On January 28, 1918, sitting beside his annoyed wife, listening to Amelita Galli-Curci sing the Ombra leggiera—the “Shadow Song”—the voice of the music spoke to Avrum, and the power to wish, to dream, was released in him and he became another man, a man that people would call crazy and an old fool preoccupied with romantic nonsense.

When he spoke of that night—as he often did during the thirty-eight years I knew him—it was always as though he were living it for the first time, as though the experience were something that had occurred only hours earlier.

It was a cold night, he remembered, a night whipped with snow and sheets of rain and wind that howled out of the lungs of Manhattan skyscrapers. After the performance, standing outside the theater, with his wife quarreling about the thinness of her winter coat, Avrum heard the voice of the music again. The voice ordered him to walk away, and he did, leaving his wife shouting angrily at him as passersby shook their heads in disgust.

Avrum did not return home that night. He wandered the streets dazed, with the echo of Amelita Galli-Curci’s magnificent voice ringing joyfully in his memory. Twenty-four curtain calls for the “Shadow Song,” he vowed emphatically when he told the story. He had counted them. And sixty for the final curtain. Yes, sixty. And Geraldine Farrar, the great prima donna, had stood in her seat in the theater and cheered.

“And my wife, my wife. Do you know what she said?” Avrum would hiss. “She said, ‘So much money for such squealing.’ ” And then he would add, in a bellowing of anger, “She would not stand for the ovations.”

In the morning, at sunrise, taking coffee in a small coffee shop, Avrum read the reviews from newspapers left on tables by other readers. The critic from the Times had written: “The voice that this shouting audience heard for the first time is one of those voices that ‘float.’ At the end of its principal demonstration last night it wasn’t a woman’s voice but a bird’s swelling throat…”

After his coffee, Avrum folded the newspapers under his arm and went home. Marina had left early for the bakery where she worked. She had placed a note on the kitchen table against the sugar dish: Where did you go? What did I do? Avrum tore the note in half and went into the bedroom and packed his belongings into two suitcases and left.

It was what he had to do, he explained. It was what the voice of the music told him to do.