her care) the diaper baby was no longer permitted to wander the Front Street house at night; since her arrival, I hadn’t seen or smelled him in my attic bedroom, or heard his creak on the attic stairs. Yet Nana and my mom wanted the deluded diaper man to be at the wedding, whatever came of it. What for? To stand in close proximity to the wedding vows, which the infant emeritus couldn’t possibly comprehend?

As Dottie said to me at the rehearsal: “It’s not what we woulda done in Maine.” She’d managed to dress the diaper dad for the occasion—a dark suit, a white shirt with cuff links, a matching pocket handkerchief and necktie. It wasn’t Dottie’s fault that Principal Brewster put his necktie in his mouth, or stuck the tip of it up one of his nostrils—or took off his cuff links and played with them in the birdbath. In Nurse Dottie’s opinion, this harmless child’s play was to be expected. We were lucky, Dottie pointed out, that the diaper guy hadn’t taken off his diaper and played with whatever was in it.

“What I don’t like, Adam,” Dottie confided to me, “is how the poor fool keeps eyeballin’ your mother—like he don’t trust her, or somethin’—and, if looks could kill, how the diaper baby keeps lookin’ at that little groom!” I’d seen those looks—delusional, to be kind. It’s a wonder to me how we got through the rehearsal without a hitch—worse, with no forewarning of what would happen at the actual event.

The diaper man did not attend the rehearsal dinner at the Exeter Inn. The befuddled emeritus was left at the Front Street house, where Dottie could take charge of him—where we could, for the moment, forget about him. There was a tent outdoors at the Exeter Inn, too—the rehearsal dinner would be there.

It was a warm July night. I have no idea if the Exeter Inn had air-conditioning in 1956—likely not, because many of the guest-room windows were open. Before the music started in our tent, we could hear snippets of conversation and occasional laughter from the open guest-room windows of the inn.

As for the music we awaited in our tent, Nora had forewarned me that her dad and Uncle Johan were providing it. Thank goodness they weren’t performing it, but the music was their idea. Nora and I knew this was a dangerous plan: to match my uncles’ deplorable taste with the Barlows’ European refinement. Nora had predicted strippers from Boston, grinding to country music. But the musical entertainment had not arrived. Em and Nora were nowhere to be seen. Nora might have been dreading the musical entertainment, or so I imagined.

Not so. Nora told me later that they’d gone to their room in the inn because Em wanted to get a jacket or a sweater—something to put on if the weather turned cooler later, under the tent—and while they were in their room, they started fooling around. I guess one thing led to another. Suddenly we heard the keening cries of Em’s orgasm; I’d heard nothing like it, not even in foreign films with subtitles. Not even Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan thought Em’s orgasm was funny—they weren’t laughing. This was a climax that could end the world. Em’s orgasm went on and on—it just kept going. One of our waitresses under the tent appeared to be mentally disordered by how long the ecstatic screams lasted—she lost control of her tray, a water pitcher was spilled, and the waitress dropped to her knees to recover her equilibrium.

“Merciful God!” Aunt Abigail cried.

“Someone should call the police, and an ambulance,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

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.

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.

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.”

“It went over my head,” Nora said. “Did you hear a waltz?” she asked Em, who violently shook her head and squinted her eyes shut. I wish she hadn’t done that, but I no longer imagine her climaxing this way—at the frightening apex of her screams, or during the gasping inhalation all of us heard, before her toe-curling silence.

I remember Molly’s speech. It seemed impromptu, but it was incisive and short, and the snowcat operator had waited for the end of the evening. There was a moment when the zither man was quaffing a beer, when the abiding sorrow of our musical entertainment fell silent. The only one moving between the tables was that waitress who’d been brought to her knees by the keen of Em’s orgasm agonies. The waitress had somewhat recovered herself, we’d all observed. She was moving very slowly and carefully among the dinner tables, gathering up the dessert dishes and empty glasses.

At this lull in the evening’s festivities, the trail groomer stood. The clarity of her dessertspoon striking her water glass brought us to attention, briefly causing the old zither-meister to choke on his beer.

“I want to say something,” Molly told us; she put one hand on my mom’s shoulder, while pointing to the little snowshoer with her dessertspoon. “These two are meant for each other,” the night groomer said. “If there’s anyone here who thinks otherwise, you should talk to me.” Yes, Molly was used to being on a mountain in a snowcat when everyone else was asleep—she was not afraid of the dark, or of much else. She kept her hand on my mother when she spoke, and she’d pointed to the snowshoer, but the trail groomer was looking at Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, who quickly looked away. When Molly sat down, I was thinking it might be a good time to leave—knowing we had another night of reveling to the zither ahead of us. Other people were leaving.

That was when Henrik, cradling a cupcake in his lacrosse stick, took a sidearm shot at Em—an errant shot, but one with a lot of zip on it. The untouched cupcake was chocolate with a cranberry frosting. It struck the white apron of the waitress who’d already been emotionally shattered by Em’s orgasm. The zooming cupcake hit her in the area of her lower abdomen, below the tray she was carrying.

“Oh, that poor girl—she’s having a rough night,” my mother said, squeezing my hand at the clatter of the falling tray with the dessert dishes and empty glasses. The zither-meister misinterpreted the meaning of the clamor—he instantly resumed playing.

Naturally, the waitress had screamed. To the dinner guests who hadn’t seen the flying cupcake, she sounded as if she’d been shot. The waitress hadn’t seen the cupcake, either. Once more, she’d fallen to her knees—this time, she was clutching her lower abdomen. Of course the cupcake had rolled away, but the cranberry frosting was prominent on the waitress’s white apron. The dark-red, sticky stuff was smeared on the waitress’s hands. She may have thought it was blood.

What I said to Nora, when more people were leaving, was not intended to be unkind. Yes, now I know it was thoughtless of me not to consider how my remark might be misunderstood by Em. “After a night like this,” I said to Nora, with Em hugging her, “it’s hard to imagine that the wedding won’t be an anticlimax.” Em responded with another scary inhalation.

“Merciful God!” Aunt Abigail was soon crying, again.

“Someone should call the police, and an ambulance,” Aunt Martha once more chimed in.

As before, given the hysteria at hand, it was difficult to know if my aunts were anxious about the fallen waitress—now wailing to herself in a fetal position—or if they were more concerned for Em’s fragile state of mind. Em had dissolved into tears—she was sobbing inconsolably in Nora’s arms.

For my inadvertent role in making Em unhappy, I felt very sorry. Nora knew I hadn’t meant anything judgmental by my anticlimax remark. What did I know about female orgasms? At fourteen—actually, at any age—I would never have judged Em for hers. But that’s how it was. This is what happened that night at the Exeter Inn, and it was only the rehearsal dinner.