She had stumbled into these situations ingenuously and out of loneliness and a desire to be anyplace but home. Ironically, while at the parties she wished she had been home, safe from the crowd she found herself among. Such events were not her style.
Things would have been far worse had Ophelia known that Mary had been intimate with a boy she’d met through a coworker while working after school at a grocery store. For Mary it was a nerve-racking and unpleasurable first experience.
Mary’s view of sex and intimacy was influenced by her mother. During Mary’s early adolescent years, Ophelia became obsessed with the idea that Alvin was cheating on her. With Alvin at sea or lather, at she would grouse about her suspicions within earshot of the children. Mary could not tell whether her mother had evidence, or even whether the issue was ever discussed between her parents. She only knew that Ophelia was deeply embittered about it.
In later years Mary would speculate that this had been the source of Ophelia’s dissatisfaction and sour attitude. Perhaps there had been an early affair, or an imagined one. There was never talk of divorce. The couple lived together for sixty-two years, until Alvin’s death in 1986.
But Ophelia’s suspiciousness had a profound impact on her impressionable daughter. Her mother communicated that it was in the nature of men to stray and the fate of women to suffer it. In fact, the message Mary got was that if a man strayed it was somehow the woman’s fault. All this dug into Mary’s psyche, and would later reverberate in her own life and marriage.
Mary’s adolescence seemed to her like an uncharted voyage with no one at the helm. Things happened to her, it seemed, rather than the other way around. She didn’t know where she fit in. Timid, sexually repressed, feeling unattractive, she blamed her sinful nature for leading her into trouble: not getting along at home, the occasional excessive drinking, the sex. She believed that everything that went wrong came from not being right with God. She desperately needed an anchor.
Mary’s first meeting with her future husband had the makings of an Archie Andrews comic mixup. It was a double date concocted by Mary’s friend Barbara. Mary was to be matched with John, Barbara’s most recent ex-boyfriend. Barbara was to meet Bob Griffith, John’s buddy. But Bob’s impression was that he was to match up with Mary. They all converged at a bowling alley and piled into Bob’s car for some illicit beer drinking in the Oakland hills. Barbara ended up in the front with Bob, Mary in the back with John.
It soon became apparent that the boys were primed for some heavy petting. Mary was not at all interested in John, and Barbara was proving resistant up front. John persuaded his ex-love Barbara to switch, and Mary found herself in front with a passionate and persuasive Bob. She resisted him, but her lips hurt for a week from his ardent kisses.
Bob showed up at her doorstep the next night, and the night after. They began dating intensely. To Mary, Bob seemed worldly, yet kindly and considerate. She felt safe with him, in spite of his passionate advances.
If Mary’s childhood had been less than idyllic, it was heaven compared with Bob’s. He was the son of a blue-collar worker, Robert Sr., and Blanche, a frail, quiet young woman. At the age of nineteen, six months after giving birth to Bob, Blanche Griffith died of an internal infection caused by remnants of the afterbirth, which a careless doctor had failed to remove. (For years Bob had the vague sense that he was somehow responsible for his mother’s demise.) Her death left Bob at the mercy of his hot-tempered father. Robert Griffith was a lout, subject to bouts of unpredictable anger and violence. Bob learned to anticipate beatings regularly and for no logical reason. At least once his father locked him in a closet for hours. Robert Sr. had even once knocked his infant son out of a high chair in a burst of anger.
Bob feared and hated his father. Robert would disappear for long periods, leaving his son with his maternal grandparents, who treated him well but without much warmth. But Robert would turn up regularly, continuing to terrorize his young son, who anticipated these arrivals with purest dread. Miserable, with no one to confide in, Bob turned inward. He learned to think through his own problems, and to choose solutions with a minimum of communication. He read a lot, skipping school and dropping out in the tenth grade. He turned a defensive shield to the world, telegraphing a shy, taciturn nature. Inside, strong opinions and emotions boiled.
Hungry for emotional bonding, he turned to the streets of his rough neighborhood in Oakland and a mixed-race crowd of friends who lived on the edge. To overcome a legacy of physical fear Bob flung himself into street brawling and other more dangerous peer rituals. One day the gang decided to burglarize the store of a Chinese merchant who dealt numbers, hoping for a big haul. They were immediately caught, and Bob was packed off to reform school for a year.
He emerged determined never to foul his life that way again. Soon after, he met Mary. To her, Bob seemed self-confident and courageous, things she felt she wasn’t. He was mature, a man of the world, not one to be manipulated by anyone. Slender, blue eyed, with rugged good looks, Bob could thank his Scottish heritage for his air of understated charm. He was not equally stricken, but he felt at ease with Mary, and she was comfortable with him. Mary’s obvious neediness and lack of self-assurance appealed to his masculine, protective side. And even though Ophelia opposed the match, Bob was at first highly impressed with the Harrisons, who, at least externally, seemed to be a large, happy, normal family — something he had never enjoyed.
Before long, Bob and Mary launched into an affair. Mary graduated from Oakland High School with barely passing grades (the only book she read through to the end was Rebecca) and took a twenty-dollar-a-week job as an elevator operator at Capwell’s department store in Oakland. She moved from home to a rented room in a hotel in Oakland, where Bob covertly spent many nights. For Mary the romance was wildly passionate yet tinged with guilt, especially after she had accepted Christ and been baptized during a brief visit to her grandparents in Florida.
Within seven weeks of their meeting, Bob proposed. “I want to hold you forever,” he said. He bought, on account, an engagement-and-wedding-ring package for four hundred dollars, the bill cosigned by Mary’s mother. But they delayed marrying for nearly two years while Bob worked toward his electrician’s license and they saved money.
Finally, in July 1955, they drove to Reno with Mary’s sister Jean and her husband, to be married by a justice of the peace. Bob was down on religion and had resisted a church wedding. Mary had borrowed a navy blue taffeta dress from her mother and had bought a new pair of shoes. Bob had purchased a jacket, slacks, and shoes.
The ceremony, in a little office space, took about five minutes. It was not very romantic; the corsage Bob had bought her was wilted by the appointed hour. Still, the occasion was magical for Mary. The judge was friendly, and Bob’s kiss was lingering and passionate. For that moment everything was right with the universe.
Mary was twenty, Bob twenty-one. Each brought to the union separate images of marriage and family. With no role models in his life, Bob had not the least concept of “man and wife” or, for that matter, “parent.” His pictures came exclusively from books and movies. He was winging it. Mary, her head still filled with fears and insecurities, was determined to undo the mistakes of her own upbringing. No busy social whirl for her; no career. She would be a proper wife and mother. Her children would feel loved, welcome, and nurtured; their home would be a shelter. Together, Mary and Bob embarked on a Norman Rockwell journey in the midst of the complacent 1950s, unprepared for what lay ahead.