Was she alive or dead; was she living anywhere in the state; had there ever been any truth to the rumor (if what Wilma had said could constitute “rumor”) that she’d spent some time in prison . . . ? Perhaps she was in prison still. Or in a mental hospital.

The mental hospital was altogether likely, Marya thought. She recalled the alcoholic stupors, the drunken rages, the weeping, something mad and terrifying about a wildflower growing alongside the road (Queen Anne’s lace? the very look of it made Marya sick with apprehension to this day). Yes, the mental hospital was likely. Vera Sanjek disheveled and fat, toothless, incontinent, chattering away at the walls or mute, mute as stone: which would it be? She was in her early fifties by now. Not old. Not at all old. But in the mental hospital she would have aged grotesquely. Marya saw her dumpy crouched figure, the breasts straining against her blouse (plain hospital issue? something of her own, missing one or two buttons?), Marya saw the narrow suspicious eyes, the lips bright with spittle. This is your daughter Marya, Mrs. Knauer, one of the attendants would say, and Marya, foolish smiling trembling Marya, would step forward and extend her hand and . . .

But the absurd vision faded. Marya banished it, forgot it. She only thought of her mother (even the expression “mother” was forced) in weak moods, when she clearly wasn’t herself.

THESE DAYS, MARYA thought, she often wasn’t herself. The very question of “self” intrigued her. (For if she could raise her emotional confusion to a philosophical plane, might she not be redeemed? It was an old, old tradition.)

In classic habits of thinking, essence preceded existence: what one does follows from what one is. In America, however, the reverse seemed more likely, and more rewarding: what one is follows directly from what one does (“Doing determines being,” as William James succinctly observed). So Marya immersed herself in activities. She moved to another apartment not unlike her previous apartment but in a quieter neighborhood, along a leafy stretch of West 11th Street; she took on an assignment for The New York Times Magazine, to do an article (“analytical but with a popular slant”) on radical French feminism; she agreed to give six evening lectures at the New School, on contemporary feminist thought in general, though she knew beforehand that the experience would be exhausting. In any case Eric Nichols would have approved.