Once the piece was recorded, first by the Tokyo but subsequently by several different string quartets, so many women claimed that they had gone into labor soon after listening to the music that many midwives and obstetricians routinely began to provide their patients with a Parturition CD at thirty-eight weeks, once the cervix was noted as ripe and beginning to soften. Parturition stories ran in newspapers and magazines, and there were endless interviews on television and radio, throughout which George kept pointing out that all pregnant women go into labor and have babies after forty weeks of pregnancy, regardless of the music they hear, although he certainly didn’t mind if these women had found his music helpful to the process. His modesty and logical insistence on crediting the ordinary course of human biology and not the music only enhanced the legend.

Even before the success of the quartet, George had continued to explore all sorts of formations found in nature for their musical possibilities, especially genetic codes and cell structures. Now the public eagerly waited for the next composition, and the next, which was a new kind of pressure, but it meant that whenever he deemed any composition finished, there were performers waiting to play and record the work. The danger, had he been temperamentally different, was that it could have meant a constant temptation to declare a piece finished far too soon, but George wasn’t constitutionally capable of persuading himself that a work was finished when it had reached a difficult stage of development or when he was bored and no longer sufficiently challenged by its newness.

Sometimes his work was only a playful riff, as when Rebecca’s naturopath friend Sharon gave George some echinacea capsules to palliate symptoms of a terrible, plaguing head cold, and he was inspired to arrange a soothing and strangely familiar (the way a half-remembered dream has strangely familiar elements that slip just beyond the reach of your conscious mind) flute sequence based on the amino acids of echinacea. The James Galway recording of Echinacea Serenade soon became standard background music in thousands of holistic healing centers and treatment rooms of naturopaths, acupuncturists, and chiropractors around the world. It wasn’t George’s best work, but it was simple, people just loved it, and it became the Botkin standard, the opening diminished-fifth interval making it instantly recognizable in two notes.

In the winter of 1986 George’s best friend, Stark Whitely, a jazz musician with many appealing obsessions (among them Scottish history, presidential kitsch, repudiated members of the royal families of Europe, Jayne Mansfield, Krazy Kat, chutneys of the world, and Bix Beiderbecke) whom he first encountered in a tedious modern German history class during their sophomore year at Yale, told George and Rebecca that he had lymphosarcoma and had been given a pretty grim prognosis.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Stark said. The three of them were at Pepe’s Pizza in New Haven, a favorite, worth the chronic lines out the door. Stark was a large man, and though he was big and soft and had all sorts of unhealthy habits, he was robust in his own foppish way, and it seemed ludicrous to think that he had a disease that could kill him. “I thought I dodged a bullet when I tested negative after Steve got sick four years ago,” he said. “When every time I would see a different friend with new KS lesions, I would feel so lucky. And now I’ve got this. Everyone will assume I died of AIDS, won’t they?”