MARYA DAYDREAMS IN school, filling the margins of her notebooks with angular heraldic figures, sketching out stories and miniature plays, heated exchanges of dialogue (bodiless, characterless) pages long. For weeks it is so difficult to think of Father Shearing as the man in the hospital—that man, that particular hospital room—that she doesn’t think of him at all in that situation: she thinks of him, sees him in her mind’s eye, as the priest who welcomed her into the rectory office that afternoon, disconcerting her with his handshake . . . as if it were a commonplace in Innisfail, or out along the Canal Road, for adult men to shake hands with someone Marya’s age. (In fact adult men in Marya’s world rarely shook hands with one another. They would have been puzzled, embarrassed. Handshaking, like certain other gestures of camaraderie—equality?—belonged to another class entirely.) She draws priest figures in her notebook; tries, and fails, to reproduce Father Shearing’s face; sits slouched and discontent, her mind drifting free, circling about an image of a man paralyzed in a state between sleep and waking, a spirit trapped in a body, yearning for its freedom. So lost is she in her reverie, so evidently distressed, one of her teachers calls upon her suddenly, half annoyed, joking, “Marya, wake up. The bell is going to ring in another minute and you won’t want to be left behind.”

MARYA IS IN her glory through much of February, transcribing Father Shearing’s thoughts. He has abandoned his essay on Teilhard in the interests of something more ambitious, a far longer work, unsystematic, wayward, springing from Van Dorne’s study of Hegel but ultimately larger, more spacious; a meditation that will reveal its significance only at the end. The treatments, the intense medical attention, must be doing him some good: he speaks in inspired rushes, sometimes for minutes at a time, leaving Marya quite astonished. Maréchal’s challenge to Thomistic metaphysics. . . . Barth on Hegel: that great question mark, that great disappointment, yet also a great promise. . . . Künstler’s vision of the ontic perspective and the God-world-happening, a phenomenon of God’s free grace. . . . Marya sits hunched over her notebook, her hair in her eyes, writing as quickly as she can. These are unique sessions, she is fairly glowing with excitement, she sees now that many of her worries were unfounded. Father has told the nurses to keep everyone else out, he’s working and doesn’t want to be disturbed.