Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [16]
Bobby Griffith came into a world that was erupting with social change. It was 1963: the South was immersed in a fury of protest, and Buddhists were self-immolating in Vietnam. By the time Bobby was five months old, the American president had been assassinated and the age of post-World War II innocence was forever gone. The deep pools of American culture and politics were being stirred up, and discontent was rising to the surface.
None of this had an immediate impact on the Griffith enclave. Bobby’s infancy and childhood had all the earmarks of an idyllic time. He was loved and valued. He was a happy child who displayed a sunny disposition and gentle manner.
Mary, the nondriver, and her three kids would walk the two miles to downtown Danville to shop; or they would walk to the dentist, Bobby in the stroller, Ed riding the back support, and Joy walking alongside. The children loved to go to Merrill’s Fountain for treats. As they got older, Bob and Mary would pile them in the backseat of the station wagon on Friday nights for an evening at the drive-in theater.
Bobby was a gentle spirit, almost too good and too obedient, yet endearing and lovable. He was a skinny child, with a space between .his two front teeth that brightened his whole face when he smiled. This feature, together with his sheath of blond hair, gave Bobby the look of the ail-American boy.
But it didn’t take much further observation to see that he was different from most other boys. He was not a cut-up, not given to roughhousing. He was content to be in the house coloring or playing with stuffed animals and dolls. Outdoors, he loved nature and paid more attention to the detail of natural settings than did any of the other boys. Once, at age three or four, he said, “Mom, when I woke up this morning I said good morning to all the trees and the forest.”
It was around that time that Bobby dressed up in his sister’s fluffy half-slip one day and ambled next door to a neighbor’s house. There, he got into a playful scramble with the neighbor boys, kissing and hugging them. The boys’ mother called Mary, perturbed by the incident. Mary felt angry, humiliated, and frightened all at once. When Bobby came home, all smiles and happy, with the slip bunched up around his neck, Mary yanked it off and remonstrated, “Don’t get into your sister’s things ever again.”
Bobby was not like Ed, who loved his tanks and soldiers and Tonka trucks and who liked to hang out in the garage with his dad as he puttered at the workbench. Ed was assertive, at times aggressive. Bobby was quiet, even timid. He wouldn’t speak up for himself as the others did. Yet he was outgoing in other ways, often racing up to strangers and hugging them.
Bobby liked being in the kitchen with Mom, or rummaging through her costume-jewelry box in the bedroom, or playing with Joy’s things. Mary caught herself more than once shaping the word sissy in her mind, then quickly suppressing the thought. The idea of Bobby’s being somebody society didn’t approve of scared her, not only for Bobby’s sake but also for hers. It didn’t help when Granny would visit and scold Bobby for smearing on his mother’s lipstick or messing with Joy’s things. She warned her daughter, “Mary, if you aren’t careful, this boy will turn out a sissy.”
Mary strove to discourage anything feminine. Once, she bought Bobby a pretend shaver so he could shave with his dad. Before Christmas in 1968, Bobby, then five, got hold of one of Mary’s Christmas catalogs. He turned to a display of beautiful dolls and asked his mother if she would get him one for Christmas.
Mary said, hastily, “Well, Bobby, I don’t really have the money.”
“If you had the money, would you?” Bobby insisted.
Mary tried to divert the discussion. It did not seem right to her for boys to want to have dolls. “Someday, Bobby,” she said, “you’ll have your own wife and you can dress her up in all these beautiful things.”
She had felt squeamish enough to lie to a five-year-old. She could not have said exactly why. In her heart she had wanted to buy him the