White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “You mean you couldn’t have any friends?” I asked.

  My aunt paused and thought for a moment. “You could, but you had to be careful. You couldn’t let anyone know you mattered to anyone or that anyone mattered to you. Eating too frequently with the same sisters, even laughing too loudly, wasn’t allowed. If you started forging friendships, the Mother Superior broke them up.”

  “We could never gather as a group of two,” my mother’s fellow nun Marian told me. “Groups of three or four? That was okay. But groups of two were an absolute no-­no. They didn’t want any illicit relationships to take place. And they didn’t want anyone to have a confidante.”

  Sisters who failed to conform to the strict standards were reported to management. In my mother’s first years, that manager was the novice mistress, the sister who oversaw the new class of nuns who, like my mother, had yet to make their final vows. The novice mistress at Oldenburg in the latter part of the 1950s was a stern, unsmiling woman who was difficult to please. Unfortunately, the woman—­who liked few nuns to begin with—­took a particular dislike to my mother. She loathed my mother’s intelligence as well as her growing popularity among the young students at the academy where my mother taught. She also took particular issue with my mother’s frequent questions about why certain things were done the way they were at Oldenburg.

  “I couldn’t do anything right,” my mother once told me sadly. “Everything I did, everything I said, was wrong.”

  When my mother good-­naturedly asked whether the sisters might consider doing additional community outreach in the area, whether they might be able to read some different books on communal reading nights, whether the sisters could possibly consider conducting dinners differently or implementing new recipes, the mistress balked.

  “This is the way we do things at Oldenburg, Sister Aurelia Mary,” the mistress said with a click of the tongue. “This is the way we have always done things.”

  Change was not an option, the mistress told my mother. The role of a young nun was not to question why—­her role was but to serve or die. Posing questions was viewed as a challenge to authority and a direct violation of the vow of obedience.

  “They wanted to keep things as they’d always been,” said my mother’s nun friend, Marian. “I asked once why, if we were to embody the values of St. Francis, couldn’t we go to Goodwill and get our clothes there, instead of wearing habits. St. Francis was all about modesty and the clothes from Goodwill would have made sense for us to wear. When I asked that, the sisters in charge looked at me as if I was crazy. Then they said, ‘If we went to Goodwill, we wouldn’t all look alike.’ And to them, uniformity was what it was all about.”

  Punishment for perceived acts of insubordination was swift. In my mother’s case, it came in the form of additional chores, the relinquishment of certain privileges, and, worst of all, being forced to remain silent for additional hours, even days, on end. My mother was told that the punishments were for her own good. In truth, they were a means of maintaining control and rendering a highly intelligent woman powerless.

  The one thing that sustained her throughout the period of transition was the young students she’d been assigned to teach. The more restrictive and oppressive things became within the order, the more my mother clung to the spirit and energy of the students she taught in sun-­dappled classrooms in the academy. The academy was technically part of the convent, but within her classroom, my mother had a freedom that she lacked anywhere else at Oldenburg. And in her students she had a reprieve from the stern and judgmental stares of her fellow nuns. The boys and girls were her window to the outside world she had given up, telling her of their hopes and dreams, bringing her apples, talking to her about movies she was no longer able to see, music she couldn’t listen to on the convent’s communal radio.

  My mother enjoyed her students’ company, often staying after class to help those struggling, or lending an ear to those who needed to talk about problems at home.

  “One young man didn’t want his mother to remarry,” she recalled. “The girls worried about the mean girls in the class.”

  She relished every moment she spent with her students. The children accepted and loved my mother for who she was instead of imploring her to pray harder, do better.

  When my mother was gifted with presents of handmade cards, there was trouble.

  “You smile too often, Sister Aurelia Mary!” the novice mistress hissed. “You enjoy their attention entirely too much. You are failing. Have you forgotten the need for humility?”

  After a series of warnings and admonishments, the novice mistress doled out the ultimate punishment: she reassigned my mother to a post outside of the school, away from the students.

  “I d-­d-­don’t understand!” my mother cried to the novice mistress when she heard the news. Her heart raced. Her stuttering returned. “I’m a g-­g-­g-­good teacher. What have I done wrong?”

  “Your ser­vices are needed elsewhere,” said the novice mistress. “Do you not recall that you took a vow of obedience? Questioning me and my decision will only make matters worse.”

  My mother shook her head in disbelief. “But I’m a good teacher!”

  Students’ grades had improved dramatically under her tutelage.

  “Can I at least say goodbye to the children?” my mother asked. Her heart broke at the thought of the boys and girls coming into the classroom and not finding her there to greet them, to listen to their problems. She needed to say goodbye, to give them closure, for their sake. And hers.

  “Goodbyes, Sister Aurelia Mary, will only make things more difficult,” sniffed the mistress. “Great damage has already been done,” she continued, referring to the senior sisters’ belief that my mother’s open, happy ways in the classroom—­the ones that had encouraged her young charges to speak their minds and to express their feelings—­were at odds with Oldenburg’s long-­held belief that children were to be seen and lectured to, not heard.

  “You are dismissed from your teaching duties effective immediately,” repeated the novice mistress. “We will tell the children goodbye for you.”

  At this, she sent my mother to her room. My mother wept uncontrollably, stopping only long enough to vomit before crying some more.

  She had prayed so hard that summer after Bongo left for a sign of what God wanted from her, where he wanted her to serve him. She had thought for certain that Oldenburg was the answer. On paper, at least, it had all seemed so right. But could it be? Could the answer really be a lonely existence among rigid women who seemed to care so little for the children they were supposed to be educating?

  The new assignment my mother received at Oldenburg seemed to her something akin to solitary confinement. Instead of a teacher, she was now the equivalent of a maid and secretary, spending hours on end cleaning and doing the bidding of the novice mistress. At times, this meant remaining on her knees and waxing a marble floor until it shone. At other times, it meant attending to convent correspondence.

  Her lowest moment, my mother told me one night, was the afternoon a group of her former students came to the front door of the convent. There were five or six of them, she said. They climbed the stairs of the main house and rang the bell. My mother, cleaning the floors at the time in an upstairs hallway, recognized their voices and approached the main hallway.

  “We’ve come to see Sister Aurelia Mary,” said the young lady leading the group. Her voice was soft and timid, likely daunted by the frosty reception of the old nun who answered the door.

  “Please, we miss her,” said another.

  My mother’s heart skipped a beat. She had visitors! She longed to run to them, to throw her arms around them. But no sooner was her spirit buoyed than it was crushed again.

  “Sister Aurelia Mary does not wish to see you,” replied the nun tersely, motioning the children away from the door. “We’ve work to do. It’s best you leav
e. Now.”

  And with that, the door was closed in the children’s crestfallen faces.

  My mother described the moment as not only one of the lowest in her life as a nun, but in her entire life.

  “I didn’t know what pain felt like until then. I’d never hurt so much. They told them I didn’t want to see the children. That was the furthest thing from the truth. They made it sound like I chose to leave them. They wanted them to think I was as cruel and uncaring as the rest of them.”

  Anne was sinking in the rising tidewaters of a life of cruelty and loneliness, and the one lifeboat she’d had—­the children—­had been taken away. She prayed for a miracle, for a sign that she hadn’t stumbled down the wrong path. Her prayers were answered in the form of one of the few men among the sea of Oldenburg’s sisters: Father Vincent.

  Father Vincent was a priest at the church affiliated with the convent in Oldenburg. The priest, with dark hair, kind brown eyes, and an easy smile, had taken an immediate shine to my mother. He offered her smiles when possible, brightened at the insightful compliments she paid him for his sermons.

  In time, he invited her to the rectory, engaged her in conversation. He told her about his large family, his close relationship with his mother, whom he often visited on holidays. They talked about their mutual love of poetry, their shared loves of St. Francis and St. Augustine, their thoughts about different Gospel readings. Sometimes they even talked about music and politics.

  The sisters, particularly the novice mistress, were incensed at the development of such a close relationship between my mother and the priest.

  “What is she doing in that rectory?” they whispered. “Who does she think she is, spending time with him instead of us?”

  But in the 1950s, the Catholic Church remained a patriarchal system. If a priest—­a male leader in the parish community—­deemed it necessary to visit with my mother behind closed doors, there was nothing the nuns could say or do to stop the visits. She was forbidden from confiding in just one other nun, owing to the rules they had in place against female friendships. But a friendship with a priest? That was out of their control.

  What they could do was mete out punishment when my mother returned to the convent after a visit with Father Vincent—­namely, the turning of an increasingly cold shoulder toward her. There were as many as nine hundred nuns at Oldenburg when my mother lived there. But she felt as if few, if any, of the many sisters were friends.

  “So many of us wanted to better know Anne,” Marian would later tell me. “But she was so quiet. When they told her to talk to no one, she took it very seriously. She didn’t confide in any of us. She was very secretive.”

  The growing frostiness of the nuns took a considerable toll on Anne. The flicker of light that had once shone in her eyes dimmed. Her fair skin grew paler. And beneath her robe, her body began to waste away. Increasingly, it was racked by unbearably painful abdominal cramps that often forced her to double over in anguish. The sisters—­notably her novice mistress—­turned a blind eye.

  “Pray through the pain,” she instructed Anne.

  For a time, my mother did as she was told, spending hours on her knees, a rosary at the ready. Even her journals show her intense, and at times disturbing, devotion to prayer. At her lowest, she filled entire notebooks with handwritten Hail Marys, obsessive pleas to a higher power and beyond to right the ship she was sinking upon.

  But eventually, the physical pain in her abdomen became too much, making it all but impossible for her to get out of bed in the morning or to move up and down the numerous flights of stairs. My mother credited Father Vincent with saving her life.

  Increasingly concerned about my mother’s gaunt frame, Father Vincent implored the hierarchy of the convent to get my mother medical help.

  “Sister Aurelia Mary is sick, I tell you,” he barked one day at the Mother Superior. “Really sick!”

  “We’re handling the situation,” the Mother Superior told Father Vincent, motioning for him to keep his voice down. “This is a private affair involving the sisters. There’s no need for you to get involved.”

  “Handling the situation?” Father Vincent asked, incredulous. “The girl is wasting away and you’re telling her to pray it off? This is the twentieth century, not the Dark Ages. She needs a doctor!”

  Reluctantly, the Mother Superior agreed, sending Anne to a local physician under the watchful eyes of a pair of nuns who had been asked to drive the car. Sisters were never allowed to do anything on their own—­even seek medical care, Marian explained. “We were always chaperoned and always watched,” she said.

  Nuns who said they weren’t feeling well, Marian added, were often viewed with skepticism by the hierarchy.

  “They would say nuns who felt sick just wanted attention,” Marian said. “I remember one poor sister complained and complained she had a headache. She told the sisters in charge for weeks, months, that something was wrong. They never took her seriously. By the time she finally got them to take her to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis to see doctors there, it was too late. They took a biopsy from the roof of her mouth and discovered cancer. It was everywhere. A big portion of her brain and a large section of her face had to be removed. It was horrible.”

  Fortunately for my mother, her condition was caught in time. Horrified at the shape he found her in—­he described her as a “bag of bones”—­the first doctor my mother saw sent her to a hospital in a nearby city. The diagnosis: a tipped uterus, which explained the abdominal pain, and a case of myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune neuromuscular disorder, which explained her extreme fatigue. Emergency surgery was necessary. Without it, she was told, she could die.

  My mother lay listless in the hospital bed, self-­consciously touching a hand to her badly cut hair, now exposed for all the world to see since the hospital had replaced her habit with a hospital gown. She made two requests before her surgery: She wanted a rosary with which to pray. And she wanted to send a note of gratitude to Father Vincent.

  “Tell him thank you,” she told the nurses.

  When Anne regained consciousness after the surgery, her uterus was fixed, and medication was prescribed to bring her myasthenia gravis under control. But while her body was on the mend, her spirit was not. Sometime during the recovery period in the hospital is when the tears started. Perhaps it was because she was out from under the crushing pressure of the convent walls, or maybe it was because of her weakened physical state and the pain of the surgery itself. Whatever the reason, the tears started, and she couldn’t stop. It was her second major bout of depression. This one was even worse than the summer after Bongo left Ball State.

  Al and Aurelia drove from Dunkirk with young Mike to be by Anne’s side. Perplexed by her tears, they hoped she’d feel better when she finished recovering from her surgery. But they were worried. In those days—­the mid-­1960s—­new situations were arising called “nervous conditions.” Aurelia prayed that this wasn’t what was wrong with Anne, but it certainly sounded like those conditions she’d read about. To her, it appeared that her heaving, sobbing mess of a daughter had suffered a nervous breakdown.

  The nuns of Oldenburg concurred.

  As official “property” of the Catholic Church, my mother couldn’t seek out just any help for her frayed nerves. Instead, she was assigned a church-­appointed psychiatrist. In southeastern Indiana, that psychiatrist was Dr. Countryman.

  Dr. Countryman was a learned man whom family members would later describe as a consummate egghead. When my mother was discharged from the hospital, he listened in an austere office as my mother recounted her feelings of inferiority in the convent, her quest to be the perfect nun, her fear of falling short and disappointing her family and, in turn, God. Dr. Countryman prescribed “nerve” medication for my mother. But the tears continued. And the frosty treatment on the part of my mother’s fellow nuns intensified.

 
Ultimately, it was Father Vincent who again came to my mother’s rescue. Following her return to Oldenburg, Father Vincent kept watch over her, inviting her again to visit him in the privacy of his residence at the rectory. There he prayed with her, talked with her, and perhaps most importantly, he listened to her, not with the analytical ears of Dr. Countryman, but instead with the compassionate ears of someone who adored her. During those long talks, he began to call her by her given name, Anne. He also offered her that most scandalous of things: human contact. Taking her into his arms, he held her as she cried and confided in him her innermost fears.

  “His hugs were the best,” my mother would tell me years later, closing her eyes as she momentarily relived the memory. “He was the best.”

  In addition to hugs, Father Vincent presented my mother with gifts, notably an intricately carved pewter crucifix. Some eight inches long, the cross remained among her most treasured possessions. Decades after leaving the convent, she kept it in a large jewelry box with her valuables, next to a brooch from her grandmother Trudy and cherished letters from her parents. I saw it for the first time when I was having a particularly difficult time in high school.

  “Hold this,” my mother told me, handing me the crucifix. “Pray on this, and everything will be better.”

  “What’s so special about this?” I’d asked, confused.

  “It’s too difficult to explain,” she’d said. “Just know that the man who gave it to me was as saintly as they come. This got me through my darkest times. It will help you with yours.”

  Time and again, my mother turned to Father Vincent in the safety of the rectory and asked with pleading eyes, “What should I do?”

  Life within the convent had gone from bad to worse. The sisters wouldn’t let her back in the classroom, and now they used her medical issues and growing friendship with Father Vincent as reasons to further ostracize her from the group. Any hopes she might have harbored of eventually moving up the convent totem pole had been summarily crushed. At most, she might be able to hope for a transfer to another arm of the order. But attaining a position of leadership within the convent? Her reputation for being a “problem nun” deemed those “promotions” highly unlikely, if not impossible.