Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [24]
As tension grew, Mary wondered if her marriage would survive. Typically, she shielded these thoughts from Bob. But one day, across a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, she discussed them with Joy. “Mom, it’s one thing to talk about it, but have you thought it through?” Joy protested. “What would you do? Tell Daddy to leave? Where would he go after twenty-eight years? To some hotel? Let’s be realistic.”
Autumn arrived soggily, and with it the round of holidays and memories. Halloween had been Bobby’s favorite, and it was Mary’s custom to go to the elementary school Halloween fair the kids had attended and volunteer at one of the booths. This time, she got as far as the door, from which she could see all the youngsters in costume. She turned back and went home. They reminded her too much of Bobby.
Mary desperately wanted a sign, something from the other world to assure her that Bobby was okay. One night, she, Ed, and Joy decided to go to Bobby’s room and pray for one—a ring, a feather, something. They sat for a long time in the lamplight, praying in vain. Nothing came. At Christmas, they noticed a limb of the Christmas tree beginning to wiggle. Mary said, only half-jokingly, “That must be Bobby. It would be just like him to pull a stunt like that.”
But Bobby’s absence was no joke. Mary could not accept that she might be eternally cut off from her son. She could not reconcile herself to the notion of acquiescing to God’s judgment, which she had never before doubted. This was risky territory: challenging divine action gets you into the realm of blasphemy.
Three unfathomable realities tormented her: (1) the prospect of never seeing Bobby again; (2) the fact that God had not cured Bobby, but instead allowed him to die—an inexplicable heavenly screw-up; and (3) her growing obsession with unearthing within the Bible some citation, a strand of proof that Bobby was part of God’s creation, that his way of life was compatible with God’s law, that he was not burning in hellfire.
The religious television stations confounded her with panel shows giving the testimony of people who had been cured of being gay. The shows struck a sour note: here were these guys claiming God had cured them and they were on the right path. She thought, “Then why did God pass Bobby over?” Something wasn’t right.
Instinctively she knew she must make sense of all this as a path through the brambles of grief and loneliness. Through all of her life she had relied on the Bible, and God’s book had had the answers, the comfort. Now she would turn to it to help her explain the greatest tragedy she was ever likely to know.
In early 1984, Mary quit her job at I. Magnin. She stopped going to church. Walnut Creek Pres held little for her now. The chief pastor, returning from a vacation in Hawaii, had sent her a form letter of solace. Someone in the pastoral ministry would call once a month to see how she was getting on, but these people’s interest was in Mary’s state of well-being, not her odd personal quest, which, of course, she did not share with them. Eventually someone took her off the church mailing list.
So she remained at home, paging through her old Bible, wrestling with a jumble of thoughts. The rest of the family resumed their normal routines. Mary pondered. Nancy, bemused, started referring to her mother as a recluse. Mary took to pecking on her ancient Remington or scrawling notes at a makeshift desk in a converted garage that now served as a utility room. Bob would bring her coffee from time to time. She spent hours and hours, jotting odd thoughts at first: “They say your children are really not yours, they belong to God. Well, if I thought I was going to be a surrogate mother, I would never have had children in the first place. Selfish I guess.”
She began digging back into biblical passages