Upstairs, Mary got the call and assumed the kids were out of gas and needed money. When she came down and saw Joy slumped in the corner on the other side of the glass partition, a rush of fear gripped her.
“What’s wrong?”
Joy blurted, “Bobby’s dead! He jumped off a bridge.”
Mary tried to push through the glass employees’ door, forgetting it was locked. She scrambled for the buzzer, but the attendant didn’t seem to hear it. Mary banged frantically on the partition.
“My son is dead! Let me out!”
The attendant released the latch.
On the short drive home in her truck, Joy told Mary what she knew. Mary listened and understood the words, but they did not yet connect with her emotions.
At the house, Mary and Bob embraced, weeping. “It was God’s will at work,” Mary heard herself intoning. She had done everything by the book — capital B. The prayers, the Christian counselor, the admonitions. Four long years.
After dropping Mary off at home, an already exhausted Joy drove south thirty miles to California State University at Hayward, where Ed was at football practice. When she drove up, Ed was standing in his uniform on the sideline.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Joy couldn’t speak through her sobs. Ed kept repeating, “What? What?”
Finally, Joy got her voice. “It’s Bobby,” she said. “He jumped from a bridge. Eddie, he’s dead!”
Ed stiffened, blood draining from his face. Abruptly, he picked up his equipment from the bench and broke into a wild run, heading nowhere, just zigzagging across the field. He yanked off his helmet and kicked it. In the car, Joy followed along the running track that circled the field. She reached him and jumped out, yelling, “Eddie, please, stop. We’ve got to go home!” Ed slowed to let Joy catch up with him. They clung to one another. “What happened?” Ed sobbed. “I’ll tell you all about it in the truck,” Joy said.
Ed headed for the locker room to change. His head was pounding so hard he thought it would burst. He went to a sink and threw cold water in his face. Numbly, he dressed. Then, in a burst of pain and fury, he punched a locker and stormed out without storing his gear.
Ed couldn’t face going home. He asked Joy to drop him at the home of one of the church counselors from Walnut Creek Presbyterian, where Ed was a devout congregant. Some other kids from the church came over, and Ed started downing shots of Scotch. He was not a drinker. The others urged him to slow down, but he got roaring drunk and bawled for several hours.
He and Bobby, the two boys of the Griffith family, had a special closeness, although they couldn’t have been more different. Ed the athlete, built like a truck, always playing soldier, dreaming of being a professional baseball player. Bobby, slender, not into competitive games, artistic, as a kid interested in dolls and drawing and dressing up.
Yet there was a deep bond. As youngsters Ed and Bobby had bunk beds, but every once in a while they would crawl in together and sleep, one brother curled in the other’s arms like a cup in a saucer. It was to Ed that Bobby had first confided he was gay.
Lately, they had drifted apart. Bobby withdrew, set up his own room, hid out in it, and brooded a lot. Ed knew his brother was unhappy, and it troubled him. But he figured Bobby would grow out of it. He never dreamed…
Their last parting, when Bobby had come down for a short visit from Portland, was unusually painful. Ordinarily they separated with a bear hug. This time Bobby merely put out his hand for a shake.
For now he tried to forget it all with booze. The next morning he awoke at the counselor’s house with a big hangover and finally went home.
By Saturday afternoon, Mary had worked up the courage to call her parents. She prayed that Porter would answer the phone. Her mother and father knew nothing of Bobby’s gayness, which until now was the nuclear family’s deep, dark secret. She had only recently confided in Porter, her younger brother, a bachelor who still lived with their parents. Almost fifty, Mary still feared Ophelia Harrison’s tart tongue almost as much as she desired her approval. Porter did answer, and Mary told him what had happened. “Porter, I truly believe Bobby killed himself because he felt guilty about his homosexuality.”
Something had backfired. God was supposed to heal Bobby. She had seen so many success stories on the religious channel about gay people being healed by prayer. Lord knows Bobby had prayed. She had prayed. What went wrong?
The rest of that week was like navigating through a fog. There were a million details to attend to. Family members converged and took on the mundane tasks of keeping the household going. Mary, who was finding it difficult to get motivated, even to eat, was grateful. Besides, she found the chaos and confusion a blessed distraction.
But several things absolutely had to be settled. One was the question of the details of Bobby’s death. Did he jump? Did he fall? Mary called the medical examiner to confirm that Bobby was neither drunk nor on drugs. There seemed to be no question that Bobby had made a conscious decision. Bobby had killed himself.
Funeral arrangements had to be made. She and Bob had no previous experience; there hadn’t been a death in the family in twenty years. They didn’t even have suitable clothes for a funeral.
Mary pulled from the yellow pages the name of Oakmont Memorial Cemetery, in nearby Lafayette. One of the employees there agreed to drive to Portland to bring Bobby’s body back. The funeral was scheduled for Friday afternoon, September 2.
They went to a local department store, Bob to pick out a white shirt, and Mary a dress, for the funeral.
On Wednesday Mary and Bob went to Oakmont, a beautiful site in the rolling hills above the small town of Lafayette, to choose a marker for Bobby’s grave.
They picked out a coffin and the marker, a bronze plate with a relief of a placid lake surrounded by mountains. They chose the Garden of Peace area for the grave site. It was on a hill, overlooking the valley and surrounded by a neatly kept lawn. That’s what he had wanted through all of this, Mary thought — a little peace.
The attendant asked if they wanted an open or closed coffin. Considering the force of the blow, he said, Bobby looked “pretty good.”
“No,” said Mary. “I don’t want to remember my son that way.” She thought with a start that she would never see Bobby to say good-bye. And yet the surreal anticipation that he would walk in at any moment haunted her all week. One night in the kitchen she was changing the bag in the trash can and felt — knew — that Bobby would come through the back door.
On Thursday, Mary’s nieces Jeanette and Debbie arrived from Portland in Debbie’s ’73 Nova rattletrap. The Nova’s narrow trunk held Bobby’s few personal effects. Mary rushed out to peer into the trunk. She felt like grabbing everything in her arms and hugging it. There wasn’t much there — some clothes, letters, gym workout gloves. But it was all of Bobby she had left.
The treasure of the lot was Bobby’s diaries. There were four books, the first two in spiral binders, the final two hardcover journals. Years before, Mary had stolen a few glimpses of early entries when Bobby had left the diary lying around. But this trove of two hundred pages of Bobby’s most intimate musings now offered both a way to commune with her dead child and a passport to his inner life. She would wait for the right moment to read them.
The funeral service was at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church, where the Griffiths (except for Bob) had worshiped for fourteen years. Mary and Joy taught Sunday school. Bobby and Ed had been involved in youth programs. To Mary, still numb with disbelief, the once safe, familiar space seemed alien.