Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [19]
At home, she was the architect of her own religious universe, a pastiche of her fundamentalist upbringing, radio and television evangelists, reverential doodads, and, at the heart of it all, her personal Bible, which held a place of conspicuous honor on a book stand in the shape of a cross on the kitchen table. Calendars from Norman Vincent Peale adorned the walls, and there were Bible verses pinned up in the kitchen and in the boys’ room (along with a portrait of Jesus). Also in the kitchen, near the phone, was a wooden box of Bible verses, and, hung near the window, a cross with a ceramic child in blissful repose against it.
Mary encouraged her children to partake of Walnut Creek Pres’s prodigious menu of activities. They plunged in and became, to varying degrees, active and committed devotees. Ed was most aggressively devout. Bobby was a close second. After he and Ed were baptized together, Bobby bought a ring with an image of Jesus on it and told everyone of his commitment to being a Christian, to living for God and not himself.
Joy, despite her early conversion, was more ambivalent, vacillating about religion but sustaining a deep faith in Jesus well into adulthood. Most resistant, except for Bob, was Nancy, who remained skeptical of organized religion from an early age.
The Griffith youngsters and their parents spent much of their time within the extended family circle. The Griffith-Harrison family constellation was rather insular. Ophelia and Alvin were always at the ready to rescue one of the children involved in a messy divorce, an illness, or financial straits.
The Griffiths knew little about outreach—how to navigate institutions outside their narrow universe. They had little need to. Bob’s profession and its powerful union met their modest needs. Their suburban lives were relatively sheltered. Although Bob liked to read, dabbling in Hemingway and even Faulkner, the Griffiths retained an unworldliness that would work against them when real crisis struck.
In his prepuberty days Bobby would have been described as a happy, free spirit. He organized carnivals in his backyard for the neighborhood kids. He loved animals and longed for a pet raccoon. He liked to write, and won a prize for an essay he did on John Muir. He was shy, yet loved to laugh and had a mildly mischievous streak.
Bobby wanted and needed to feel accepted. The family unit, a tightly bound circle of love and protection, was the universe in which he defined himself. He rarely acted out, flared with anger, or did anything that would draw anger in return. He was so good that his mother once told him, “Bobby, I wish I had fifty more little boys like you.” Privately, she worried that her son was fading into the woodwork, so good as to be almost invisible, ignored.
If he felt different from the others, Bobby never showed it. “When I was little, I never gave a second thought to playing house, or playing dolls or wearing my mother’s jewelry,” he reminisced in his diary. Yet, he records, “when I was young I was always very sensitive, and it didn’t take much to make me cry.”
He waxed nostalgic about the good old days: “What a good time in my life that was. I was really a beautiful little boy then, right before high school. [In] 9th grade all my troubles began.”
Before the “troubles” surfaced, some warning signs appeared. At age thirteen, Bobby became fascinated with the television fitness guru Jack LaLanne, whose syndicated show enjoyed wide success in the early stages of the health boom. Bobby would rise early and sit at the tube for a couple of hours watching the muscular LaLanne go through his routines, then catch reruns after school. Mary noticed that Bobby merely watched, never joined in the routines. It annoyed her. “Bobby,” she asked once, “why don’t you ever do the exercises?” Bobby reacted with rare anger and walked out of the room.
Homosexuality was much in the news at the time. The gay liberation movement had begun in 1969 and surged