Separate Lives

Mary Beth (not her real name) and I grew up together. Our mothers were childhood friends. Mary Beth’s mother died when she was an infant; she and her older sister lived with their grandparents in a big, two-story frame house a few blocks from my grandmother’s home.

Our families were staunch members of College Avenue Baptist (a real church) in Fort Worth, Texas. The exterior of the church, with tall Corinthian columns, looked like a Roman temple. Inside it was a plain, square box with ugly stained glass windows, oblong panels in garish orange and acid green. Many years later I visited a village in Turkey and realized that, in avoiding anything that might resemble a Catholic Church, these Texas Baptist built something which resembled a mosque.

Mary Beth and I were in the same Sunday School class as far back as I can remember. After Sunday School came the long church “service,” where I saw the back of Mary Beth’s head as she sat with her grandparents and sister a few rows ahead of the pew where I sat with my grandmother, my parents, and my little brothers. Facing us across the front of the auditorium, where traditional Christian churches have an altar, we saw three rows of fellow Baptists sitting in the choir. I’ll always remember one choir member, sitting in the center of the front row, Mrs. Henderson, with her purple hair. Above and behind the choir was the baptismal with its painting of a stream which seemed to flow into the tank. I thought it represented the River Jordan.

Like every child, I believed what my parents told me, just as I believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Every Sunday the preacher told me I must “believe and be baptized” in order to be “saved.” As a nine-year-old I remember sobbing on Mary Beth’s shoulder that I could not feel Jesus “in my heart” but was afraid I would go to Hell if I was not baptized,. I made my “confession of faith” and was dunked in the tank behind the choir. As I came out up out of the water, the lights went out. Was God showing disapproval of me by plunging the whole church into darkness? No. The lights were always shut off at baptisms to prevent men and boys from the lascivious sight of young female bodies, wet in clinging baptismal robes as they emerged from being blessed “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

As a teenager I began to doubt that mortal sins, according to the Baptist lexicon, were dancing, drinking alcohol, playing cards, and going to movies on Sunday. Where was loving your neighbor as yourself? An unrepentant sinner, I danced, even with Methodists and Presbyterians. A Christmas our family always drank eggnog in little glass cups in which my grandmother poured a generous shot of bourbon. One Sunday, when a movie I especially wanted to see was playing, as I surreptitiously approached the neighborhood theater, I caught our church’s choir director buying a ticket. As for card playing, the same preacher, who stood up in the pulpit on Sunday proclaiming, “A deck of cards is the Devil’s prayer book,” came to our house on Tuesday night and played dominoes with the deacons.

Mary Beth and I attended the same schools, but she was always a year ahead of me. After high school, she went to Texas State College for Women in Denton. When summer came, she walked over to our house, bringing her college annual to show me the advantages of attending the all-girls school. She urged me to go to TSCW, too. And I did. The first Sunday after I enrolled, Mary Beth came to my freshman dormitory and took me with her to the First Baptist Church in Denton.

She let me go to church with her a couple of times. Then one day she came to my dorm and told me gently that I should “find my own friends.” She was not going to let me hang onto her like a puppy dog on a leash. I realized later – much later – that she had a Baptist boy friend who attended North Texas, the coed college on the other side of town.

Forcing me to find my own way was the best thing she could have done for me. One day, as I walked to church alone, I passed a Presbyterian Church. The service was just beginning. Impulsively I went in and sat on a back pew. I enjoyed the service. The following summer I went to Texas Tech in Lubbock and attended a nearby Methodist Church all summer. Thus began an interest in other forms of worship and other religions which continues. Last year friends took me to the magnificent Hindu Temple in the Houston area.

At college I took courses in history, economics, and government, where I learned to read and think analytically and critically. I also took courses in the Bible. As a child, “Bible study” meant reading a few verses from the King James translation and talking about them. God said to Moses, “Take a chisel and carve out the words I’m going to dictate to you.” In English, of course. Now I learned about scholarly studies of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament and how both books were assembled from various sources at various times.

I also took a course in comparative religions. I found out that Christians do not have a monopoly on virtue. All religions have a version of the Golden Rule. There is much to be learned from studying Buddhism. The teachings of Mohammed, too.

After I graduated – the year after Mary Beth – I worked for a few years at the Fort Worth Press, before marrying a kid from Chicago, an 22-year-old airman stationed at Carswell Air Force Base. That started the journey which led to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, and travels around the World. Every where I learned something I did not know from even from my extensive reading. Finally, three years ago, I came back to Texas and this house in Garland.

After college Mary Beth married the sweetheart she met at Denton’s First Baptist Church. They became Baptist missionaries in Spain. They spent the rest of their adult lives trying to show Spanish Catholics the error of their ways. In three trips abroad, I spent weeks traveling in Spain but never even looked for their Baptist church. Through the years I heard about their missionary efforts from my mother, who remained a devout Baptist her entire life. Until recently the last I heard Mary Beth and her husband retired and were living in Virginia.

Last month I went to a luncheon with other 80-year-old women who graduated from what is now Texas Woman’s University in 1950. The ladies across the table started talking about the boys they remembered who attended the coed college across town, now North Texas University.

“I remember Bill Thompson (not his real name),” one said.
“He died,” another said.
“What was his wife’s name?”
“Mary,” another prompted.
“Mary Beth!” I said. “I grew up with her.”
“Did you know she is living in Fort Worth now?”

How strange. We grew up together. Attended the same schools from kindergarten through college. Then our lives took such divergent courses. Yet here we are, 80-year-old widows, and back where we started.

Yul Brenner, as the ruler of Siam in The King and I, said, “It’s a puzzlement.”