Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [59]
She told him, “Bobby, if you ever want to come back in a hurry, I can drive up and be there in eleven hours. Remember that.”
“Thanks, Joy,” he said. They pulled into the Greyhound terminal, a lonely patch of light in a deserted part of downtown, at around 11 P.M. They hugged and held on to each other. Ed and Bobby embraced. Then Bobby boarded and the bus pulled out through deep oily puddles of rain.
NINE
The Second Coming Out
MARY, 1986–1987
Mary’s self-discovery that her son had had nothing to repent, that he had been untainted by sin from the start, was at once a huge relief and a terrible indictment. It enabled her to believe, at last, that Bobby was not eternally damned but was instead a happy and free spirit enjoying the benefits of a blissful afterlife somewhere in the firmament.
On the other hand, Mary for the first time grasped the full implication of what had transpired during those final years. There was no getting away from it: her well-meaning campaign to save her son had merely helped drive him to his death. Bobby had believed the verdict pronounced by the people he most trusted and cared about: his own family. And it was wrong!
The enormity of this revelation was almost harder to bear than the three years of doubt and grief that preceded it. She had been deaf to the agony of her own child, unresponsive to his caring, creative nature. All Bobby had needed was to be told he was perfectly all right just as he was. How blind, how stupid could she have been? she demanded of herself. What a monumental mistake!
Mary now could look back and see the roots of her fatal error. Insecure and unquestioning from early childhood, she had evolved a pastiche of religious superstition and dogma that provided an illusory cocoon of safety. She had trapped herself within that shell, totally closed to either fresh ideas or independent thought, and gathered her children within its boundaries. No wonder Bobby’s feeble protestations could not penetrate.
Now she could also see how she had deprived herself of the full pleasure of her son from the earliest years. His individuality had always provoked fear and embarrassment in her. Intimidated by the opinions of her mother, her neighbors, her church, she had foisted onto Bobby the subtle judgments of social rejection that she herself feared.
By the time his secret got out, he knew his sexual identity would be a mortifying and forbidden burden to his family. Everything else about Bobby had been forgotten, Mary now saw, in her persistent focus on eradicating his gayness. Every effort Bobby made, every protest, every attempt to better himself had been sabotaged by his overwhelming sense of failing his family and himself. It was a wonder, she thought, that he had held on as long as he did.
Mary could now trace the inevitability of events. She saw her own role as the flawed parent who had sacrificed her child in the name of rigid tradition. It took her son’s death to blast her free, to force her to think about beliefs she’d held all her life, like coded commands in a computer.
Guilt-ridden, she turned once again to Rev. Larry Whitsell.
“I look now at what I said and did,” she told him, “and I’m horrified. Can Bobby ever forgive me? Can God forgive me?”
“Mary, God’s already done the forgiving,” Whitsell said. “We have to forgive ourselves.” He felt compassion for Mary and was moved to confide that he, too, had lost someone he loved to suicide. A lover nearly two decades back had killed himself because of alcohol and drug problems. “I went through the guilt. I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I see?’ I didn’t want to see it, to acknowledge that something like that could happen to me.
“Mary, you can’t go back and erase what happened. But you’ve got a story to tell. It’s got the power of ultimate truth. Share it with others. Maybe you can touch a life early on, before a tragedy happens.”
She pondered this. She was a private woman, painfully shy in public. She felt poorly educated, underread. Where would she begin?
“In the schools, in the churches,