One rain-darkened afternoon when Marya was his only visitor, he said suddenly, “What we’re going to have to do, Marya, is arrange some sort of abduction. ‘Roman Catholic Priest Spirited Away from Hospital.’ A secret plot. A conspiracy. And someone else can take my place in this damned bed.” The remark was meant to be jocular, half teasing, but something was wrong: the tone was flat, the words slurred. It must have been the effect of the drugs they were giving him, Marya thought. It wasn’t him. But she laughed just the same.

THIS WAS THE long arduous winter when Marya, who knew herself generally disliked below (she was rude, she was haughty and impatient, why couldn’t she help herself?), reasoned that she might have a chance with God. With Jesus Christ. With Mary most of all: Mary was a comfort, a human woman elevated to sainthood but still human, and not (so Marya supposed) inordinately bright. She loved the virtuous and the sinful alike, it was not her business to measure, to judge, to monitor thoughts and actions on earth. . . . Such intellectual vigilance belonged to men; to the male God and His Only Begotten Son.

Though Marya usually managed to impress and to please men—men of a certain type; and not often women.

Who made the world? the simple catechism began—God made the world, the catechism answered itself; and why did God make man?—to know, love, and serve Him in this world, and to dwell with Him in the next. It was all very clear. It was all very straightforward, uncontaminated by irony. (Irony, being sarcastic, being in Wilma’s words “sour-mouthed”—these were Marya’s most conspicuous defects. But she was struggling to overcome them. She had overcome them, generally.) Marya liked it that God had promised to be fair and just and merciful, punishing sin and rewarding virtue in keeping with the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church.

She liked it too that God cared not at all for outward appearances. He saw directly into the heart, the soul. He was the heart, the soul, even the body of man. . . . He dwelt within as sheer spirit and yet body. . . . (So Father Shearing had tried to explain to his catechism class at St. Anne’s Cathedral. Spirit and body were one; Christ was man; the Eucharist—which they would one day soon be privileged to take, at Holy Communion—was both a wafer and the very body of Christ. This is my body and this is my blood. Did they understand? No? Yes? Then why did they look so puzzled? There were nine young people in the class—six girls and three boys—and apart from Marya they were subdued, slow to respond, vaguely anxious. They were in fact so docile that they sometimes forgot even to nod in agreement with what they were being told. And it struck them as faintly scandalous that Marya should laugh so loudly at Father Shearing’s remarks when he gave every indication of speaking seriously, even solemnly. . . . It pleased Marya to shine even in that lusterless context; and if belief in the Catholic cosmology was a challenge to her natural sense of doubt, wasn’t Marya the very person to meet such a challenge?)