Rebecca’s grandmother, Esther Gottesfeld, had lived for the past twenty years in the West Village Jewish Home, which was not too far from where Esther had lived for forty-five years before that, in a small third-floor walk-up apartment on Bleecker Street. Rebecca had grown up there, after her parents died when she was eight. Esther had managed on her own until she was eighty-six and the stairs had become a serious problem with her arthritic knees, not to mention the crack addicts sleeping in her lobby, though they didn’t bother her as much as they concerned Rebecca. (“They’re just looking for a warm, safe place, and who isn’t?” Esther had shrugged, though even she was not so thrilled about the powerful stench of urine in the corner of the lobby by the mailboxes.)

The Jewish Home was also just a few blocks from George’s loft on Tenth Street, so Rebecca wanted to let him know that, unexpectedly for a Thursday, she would be taking the train into the city to spend the night. She hoped he would be free to have dinner with her. She hoped he would be in a mood to go to a restaurant. But if not, not. She knew she wouldn’t have to ask him to go with her to Esther’s bedside. He adored her grandmother, who adored him back. He had probably seen Esther more recently than had Rebecca, as he often dropped in for a quick visit, which always perked Esther right up.

“A very talented young man,” Esther would always boast to the nursing staff and any of her hallway neighbors who happened to be in range when George came to call. He often sang to her—strange, scatty renditions of his works in progress, which she tolerated with a certain amount of interest, or show tunes from the thirties, which made her face light up as she hummed along. In the stale, linoleumed social room down the hall, there was a horribly out-of-tune piano, with a broken sostenuto pedal and several keys missing, like bad teeth, their ivory veneers. The room was used mainly by the bridge and poker crowd, as well as the illicit smokers, residents and staff alike, who congregated by an open window down at one end, and sometimes he played for her there, which always drew a small crowd of residents and staff.

“Talented! Ach, like you wouldn’t believe. A Mendelssohn. Like two Mendelssohns.”

Rebecca and George had met because of Esther. It was now five years since George’s beloved great-aunt Molly died, just short of her eighty-sixth birthday. A sweet-faced tiny woman who stood well under five feet in her prime, Molly Rozencweig had been resident in the Jewish Home for decades—ever since the death of her equally tiny husband, Sol Rozencweig—plagued all her life by the effects of the polio that had struck the summer she was eight. (Molly got sick first, but her little sister Dora, then six, had come down with a more severe case and died overnight. Their older sister, George’s grandmother Eva, had been spared entirely.)