These elements, an approximation of traditional orthodox Protestant doctrine, defined the realm within which Mary could ensure both her family’s safety and its immortality. Indeed, for Mary, accepting Christ was a way of finding self-acceptance. She used the Bible and its verses — one for every occasion — as sentinels against the fearsome agents of Satan, who she knew must be contriving to infiltrate her comfortable suburban bubble.
As it was for her mother before her, religion was a weapon of control, but Mary wielded it less like a general, more like a zealous shepherd.
She was comforted by the belief that God and his guardian angels would always keep her husband and children out of harm’s way. Yet a contradiction was always present: she admonished her children daily with the statement “God cannot protect you from Satan if you are disobedient.”
One evening a tearful Joy, then five years old, came to her mother. “I want to be saved,” the child pleaded. “I’m afraid I won’t go to heaven.” It was 7:30, but Mary insisted that Bob drive them to the church. Somewhere she had learned that a child was not accountable for her sins until twelve years of age, but she wasn’t taking any chances. At the church, Joy accepted Jesus as her savior and was baptized by the minister.
The missing link in all this was Bob, who resisted all of Mary’s efforts to get him baptized. He saw religion as based on ignorance at best, and founded on intimidation and fear. Characteristically, he tolerated it as long as it didn’t interfere with his life. He watched Mary’s emotional involvement with a kind of detached bemusement. He could never fathom the depths of her immersion, but he never chose to argue about it. And he never interceded when his children became involved. He reasoned that they were intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions.
Mary worried that Bob would be denied the kingdom of heaven, but, after initially making a pest of herself, she settled for subtle nudgings. (But she didn’t give up. When Bob suffered a painful ulcer attack in 1980 and required an operation, she accompanied him to Kaiser Hospital’s surgery prep room. As he was about to be wheeled away, Mary leaned over and asked, “Bob, do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?” Bob shot back, “Hell, no!”)
Bobby Griffith came into a world that was erupting with social change. It was 1963: the South was immersed in a fury of protest, and Buddhists were self-immolating in Vietnam. By the time Bobby was five months old, the American president had been assassinated and the age of post-World War II innocence was forever gone. The deep pools of American culture and politics were being stirred up, and discontent was rising to the surface.
None of this had an immediate impact on the Griffith enclave. Bobby’s infancy and childhood had all the earmarks of an idyllic time. He was loved and valued. He was a happy child who displayed a sunny disposition and gentle manner.
Mary, the nondriver, and her three kids would walk the two miles to downtown Danville to shop; or they would walk to the dentist, Bobby in the stroller, Ed riding the back support, and Joy walking alongside. The children loved to go to Merrill’s Fountain for treats. As they got older, Bob and Mary would pile them in the backseat of the station wagon on Friday nights for an evening at the drive-in theater.
Bobby was a gentle spirit, almost too good and too obedient, yet endearing and lovable. He was a skinny child, with a space between.his two front teeth that brightened his whole face when he smiled. This feature, together with his sheath of blond hair, gave Bobby the look of the ail-American boy.
But it didn’t take much further observation to see that he was different from most other boys. He was not a cut-up, not given to roughhousing. He was content to be in the house coloring or playing with stuffed animals and dolls. Outdoors, he loved nature and paid more attention to the detail of natural settings than did any of the other boys. Once, at age three or four, he said, “Mom, when I woke up this morning I said good morning to all the trees and the forest.”
It was around that time that Bobby dressed up in his sister’s fluffy half-slip one day and ambled next door to a neighbor’s house. There, he got into a playful scramble with the neighbor boys, kissing and hugging them. The boys’ mother called Mary, perturbed by the incident. Mary felt angry, humiliated, and frightened all at once. When Bobby came home, all smiles and happy, with the slip bunched up around his neck, Mary yanked it off and remonstrated, “Don’t get into your sister’s things ever again.”
Bobby was not like Ed, who loved his tanks and soldiers and Tonka trucks and who liked to hang out in the garage with his dad as he puttered at the workbench. Ed was assertive, at times aggressive. Bobby was quiet, even timid. He wouldn’t speak up for himself as the others did. Yet he was outgoing in other ways, often racing up to strangers and hugging them.
Bobby liked being in the kitchen with Mom, or rummaging through her costume-jewelry box in the bedroom, or playing with Joy’s things. Mary caught herself more than once shaping the word sissy in her mind, then quickly suppressing the thought. The idea of Bobby’s being somebody society didn’t approve of scared her, not only for Bobby’s sake but also for hers. It didn’t help when Granny would visit and scold Bobby for smearing on his mother’s lipstick or messing with Joy’s things. She warned her daughter, “Mary, if you aren’t careful, this boy will turn out a sissy.”
Mary strove to discourage anything feminine. Once, she bought Bobby a pretend shaver so he could shave with his dad. Before Christmas in 1968, Bobby, then five, got hold of one of Mary’s Christmas catalogs. He turned to a display of beautiful dolls and asked his mother if she would get him one for Christmas.
Mary said, hastily, “Well, Bobby, I don’t really have the money.”
“If you had the money, would you?” Bobby insisted.
Mary tried to divert the discussion. It did not seem right to her for boys to want to have dolls. “Someday, Bobby,” she said, “you’ll have your own wife and you can dress her up in all these beautiful things.”
She had felt squeamish enough to lie to a five-year-old. She could not have said exactly why. In her heart she had wanted to buy him the doll. But knowing Bobby, he would have wanted to take it to school. It would have been embarrassing. Worse, the other boys might have teased him. A vague sense of threat to her carefully ordered existence caused her to wish this problem away.
Big brother Ed, a second grader to Bobby’s first, tried to teach Bobby how to throw and catch a ball. He never got the hang of it. “You throw like a girl,” Ed would yell. Indeed, through his childhood Bobby seemed to prefer playing with girls — a behavior that led Mary to feel intimidated when a teacher reported it to her at a parent-teacher conference.
Mary fretted about Bobby through most of his childhood. Even as she admired his artistic bent, his growing proficiency in drawing and writing, she reacted with embarrassment to his girlish way of swinging the bat, the flourish of his hand as he swept his long hair from his forehead, the doll he made for her one Christmas in junior high from scraps of lace borrowed from her sewing basket.
In the early days she never equated sissy with homosexual. She simply feared difference. Others can be different — fine for them. Those hippies she was seeing on television, talking about love and peace — well, nothing wrong with that. But she shuddered to think of her kids turning out that way.
Pamela [not her real name], a nearby neighbor, was different. Uninhibited, outspoken, Pamela would regale Mary with stories about her sex life with her husband, sometimes in front of the kids. She talked about wife swapping. This made Mary squirm, but their kids liked one another, and the mothers helped each other out, so it was convenient. Eventually Pamela got divorced, which played directly into Mary’s darkest fears. She was already suffering the daily agony of paranoia about Bob, and now practically next door lived an available woman of no apparent morality!