When Monsignor says Mass and not his young assistant, Shearing, Marya tells herself that she believes just the same: it’s the same thrill of certitude, of ecstasy, when the wafer is pressed onto her tongue. No difference. How could there be any difference? . . . all are united in Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Marya keeps her rosary of clear blue plastic beads beneath her pillow, has affixed an ivory crucifix to her wall, wears a small St. Christopher’s medal (which leaves tarnish marks on her skin) on a silver chain around her neck. She has a prayer book with a mother-of-pearl cover and pale crimson endpapers; she even has a pair of white cotton gloves with an eyelet design at the knuckles. Each Sunday while the Knauer household sleeps Marya prides herself in waking early—it’s pitch-black these winter days—and trudging down the road to the pike, where she catches a ride to town, to eight o’clock Mass at St. Anne’s, with the Dietzes. (Marya no longer takes Erma very seriously but doesn’t mind her chattering; she likes Erma’s parents when they don’t nag at her about Everard and Wilma and why the entire Knauer family isn’t going to Mass. . . . “Doesn’t your uncle realize how serious it is?” Mr. Dietz asks Marya, looking at her by way of the rearview mirror, “not only his own soul but the souls of his family? He’s an intelligent man, can’t he be made to realize, to realize . . . ?”)

Marya has been instructed by Father Shearing to pray for the rest of the family, which she does, though without a great deal of enthusiasm. There is very little likelihood of converting Everard, after all (“What kind of horseshit is this?” he’d once inquired, frowning over the Sunday bulletin Marya had brought home from church); Wilma thinks Catholics are “back numbers” and Catholic women in particular idiots—“Just like brood sows, having ‘all the kids God sends’ ”; Lee thinks no more of the condition of his soul than he might think, for instance, of the condition of his intellect; Davy and Joey are just little boys who cannot possibly matter (so Marya tells herself idly) to God. As for Alice—Marya has observed her eyeing the rosary, the gloves, the navy blue straw hat Marya wears in warm months and the navy blue woolen hat she wears in cold months, and is halfway worried that Alice will one day want to convert too. Much of the value of Marya’s being Catholic, after all, has to do with the fact that the rest of the Knauers are not.