White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  But never mind the ration stamps or old dresses. Today she had only one thought: standing up there to accept Holy Communion, the body of Christ in wafer form, for the first time in front of everyone. In front of everyone—­including Daddy. Her father was going to be so proud of her. His eyes would be glued to her. Mimi would be up there, too. And Patty and Kathy would be making their First Communions in a ­couple of years. But she was going to make her First Communion first and best. Today was her day. Hers and Daddy’s. She was going to the best little Catholic girl in the whole wide world, and make Al Diener the proudest daddy in all of Indiana.

  World War II was a frightening time for any child, especially for one as sensitive as my mother. As the boys in her town went off to fight the Nazis and the Japanese, the small Indiana community—­and the entire Diener family—­hunkered down around the radio, listening for updates, praying for peace. For Anne, who already lived in fear of contracting polio and living out her days in an iron lung, the war was one more real-­world scenario that kept her awake at night. The bedwetting continued even as she approached the third grade. Exacerbating her struggles: the pressure to keep her fears hidden from her siblings, and especially from her mother. She was the oldest, and she was supposed to be the strongest. If there wasn’t enough food to go around, she was supposed to go hungry. If the air-­raid sirens sounded, she was expected to stand stoically when younger siblings covered their ears and cried. Trouble was, she wanted to cry out, too, just as loud as, if not louder than, the babies.

  During the school day, Anne, like many of her friends, tried to brush off the war as something of an adventure. At recess and on weekends, the youngsters often played a game in which some of the children pretended to be Americans, some Germans, and some Japanese—­hiding, seeking, chasing.

  “We called the game ‘War,’ ” my mother told me matter-­of-­factly, years later. “It’s all any of us wanted to play.”

  But at night, when the games were over, Anne huddled in a fetal position in her bed, wishing she had her long-­missing Pooh blanket and worrying about all of it. About the Japanese launching another Pearl Harbor–like surprise attack on U.S. soil. About Hitler and his team dropping a horrible bomb on Indianapolis, similar to the deluge of bombs he’d dropped on London that had killed dozens, even hundreds, at a time. About her beloved father being sent off to fight.

  As a father of five, Al Diener was never considered a candidate for the draft, much to the chagrin of the patriot within him. In the eyes of Uncle Sam, he was already doing his part leading a glass factory and raising so many children. Still, Al worried about the toll a long war would take on his young family. The rationing of the war, which limited his family to only a fixed amount of food—­some bread, some meat, some milk, but not much else—­made him nervous. Yes, the town of Dunkirk was generous. Many parishioners at St. Mary’s gave Aurelia extra ration stamps so that she could buy sugar for the children and gas for the car. But if this war continued, Al Diener feared that his children would starve. Literally. No—­the only answer for him was to take matters into his own hands and plant his own crops.

  Al had raised tomatoes and cucumbers and peas in the yard at Broad Street. But he needed space for a big garden: land to grow not just a little victory garden, but to start a victory farm to sustain his family, if need be, for years. He found his opportunity in a large plot of land a half mile up the road from the house on Broad Street. Inspecting the acres of trees and open space, Al decided he would take the little money he and Aurelia had managed to cobble together and buy his family a future. They would call it the Pine Patch.

  But while Al scraped together the funds for the land, there was little left over for a house. The house, Al decided, was something he would have to build himself, using his engineering skills and the manual labor of friends and family, including that of his own small children.

  “He had no real background in architecture,” my mother would later tell me of the cobbled-­together blueprints for the house. “But with Daddy, if there was a will, there was a way.”

  If my grandfather was the chief engineer and architect of the new house, my mother and my aunt Mimi were his lieutenants. In the morning before school, while their classmates slept in or ate breakfast, Al Diener’s two oldest girls donned jeans and accompanied him to build their future family home. They wielded wheelbarrows, helped to lay cement, assisted their father in the fine art of plastering.

  For my mother, the physical tasks that left her hands blistered, her fingernails broken, her hair streaked with cement in the early-­morning hours were nothing to complain about. Quite the contrary. She was in heaven.

  Away from her mother, who was home tending to the younger children, she had found a way, besides going to Mass at St. Mary’s, to connect with her beloved daddy. Sure, it was messy. And her father was a sometimes impatient taskmaster who demanded that his instructions be followed explicitly. But my mother wouldn’t have traded that time with her father for anything in the world.

  “It was such a special time,” she said. “Out there in nature. With just Daddy.

  “Sometimes he yelled. We never seemed to do things quite right. And it was always either too hot or too cold. But it didn’t matter. It was Daddy time.”

  Slowly, the house took shape. And by the time my mother was ready to enter high school, it was ready for move-­in. At first, the dwelling was extraordinarily small, consisting of just a front room, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry room, and one very large bedroom for all. Additional rooms would come in later years. But in those early years, the six rooms would suffice. And so would the land. The sizable plot featured an apple and pear orchard, a gargantuan vegetable garden, and a pond to swim in during the summer and to ice-­skate upon in the winter.

  My mother became a capable young skater during those early years at the Pine Patch. For hours after school and on weekends, she perfected her figure eights and spirals. Her favorite time to skate wasn’t in the light of day, but instead after the sun had set on the shortest days of winter, beneath a full moon.

  “It was the best feeling,” she would later tell me. “I was free. Skating out there I could think and dream. It was magical.”

  Soon after my mother’s home address changed, so too did her family unit. Just shy of her fifteenth birthday, Mimi decided to enter the convent. She was inspired by a book entitled You’re Called to Be a Nun that my grandmother had left out on the living room coffee table.

  “I think my parents put the book out on display as a hint to all of us girls,” my aunt Mimi would later recall. “And I was the only one to take the bait.”

  During a summer of babysitting for her aunt Peg’s children in Indianapolis, Mimi, reading the book and its message, wrote a letter to her parents, informing them that she was thinking about becoming a nun. When she returned home, without ever bothering to discuss the idea with her, my grandparents packed her things and drove her to the St. Joseph Academy and Convent in Tipton, Indiana. They bade goodbye not only to their second-­eldest daughter, but also to her name. Within the walls of the convent, she relinquished “Mimi”—­her entire Diener identity—­and became Sister Mary Gertrude.

  In later years, it was revealed that both Aurelia’s and Al’s parents were outraged by the sudden decision, arguing that it was premature and that young Mimi should at least have been encouraged to graduate from high school in Dunkirk alongside her peers and siblings before entering any convent. But Aurelia, perhaps actively working to reduce the number of mouths to feed, was undeterred. If her fourteen-­year-­old daughter thought she heard a calling, there was no need for discussion. Off to the convent she would go.

  My aunt Mimi remembers her departure as a virtual nonevent in the Diener household. “There was never really a discussion. There were never any questions.” Perhaps most surprising, and most troubling of all, she said, there were never really any tears.

 
Was she homesick? I would later ask. “Yes, of course,” she said. “There were times when I was extremely homesick. But as far as your grandparents were concerned, the decision had been made. Now I belonged not to them, but to the sisters and the church.”

  My mother had a different take on the decision. “It was child abuse,” she told me when I was in college. “They didn’t know it was child abuse. But it was.”

  Mimi’s calling was a source of intrigue and confusion for my teenaged mother. Anne had always fancied herself the good Catholic. She was the oldest. She had been the first of the Diener children to memorize the prayers of the rosary, the first of the siblings to be confirmed. If God wanted a Diener girl in his fold, shouldn’t he have tapped her first? Was she doing something wrong, she wondered, to have not yet heard the calling? Why had Mimi been the one to take and read that book? Was something wrong with Anne that she preferred Wuthering Heights and Nancy Drew to You’re Called to Be a Nun?

  “I wanted to impress Daddy,” my mother said, shaking her head once at the memory. “So I just prayed harder to be better. I tried so hard.”

  For my mother, Mimi’s departure left a significant hole. It marked the first time in nearly a decade that the family had only six members. That meant there was one fewer sibling with whom to quarrel and with whom to vie for her parents’ attention, which remained in short supply. But in spite of Mimi’s absence, the headache of sibling rivalry was far from over. Indeed, in the wake of Mimi’s departure, the war continued, and intensified, particularly between my mother and her greatest rival at the time, her sister Patty.

  With Mimi out of the way, Patricia “Patty” Diener became sandwiched—­some might say smothered—­between my mother and their youngest sister, Kathy. As the eldest, my mother was Trudy and Dad Diener’s unmistakable favorite grandchild. And as a straight-­A student, she was also a class leader. That meant, for Patty, my mother cast a mighty shadow in both the school and the town. Kathy, meanwhile, was both the baby girl and the designated sweetheart of the family.

  Kathy earned the sweetheart title through a now-­famous story within the Diener family. When my mother and her siblings were deemed naughty, Aurelia often resorted to sending them to the kitchen pantry and locking them in the closet area usually reserved for baking supplies. All the children railed against the draconian punishment—­except Kathy, who went willingly to the kitchen closet with a sweet smile upon her face. My grandmother was initially surprised at this reaction. But eventually, her surprise turned to suspicion. Her hunch that something was amiss was spot-­on. It turned out Aunt Kathy was keeping a little silver spoon in the large bag of sugar stored in the pantry and was only too happy to be punished so that she could indulge in spoonfuls of sugar for uninterrupted swaths of time. Her philosophy: something good could always come out of something bad.

  For Patty, the unenviable position that placed her squarely between an older award-­winning sister and a younger beatific sister was often too much. My mother later admitted it was a no-­win situation.

  “Patty was stuck in the middle,” my mother said.

  Patty was bright and earned good grades. But Anne’s academic achievements—­her straight A’s and involvement in a plethora of extracurricular activities—­had set the bar extremely high. “Even if I won an award or went out for a club, it was often something Anne had already won or done,” Patty told me recently. “And with our grandparents, especially our father’s parents, it was clear during our childhood that she was the favorite and could do no wrong.”

  The strain of trying to find a place of distinction in the family took its toll. Arguments increasingly broke out not only between Anne and Patty, but also between strong-­willed Aurelia and equally strong-­willed Patty. A young Al Joe witnessed the friction.

  “Patty was the first of the Diener kids to question why things were done in the home the way they were done,” my uncle Al would later tell me. “But she certainly wasn’t the last.”

  There were plenty of rules to rail against. The bedtime routine my grandmother had put into place for her children had made sense when they were still in diapers. But as my mother and her siblings reached adolescence, the six P.M. bedtime began to feel exceptionally unfair for healthy, growing children who had friends and ample energy.

  “We would go to bed and it would still be light out,” my mother told me sadly in later years. “Not just a little bit light. In the summer months, when the sun didn’t set until nine o’clock, it was very light. The worst sound in the world when you’re small and healthy and well behaved is hearing all of your friends laugh and play outside while you’re being told to go to sleep. The sound of their laughter carried into the room. It was like salt in the wound.”

  The enforcement of rules coincided with my grandmother’s diminishing looks. The once relatively trim figure my grandmother had sported when she’d met my grandfather had grown thicker. Her hair became even more of an afterthought. The biggest telltale sign of her discontent: her eyes. Most of the photos my mother has from the 1940s and 1950s are of her and her siblings sporting cherubic smiles. But in photos where my grandmother’s image can be found, her eyes appear increasingly tired and preoccupied, sometimes listless, as if she’s willing herself to get through both the picture taking and the day.

  A multitude of miscarriages was almost certainly part of the problem. While doctors told Aurelia to stop having children after she birthed Patty, she continued to get pregnant.

  “Catholic or not, I would have gone on the pill if it had been available to me,” my grandmother told me years later, as she not so subtly encouraged me to embrace the birth control pill when I came of age. “But since it wasn’t, I didn’t. And sometimes you reach a point when you just can’t stop.”

  Translation: in the words of my mother, the sex between Aurelia and Al “must have been pretty amazing.”

  But the unprotected sex came with a price. Beginning in 1942, shortly after my uncle Al’s birth, my grandmother suffered miscarriage after miscarriage. Often the miscarriages were fast and kept from the children. But other times, Aurelia was unable to hide the losses. By 1951, she’d suffered at least five miscarriages.

  “I helped Mother with one of them,” my mother told me once. “She screamed for me to bring her towels. I remember there was blood. So much blood. I thought she was going to die.”

  Aurelia didn’t die physically. Instead, she faded away emotionally, becoming less and less available to her children. Increasingly, she sought to escape through words, just as she had as a child. And while the children left her with no time to write, there was time to read. She buried herself between meals in Agatha Christie novels and periodicals of the day like Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. The Indianapolis Star, the leading paper of Indianapolis, was for her a veritable bible. My grandmother read the newspaper from front to back, keeping tabs on global and domestic stories of the day. But interested though she was in news, without doubt her favorite section was the Star’s society page. She pored over the page, her children would later tell me, as if cramming for a test, committing to memory the names of the movers and shakers of Indianapolis’s social circle. In subsequent months and years, the names served as secret weapons my grandmother kept at the ready, sprinkling them into conversations with friends and neighbors at cocktail parties and church socials and Al’s business gatherings in a bid to suggest that those well-­heeled ­couples were Al and Aurelia’s old friends. Seldom did listeners question her actual connections to Indianapolis’s elite or doubt that she really exchanged phone calls and holiday cards with them. Family members say Aurelia was so keen to convince neighbors that she actually rubbed elbows with the upper crust of the Midwest that she took to memorizing portions of the phone book so that she could tick off various socialites’ numbers and addresses as she spoke of them in conversation. If the well-­to-­do world that Aurelia Arvin had dreamed about since she was a teenager wouldn
’t come to her, she would create it for herself, one tale at a time.

  “Aurelia Diener was happiest when she lived in a fantasy world,” my uncle Al told me. “It wasn’t who she knew that mattered. For her, it was all about who she claimed she knew.”

  According to him, if she’d been half as committed to the notion of motherhood as she was to convincing onlookers that she really was Somebody, she would have been Mother of the Year.

  But while my grandmother disliked many of the trappings of domestic life, she continued to adore my grandfather. She rose early to see him off to the factory, then in the afternoon, she smoothed her hair, changed her dress, applied a splash of perfume just before he arrived home from work. She laid out his pipe, smoothed out the wrinkles of the newspaper she’d already devoured, turned on the radio, and waited.

  Once, when Al Diener was particularly perplexed that a pear tree he had planted in the front yard refused to yield any fruit, Aurelia surprised him by taking pieces of string and hanging a collection of fruit from the fruit bowl on the branches of the tree. As my grandfather approached the front door after a day’s work, the tree greeted him, teeming with bananas, apples, peaches, and plums she had saved to buy at the grocery store. My grandmother stood waiting inside the door, smiling and laughing as she saw his frown turn into a grin. A hearty laugh sprang from his belly, a giggle from hers. A moment later, she was in his arms.

  “It was magical to see him laugh like that and her laugh in return,” my mother would tell me years later, after both of her parents had died. “We kids watched her surprise him from upstairs. She worked all afternoon on that tree. And it paid off. It’s like they were teenagers.”