“We’re alive,” Rebecca murmured. “And I’m starved.”

“It’s the best thing to do after a funeral,” George whispered into her neck.

A few weeks later, when Rebecca and George had both pretty much forgotten about Edwina Whitely’s promise, Stark’s alto saxophone arrived by UPS. George had at that moment become preoccupied with a little lullaby inspired by the molecular structure of valerian (though he would soon abandon it in favor of a paradoxically jazzier yet effectively soporific lullaby based on the patterns of certain neurotransmitters and endorphin receptors). The saxophone sat untouched in a corner of George’s loft for a couple of months, and then Rebecca had a thought.

Without mentioning it to George, she took the mouthpiece away with her one Sunday evening, carefully bagged. She brought it to work the next morning and asked one of the lab techs who liked her if he could get a DNA sample good enough for a complete off-the-books profile, using the new PCR amplification technique. “What do you think this is, toots, a private forensics lab?” he had complained, but in fact he could and he did.

When Rebecca arrived at George’s loft the next Friday evening, she presented him with the printout of Stark Whitely’s DNA profile. George hardly ate or slept for the next forty-eight hours, their weekend plans abandoned, until he had finished the outline of the opening for Requiem for Stark Whitely, his famous first individual portrait composition and the only one composed for piano, alto saxophone, and cello. He completed it within the month, and it was performed in a student workshop at Yale that autumn by three of the students who had played at Stark’s memorial service.

Fortuitously, Ornette Coleman was visiting on campus and sat in on the workshop. His performance of the Requiem at a jazz festival in Montreal the following spring was the public debut of the piece, and then came the Miles Davis recording that made it truly famous the following year.

To hear that recording is to feel that you knew Stark Whitely and you knew the way he played his saxophone—the clever quote from his quirky rendition of “Satin Doll” in the opening bars made sure of that—but beyond that, well beyond that, you knew the resonance and timbre of Stark Whitely’s voice, the force of his handshake, the smell of his hair after a day at the beach; you knew how he liked to drown his pancakes in maple syrup and that he was partial to nasty boys with tattoos who took his money, as well as to rebellious debutantes who would nevertheless end up just like their mothers; and you knew the sound of his footsteps on the stairs when he was growing up in a small town in North Carolina. To hear this music was to know that you missed, you desperately, deeply missed with all your heart, the way he held his knife, his love of P. G. Wodehouse and Thomas Hardy, his fondness for bow ties, the way he danced ’til three—and to hear this music was to know that you loved this man, you really loved him (and you loved George Botkin too, for writing the piece), and you would mourn Stark Whitely every day for the rest of your life. George Botkin won a MacArthur the following year.