To Mary, a sensitive, introverted girl, life meant keeping from underfoot. Yearning for affection, she settled for lying low — anything to escape the maternal barbs. Mary had buck teeth; she was gawky and a slow developer. By first grade she still could not print her name. Ophelia reserved one of her most hurtful terms for her daughter: she called her “lamebrain” far into adulthood.
Mary contrived to avert conflict, spending a lot of time feeling fearful or guilty. She longed for a safe space. She felt dumb. Every day, before getting out of bed, she prayed that she would be able to get through the day without doing something to displease her mother.
Her closest friend was her sister Jean, six years her senior. Mary could confide in Jean, who shared the same feelings of neglect at home. In school, Jean was encouraged because of her unusual singing voice. Once, a teacher sent a note home urging that Jean’s talent be nurtured. Ophelia set the note down, and that was the end of it. Jean, also an introverted child, never brought the subject up, but it lingered as a bitter memory throughout her life.
The navy family moved around a lot during Mary’s earliest years, from Panama to Jacksonville to Pensacola. They settled finally in Oakland, California, in 1941 just before America joined the war. Alvin Harrison, by then promoted to commissioned officer, was assigned a desk job at the naval air station.
The Harrisons were churchgoers. They drifted between Catholic, Baptist, and Methodist congregations. Ophelia in particular subscribed to the wrath-and-vengeance school of religion. The children learned that God was to be feared. You did what God said or risked being punished. You could burn in hell.
Whatever else he was, God was a handy instrument of control. Ophelia employed the deity as a partner in disciplining her large brood. Once, when Mary was about five, she was allowed to go to the base movie house with her siblings to see The Wizard of Oz. Ophelia warned her in advance, “Just sit there and do not get up, because I can see you, and God can see you. Understand?” Mary did, and believed as well.
In that environment, God and Mama merged in Mary’s mind as twin keepers of a stern domain pocked with unpredictable hazards — on earth as well as in heaven. The church told her that all of us are born with a sinful nature. Damnation is a living reality for those who do not reconcile themselves with God. In that domain, Satan was a constant living presence. It was a struggle to stay within the narrow safety zone. Mary once dreamed of a God with a giant hand coming to get her. She hid behind a rock, to no avail. God found her.
The hymns she learned in church, with their beautiful melodies and emotional lyrics, were earthy and alive, filled with vital images that spoke to her.
When we walk with the Lord,
In the Light of His Word,
what a glory he sheds on our way!
While we do His good will,
He abides with us still,
And with all who will trust and obey.
Trust and obey for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
God represented danger, but also safety. This was a contradiction that would influence much of her life, layering it more with guilt and worry than with peace. It would dictate her response when her own son’s crisis erupted.
When Mary was ten, Alvin, now a commissioned officer, went to sea and was gone much of the time for the next two years. Mary felt further exposed and more lonely than ever. At Christmas, Ophelia gave the kids the kind of gifts that would keep the children distracted and out of the way. She seemed to favor the boys: Warren, the eldest, and, born years later, Porter and Charles. The girls, especially Jean and Mary, had a harder time, it seemed to Mary.
In school, at Jefferson Elementary in Oakland, Mary felt like the ugly duckling. The other girls all seemed prettier, got good grades, and wore nice clothes. The Harrisons weren’t poor — Ophelia worked to augment her husband’s salary — just not sensitive to matters of style and peer competition.
Adolescence brought more trauma. When Mary started to menstruate, Ophelia seemed as upset as she was about it. “You’ll start to bleed,” her mother had warned her, “and if you mess with boys your belly will swell up.” Sex seemed dangerous and vulgar, something you didn’t talk about. Ophelia would tell her girls that a boy’s kiss on the cheek could get them pregnant. Mary dreaded growing breasts; they would stick out and make her conspicuous.
She was conspicuous anyway. While other girls were setting their hair and snaring boyfriends, Mary continued to wear pigtails to age thirteen. By her teens she weighed 150 pounds and wore a coat in class to hide her bulk. This made her no less boy conscious. She obsessed over boys without fully understanding what it meant. While she envied the other girls their boyfriends, she harbored romance-magazine fantasies of meeting an older man, marrying, greeting him at the door at the end of the day…
She made a few friends and was allowed once to go to a pajama party, and, at fourteen, on her first date, to the movies with a boy named Louis. He kissed her a couple of times. But after the show he told her he was going to a party “where you can’t take nice girls.” Mary walked home alone.
For all her indifference day to day, Ophelia was possessive and fearful for her children. The world was a dangerous place. As they matured, she struggled to rein them in.
Mary as a teenager fought for a measure of independence. Her desperate quest for security obscured a strong inner will that in other circumstances would have produced a powerfully self-motivated person. That strength would show up later in tragic circumstances, but it surfaced as a streak of rebelliousness in her teens.
At sixteen, while a student at Oakland’s Fremont High School, she befriended a girl named Gail, who traveled with a racy crowd. It was the postwar era, and the area was flooded with returned veterans with sophisticated ideas on how to party. As naive and impressionable as she was lonely and eager for adventure, Mary followed Gail’s lead, and the pair secretly took to hanging out at bars. That didn’t last long: Gail’s mother discovered it and reported one of the bar owners to the authorities for serving underage kids. One day, Mary returned home from school to find state officials waiting in the living room to question her. Terrified, she confessed and was required to go with Gail to identify the waitress and owner. Once fingered, the bar owner called the frightened girls “bitches.” That struck an arrow in Mary’s fragile ego; she felt humiliated, and sorry to have caused so much trouble.
On another occasion, at a party Gail took her to, Mary got sick after mixing beer and whiskey drinks. She went into a bedroom to lie down. Suddenly the door opened and a man entered, leering at Mary. Gail came to the rescue. “She doesn’t do that,” she told the man. Someone volunteered to drive Mary home. The next day the Oakland Tribune ran a front-page story about a raid on a party in which the proprietress was arrested for prostitution. To Mary’s horror, it was the same house, and the raid had occurred fifteen minutes after she left.
Matters deteriorated further when Mary got invited to a “tea” party, the kind that featured heroin and marijuana. Naively, Mary thought the objects people were smoking were regular cigarettes, and accepted a couple as a gift from a young man who was kind enough to drive her home. When she told her mother about it the next day, the horrified Ophelia phoned the Oakland drug squad. A day later, Mary was downtown talking to the FBI. It turned out, again to her horror, that the man who threw the party had a long police record. The authorities asked Mary to serve as a police plant at another dope party, but then failed to follow up.