FATHER SHEARING IS transferred in early March to a clinic in New York City; he disappears from Innisfail and from Marya’s life overnight.

He lives on for months, months. The death doesn’t occur until autumn, the funeral services are in a distant part of the state, a number of parishioners from St. Anne’s make the trip but Marya Knauer does not. She has been thinking of him as dead for some time, evidently. She has hardened her heart.

It excites a great deal of comment in the parish that Father Shearing has willed a Swiss watch to Marya Knauer—a watch like that must be expensive, after all, worth hundreds of dollars (so people speculate, complain); and in any case what can she do with it?—it’s a man’s watch.

Five

FIVE

The summer after Marya’s high school graduation, the summer of the going-away party, Emmett Schroeder began suddenly to say, “We love each other, we should get married, shouldn’t we get married?”—in his low rapid faintly embarrassed voice that made Marya think uneasily that he was angry with her. “We love each other, don’t we? we should get married, then.”

It had the air of an argument, an old quarrel. We love each other, we should get married.

The surprise of Emmett’s interest, the prevailing miracle of it, did not fail to astonish Marya. That Emmett Schroeder should want to get married. That Emmett Schroeder should want to marry her. (For Marya was a Knauer, after all. No matter how she prided herself on being different, superior. And she’d made a spectacle of herself—so it was generally thought—giving that spirited valedictory address at the high school, reciting a memorized speech in a quavering voice that, emblazoned with quotations from Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and Dostoyevsky and Teilhard de Chardin, left nearly everyone in the audience baffled and resentful. Marya Knauer! so people murmured, disapproving, annoyed. Who does she think she is, putting on airs? talking like that in public?)

Emmett Schroeder must have been as offended by that valedictory speech as anyone. For days afterward he didn’t call and Marya thought wildly that she’d lost him—as she was always losing friends, this past year in particular. Everyone is proud of you, Marya, her teachers said, because she was the only senior in Innisfail to win a state merit scholarship (and a matching “need” scholarship from the State University at Port Oriskany), and she’d won four of the nine awards presented to graduating seniors at commencement; but Marya knew that wasn’t true. Aloud she said, Thank you. Secretly she said, Like hell. They hate me, they’re jealous of me.