Wilma says with a chuckle that it’s one way of solving the problem Catholic women have.

Marya asks, “What is the problem Catholic women have?”

“Wait until you’re married,” Wilma says. “Then you’ll know.”

TALENTS? MARYA WONDERS, hearing that rough hoarse lightly jeering voice. Is he sincere, or simply trying to be kind? As a Knauer, as a Canal Road girl, Marya is as accustomed to people being kind as she is to their being nasty. But it never rings quite as true.

“WHAT EXACTLY DO you do there?” Wilma inquires, meaning St. Joseph’s, meaning room 411. Marya tells her, quietly, with pride, that she is assisting Father Shearing with his literary work. She is in fact his “assistant”—he speaks of her to others in those terms.

Wilma asks if the work is hard. How many hours a week, approximately.

Is he paying her? or the diocese? Is the diocese paying her?

Marya, offended, says she is doing it because she wants to. Father Shearing can hold a pen (more or less) but he can’t write at the present time; his handwriting is indecipherable. So she’s helping him out. In any case she already has a job, hasn’t she, at Cappy’s.

“Yes, but they pay you for that job, don’t they,” Wilma says, sucking at her cigarette with a certain unmistakable zest, edging toward a fight.

But Marya, the new Marya, Marya who has converted to Catholicism and is even now wearing a dime-sized St. Christopher’s medal around her neck, hidden beneath her clothes, Marya can’t be drawn in that direction. She says in her new calm sweet maddening voice, “You wouldn’t understand.”

BUT SHE IS beginning to feel exhaustion beforehand, running up the stairs to the fourth floor of St. Joseph’s, settling herself into that hard-backed chair beside Father’s bed. Her head rings at virtually any time with his droning insistent words; the rosy underside of her eyelids seems to be imprinted with his gaunt face, his thin-lipped smile. “Are you ready, Marya? Shall we begin? I’ve been waiting. . . .”