Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [4]
The medical examiner said later that Robert Warren Griffith, age twenty years and two months, had died instantly of massive internal injuries.
TWO
“What Went Wrong?”
AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1983
WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA
Bob and Mary Griffith’s stucco-surfaced wood-frame house is part of a 1940s tract, built in the sleepy days when Walnut Creek had both walnuts and a free-flowing creek. The northern California town had graduated from a bucolic suburb to a flourishing nexus of service businesses and clean industry. Just twenty miles east of San Francisco, Walnut Creek had the conveniences of a bedroom community with the gloss of an increasingly sophisticated and congested city.
Still, there remained quiet streets and charming neighborhoods. Except for a disquieting rise in traffic fed by a massive freeway a few blocks away, Rudgear Road was that kind of street. Mary and Bob and three of their four children enjoyed what appeared to be an idyllic life in their compact three-bedroom ranch-style home with a swimming pool out back.
The night of August 26–27, 1983, Mary Griffith, forty-eight, sat up late sewing in her kitchen. Her neatly styled brown hair had begun to assume gray highlights, but she was still slim, in scale with her five-foot, three-inch frame. She had a pleasant but ordinary face with a rather blunt nose and soft hazel eyes hidden behind oversize clear-frame glasses. When she spoke, her speech had a faint midwestern cast, although she had been brought up in Florida and California.
Favorite pictures of her four kids adorned a buffet in one corner of the living room: Joy, the oldest, now twenty-two, large boned and serious; Ed, twenty-one, square jawed and muscular; Nancy, the baby, age thirteen; and Bobby, a tousle-haired Tom Sawyer.
She sewed and chain-smoked Carleton menthols, surrounded by familiar icons of her faith. Next to the telephone was a crammed wooden box of index cards inscribed with Mary’s favorite Bible verses. On the kitchen wall hung a ceramic cross with a little child nestled asleep on the horizontal bar. On the table was another cross, of wood, and a bookstand supporting Mary’s weathered and dog-eared personal Bible.
Bob was asleep in the bedroom. Joy, Nancy, and Ed were out tripping around in Joy’s old truck. Mary loved these rare moments of solitude, feeling safe in an ordered universe in which the rules and regulations had all been codified two thousand years before and bequeathed to humanity for all time. It was like living in a giant compound guarded by angels: the world was an alien and dangerous place, but if you had faith and played by the rules, you and your loved ones were okay.
Her home reflected the warm simplicity and unpretentious-ness of a blue-collar family that had made it to the suburbs: reproduction prints on the walls, doilied tables, family pictures on the refrigerator; in the kitchen, white walls and pink cupboards. Bob, an electrician and a proficient carpenter, had built the kitchen table of plywood and tile and trimmed it in mahogany stain. Behind the house, in a large, cluttered backyard, was a “doughboy” pool—in effect, an oval-shaped ground-level tank of water.
The one jarring note in Mary’s life was the constant nagging worry about Bobby. Since that day more than four years earlier when he acknowledged to them that he was gay, Mary had rarely known a moment free from anxiety. The Bible repeatedly warned that homosexuality is a mortal sin; clearly gay people were doomed to perdition. If Bobby did not repent and change, there would be no reunion in heaven.
The promise of that reunion with her loved ones at the end of earthly existence was at the core of Mary’s faith, the deal she was willing to make with God. Without the prospect of rejoining her family in some celestial paradise, life would have little meaning.
Mary couldn’t help feeling frustrated. Bobby seemed to be getting more and more miserable. She had prayed and badgered him relentlessly, but nothing