The winter, fierce and prolonged, when Marya was fifteen, she went twice weekly—usually on Mondays and Thursdays, directly following school—to visit Father Clifford Shearing at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the hilly Riverside section of Innisfail. She was a sophomore in high school; she had no friends and told herself that she needed none; she was not in love with Father Shearing (that would have been a sin) but she had lavish fantasies in which the proposition was put to her that she might exchange her life for his, she might die in his place: Yes, Marya whispered, desperate and elated. Oh yes.

As it turned out, not even a blood donation was required of her.

Marya’s week centered around the visits, which had an air of the half illicit, the subversive, about them. She didn’t keep them secret from her family but she didn’t exactly tell them either. (None of the Knauers in this generation was a practicing Catholic though all of them—Marya included—had been baptized Catholic. Wilma had been baptized Methodist and said it was all a lot of bull, churches, priests and ministers, nuns stuck away in convents, low-minded people boasting that Jesus was their friend when, in Wilma’s words, He wouldn’t give them the time of day. If you needed Him He’d come to you directly or not at all. The same held true for God—didn’t it? Because He spoke out of whirlwinds and tongues of flame in the Bible, after all. When Marya informed her—tremulously, defiantly—that she had decided to become Catholic, to become Catholic really, Wilma had stared at her as if she’d been personally betrayed. “Now what do you want to do that for . . . ?” Wilma asked faintly.)

So Marya rarely spoke of the visits to Father Shearing. She would not have wanted to be quizzed about his health, his condition—whether he was “making progress” after his operation or not. It was hateful enough if, in the corridor outside his room, or in the elevator, she found herself trapped in a conversation with one or another of Father’s parishioners: had he lost more weight?—was that new medication affecting his eyesight?—would there be a second operation, did anyone know?—but wasn’t the man a model for all to look up to: wasn’t he a saint?

Marya repeated certain exchanges to Father Shearing, offering up little nuggets, gems, for his amusement. “They’re saying now that you are a saint,” she told him daringly, and he laughed harshly, and began to cough, and said, “Will I be offered any choice?”

It was always a mild shock to see him in bed; in white; graying frizzy curls at the V of his hospital gown, forearms bare, flesh pale and bruised and needle-pricked, the elegant white collar gone; a certain haggard look about his face. He was only in his late thirties and too young for any of this: too vigorous, too well-liked, too good-humored. Wasn’t a sense of humor a protection against such bad luck . . . ? And what if it began to shade into bitterness, resentment . . . ?