Where had it come from? Her father, George’s grandfather Max Jacobson, had, in all likelihood, begun to develop Huntington’s symptoms before his death; they would never know for sure, because he died of a heart attack at age fifty-two. But family stories of his rages, his accident proneness, and his rapid decline in ability to manage his shoe store—which had led to rumors of secret drinking in the year before his sudden death in the stockroom of Stride Rite Shoes on Austin Street in Forest Hills—made it a likely supposition. A cousin at the funeral told the family he thought his grandfather, Max’s brother Morris, might have had the same illness, whatever it was, though at the time, no doctor had ever put a name to it. He had died in a fire, the family said at his funeral, though since then two different aunts had confided in this cousin that Morris’s death had in fact been a suicide.

Whenever George tripped or dropped something or cut himself with a paring knife that skidded off an apple, he was reminded of his mother’s early, inexplicable symptoms—she had for years blamed herself for her increasing clumsiness, especially in the kitchen—and he wondered if this was the beginning, if it was all going to start slipping away, quite literally, from that moment on.

Meanwhile, he had far too many commissions hanging over him for his brilliantly economical little musical portraits based on an individual’s DNA. It had become a problem. The first one had caught him by surprise, the year after Stark’s Requiem was recorded, when Ted Turner had phoned to ask him if he would be willing to compose a Ted Turner concerto.

“I can have my DNA profile delivered to you in an hour,” Turner added. “Name your price.”

“Um,” George had replied, not quite certain that he wasn’t the butt of a practical joke that would soon reveal itself.

“For full orchestra,” Turner had added. “I loves me some violins.”

“A million dollars?” George ventured.

“Done. My lawyers will draw up a contract,” Turner had replied.

It was insane. When in 1988 the piece was premiered, ridiculously, in Los Angeles, conducted by James Levine, it was news everywhere. There was a profile in The New Yorker, an article in Vogue, another in The New York Times Magazine, and then there was the famous Letterman appearance, and after that more narcissistic rich people than he knew existed on earth were all clamoring to commission a Botkin musical portrait. Trump, of course. Soros. Various members of the Goulandris family. A lot of absurdly wealthy athletes with absolutely no familiarity with classical forms of music (one seven-foot basketball player referred to having enjoyed the “prinkle-prankle music they played when the little mice ran around” during the vintage Saturday morning cartoons he viewed in his childhood). A Saudi family wanted a symphony representing the DNA of fourteen family members, all of them men, and was willing to pay ten million dollars for it.