“My father wrote ‘Blue Moon,’” she announced in her freshman dormitory at Skidmore College in 1965. She was remembering the one and only exchange about “Blue Moon” that she ever had with him, a conversation when she was 9 or 10, or maybe 11.

“You wrote ‘Blue Moon,’ didn’t you?” she asked.

She recalled that he did not say no, but he did not say yes, either. His reply was, “Who told you that?”

She said she “mumbled something about having heard the stories.”

He then told the story his way: He would go speed-skate racing on a frozen pond — he still had the skates when Ms. Gallese was a child, and he often took her and a sister skating with a cousin. That night in 1930 or 1931, he said, “the moon reflected blue on the ice.” She said he formed a circle with his hands, like the moon.

That was it, the end of the story. He said nothing about Rodgers, Hart, a Tin Pan Alley go-between or a lawsuit.

Uncle Dom said that Rodgers and Hart had called Mr. Roman offering to settle for $1,200. As Ms. Gallese pieced the story together, Mr. Roman took the money but did not tell Uncle Chris, who became furious when he heard that “Blue Moon” had rung up $75,000 worth of sheet music sales in the first year after it was published, with Rodgers and Hart listed in the credits.