The chapel was crowded. In addition to family, there were Bobby’s friends from school, relatives, and even some of Bobby’s gay friends. One or two came up and shook Mary’s hand.
To Jeanette the room seemed drenched in tears. She had never seen so much emotion in one place. Everyone cried. When not weeping, they seemed to her in shock, in a trance. Nothing hurt like the loss of a young person, she thought.
A young minister, Dave Daubenspeck, who was friendly with Ed and knew Bobby slightly, gave the eulogy. He took the orthodox Presbyterian position that holds homosexuality to be a sin: out of deep frustration — disillusioned, yet feeling trapped in the gay lifestyle — Bobby had chosen to end his life. The good news was that Bobby had accepted Christ, and despite the sins of homosexuality and suicide, nothing can separate the true Christian from the love of God. Therefore, Bobby’s place in heaven was secure….
The choir sang the “Hallelujah” chorus and it was over. The pallbearers, including Ed and Mary’s brother, Warren, gently and solemnly did their task.
At the cemetery, Jeanette watched one of the mourners throw a shovelful of dirt on Bobby’s coffin. She heard the earth hit the coffin, and a vein of grief opened. She found herself crying hysterically.
There was a small reception afterward at the home of Mary’s sister Noma, in nearby Concord. Mary wept almost continuously. Her mother, Ophelia, remarked testily how she couldn’t fathom the flow of tears from her daughter, who was after all a staunch Christian who believed in salvation. Noma tried to leap to the rescue. “Her son killed himself!” she said sharply. It seemed that whatever Mary did, Mom would find something to criticize.
But Mary herself hadn’t realized how much the loss would hurt. You die and you go to heaven; that’s the glory of being a Christian. At least that’s what they teach you. They don’t teach you about grief.
One of her Bible verses kept repeating itself in Mary’s head like a mantra. It was from the book of Revelation, the book of the apocalypse: “He that overcometh…shall be clothed in white raiment; and will not blot out his name in the book of life.”
The way she read that verse, it meant that the sinner who repents is promised eternal life. He who does not “overcome,” who dies unrepentant, must be destined for hell. Revelation seemed to contradict what Daubenspeck had said.
This frightened her. Bobby died without repenting. If he was condemned, he was in hell for certain.
Back home that evening, Mary asked Bob, “Do you think Bobby made it to heaven?” Bob shunned religion. He had resisted all her efforts to get him baptized. True to style, he answered simply, “He’s not here.”
Mary shuddered, her voice rising. “According to the Bible, Bobby’s in hell. I’m never going to see him again. Never, never, never!”
She sat up late, turning the question over in her mind. Why would God allow her son to go to hell if it was in God’s power to cure him?
Days later, Mary turned to the diaries. She sat through the night, reading them page by page. Bobby had begun writing in January 1979, when he was fifteen. He wrote through 1979, for some reason skipped 1980 except for a single entry, and continued up to two weeks before his death. The entries varied from consecutive to sporadic, sometimes jumping several months.
Mary quickly discovered that another Bobby — one far more scarred than she knew — lived in the diaries. The entries dripped with self-hatred. Bobby’s revulsion toward his gay nature was a constant refrain.
She read:
I am evil and wicked. I want to spit vulgarities at everyone I see. I am dirt, harmful bacteria grows inside me…. I was innocent, trusting, loving. The world has raped me till my insides are shredding and bleeding. My voice is small and unheard, unnoticed. Damned.
Mary had known that her son was deeply unhappy. But the diaries revealed that for Bobby each day, no matter how routine, was a Sisyphean struggle.
Gentle springtime weather surrounds me, but a fierce unrelenting storm rages within…. How much longer? How much more can I take? Only time and a million tears of bitterness…. I wish I could crawl under a rock and sleep for the rest of time.
From childhood, Bobby had embraced the faith of his mother. He had been going to Sunday school for years, when, at age ten, he came to her and said, “Mom, I want to accept Christ in my life.” Mary took him to be baptized. Bobby’s belief in God and God’s immutable word as revealed in the Bible had all the innocence and conviction of one whose faith is shaped early in life. This showed in his diaries. But Mary was shocked by the dark, violent blasphemies also present.
“Sometimes I feel so guilty about my feelings,” Bobby wrote in one entry. “Am I going to hell? That’s the gnawing question that’s always drilling little holes in the back of my mind. Please don’t send me to hell…. Lord I want to be good…I need your seal of approval.”
But that mood could change mercurially: “Fuck you God! If it’s not one damn thing it’s something else and a person can only take so much.”
Near dawn, red eyed and exhausted, Mary approached the final passages. Closing the pages, she thought of Bobby on his last visit home, just a few weeks earlier, at the end of July. He had never before seemed so blue, so lethargic. A vision haunted her of the preadolescent happy-go-lucky Bobby of the wide grin and untroubled face.
It had been a good time, and Mary had believed those times would return. Now…my God, such misery. Dear Lord, did he deserve that? And what was her role in it?
THREE Fire and Brimstone
MARY, 1934–1963
Mary Alma Harrison arrived on October 13, 1934, at Colon Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, the fourth child and third daughter of Ophelia Harrison and Naval Air Machinist First Class Alvin Edward Harrison. She was not a comely baby. When the nurse handed the squinchy, slippery five-pound infant to her mother, Ophelia had a hard time grabbing on.
Mary was to spend a good part of her life trying to get her mother to do just that — grab on. She felt not so much unloved as ignored. There eventually were seven children, all of them scrambling for attention from a mother who seemed more interested in the social whirl of navy wives than in nurturing her young brood. For Mary, childhood was an exercise in finding ways to stay out of the way.
Ophelia, not given to stroking, ruled with an iron hand. There were few hugs and kisses to go around. On the other hand, father Alvin, when he was around, offered warmth, affection, and fun, acting as a buffer between the kids and Mom. He didn’t talk much, but he made the children feel cared about. Once, when they lived in Jacksonville, there was a rare heavy frost. Alvin drew pictures on the window of the bedroom Mary shared with her younger sister, Gail, and told the children Jack Frost had come for a visit. Mary believed every word of it and was enthralled.
Ophelia Ambria Casey had met her future husband at a dance in Pensacola, Florida, when she was just thirteen. Her father, a railroad worker, chaperoned them on dates, until they were married in 1924. Ophelia was fifteen, and Alvin, a young seaman, was twenty-two. Ophelia had been a willful child, pampered by parents who grieved the loss of an earlier daughter who had died of pneumonia at eighteen months.
She was little more than a child when she married. Two of her seven children arrived before she was twenty. She greeted motherhood with the mixed feelings of a young girl who loved her children, was intensely loyal to them, but resented the responsibility they entailed. She could be biting and cruel — a lifelong habit that prompted some of her grandchildren later to dub her, half-affectionately, “Wicked Badass Granny.”