“The reason I played so slowly was because I couldn’t read the notes any faster,” he joked. “Anyhow, we’d better get going.”

The funeral home was on Ninety-sixth Street, just off Riverside Drive. As their cab made its laborious way uptown, Alvirah reflected on her friends Bessie and Kate Durkin. She had known Bessie and Kate for many years. Kate had worked as a salesperson in Macy’s, and Bessie had been the live-in housekeeper for a retired judge and his ailing wife.

When the judge’s wife died, Bessie had handed in her resignation, saying she could not possibly stay under the same roof with the judge without the presence of another woman.

A week later, Judge Aloysius Maher had requested her hand in marriage, and so, after sixty years of maidenhood, Bessie promptly accepted the offer. Once married, she had settled in to make his large and handsome townhouse on the Upper West Side her own.

After over forty years of marriage, and a blessedly happy one at that, Willy and Alvirah had reached the point where they typically thought about the same subject even before they discussed it. “Bessie knew just what she was doing when she quit her job,” Willy commented, his words melding seamlessly with Alvirah’s own unspoken thought. “She knew if she didn’t grab the judge before other women got their hooks into him, she didn’t stand a chance. She always treated that house as if she owned it, and it would have killed her to be booted out of it.”

“True, she loved it all right,” Alvirah agreed. “And to be fair, she kept her part of the bargain. She was a marvelous housekeeper and could cook like an angel. The judge couldn’t get to the table fast enough. You have to admit she waited on him hand and foot.”