“I’m fine.” He patted her hand. “Really, I’m fine. Are you all right?”

Frieda pulled out a tissue from her handbag and dried her cheeks. “Akiva, do you know why I married the man I did?”

Decker shook his head.

Frieda said, “There is a custom in our religion called a pid’yon haben—redemption of the firstborn. Are you familiar with it?”

Decker said he was. It was based upon the final plague inflicted on the Egyptians by God, the killing of the firstborn males. A plague of revenge wrought by God because the Egyptian Pharaoh had ordered every firstborn Jewish male to be drowned in the river Nile.

Firstborn Jewish males were considered to belong to God. A family redeemed its son in a ceremony called pid’yon haben. Not an elaborate rite. When the baby was thirty days old, the family gave a kohen a token gift and the kohen—acting as an agent of God—gave the son back to the family.

“So you know,” Frieda said, “that Jewish families do this ceremony except for those families belonging to the tribe of Levi, which includes the kohanim, the priests. Levi’im are not required to redeem their sons, because the Levi’im were never slaves in Egypt.”

Decker nodded.

Frieda said, “I never married your…biological father civilly, but we were considered married according to Jewish law. So when we parted, I was given a religious divorce. Divorced women cannot marry a kohen, a priest. But they can marry men from the tribe of Levi. My father insisted I marry a Levi so if my firstborn with my new husband happened to be a boy, I would not be required to do a pid’yon haben and defile the ceremony. Alter Levine was not my heartthrob, Akiva. But Alter was a gentle man who loved me very much. And Alter was a Levi. So I married him.”

She shrugged.

No one spoke for a moment.

Finally, Decker said, “How did you explain away the divorce?”

“Oh, that wasn’t hard,” Frieda said. “I simply told him that I had been engaged before, had made tenoiyim—a marriage contract—with another boy before him. Then we broke off the engagement. According to Jewish law, if a couple makes tenoiyim and breaks up, they must be religiously divorced whether they marry or not. To this day, Alter still thinks he married an untouched woman. And I am too cowardly to correct his impression.”

Decker said, “That’s not cowardice at all, Mrs. Levine. That’s shalom bayis—keeping peace in the house. What would be the point? I’m sure you’ve been a wonderful wife, you’ve raised a wonderful family together. What’s the difference?”