Al Diener had three great loves in his life: his mother, Trudy; his wife, Aurelia; and the Catholic Church. And more often than not, the women took a backseat to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In Christ, in the sacraments, in the words of the pope and the cardinals and the presiding parish priest, Al found life’s meaning and order. And in that order—in those traditions and rigid commandments—he placed his undying faith. The church provided the structure around which all things, both personal and professional, revolved. So it was no accident that Al chose as the first home in which to raise his family a rambling gray house next to St. Mary’s, the only Catholic church in Dunkirk.
For my mother, it became evident early on that if she wished to spend more time with her father, to find a way into his heart so that she could be certain he was thinking about her during at least some of those many long hours he spent away from her at work, she needed to do so through the church. Saying the rosary with Daddy, attending weekday masses with him, helping set the table when a priest was invited over for dinner, all scored her additional moments with her father, and, more importantly, additional doses of the love and approval she so desperately craved. She was intrigued by the stories her father told her about the saints, listened with rapt attention to the Gospels, and marveled, with a combination of fear and intrigue, at the robed priests who held court before the altar, engulfed in plumes of smoke that spilled out of their incense decanters.
But while embracing Catholicism was the clear path to reach her father, less clear to Anne was how to find an “in” with her mother.
Aurelia Arvin Diener longed to become many things as a child, but a good mother was not at the top of the list. As a child, in the wake of her father’s devastating loss of hearing and her stern mother’s growing arthritis, she had watched the family’s fortune dwindle to nothing. One minute, they were living a life of teas and dance classes in Cincinnati. The next, the family was destitute. For years, Aurelia scrounged for coal along train tracks to keep the family’s modest home in Indianapolis heated, worked on nights and weekends for a car dealer so that she could buy her younger sister a winter coat. She prayed that when she eventually married, she could exhale. But motherhood was anything but relaxing.
The constant penny-pinching and nose wiping that came with motherhood made her feel, more often than not, trapped. And it showed. She snapped often or retreated, burying her head in newspapers and cherished books instead of paying attention to the house or her children. To a young Anne, her mother’s moodiness made her feel as if she were doing something wrong, as if she weren’t the daughter she was supposed to be.
The level of stress in the young Diener home only intensified as my grandmother became pregnant again—and again—and again—in rapid succession. Fourteen months after my mother came another daughter, Mary, whom my grandparents would call Mimi. The delivery was so fast that the doctor dropped my poor aunt as she exited the womb. My grandmother winced as she heard the baby’s head hit the table. Thankfully, she survived. Soon after Mimi came Patty, a curly-haired dirty-blonde who, almost from the day she was born, clashed with my mother for her parents’ affection. Then came Kathy, a dark-haired beauty with a sweet smile and doe eyes. Finally, after four girls, my grandfather got the boy he’d always dreamed of: Albert Joseph Junior, a.k.a. Al Joe, a strapping boy who commanded his family’s attention.
Dealing with five babies in six and a half years prompted Aurelia to turn into something of a robot. She approached childcare in an increasingly pragmatic fashion, seeming less interested in doling out hugs and praise than in managing chaos. Meals were served systematically at five o’clock. All the children—including my mother, the oldest—were in bed by six o’clock. In this way, Aurelia carved out time for what she really desired: being alone with Al. There was now no time for writing, for completing those novels she’d dreamed of penning as a teenager. And there was less and less time for reading. But Al? She would always make time for her beloved husband. By all accounts, he was what she lived for.
The house they dwelled in on Broad Street had two stories, but it was small. All the children were forced to share one room, the girls sleeping two to a bed.
To combat fuel costs, heat was limited to the downstairs. Consequently, during the winter months, the children slept in two or three layers of clothing and two pairs of socks at a time to ward off pneumonia.
“Oftentimes,” my mother told me, “the house was so cold I could see my breath when I got dressed. And the sweaters on the drying racks became solid as blocks of wood.”
Other times, she said, her mother’s bottles of cheap perfume turned into fragrant ice cubes.
Aurelia displayed intermittent bursts of warmth during the difficult times. She treated the children to popcorn and Coke on holiday nights when finances allowed. She was a capable nurse when her brood came down with bouts of chicken pox and mumps and measles and whooping cough.
But for the most part, she ruled the house with something of an iron fist. For Aurelia, the implementation and enforcement of rules was a means of controlling the chaos engulfing—and sometimes drowning—her. That quest for rules reared its head when she decided it was time for a young Anne to be separated from her beloved childhood blanket, Pooh. For years, the blanket, tattered and torn, was my mother’s one true constant through the changes of more siblings. She slept with it clenched in her chubby little fists at night, played with it alongside her dolls by day, even attempted to bathe with it.
“I loved my Pooh,” my mother would later tell me. “It was more than a blanket, it was a friend.”
But for Aurelia, Pooh was a problem. Anne was the oldest, and enough was enough. It wasn’t proper for Anne to keep a blanket. That’s what conventional wisdom told her, and that’s what she’d adhere to.
One morning when my mother was out playing, Pooh disappeared.
“Where’s my Pooh?” my mother asked innocently upon returning to her bedroom at lunchtime to seek out the comfort of the blanket.
“Pooh is gone,” Aurelia responded curtly, snapping string beans in the kitchen sink, an apron tied around her waist.
“What do you mean, g-g-g-gone?” asked my mother, her eyes widening, her voice rising. She had begun to stutter when she spoke, and moments like these, when she was especially nervous, made her stuttering more pronounced.
“Gone,” Aurelia replied firmly, placing a roast beef sandwich in front of her daughter. “I’ve told you before. You’re a big girl now. Big girls don’t need security blankets.”
“But it wasn’t a s-s-s-s-security blanket,” cried my mother, confused. Her stomach churned. The tears started. She didn’t even know what a security blanket was supposed to be. All she knew was that she loved her Pooh. She needed her Pooh. “It was m-m-m-m-m-mine.”
She couldn’t breathe. She tried to eat the sandwich in front of her, afraid to make her mother any angrier. But each bite made her feel sicker and sicker.
For hours, then days, she cried for her Pooh.
“You’ll get used to life without Pooh,” her father told her matter-of-factly that weekend before diving into the enormous to-do list of household chores Aurelia had compiled for him.
But Anne never got used to life without Pooh. For years, she kept one eye open for the tattered blanket, hoping against hope that it would turn up beneath a sofa cushion or at the back of a kitchen cabinet. It never did. And my mother’s relationship with her mother was irrevocably altered.
The bedwetting episodes started soon after Pooh disappeared. Though she’d long been potty trained, Anne regressed, wetting her bed on a nightly basis. She tried to hide the soiled sheets from her mother but failed more often than not.
“You naughty girl!” Aurelia would cry, pressing her nose to the sheets before angrily stripping the bed. “You’re the oldest! We don’t have time for these things!”
The overarching result of all the chaos of the household was that Anne was shipped to her grandparents to stay for long stretches of time. Each time a new baby arrived, each time a crisis gripped the household, she was sent away for days, sometimes weeks, as her mother worked to get the new dose of chaos at home under control.
My mother loved both sets of grandparents, but it was her paternal grandparents—her Trudy and Dad Diener—to whom she became especially close and with whom she spent the greatest amount of time. The love Trudy had for her eldest son, Al, was passed on to my mother in great supply. Trudy took my mother to fine lunches in Indianapolis’s LS Ayres tearoom, taught her how to set a table and place a napkin on her lap, how to properly eat her soup, tipping the bowl just so, moving the spoon away from her as she scooped. She purchased for my mother school supplies—colorful pencils and fancy notebooks—and pretty dresses that Al and Aurelia Diener could not afford. Most significantly, Trudy gave my mother a place to call her own in their North Indianapolis home.
At Trudy and Dad Diener’s house, my mother developed, among other things, her love for the radio. August Diener, whose glaucoma and cataracts had eaten away his vision bit by bit, spent hours seated in front of the radio. And he passed that passion for the spoken word on to my curious mother. It was with August that my mother listened breathlessly to the speeches delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he worked to put the nation back on the road to recovery with his New Deal plans. Together, they listened enthralled to the cracks of the bats and the cheers of the crowds at his beloved Cincinnati Reds games. And as a family unit, they gathered to hear Amos ’n’ Andy and The Lone Ranger.
“Your generation has television,” my mother would tell me as I rolled my teenaged eyes. “Mine had the real deal: radio.”
Radio, my mother said, soothed her to sleep during countless nights and offered hours of comfort as she suffered through childhood fevers and the mumps. The dramatic chords of the organ used to narrate The Guiding Light, the melodic strains of Glen Miller, and the jokes shared between Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, between George Burns and Gracie Allen, all served to calm my mother and make her feel as if everything, even on the scariest of nights, was going to be all right. She was afraid of the typical things of youth, monsters beneath beds chief among them. And she was afraid of the issues gripping the adults of the nation, including a polio outbreak that was forcing public pools to close and children her age to live out their days in iron lungs. But the sounds of the radio took her mind off of her worries, if only for a few minutes. In radio, Anne Diener happily escaped.
“You haven’t really learned how to imagine,” she would later tell me, “how to really see a story come to life in your mind, until you’ve spent an afternoon just listening—really listening—to words.”
While August Diener instilled in my mother a love of radio and the spoken word, Trudy Diener instilled in her a love of the arts. Decked out in a mink stole she’d been given long before the Depression struck and a pair of gloves that buttoned at the wrist, Trudy squired a young Anne to musicals in Indianapolis’s finest theaters, ice shows featuring the figure-skating sensation Sonja Henie, and orchestral concerts at symphony halls. Over the course of months, then years, Trudy painstakingly introduced her young charge to Bach, Brahms, Beethoven.
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Emperor Concerto,” my mother used to sigh. “I felt as if I’d discovered something so special, so exquisite, I wanted to share it with everyone and with no one all at the same time.”
And at night, Trudy introduced a young Anne to more music: lullabies. While Aurelia and Al were more often than not too busy to sing to their children at bedtime, Trudy was not. Sitting beside Anne in a darkened room after her eldest grandchild had completed a day of tree-climbing and radio-playing, Trudy sang song upon song: “Rock-a-bye Baby,” “When the Fairies Sing,” and my mother’s favorite, an old Native American tune. Trudy belted out the plaintive melody to my mother as she tucked her into bed. My mother lay, both mesmerized and torn, not sure which she wanted more: to stay awake to enjoy her grandmother’s performance or to retreat to a world of sleep.
“Trudy made me feel safe. Her voice, her song, they made me feel as if I mattered,” my mother told me one night from the post of the rocking chair in my bedroom before breaking into her own version of the lullaby.
But almost as important as music to Trudy and my mother were movies. Every Saturday, Trudy accompanied my mother to the cinema. Oftentimes, they attended a double feature. They were nondiscriminatory and ran to whatever was playing, loving virtually all genres: romantic dramas, whodunits, adventure capers. The darkened theaters introduced my mother to worlds she increasingly longed to be a part of: far-off lands, mysterious castles, happy homes. She may not have seen as much as she would have liked of her parents in those early years, but she saw plenty of Shirley Temple and Cary Grant and Joseph Cotton and Fred Astaire. They became her heroes, her surrogate friends. For a few hours she forgot about her cold house and quarreling siblings.
If my mother loved one thing more than movies during her childhood, it was books. Her most treasured possessions in her early years were her hardbound editions of beloved classics: Little Women, The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe. She additionally adored the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Bobbsey Twins series. Most of the books were gifts from Aurelia. Money strapped though the Diener family was, my mother often said her literary-minded mother would have let her starve physically before she allowed her to starve intellectually. Every Christmas, a brand-new beautiful book was among her presents. Other books in my mother’s little library were given to her by Trudy and Dad Diener and her aunt Peg. All were kept in places of honor beside and beneath her bed.
“In books,” my mother always liked to remind me, “anything—and I mean anything!—is possible: adventure, peace, stability. And love. Definitely love.”
“When I read Little Women for the first time, I wanted with all of my heart to be Jo,” she said to me years later, reflecting upon the classic tale’s spunky heroine, one of four girls. “What I wouldn’t have given to have had the love of Laurie. Then the professor. And Marmie.”
“Marmie?” I’d asked, confused. Laurie, I knew, was the wealthy boy who lived next door to Jo and shared her sense of adventure and mischief. The professor was the man she’d fallen in love with in New York City over mutual passions for literature and theater. But Marmie?
“Marmie wasn’t one of Jo’s boyfriends,” I said, gently correcting her. “She was Jo’s mother.”
“That’s right,” said my mother. At that point, a cloud passed over her face.
“Mother or not, Marmie was one of Jo’s true loves. Every bit as important to her, if not more so, than men. Such a tremendous mother, don’t you think? Loving her girls, taking care of each of them, encouraging Jo to write the way she did?”
I realized then that from the time she was old enough to read, Anne Diener had craved the affection and approval of a mother she couldn’t seem to reach every bit as much as she did the unconditional love of a dashing suitor. Trouble was, she didn’t have a clue as to how to go about obtaining either.
Chapter 2
First Communion at St. Mary’s
1943
Today was the day. Today was the day! Anne stood in front of the mirror in the house on Broad Street, admiring herself. The dress was all that she dreamed it would be. It was white. It was lacy. And best of all, it was new. She loved everything about it: the short puffed sleeves that reminded her of something Ginger Rogers might wear; the row of buttons down the back that her mother had to take the time to fasten, one at a time; the crinoline that made the skirt poof just so. But the best part? The veil. The lace-and-tulle confection that attached to her shoulder-length curls made her look and feel like the little princess bride she was. This was better than any dress she’d ever wor
n. In fact, this was probably as nice as or nicer than anything in Princess Elizabeth’s closet.
Anne twirled on one foot to see if the dress poofed out even more when she spun. It did! She sighed happily. How lucky she was to be making her First Communion. She was one of only a few Catholic girls in the whole school. Everyone else was Baptist or Lutheran or Mormon or something her parents called Holy Rollers, and she was starting to get a lot of questions from her classmates about why her family went to St. Mary’s. One of the boys even told her that the KKK chapter based in Jay County hated Catholics almost as much as they hated the Negroes. She’d asked her parents what that was supposed to mean. But they told her never to listen if anyone talked about the KKK again since everyone knew that Catholics and Negroes were good people.
Today all of that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was making her First Communion. She’d been preparing for weeks, meeting with Father after Mass, memorizing the Hail Mary and the Our Father. Mimi had come along for the lessons since she was making her First Communion, too. Father said that as long as Anne was making her First Communion, they might as well do it for Mimi, too, especially since Mimi was just a year younger.
At first, Anne hadn’t liked the idea of sharing her big day with her younger sister. It didn’t seem fair. She’d had to wait a whole year longer than Mimi to receive the big sacrament, to don the dress. But in time she realized it might be nice to have someone up at that altar with her, just in case she got scared. And the whole point wasn’t that there would be two of them—the point was the dress she got to wear. That new white dress. New! So many of her clothes these days were hand-me-downs. Friends and neighbors with older girls increasingly gave her mother their used clothes. Sometimes the dresses were nice. But sometimes they had holes in them. Or they had the kind of wrinkles that never seemed to come out, no matter how much her mother ironed them. Everyone knew that money was tight for the Diener kids. That’s what Anne’s parents said every time someone slipped them extra ration stamps after Mass or when they were at the grocery store.
White Dresses Page 2
