They settled in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Oakland. Through an uncle, Bob had obtained a four-year apprenticeship with the electrician’s union. He worked as an electrician and went to Laney Trade College. Mary continued at Capwell’s. A year later, Mary conceived, but she miscarried before even realizing she was pregnant. Within another year she was pregnant again, with a girl, who came to term prematurely at seven months.
Mary was rushed to Oakland’s Providence Hospital in great pain and had to be anesthetized for the delivery. Bob was at her side when she awoke, and told her that everything was fine. But a day later the infant died. Young Jennifer Ambria was given a funeral and a proper burial. The loss traumatized Mary. She brooded, stunned by a mix of pain, confusion, and guilt. Again, her mind latched on to the specter of an angry and penalizing deity. She was convinced that God was punishing her and Bob for their premarital sex.
Mary sought comfort in the church, at first at Lakeside Baptist in Oakland, confessing and praying with the minister, and later at an evangelistic missionary church in their neighborhood. Mary prayed and read the Bible, trying to pull out of her depression.
The world was indeed a dangerous place. Unable to trust her own judgment, Mary turned herself over to doctrine. She began putting little Christian icons around the house and collecting Bible verses.
Her insecurity extended to her marriage. For a long time she had difficulty calling her husband by his name, usually substituting “honey” or “sweetheart.” Ophelia had drilled into her, “You don’t call people by their first names.” She found it difficult to be openly affectionate outside the privacy of the bedroom.
For his part, Bob was attentive and caring. But Mary focused on the empty half of the cup: “What if he doesn’t really care?”; “How could he truly love someone like me?” One Christmas, Bob bought her a beautiful strand of pearls and earrings. Mary asked, “Were you drunk when you bought this?” She couldn’t believe his gift was sincere. Nothing he could do would erase her self-doubt.
She began to feel intensely jealous. Yet there was nothing real to fear; Mary’s anxieties arose from the depths of her own tarnished self-image. She panicked and felt inadequate if Bob seemed to pay attention to other women. Gradually, the same paranoia that obsessed her mother began to possess her: “He could find someone else. One day I’ll wake up and it will be over.” Such thoughts filled her with terror. In her brooding fantasies she created a phantom woman, hovering, waiting to swoop her husband away forever.
Typically, Mary shared none of this with Bob. Maybe it was all wrong, a figment of her imagination. Bob would be furious. It could endanger the entire marriage. She kept quiet, kept praying, and tried to stay alert.
Thus, externally, life was smooth. Bob got his apprenticeship and began making a good living. Their first child, Joy, arrived in 1960. Fifteen months later, Ed was born in the home they had bought for thirteen thousand dollars in Danville, a suburb east of Oakland. Mary was able to quit work and devote all her time to motherhood.
She was a dedicated, loving mother. The kids had the run of the house. Granny would come and complain that she was being too lenient, but Mary persisted. She was more sensitive to the opinions of her peers — neighborhood mothers, who urged her to wean the kids from their bottles early, or to hasten potty training.
Despite her preoccupation with motherhood, Mary’s secret agony over her imaginings about Bob raged on. The obsession seemed like a thorn in her gut, which she likened to the thorn in the flesh of the apostle Paul. She prayed about it, begging God to take it away. She inscribed in the margin of a page in her Bible: “If you will not remove it, Lord, ease my thorn. It is too painful. Satan digs it deeper. I sometimes feel I will die, it hurts me so.”
But God was not answering. Mary began suffering anxiety attacks accompanied by depression and a loss of energy. She felt too humiliated to tell anyone — not the counselors at the church, and certainly not her family.
Her doctor had prescribed diet pills to control weight during her pregnancy with Joy. After Joy was born, Mary found it easy to keep renewing the prescription. The drugs gave her energy, lifted her self-esteem, and made her obsession about Bob more bearable. Soon, she had to increase the dosage to get the desired effect. Without realizing it, Mary was getting hooked on amphetamines and other substances, such as painkillers. She used them increasingly over the next nine years — through the birth of her third child, Bobby, and into her final pregnancy with Nancy in 1970. All this was in secret. Once, a friendly druggist even dispensed drugs to her without requiring a prescription. Mary hid her drugs in the stove, always remembering to remove them before using it for cooking.
FOUR The Sissy
1963–1979
Despite the currents running beneath the surface, daily life in the Griffith family fit the “Leave It to Beaver” image with amazing accuracy. Mary was gentle, soft-spoken, self-effacing, good-humored. Bob was a kindly if taciturn father who worked hard on the job and puttered constantly around the house in his time off. Her children remember the 1960s and early 1970s with great fondness. They felt sheltered and loved, and perceived their parents as a devoted and affectionate couple. Life was a pleasant round of school, afternoon play, church activities, and summer visits to the grandparents.
In fact, within the whole Harrison clan, Mary got the votes as the preferred relative. Her brothers and sisters were experiencing tumultuous lives. Bob and Mary’s was the place to go if you wanted an oasis of sanity and stability. The family would find any excuse to turn up there. Granny and grandfather Harrison, who after his retirement had settled three hours away in Sonora, in the Sierra foothills, went down a couple of times a month. Jeanette and Debbie, Jean’s daughters, who lived in nearby Lafayette, loved spending time at Aunt Mary’s, playing with their Griffith cousins. With the birth of three infants in rapid succession, Mary’s first years in Danville were devoted to child care. Bobby arrived fourteen months after Ed, on June 24, 1963. (Nancy came much later — in January 1970.) Mary welcomed the busyness; it distracted her from her fertile imaginings.
Religion completed the circle of Mary’s neatly contoured life. She joined the local Baptist church. There was prayer meeting on Wednesdays, and both morning and evening services on Sundays. Mary also taught Sunday school, which her children attended right up through high school. At home there were prayers at dinner — as the children got old enough, they would be called on to recite — and prayers before bedtime. Mary conducted a mini-Bible study session at home each day after school, complete with a small blackboard on which to list Bible verses. Mary encouraged her kids to “plant a seed,” urging Joy, the eldest and the first to go to school, to “tell the kids about Jesus.”
Her view of religion was eclectic, quilted from a variety of sources including the Southern Baptist roots of her earliest church experiences, her mother’s fire-and-brimstone admonitions, her own later church exposure, and the ubiquitous drone of evangelists on the religious radio station she loved to listen to. She relied solely on Christian-oriented books to guide her in child raising, and read little else.
She held certain beliefs sacrosanct: all humans are born sinners; original sin may be redeemed only through the transformative acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior, usually through baptism; the Bible is the revealed word of God and as such the unquestionable authority on pious or sinful conduct; Satan is a living presence of enormous power, capable of luring the unsuspecting victim into sin; an unrepentant sinner — which includes anyone who has not accepted Jesus Christ — faces eternal damnation. Conversely, those who accept Christ and lead godly lives will reunite with their loved ones for eternal life in Paradise.