TO MY SURPRISE, not only did Mary Virginia not mind my rowdy girls punching up on her amenable boys, she welcomed it. A week later she called to invite us all to her house. “Me with boys?” she said on the phone. “Right there you know I’m going to make a fine mess of it. What do I know about boys, growing up with a sister? Boys don’t tell you one thing about themselves when you’re dating; you’re the last person they want to know anything. Husbands, you can double that. I always envied girls with brothers. They knew everything. What went on in their heads, never mind the bathroom stuff and all the unmentionable business.

“When they handed me the first one in the hospital, I said, you must have made a mistake. The worst of it is that my husband was pleased as punch. He worships the memory of his dad—he was killed in that awful ice storm of ’78. He has this image of him as this big outdoor man in boots and Stetson, his face brown as an old briefcase. So now he has these boys and he expects them to be like that. Forget it, I tell him, it’s another world now. But I can’t stand it if he’s disappointed in them. So if, you know, playing with your girls—I don’t see how you even keep up with them—toughens them up, that would be the grandest thing in the world for me, Cile.”

Her house, in the scenic part of Lake Shore off Lago Lake, had more rooms than I could count. One of those big rambling ranches with a lake view, and each room had its own bath, even the little boys’ rooms did, at their age, plus each had a big double closet and all kinds of features built in for when they were older. Everything was in these mossy colors, gray-green in one boy’s room, gray-blue in the other, and there was wall-to-wall carpet everywhere, acres of it, all looking as soft and clean as the day it was installed. In the living room there were love seats in bisque gray, brocade chairs in cream gray. The master bedroom was beige gray with a bed the size of a football field.

There was a maid, white and Swedish, silent as her footfalls on the turf, who brought us Dr. Peppers outside in a fenced yard filled with trikes, scooters, push toys of every sort, plus rocking horses and racing cars that ran on small boys’ feet.

It was March, the week of Wind Day, and there was a nice steady breeze blowing off the water. It made me think of kite flying and roller-skating, all those aimless, harmless occupations of grade school. I thought I might move in. The maid appeared with thick slices of hot banana-nut bread for us and oatmeal cookies for the children. I remember letting my breath out slowly, wondering if it would be rude to slip off and take a nap on the big beige-gray king-sized bed in that quiet and spotless, immense and private room.

The fact was, I had to keep an eye on my watch; Eben was expecting me in an hour at the church, to greet and go eat with another pastor in the synod who’d helped him get the appointment at Grace Presbyterian.

“Ruth and Martha are nice names,” Mary Virginia said to me. “Different. I mean I haven’t met one preschool female in this town who isn’t named either Sherrie Lynn or Lynn Cheryl. I mean it. Aren’t yours Bible names? I know they are; even Episcopalians read the Bible sometimes. Ruth is the one who goes with her mother-in-law to her country, ‘Whither thou goest, I will go,’ right? And Martha, that’s New Testament, Mary and Martha.”

“That’s right.” I gave her a big smile for knowing all that. Keeping to myself a very old secret, that while this was her assumption and, of course, had been Eben’s, too, my daughters’ names, to me, were those of dancers leaping free of gravity, names to grow into.

“How about Trey and Jock?” I asked her, returning her interest. “Are they nicknames?”

“Sort of. Trey is the third. He’s named for his daddy and granddaddy. Jock is named for Lila Beth’s daddy, the other granddaddy. Actually, Mr. Jarvis, who I didn’t know, was named Jochem, which I couldn’t do anything with. Nobody was ever going to say it right or spell it right. And my sister had already got our daddy’s name. So we decided on Jock. And Lila Beth likes that okay.” She looked doubtful, breaking bits off her banana-nut bread. “Your husband is Eben, is that right? That’s an unusual name.”

“Eben Tait, the original one, was a Scot clergyman, way back. He’s a namesake.”

“What do you call him, I mean his title? We say ‘rector,’ Episcopalians. I mean I know you never call them ‘reverend,’ that’s an adjective, but I don’t know if you say ‘preacher’ or ‘minister.’ ”

“Probably Lila Beth knows more about that than I do.” I smiled at my slight disclaimer; I’d only been in the church five years then. “She probably knows more than Eben. But I say ‘pastor.’ ‘The whole congregation ministers; the pastor preaches’ is what they say. We say.”

“Do you like it? Seems like it would make you nervous. Being a preach—oops, a pastor’s wife.”

“I try not to think a lot about it.” I laughed. “What does your husband do?” My hope was that he’d be somebody Eben could like, so that we could be friends, the four of us. I was thinking that if I helped turn her placid boys into little hoods then maybe we would see a lot of them.

She stopped to smooth the hair and hurt feelings of her smaller son, Jock. She wiped his blue eyes and set him back in his play car that my Martha was trying to push him out of. “He’s in agribusiness. Isn’t that the worst word in the world? The paper here is always talking about agribusiness. He says he’s a farmer; he likes that, calling himself a farmer. I can’t say I do. I don’t know why but rancher sounds a whole lot better. You know? I mean there’s as much oil found on people’s land in east Texas as in west Texas, but people don’t know that. They think oil, they think ranch. That’s Hollywood, I guess. If they’re going to do a farmer, they put him in a straw hat with a stick of grass in his mouth. You’d think people who had oil on their property could think of another name to call themselves.”

“It sounds nice and private to me.”

“Do you like this town?” She made a face, a Dallas girl face, which meant she closed her eyes and lifted her brows. “But then you just got here, didn’t you? I’ve been in Waco since we got married. Actually, before that I went to Baylor. That’s where we met. That’s been about a hundred years ago, and I can’t get used to it yet. It’s so antebellum that sometimes I think it’s antediluvian.” She looked pleased with herself for making a biblical reference to me. “It’s just so set on itself. I mean nobody in the whole place can mention Waco without reminding you that it has produced six Confederate generals and three Texas governors. And Dr. Pepper. I mean you don’t go to Atlanta and hear how they invented Coca-Cola, do you? Maybe you do; I haven’t been there. And cotton. Don’t forget cotton. How they supplied the whole Confederacy with cotton. ‘When Cotton was King, Waco was Queen.’ I can’t believe people still say that. And brag on how they had a suspension bridge before the Brooklyn Bridge, and the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, south of Kansas City? Doesn’t that just slay you? Don’t you wonder what town up there is bragging it had the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, north of Kansas City?” She shook her head as if amazed. “At least Dallas knows there’s other places on earth.”

At that exact moment, Ruth barreled into my legs, spilling the Dr. Pepper all over my lap—my lap being my one good skirt, a pink lined linen, which I’d worn with my one decent blouse, also pink. No accidents are small in the lives of pastors’ wives. I would have snatched my daughter up on the spot and spanked her, except for the audience. I looked at my wristwatch, trying to decide whether or not I had time to go home before meeting Eben and the visiting clergyman. Trying to recall what, if anything, was hanging in my closet to wear if I did get there.

“Come on, Cile,” Mary Virginia said. “I’ll fix you up. My fault for serving anything but water with four little kids around.”

Leaving the redoubtable Swede with my terrorists and the boys named for grandfathers, she led me into her dressing room, where in two minutes flat she had me in a rose silk shirt and matching skirt with flapped pockets and a self-belt. About ten times as nice as what I’d arrived in. Her skirt, several inches longer on me, gave me a nice conservative look that Eben was sure to appreciate.

“Lila Beth would never forgive me,” she said, “if I returned you to her church a mess. That place is her whole life. You know the house you’re in, the parsonage? It belonged to her family. When they died, she gave it outright to the church; it wasn’t touched when the tornado of ’53 tore down the town, and she thought it must have been spared for a purpose. Can you imagine?”

I thanked Mary Virginia, gave her cherubic boys moist kisses on their placid cheeks, gathered up the pair of rowdy ruffians I’d come with, and headed for my new secondhand Pontiac. “My time next week,” I told her.