Fruma Esther, be happy! she admonished herself. Who more than you knows how close the family had come to the brink of despair, disgrace, and financial ruin! Maybe Leah couldn’t support Yaakov as a full-time learner, but the money from her thriving internet business was at least helping to pay off the endless loans from the interest-free loan funds, taken out in desperation to make up for the loss of Zissele’s teacher’s salary after she died. The loans, financed by the tithe money from generous members of the community, were not like getting money from a faceless bank. It was from someone’s pocket, usually someone who knew you, and whom you knew well. Defaulting on such a loan was not a private, personal matter but a widely known disgrace with immediate consequences to a family’s communal standing.

Yet, despite it all, she admitted to herself that even her happiness over these good things was tinged with a strange resentment as she watched the consequences of her daughter’s tragic death slowly fade from the consciousness of her family and the community. They were going on with their lives in happiness. It was so unfair! While her love for her grandchildren and her sincere desire for their well-being sweetened the bitterness in her soul, the current rumors gave her a perverse satisfaction. No one could take her Zissele’s place.

Still, she did not look forward to the possibility of hearing something scandalous about her grandchildren’s new stepmother. Having prominently championed the match, the opprobrium would fall heavily on her as well. With a great intake of breath that made her enormous breasts heave and tremble, she buttoned her coat. True or false, the stories making the rounds must be quashed immediately and decisively, especially if they were accurate. Her own and her grandchildren’s well-being depended upon it.

As for the Torah’s many prohibitions about listening to gossip, well, permissible or forbidden, she could not very well turn a deaf ear to what was being said about her family. It was, she reasoned, like taking an ambulance on the Sabbath: a desecration of one of God’s commandments in order to preserve a life that in the future would faithfully observe many other commandments. Still, for a woman as devout as Fruma Esther, who believed herself to possess an absolute, iron-clad grip on right and wrong, it was no trifling matter. Her present moral confusion was rare, even a bit frightening. And thus, she felt she had no choice but to risk the dust of slander by talking the matter over with her dearest friend, Basha Blaustein.