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?)

In any case God saw the inner person, the real Marya Knauer, and would not judge her crudely, as her classmates did. That she was a “Knauer” first of all—that she lived in the backcountry, off the Innisfail Pike, on the unpaved Canal Road—that something mysterious had happened not only to one of her parents but to both: all these factors, disreputable enough in the human world, and, in the febrile little world of the Innisfail Senior High School, drawing frank pity and scorn, must serve to elevate her in God’s judgment, if He was a just God. To be born a second time, to have the sins of one’s parents washed away, to be free of personal history, at least for a space of time. . . . To contemplate the possibility (wild, terrifying) of declaring an actual vocation in the Church. . . .