by John Bloom
So Candy had her house at last, and Jackie had her church. The only reason Candy ventured near Lucas Church the first time was strictly the novelty: she was dying to see a lady preacher. So she dragged Pat to services one Sunday morning and was at first disappointed: the building was cramped and drafty, and it turned out that Jackie Ponder wasn’t much of a preacher after all. But after the service she was completely swept away by the warmth and simplicity of the people there, most of them older than the Montgomerys, including a few of the area’s farming families. By the next weekend, Pat and Candy had volunteered to help paint the decrepit parsonage, which was vacant at the moment while Jackie and her husband Bill made plans to move to Lucas from Richardson.
For a woman who had never really been interested in any sort of religion, Candy became a dynamo in the church in a remarkably short time. Jackie Ponder’s friendship was the sole reason. Candy and Jackie were both loquacious, and the favorite part of their days was the time when they would put on a pot of coffee, take their places around someone’s kitchen table, and talk until one of them felt guilty enough to go back to work. It was at such sessions that the two women first began to feel a special kinship, especially since, after a while, they dropped their small talk and started having very intense debates over organized religion. Candy was the doubter, gleefully pointing out biblical inconsistencies and injustices as the two women smoked and drank coffee in the Montgomery kitchen. Both were avid readers as well, although Jackie’s tastes ran to philosophers while Candy’s didn’t extend much beyond the works of Taylor Caldwell and whatever steamy bodice-ripper paperback caught her eye at the supermarket. Nevertheless, it was Candy who became the firebrand intellectual, jousting against Jackie’s interpretations of scripture. When Jackie preached a sermon on the Book of Job, Candy told her point-blank that it was the “awfullest book in the Bible” and untrue, because she could never accept a God who played games with man. At times like that, Jackie would tell Candy she was a “seeker,” for only someone who cares about biblical truth could be so agitated over apparent inconsistency. This would inflame Candy all the more.
As time went on, they became close confidantes. There was little of the pastor-parishioner relationship in their meetings. In fact, Candy came to have as much influence on the church management as Jackie did, by accepting such unpleasant jobs as writing newsletters, teaching Sunday School classes no one else wanted, church-social planning, and assorted dirty work. By the end of the first year, Candy was church education chairman and would eventually become the highest lay officer in the church. Candy and Jackie were both pleasant, outgoing, self-motivated women, so they had many other friends; but because of their special circumstances, they became more intimate with each other than they could be with anyone else—including, ultimately, their husbands.
The first time they really talked heart-to-heart was a few months after Candy had joined the church, and the subject was Jackie’s marriage. Bill Ponder’s disillusionment with his marriage had been smoldering for a long time, but especially since Jackie’s decision to enroll at Perkins. Then, in the spring of 1977, Jackie decided it would be necessary for them to move into the Lucas parsonage, which at the moment was a rather down-at-the-heels frame house that looked as ugly on the outside as it was pitifully small on the inside. For the first time, Bill balked. Everything up until then had been acceptable because it did not affect his job or lifestyle in any fundamental way. This was different. He argued about it with Jackie, flatly refused at first, then eventually agreed to try it for a while. They moved into the parsonage in June. In August, Bill Ponder suddenly stopped coming to church services. Jackie didn’t say anything publicly, but she told Candy the truth: Bill had taken his things and left. He had told her he wanted a divorce, and she was crushed.
One day, visiting Candy as she had many times during the marital crisis, Jackie broke into tears.
“I’m so scared about being single,” she said.
“Jackie,” said Candy, “you don’t know how lucky you are.”
If Candy and Jackie had been close before, they now became all but inseparable. At the time it seemed like a natural friendship that was strengthened into something more solid by Jackie’s marital crisis. But something else was going on, too. Jackie was about to undergo one of the most significant changes in her life: after twenty-three years of marriage, she would be single again. But the effect on Candy may have been even greater. Candy had been drawn to Jackie because the older woman seemed, from the perspective of a marriage starting to go stale after seven years, like everything Candy aspired to be. Jackie was in charge of her destiny. She was a mother and a wife and a career woman. More important, when something went wrong in her life, she had the ability to change it. When Candy Montgomery said “you don’t know how lucky you are,” she meant every word.
It was not that anything was terribly wrong with Candy’s marriage. On the contrary, Pat had provided everything she had ever expected from him, including a comfortable $70,000 income from his work on sophisticated military radar systems at Texas Instruments. Pat was among a half dozen or so scientists able to do the top-secret government consulting work, and his national prestige in his field meant that the Montgomerys would always be secure. They had their dream house. They had two kids whom they both loved very much. They had a church and a school and, for the first time, a place where they felt they belonged.
“And I,” said Candy to Jackie, “am bored crazy.”
She didn’t know exactly what she wanted, but she knew it was more than she had. Pat was dependable but he wasn’t exciting. He worked too much. Sometimes he even worked at home. Their sex life was not what it once was. She felt increasingly used, a paid laborer, a cook and cleaner and nursemaid. (Even though she enjoyed cooking and child care, Pat didn’t know that.) She also started to think that perhaps she had missed something by never going to college. It was as though she had jumped straight from childhood to womanhood without anything in between. Jackie talked about books and ideas and writers that Candy had never heard of. Jackie talked about things like “existentialism” and the great German philosophers; admiring Jackie as she did, Candy suddenly wanted to emulate her. She clung to Jackie as the only thing in her life that seemed to transcend the ordinary. And she began to worry, for the first time, about what she might do when both kids were old enough to start school. If she didn’t find something else, she would go crazy with tedium.
First she turned to volunteer work. Candy’s responsibilities in the church continued to increase, to the point where after a while Jackie asked her to help with outside speaking engagements. Since Jackie was still considered a curiosity at many churches, she was often invited to speak on “Women in the Ministry.” In this respect, Lucas Church had a double distinction among feminists, since Candy was one of the top two or three lay leaders. In August 1977, shortly after Bill Ponder moved out of the parsonage, Jackie and Candy traveled to Plano to present one of their Sunday evening programs on “Women in the Church” at Briarwood Methodist. Their duet was a hit, especially with several of the younger couples in the audience who were growing disenchanted with their own church. Those couples included Allan and Betty Gore.
That fall Jackie’s church started growing again. It happened for a simple reason: five families moved en masse from Briarwood to Lucas. The exodus had been brewing for some time, mostly because of disagreements with the Briarwood pastor. Once they heard the “Women in the Ministry” presentation, and then visited Lucas, they bolted quickly. The Garlingtons, outspoken JoAnn and her husband Richard, were the first to go, followed by the Gores, the Maples, the Sullivans, and the Williamses. Lucas Church was still small enough to be changed dramatically by the infusion of five families, especially when they were activists. Jackie and Candy were, of course, delighted. These were not only young people, mostly thirtyish couples with children, but they were also liberal enough to pitch into Jackie’s “experimental ministry” with a zeal the old-timers didn’t have.
It was clear
that one of the principal attractions of Lucas was its primitive character, its quaintness. It was the kind of little country church that people wax nostalgic over—even people who never attended a country church or, for that matter, lived in the country. Combined with the newcomers’ obvious admiration for the plucky woman pastor, it gave Jackie a blank check to shape the sort of church she had wanted before the charismatics had fled and left the coffers empty. For the first time Jackie started scheduling evening services—she had tried before, but no one had shown up—and she quickly took advantage of anyone who showed the slightest inclination to chair a committee or organize a project. She referred to the new Lucas as an “integrative” pastorate, by which she meant that the parishioners would be expected to minister to themselves as much as she ministered to them. It was not exactly what the more conservative church members had bargained for, but they went along with the changes with their customary equanimity.
In later, sadder times, the year 1977 would be remembered as Lucas Church’s golden age, a rich, happy period of fellowship that perhaps reached its most joyous point on a day in late December. On that day the sanctuary of the church was festooned and bedecked with so many cardboard cutouts, construction-paper silhouettes, glittering gold garlands, and pipe-cleaner angels that a visitor, entering unawares, might well assume he had come upon a school pageant instead of a place of worship. The altar itself was all but obscured by the decorative excess. A large Christmas tree stood in one corner, a few feet from the pulpit, just behind an electrically-lit angel with neon yellow hair. A red-suited Santa Claus, rather too thin for the role, sat near the front of the room holding a bag of goodies, while women sliced cakes and parceled out cookies. And the effusion of special effects was dominated by hand-lettered banners, the kind usually seen in high school gymnasia, in this case devoted to such messages as “Alleluia,” “And He Shall Be Called Jesus,” “Love Your Neighbor,” and, on the pulpit itself, “Love is Born.” Among the congregation, this special service was known as the Birthday Party for Jesus.
The Birthday Party for Jesus was not the only innovation that Jackie introduced. In a way Jackie was trying to forget her separation from her husband by pouring all her energies into her new profession, but she also truly believed in a wholly democratic, pluralistic approach to church management. She avoided making decisions. She talked constantly of “getting the people involved in the worship service itself.” She encouraged her parishioners to redecorate the sanctuary to suit their tastes, even when her policy led to such quirky results as a chapel full of artificial palm trees on Palm Sunday and windows festooned with what were known as “Dolly Parton angels.” Jackie allowed laymen to administer sacraments. She made a children’s service, complete with puppet shows and funny stories, a part of the weekly worship service. By her own admission, she had no talent for administration; faced with the need for a building fund, she would announce to the church, “Well, it seems we need this money and I guess you all know what to do. Now, let’s talk about Love.” On Sundays, in fact, she increasingly resembled a reality therapist instead of a preacher. At times she would abruptly depart from a scriptural reading, look into the congregation, and say, “How do those words make you feel? What are you feeling and thinking right now?”
Perhaps the most significant change Jackie made, though, and the one that was universally approved from the pews, was the formation of a choir, something that had always seemed too extravagant and complicated for such a small church. The idea occurred to her when she got to know Elaine Williams, one of the Briarwood defectors, at a women’s therapy group both were attending in order to work out their problems with men. (Elaine was married to a photographer, but would divorce him four months later. Jackie’s divorce was still pending, but she had already started quietly breaking the news to church members.) A pianist with a strong musical background, Elaine was, as Jackie would later joke, a gift from God. To make it possible for her to become the first Lucas music director, Jackie appealed to the church’s principal benefactor, a Dallas attorney named Don Crowder, known chiefly for being the law partner of Dallas Congressman Jim Mattox, and a tireless supporter of the town of Lucas, where he had moved in 1970. Don was not a very religious man himself, but he was impressed by the way Jackie was making the church come alive again, and so he agreed to be the “anonymous donor” funding the part-time music director’s job. Elaine was hired.
The importance of the choir quickly came to be more political than musical. The choristers became, by virtue of their constant association with Jackie, the most influential people in the church. They even began to take on all the disagreeable characteristics of a social clique. There was nothing sinister about this, since their only motives were to make Lucas Methodist into a dynamic and exciting place. It was simply that the choir couples—the Montgomerys, the Gores, and three or four others—were all about the same age, with children the same ages, and a stake in maintaining control of the church’s future. Jackie was anxious to use that commitment, too, and she did—to organize athletic leagues, recruit leaders (Pat and Candy both held high positions in the church), and get people to come to the church on days other than Sunday.
Even as the church began to flourish again, though, Jackie’s personal life remained a source of periodic depression. She was out of town on the Sunday in March 1978 when Don Crowder, as chairman of the Pastor-Parish Committee, announced to the congregation that their minister’s divorce was final. Members of the choir had already been told, but some of the older church members were stunned by the news. The fact that Jackie was away at the time made it even odder, in their opinion, since it seemed as though she felt guilty about it. They were right. It would take Jackie a long time to get over her self-doubts—her feeling that perhaps she had sabotaged her own marriage by so single-mindedly pursuing her ministerial career—and her main remedy for her depression was to take refuge among kindred spirits: the other women of the church.
Jackie used to divide her friends into two categories: “front-door” friends and “back-door” friends. Front-door friends were the ones who only came by when they had a reason; usually it was to talk about church business, or to ask Jackie to make a hospital visit, or something similar. Back-door friends were the ones who never knocked, who headed straight for the coffee pot, who felt free to smoke and talk “naughty,” and who were, inevitably, women who sang in the choir. These were the ones who knew they were welcome at the parsonage any time and who came often. These were the ones Jackie could bare her soul to. One thing Jackie liked to talk about was sex—never an unpopular subject in this group anyway, but one that was increasingly on Jackie’s mind after the divorce. Like most recently divorced people, Jackie wanted to replace her old life with something new and erotic and different. In fact, Jackie was not the only woman in Lucas Church who felt the need to fantasize about sexual adventure. Candy Montgomery and Elaine Williams joked so frequently about leaving their husbands that one Sunday after church, while they were offhandedly talking about “waiting until something better comes along,” Diane Maples overheard them and was so upset that she repeated the conversation, very agitatedly, to her friend JoAnn Garlington. Both women thought it scandalous.
Candy Montgomery was a back-door friend. Betty Gore was a front-door friend. When Betty came by the parsonage for one reason or another, the other women would remember to hold their tongues for fear of offending her. It was not that Betty was unsophisticated or unfriendly; it was simply that she had never seemed very outgoing around the other women of the church. She was hard to read, even a little cold at times, and usually she kept to herself. Occasionally one of the children would come home with a story of how Betty had forbidden her daughter, Alisa, to do this or that, and it would always seem a little too strict for the circumstances. Betty had the same reputation at the elementary school where she taught; she was not very popular among her students, and some of the teachers considered her a harsh disciplinarian. Things got so bad during her first semester of tea
ching at Wylie that a group of fifth graders vandalized her house one night, decorating the front of it with eggs, writing “EGORE” on the front porch in black shoe polish, and ringing the doorbell after everyone had gone to bed. Jackie found Betty blunt but competent. One of Betty’s problems, she once remarked to a friend, was that Betty didn’t treat Alisa as a child but as a “small adult.” The only time Jackie had visited the Gore home was to tell them about her divorce; she thought Betty a bit formal at the time, but given the nature of the call, it was a pleasant enough visit. Since Betty was a teacher, Jackie had asked her to do the children’s sermon one week, and it was a big hit. Betty had gathered all the kids around her at the front of the sanctuary and handed each child a toy. Then she began taking the toys away and exchanging them at random—to make a point about how unfeeling and cruel it is to indiscriminately give and take things. The point was well made, but her playacting seemed to emphasize her uncompromising sense of justice and “correct” behavior, even when dealing with children. Betty was a moralist—fond of enforcing rules—which is one thing that made her a bit distant from the other women. That’s why it seemed so odd on the day in the spring of 1978 when Betty dropped by the parsonage, bubbling over with excitement, to tell Jackie about her new foster child.
Why Betty Gore ever took such an avid interest in the Texas state foster parents program would remain a mystery, even to her husband, right up until her death. All the evidence of her life indicated that she was awkward around children, even her own, and yet when one of the Gores’ ex-neighbors in Plano told them about the program, Betty was fascinated with the notion of temporarily adopting a child. This particular state program involved no permanent commitments; the homeless kids were simply parcelled out to willing households while court judgments of various sorts were being made. So Betty submitted her application to the state, and within a few weeks a six-year-old boy was assigned to the Gores. He stayed only two weeks, without any trouble to speak of, but as soon as he was gone Betty informed the Texas Department of Human Resources that in the future she would prefer to adopt younger children, and preferably girls. Shortly thereafter she was put in charge of a three-year-old girl, and she hurried over to introduce her to Jackie.