Mary told Bob it was time to move; the neighborhood was going downhill. Reluctantly, Bob hunted for a new place and eventually found a two-bedroom house in Walnut Creek, a smaller and more expensive community than Danville. They moved on Halloween Day 1969, Mary six months pregnant and happy to have escaped Pamela’s orbit.
They soon regretted the move. The children — Joy especially — were traumatized by being wrenched from school, neighborhood, and friends. Bob was unhappy, too, and soon Mary found herself depressed over the change. They made a lame and fruitless effort to back out of the deal, then settled in to make the best of it. Bob made plans for an additional bedroom.
Mary, pregnant with Nancy, was on diet pills again. Like all people with dependencies, she thought she had it under control. After all, there had been long gaps between pill sieges during the previous ten years, albeit imposed by lack of availability.
Now, a few months after Nancy’s birth, she had run out of pills and neglected to get a refill. Within days she began feeling ill, as if she had a bad flu, minus the cold symptoms. She was vomiting and shaking. Frightened, she phoned her doctor. He prescribed a sedative, and the symptoms ended. But Mary had been scared straight; she knew she had just gone through drug withdrawal. Never again, she vowed. She made up her mind to stay away from those happy capsules — a vow she kept.
But her obsession with Bob’s infidelity, potential or real, would last another two years. On one occasion, she was reduced to investigating hairs found on her husband’s clothing. Only once did she dare to confront him on the subject. Bob, whose style of internalizing everything led to infrequent but powerful outbursts, responded with fury. “If I wanted to leave you I would have left you a long time ago,” he shouted.
Mary’s self-imposed torment ended suddenly and strangely. She was watching a television drama about an unfaithful wife who nonetheless still loved her husband. A thought struck her: “Suppose there were two things that could happen to your husband. Another woman, or a car accident that would cripple him for life. Which would you choose?” She knew the obvious answer, but the starkness of the choice cast a revelatory light. The very prospect of a choice gave Mary a sense of control that she hadn’t felt since her marriage began. It was not about the phantom “other woman,” and it was not about her. It was about making the choice that involved the least harm for her husband.
At once she felt a great wave of love for Bob and an enormous sense of release. Of course she could live with anything as long as Bob was alive and healthy. At age thirty-eight, seventeen years into her marriage, the dark cloud lifted. She would remember it as one of the pivotal moments of her life. The phantom was gone. It seemed to her as if God had sent the message, at last answering her prayers. It reaffirmed her faith.
Mary had enrolled in Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church, about three miles from home. St. Luke’s, next door, was too far-out for her: they used handouts for services instead of the holy book itself. Walnut Creek Pres, as it was known, was founded in 1878, in the midst of a furious national debate about the merits of Darwinism and its theory that man was descended from apes. A century later, Walnut Creek Pres was still trying to cling to tradition while shepherding a flock of well-to-do urban expatriates living in semirural exclusion. But the city literally was growing around it into a minimetropolis, perhaps best symbolized by the massive Route 24/580/680 freeway interchange taking concrete form right at its doorstep. The 1970s brought the church fast growth, a membership of more than twelve hundred, and a host of issues that rattled the congregation.
Mary and the children were soon as involved with Walnut Creek Pres as they had been with the Baptist church in Danville. Mary taught Sunday school and went to a women’s Bible class on Tuesdays. The church had a strong social-educational program for young people, and all four Griffith kids took part.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian is one of three major Presbyterian churches in Contra Costa County. As is true of most other Protestant denominations, Presbyterianism has been wrestling throughout the twentieth century with far-reaching issues of traditionalism versus modernism. The traditionalist view, closely associated with evangelism, which is concerned with the rescuing of souls through Christ, holds to a literalist reading of the Bible as the sacrosanct word of God. The modernist view sees the Bible as a living document, revealed by God to holy scribes, yet subject to interpretation in keeping with changing times and customs.
A survey of Contra Costa County churches by the local council of churches in the late 1960s placed the Presbyterians in the “moderate” column when measured against an index of Biblical literalism.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian tilted to the conservative end of the spectrum. It was, for example, one of the last of the San Francisco Bay-area Presbyterian churches to accept women as deacons and elders (it did so in the early 1980s), and then only after the national church voted in 1982-83 to amend the Book of Order — the Presbyterian “constitution”—to force recalcitrant congregations to act. A bitter internal struggle over the issue ensued at Walnut Creek Pres, resulting in more than 220 parishioners’ splitting off and starting their own congregation.
The teachings at Walnut Creek Pres were in the evangelical, missionary tradition: The Bible was God’s word. Man was born a sinner. Through God’s grace, via a conversionary acceptance of the Lord Jesus, Man could enter the realm of salvation. In this construct Satan is alive and recruiting, and hell is a reality.
Walnut Creek Presbyterian was orthodox, but not fundamentalist in the aggressive or militant sense of that word — no fire and brimstone, no television ministries. It maintained a benign surface, was mildly liberal on some social issues, and accommodated a large staff that ran the gamut from progressive to doctrinaire. It tolerated individual differences as long as they were neither blatant nor disruptive. Even gay parishioners were accepted as long as they stayed closeted.
While Mary’s religiosity was probably more conservative than that of Walnut Creek Pres, the church’s practice was traditional enough to accommodate her.
At home, she was the architect of her own religious universe, a pastiche of her fundamentalist upbringing, radio and television evangelists, reverential doodads, and, at the heart of it all, her personal Bible, which held a place of conspicuous honor on a book stand in the shape of a cross on the kitchen table. Calendars from Norman Vincent Peale adorned the walls, and there were Bible verses pinned up in the kitchen and in the boys’ room (along with a portrait of Jesus). Also in the kitchen, near the phone, was a wooden box of Bible verses, and, hung near the window, a cross with a ceramic child in blissful repose against it.
Mary encouraged her children to partake of Walnut Creek Pres’s prodigious menu of activities. They plunged in and became, to varying degrees, active and committed devotees. Ed was most aggressively devout. Bobby was a close second. After he and Ed were baptized together, Bobby bought a ring with an image of Jesus on it and told everyone of his commitment to being a Christian, to living for God and not himself.
Joy, despite her early conversion, was more ambivalent, vacillating about religion but sustaining a deep faith in Jesus well into adulthood. Most resistant, except for Bob, was Nancy, who remained skeptical of organized religion from an early age.