Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [96]
“I believe what I am doing now is going to make a better place for Ed and Joy and Nancy and their kids. Maybe homophobia will disappear through education. Everything starts with education.”
We take a break, and while Mary prepares lunch, I graze through old family pictures. Almost invariably in those photos, Mary is serious or seems to be forcing a smile. “I don’t like me as a young person,” she says. “I don’t like the person I was when I married. Frankly, I’m embarrassed and ashamed of that person. I was always conforming to somebody else’s image. I had no idea who I was.”
Bob joins us. At sixty, he’s still a fine figure, with a full head of graying hair and a slender frame. He is an introvert—uncomfortable, it seems, around deep emotions or feelings. He is slow to speak; when he does it’s only after long pauses while his mind curls around an idea. Then he might sputter and spill the sentences out, groping for the right words and raising his voice and gesturing violently. One can understand that on occasions his children and his wife have found him scary.
I ask him how he thinks Mary has changed. He replies with characteristic understatement. “Well, she’s changed, yeah, she’s definitely not the same as before Bobby’s death. Obviously, she’s changed about religion, but now she has the same intensity in all that she’s doing for the gays. It’s unsettling only in the fact that she may ultimately get hurt again. She’s still dealing with people, and people are going to fail—although I think she’s standing on her own two feet pretty well. The TV stuff, it’s been a positive note. I worry that if somebody knocks the pins out from under her she’ll be struggling again.”
“And how have you changed?” I ask.
Bob ponders for a while. “I guess the biggest thing for me is I’ve tried to come forward a little more. All those years when the kids were growing up, I didn’t like to interject my thoughts. I’d rather see them grow on their own; then it has meaning to them. But I think I went overboard. I would do the fatherly things, teach them how to swim and so on, but I didn’t like to interfere in their lives when it came to decisions and stuff like that. I think the kids interpreted it as me being angry at them or something or in a bad mood. I have a bad habit of taking things for granted. I’m extremely guilty on that score. I’d come home tired and grouchy and after a hard day’s work and not say a lot, and I would take it for granted that people would understand. I should have been more communicative.
“I wish now I would have put more guidance into Bobby. I was as ignorant as he was about homosexuality. We were living in the Stone Age then as far as I was concerned. I assumed it was like other problems. You come to grips and find a niche that’s going to work. I should have explained that more to him—that he was going to have to find his niche, that everybody goes through this and everybody has to work it out. I could have helped him, but I’m a very quiet person. Even I don’t like it, but that’s the way I am.”
Mary offers, “You’re doing better; the kids say so, too.” Then she turns to me. “But he’s a hard nut. It sometimes feels like it would take a big hammer to crack him open so he’d say what he’s thinking or feeling.”
Bob is not going to discuss it, but it seems clear that Mary’s radical change affects how they relate. Bob is now the homebody and Mary the one who is engaged, on the road with a cause. This is not the traditional model