Sammy’s disappearance back beneath the water’s depths seemed to prompt Jason to speak. “I guess I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to feel about them,” he said, in a voice that sounded resigned. “I mean, I see one of these guys on a bus with a hat and a nice long beard, and I know I’m supposed to be thinking to myself, Yes, you are my brother, we stood at Mount Sinai together. Or something like that. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead I just think to myself, Why are you dressed like you’re Amish?”

Leora opened her mouth to begin her Jewish tutor’s speech, about how Hassidic dress derived from the style of seventeenth-century Polish nobles, about the code of dress for modesty that explained the long skirts and sleeves, but impatience had grabbed Jason by the neck. “And why,” he asked, his voice suddenly rising to a throaty gurgle, “do they make me feel, since I’m Jewish and they’re Jewish, but I’m not Super-Duper Jew like they are, that everything I’m doing in my life is totally wrong?”

Leora stared at him for a minute, and behind his jittery blue eyes she thought for a moment that she could actually see the undried clay of the person who was Jason, being pulled and stretched and hammered until it almost fractured in two. She took his hands in hers. “Jason, you’ve donated your vital organs, including your heart and your brain, to a Jewish nursing home. Believe me, you’re not doing anything wrong.”

Jason’s jittering eyes paused and looked at hers, as if plunging into cleansing waters. And then he kissed her for so long that the Hassidim had to try not to stare.

MOST OF THE TIME, the clay that forms a young person’s life is kneaded and prodded slowly, gradually, by him and by others, until a shape is coaxed out of it, and it is only after many years, long after the clay has hardened, that one can go back and trace the polished surface, searching for the fingerprints of those who helped to mold it long ago. But sometimes, often by accident, a dent will be made so deep, in clay just beginning to dry, that no amount of prodding will cover it up again. Something like that happened to Jason one summer afternoon a few months later, and Leora knew it when he met her after their summer jobs had finished for the day, back at the East Mountain Zoo.

When she met him at the zoo’s entrance, Leora knew that something was wrong. During that summer, meeting at the zoo each day in the late, hazy summer afternoons, they had developed a routine, a daily argument about which animals to visit first. Hogs or hedgehogs? This time, though, Jason, not even stopping to smile, announced, “Let’s go look at the ocelots,” and breezed his way into the zoo. She had to race to catch up with him.