Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [23]
He and the family sat in uncomfortable silence in the small living room. A picture of a smiling Bobby sat on the buffet, next to which Mary had placed a lighted candle, vowing to keep it lit forever. Finally, Mary haltingly voiced a subject that had been forming in her mind. “There must be other Bobbys out there,” she said. “As far as I know the church had no program to reach out to my son. What about other young gay people who may be thinking about taking their lives?”
“I don’t know,” Anderson replied, weakly. There was no such program at the church. There was nothing more to say.
Mary did not bring up the issue that gnawed at her: the state of Bobby’s mortal soul. She knew the church would have her believe he was safely in heaven. There was no use arguing her personal theology, drawn from Revelation, the section of the New Testament from which fundamentalists derive the prophecy of imminent Armageddon: “And anyone whose name was not in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” Bobby in the lake of fire! Her child! Unthinkable, unbearable! It seemed clear to her that her church was not going to provide the answers she needed.
Still, she went to the church with Joy a few days later. They sat in the prayer room, prayed, and signed the prayer book. But they received little solace. Mary felt engulfed, beyond reach.
She did not know how to handle grief. In her family, death was something to be whispered about, a taboo subject. Other than the death of her premature child years earlier, nothing had assaulted her with such a devastating affect. Left to her own devices, she contemplated her own suicide. She found temporary comfort in imagining how she would go about it, and finally settled on a bizarre image: if she tied two or three bricks to her ankles and jumped into the deep end of the pool she would sink forever, gangland style.
Typically, she kept her thoughts to herself, brooding over the prospect for weeks. Gradually, the idea of ending her life grew more frightening than contemplating the pain of going on. She realized she wanted to live—for herself, for her other children, for Bob. The suicide scheme evaporated.
After three weeks, she returned to her job at I. Magnin, barely going through the motions. One day she was having coffee in the company cafeteria with another employee when she suddenly felt a cry rising from her gut to her throat. She knew she was going to stand up and start screaming, “My son is dead!” Somehow she stifled it, got up, and fled to the bathroom. But this incident frightened her. She had never lost control like that.
At home, her relationship with Bob was showing the strain. Their sex life had fallen to zero; Mary was in too much pain to tolerate the contact. Bob accepted it at first, not understanding it, but as weeks went by, his frustration mounted.
Adding to the tension, Mary, casting about for explanations, blamed Bob for not trying harder to reach Bobby. Perhaps, she argued, if he had spent more time with him, been a buddy, he could have cultivated in Bobby the manly qualities of strength and self-esteem. But Bob had stayed mostly on the sidelines, only reluctantly sharing some fruitless and artificial “together” events with his son.
Bob Griffith’s role in the family was often unclear to his children. Inward directed and taciturn yet loving and concerned, he nonetheless harbored deep strains of anger, probably rooted in childhood, which expressed themselves in unpredictable verbal outbursts. To Nancy, her father’s long silences and occasional tirades were frightening. She imagined at times that he was disappointed with her, only to learn as she grew up that his moods had nothing to do with her. Joy, as well, often felt as a young girl that her father was angry with her, for reasons she could not divine.
Now, looking back, Bob let himself believe that at some level he might have failed Bobby. But for him, reaching out to his son meant reaching across a giant moat of ignorance. He hadn’t the slightest concept of what gay was. He had heard the jokes and snickers, but