White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  But it was my mother—­not my grandmother—­who was approaching teenhood.

  On the surface of things, Anne Diener was the typical schoolgirl of the 1940s and 1950s. She wore sweater sets and Peter Pan–collared blouses and loafers to school. She donned blue jeans that cuffed at the ankles when she performed chores around the Pine Patch. Now, in addition to the radio, she enjoyed records, especially show tunes, which her beloved aunt Peg bought for her. Al’s only sister, who had since married a dashing soldier-­turned-­insurance-­executive named Fritz, continued to dote on my mother and view her as her special project. She took her shopping for things my grandparents couldn’t afford, including cashmere sweaters and her first poodle skirts.

  My mother appreciated Peg’s attention. But even with her beautiful aunt, she felt as if she never quite measured up. Peg, with her to-­die-­for cheekbones, her trim waist, her ability to capably apply makeup, looked as if she’d walked straight out of the pages of Vogue. My mother, by comparison, felt forever gangly and awkward. Her curls were unruly. She had no clue how to apply makeup. And she was developing acne on her forehead and chin. Making matters worse: her mouth. Dentists said it was too small and was contributing to the crooked teeth that jutted up and out. They tried time and again to correct them with the help of braces, with little effect.

  It was Anne’s teachers who became her cheerleaders, patiently taking her under their wings and encouraging her to push herself ever harder and to reach ever higher. With the exception of math and physical education, her grades were stellar. And her ability to write was unparalleled. She penned her first musical at the age of fifteen.

  The score to the girl-­dreams-­of-­boy-­then-­winds-­up-­with-­boy romantic comedy was lost in later years, but my mother never forgot the lyrics. She sang them to me once when I was in the sixth grade, in the process of writing and directing the first of my own plays for a class project.

  “Who can think of dishes when you’re dreaming about kisses?” she sang.

  A beloved English teacher, Mr. Wilcox, encouraged my mother to send the script to New York for consideration. But she never did.

  “Why not?” I asked her when she revealed this nugget of information. “Why not send it to New York if your teacher thought it was good enough?”

  “Because my parents never told me it was good enough,” she said with a shrug. “If your parents don’t believe in you, it’s hard to believe in yourself.”

  One silver lining that my mother clung to throughout even the darkest of times was Pete, her first dog. She’d been presented with the springer spaniel shortly after moving to the Pine Patch. Within days, the dog was my mother’s whole life, her source of endless pride and joy.

  “He filled a hole in my heart I never knew was empty,” my mother explained.

  All the Diener children wanted to think of Pete as theirs, and according to the family friend who had given the Dieners the dog, he was supposed to belong to the entire family. But even my mother’s siblings admit Pete was always Anne’s dog. Wagging his tail, panting softly, he kept her company as she did her homework. He lifted her spirits when she quarreled with her siblings or vied for the attention of her parents. And each night, he slept in her bed, watching for her to fall asleep before he fell into a deep slumber of his own.

  Pete, a hunting dog by nature, was happiest when he went with my mother to explore the grounds of the Pine Patch. One night, he surprised her during a stroll by retrieving three baby bunny rabbits. He carried all of them carefully in his mouth, depositing them at my mother’s feet. My mother and aunts raised the bunnies to adulthood before releasing them into the wild.

  “Pete was just the best dog,” my mother would later tell me. “He loved me like I’d never been loved.”

  Anne included Pete in her nightly prayers to God. At last he had given her something to love that loved her just as much in return.

  But as much as Anne loved Pete, Aurelia disliked him. The dog was work, she lamented. More work than she wanted or felt she needed to take on. He was literally and figuratively one more mouth to feed. He smelled. He made messes. And he was loud, frequently barking. At birds. At squirrels. Even at the priest when he came to Sunday dinner.

  The night that Pete took a bite out of young Kathy was the final straw.

  “That dog is an inbreed and more trouble than he’s worth!” Aurelia shouted at Al.

  In the heat of the moment, with Kathy still bleeding and frightened, Aurelia Arvin Diener begged my grandfather: Do something about the dog.

  A resigned Al agreed.

  “He started to dig a hole,” my uncle Al later explained. “I asked him what he was doing and he said that Pete was sick.”

  My uncle watched in horror as my grandfather called for Pete to get into the hole. That’s when he pulled out the revolver and shot him, execution-­style.

  My mother was inconsolable.

  “You k-­k-­k-­k-­killed Pete,” she sobbed, her stutter returning, the way it always did when she was under duress.

  She never managed to recover from the loss of Pete. In a way, she ached for him for the rest of her life, stopping decades later to pet English springer spaniels she spied on the street, always remarking upon what a special breed they were.

  As much as Pete prompted her to fall in love with dogs, it also made her swear off owning—­or loving—­dogs forever. For years, it was a decision I failed to understand.

  “Why can’t I have a dog?” I would cry, begging her birthday after birthday for a beagle like the one my friend Jenny Stancer had or a golden retriever like the one our next-­door neighbors doted upon.

  “We have a house. We have a yard. We have the room,” I would argue. “We need a dog!”

  Usually, my mother would remain quiet during my wails and whines and pleas, waiting for me to finish before changing the subject.

  Only once did she respond directly to my request. As we drove through town on our way to church one Sunday morning, her knuckles whitened around the tan vinyl wheel of our old Chevette before she drew in a sharp breath.

  “You know why you can’t get a dog?” she asked

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Because eventually a dog dies or gets taken away. It’s one of the worst losses you’ll ever know.”

  I thought I spied her crying that morning during Mass. In later years, that wasn’t entirely unusual. But that morning, I suspect, the tears were shed for Pete.

  Chapter 3

  White Dress, White House

  June 1953

  Anne Diener took a breath and studied herself in the Pine Patch’s one and only floor-­length mirror. Her curls wouldn’t lie flat. That she could blame on the muggy nature of June in Indiana. Still, she liked what she saw. More specifically, she liked what she wore. She wasn’t sure which screen legend her gown was the embodiment of—­Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman. But she was pretty certain either actress would have looked at home on the cover of a movie magazine in the all-­white sateen dress with the cinched waist and the full ball skirt. She loved the dress. Loved the clean lines. Loved the red rose pinned to it. Most of all, she loved how the gown made her feel. Today she was a grown-­up. Today she had arrived! All that was missing was a golden Oscar statue to clutch in her hands. Who cared if all the other girls in the class were going to be wearing the same gown? In the Diener house, today was her day. Her Day.

  Everyone had come to Dunkirk for the occasion. Trudy and Dad Diener and Grandma and Grandpa Arvin had made the trek from Indianapolis. So had Aunt Mary Jane and Uncle Bob. Even Peg had come down from her new home up in Winnetka, Illinois, dressed to kill in a brand-­new gray fitted dress, handpicked from the designer section of Chicago’s Marshall Field’s. All were there to see Annie—­their Annie—­graduate from high school.

  The only noticeable absence was Mimi. Immersed in her life of duty at the
convent, she was unable to break away. But in her place was a new Diener sibling: Michael Francis. He was just a few months old, and Anne knew her baby brother would be squirming and likely squawking on Mother’s lap during the ceremony. She wouldn’t have it any other way. After all of those miscarriages, all of that loss, all of those tears and sadness and emptiness and unbearable silence of the past few years, Baby Michael’s squawks were music to Anne’s ears. A blessing from the Lord our Father, whom Anne prayed to mightily every morning, noon, and night.

  What was his will? she wondered, turning to study her backside in the mirror. What in the world did God want from her? She wished she knew. She had some ideas. But still no clear direction. No vision. No direct orders or signs of the kind that she felt certain Mimi must have had before joining those Irish nuns. She knew she loved him, as she’d always been taught to love him. But where he wanted her to go next, what he wanted her to do, she wasn’t certain.

  Trudy and Dad Diener thought maybe Anne’s future lay in politics. How she wished they were right! It sounded so—­well—­so exciting. The trip to Washington last summer—­meeting President Truman in the Rose Garden, shaking his hand, posing for photos with him—­it had all been such a thrill. It had been front-­page news in Dunkirk. The photographer did a whole photo shoot at the house with just her. Just her! She posed on command, smiling playfully with her loving cup trophy.

  So yes, Anne thought, nodding in silence, maybe her beloved grandparents were right—­politics just might be in her future. Politics or journalism. Anne still loved to write. She’d loved editing the school newspaper. Loved putting pen to paper to write most anything. She’d even written a special history of the class for each of her fifty-­nine classmates, personalizing tales of their individual journeys through senior high.

  Now the class of sixty would enter that auditorium, graduate as a unit, and go their separate ways. Some were getting married. A few were going to work for Anne’s father at the Armstrong Glass Factory in town. And a select few, including Anne, were college bound. Ball State University, in nearby Muncie, Indiana, beckoned. For Anne, it had been an easy choice: it was close—­just forty minutes away by car—­and it offered a wealth of liberal arts opportunities.

  For the class of 1953, the future was theirs. At least that’s what they liked to think. Even their class motto said so. Anne had memorized it and recited it often these past few months: “Forward forever, backward never. Within ourselves our future lies.”

  “Anne!” called a voice, breaking Anne’s moment of vanity in front of the mirror. “Anne Virginia Diener, come right now! You’ll be late for your own graduation! You know your father doesn’t like to be late!”

  Anne sighed. It was the unmistakable cry of her mother.

  What was the future? Anne Diener wasn’t certain. But smoothing her skirt, adjusting her glasses, she took a deep breath and answered.

  “Coming, Mother!”

  My mother took to the academic and social demands of high school like a duck to water. Indeed, her recollections of her high school years suggest that, for her, late adolescence provided some of the happiest moments of her life.

  “Our school was small. Our town was small. I tended to mix with nearly all of my classmates,” my mother wrote not long before she died in a journal she devoted to memories of her childhood. “We did things together.”

  Her grades remained stellar—­nearly all A’s. And, in the capacity of school newspaper and yearbook editor, and as class secretary, her popularity soared. Among her favorite activities were Friday and Saturday night basketball games. “I tried to attend all of our high school basketball games,” she wrote. “This was what held our small town of Dunkirk together. I would dress in a white Peter Pan–collared blouse, with a green plaid skirt and bobby socks. I would yell and scream at the games. Mom would have hot chocolate for us when we got home.”

  But while she had many close friends, and though she was a pretty young woman with a slim figure, shoulder-length hair, and soulful brown eyes, she had no high school boyfriends. No real dates. She attended the senior prom, but only as an organizer. Part of this lack of dating stemmed from religious differences: my mother was a Catholic girl in a non-­Catholic community during a time in history in which religious differences mattered. And part of her lack of boyfriends stemmed from the police state in which she lived. Her bedtime on nights when she didn’t have a school event remained as early as seven thirty, depending upon her mother’s mood. That left her with little to no time to socialize, particularly with boys.

  “It was cruel,” my mother would later reflect. But it was a form of cruelty that my mother felt powerless to fight, let alone overcome.

  Dating, my mother told herself, would come later. Her immediate concern was to get good grades—­good enough, anyway, to enable her to escape the fate that had befallen her own mother. Anne Diener was determined not to become a young woman who had to marry in order to succeed in life. She would use her brain and talents to do something of her own making.

  Anne took a monumental step in that direction the summer between her junior and senior years of high school when the local American Legion selected her to represent Dunkirk at Girls State, a weeklong summer camp that assembled Indiana high school girls deemed academic leaders in a mock government setting at Indiana University. My mother adored the experience. It was her first time away from home or family, and she loved every moment of it: living in a dorm, meeting girls from all over, staying up late. Her enthusiasm was infectious. She quickly became known for her “chatterbox” ways. She served as a lobbyist, toured the Indiana senate, and spent seven days discussing at length the nation’s mounting post–World War II issues, notably budget concerns, fears of Communism, and Cold War angst.

  By the end of her week at Girls State, Anne Diener was a more confident and worldly young woman. And she was something more. She was bound for Washington, D.C. She had been elected by her peers the “Model Citizen” of the week. More than five hundred of the brightest girls in Indiana had assembled for the week. And Anne Diener alone was awarded the top prize. The reward: a meeting with the president at the White House.

  For the sleepy town of Dunkirk, my mother’s feat was more than a newsworthy event—­it was the biggest of events. A local girl from a hardworking family had put the community on the map. A day after my mother was awarded the golden citizenship cup, her face was plastered on the Dunkirk paper’s front page with enthusiastic headlines: Local Girl Wins Top Prize! Diener Bound for White House! In one picture, she stands with the loving cup, playfully hoisting it atop the family mantelpiece at the Pine Patch. In another she proudly holds the trophy to her heart. The Muncie and Indianapolis papers additionally penned articles about her, referring to her as a future state leader.

  The trip to Washington was beyond my mother’s wildest dreams. For years, she had been told by her parents that vacations were things that other families took. And the few trips she had taken—­to Indianapolis, to Cincinnati, to Winnetka to see Aunt Peg—­typically required her to ride sandwiched with three other siblings in the back of a car that was decidedly over-­ or underheated, depending upon the season. Now she was riding by train in a luxe sleeper car, staffed with uniformed valets who wore starched white shirts and neat black vests. And she was doing it without any parents or siblings in tow. A female chaperone from the state chapter of Girls State served as her designated guide and joined her as she ate for the first time in a formal train dining car. Anne Diener drank fresh-­squeezed orange juice and piping hot coffee. And she feasted on warm bread, served with copious amounts of creamy butter. If this was the world waiting for her outside of the Pine Patch, she couldn’t wait to be a part of it.

  In Washington, my mother’s love affair with the outside world continued. She met Girls Nation delegates from each of the forty-­eight states, young women who, much like her, were academically bright, socially conscious, and armed
with boundless amounts of enthusiasm. Together in their nightgowns, they stayed up late at night in the dorm rooms of George Washington University, sharing hopes and dreams. Many came from families of privilege: households with more than one car, even vacation homes. My mother was in awe.

  The highlight of the week in Washington, D.C., came the afternoon my mother met face-­to-­face with President Truman in the Rose Garden of the White House. Pictures show her wearing a starched hat that Trudy had bought for her, looking on in awe at the president as he spoke to the young women, comparing some of them to his own beloved daughter.

  In Washington, my mother thrived and dared to dream of a future beyond Indiana. But once back home, her dreams of the future took a backseat to the familiar longing to win the attention and approval of her parents. For a busy Al and Aurelia, who had long preached the importance of humility and modesty, Anne’s meeting with the president was noteworthy, but soon all but forgotten amid the chaos of a full house. Anne realized she needed more than the White House to find a means of carving out more time with, and attention from, her parents. She found that path by taking a summer job in her father’s factory, Armstrong Glass.

  Al Diener’s place of work had always been a source of intrigue to my mother. For as long as she could remember, she’d longed to know how he filled the hours that he spent away from the family home. Anne knew from the locals who greeted him warmly at church and Elks Club gatherings that he held a position of considerable power and that he was largely loved and revered. But she’d never seen him in action. Working in the factory allowed her and her alone—­not her siblings—­to be close to her father during those previously off-­limits business hours.

  Every morning, Anne donned blue jeans and a plain white blouse and gamely trekked a mile and a half to the plant. Once there, she clocked in and took her position in the row of box makers, most of whom were women more than twice her age. Their task: to assemble the cardboard boxes that would ultimately house the glass jars and bottles made at the factory.