“Should I stay?” she asked Father Vincent. “Should I leave? What do I do?”
Father Vincent’s answer was nearly always the same. “When in doubt, pray,” he would gently instruct her, cupping her face in his hands. “Pray on it.”
And so she did. My mother prayed, she would later tell me, with all of her heart, all of her might. She prayed for a sign, one of biblical proportions: a bolt of lightning, a message from God. She prayed in the chapel. She prayed in her narrow bed. She prayed in the shower.
Eventually, she told me, her prayers were answered in the form of a vision.
“A vision?” I asked her, my tone skeptical. I was sixteen when she recounted the story and had been pressing her for an explanation as to why she had named me Mary.
I never much cared for my name. In fact, I’d never liked my given name at all. I wanted something less Catholic and more glamorous sounding, so I’d asked her one night over dinner why she couldn’t have named me something more fun, like Linda.
Her response?
“I named you Mary because I made a promise.”
The promise, she said, was made in response to a vision she’d had—from none other than Mary. The Mary. The mother of Christ herself. After weeks of praying, my mother told me that Mary appeared to her at Oldenburg and told her it was time to leave the convent, that she was destined to better serve the church and the world outside of the convent walls.
Whether this vision came in a dream or appeared to her during her waking hours, I’m not sure. My mother spoke of the apparition only once, and when I doubted the validity of her words (I was, after all, only sixteen and a typical eye-rolling teenager), she abruptly changed the subject. But in any case, the vision from Mary, she said, was the sign she’d been waiting for. So relieved was my mother for the sign from Mary that she made a vow: if she were to eventually bear a daughter, she would name the baby after her.
If the vision from Mary wasn’t enough to convince my mother it was time to leave Oldenburg, there was one thing more to bolster her decision: a rapidly changing world. Though the sisters of St. Francis remained largely sequestered, there were two events that even the church hierarchy could not shield them from: the growing women’s movement sweeping the nation, and the approach of Vatican II, the mini-revolution that would fundamentally banish Latin masses and elevate the role of laypeople within the church. The two seismic shifts meant that the life Anne Diener wished to lead—one that involved teaching and helping others—was not exclusive to nuns. Educated women looking to change the world could increasingly do so out from under the heavy burden of a nun’s habit. And thanks to the growing women’s movement, they could opt to do so without the assistance of any church at all. For Catholic and non-Catholic women in the 1960s, the sky was the limit.
My mother knew nuns had left Oldenburg before. One, she would tell me later, she would never forget: a pretty young woman from a wealthy family in Indianapolis who sent her sweet-smelling bath soaps and hand lotions that my mother envied. Soaps were among the few possessions the upper echelons of the order wouldn’t take away. My mother distinctly remembered the woman’s kindness and enjoyed her company in chapel and the dining hall. One day the young woman was an active part of convent life. And the next she was gone, spirited away in the dark of night after the lights went out and the sisters were ordered to bed.
“That’s what they would do,” my mother told me sadly. “The sisters who left would just disappear with no notice. Their beds would be empty and in the morning, at breakfast, no one would know where they’d gone. No one could say goodbye.”
When my mother attempted to ask what had become of her friend, where she had gone, she was silenced by the presiding sisters, and, worse, ignored. It was as if her friend had never existed. The young sister had deigned to leave and had therefore been erased. While nuns were welcomed into the fold of the church amidst grandiose displays of pomp and circumstance, those who opted to leave were forced to exit under veils of secrecy and shame far heavier than any habit they’d been forced to wear. To leave the convent was to seek a divorce from a way of life. In a way, it was the equivalent of seeking a divorce from Christ himself.
“They always said the same thing,” Marian would later tell me of the nuns’ reactions to the women who had left the fold. Marian would leave the convent some four years after my mother, and, leading up to her own departure, she watched more than a dozen sisters leave the order, as Oldenburg’s nun population began its gradual decline.
“In the morning, when everyone discovered so-and-so had left the night before, they’d click their tongues and shake their heads and say, ‘Oh, she just didn’t have the calling,’ ” Marian recalled. “The sisters who remained never said, ‘Hmm, I wonder what happened.’ For them, it couldn’t be the convent’s fault that someone had left. They assumed the person who left was the one with a problem.”
When my mother announced her decision to leave the convent to her Mother Superior, the effort to erase her from the Oldenburg community began almost immediately.
First came the instruction to keep the decision to herself.
“You must tell no one of this decision,” instructed the Mother Superior. “No one, Sister Aurelia Mary. Do you hear me?”
Failure to cooperate would be met with stiff punishment, she was told, not the least of which would be the inability to leave the convent with full dispensation, church lingo for an honorable discharge from the order. My mother desperately wanted the full dispensation. That’s what would allow her to continue to receive the sacraments, including Communion, and to eventually marry in the church.
The letter from Rome would come to the Mother Superior, my mother was informed. And if she wanted that letter, she needed to tell no one of her plans to leave.
Then, a date was decided upon. In my mother’s case, her departure was scheduled for September 25, 1965.
Finally came the exit.
A nun leaving a convent in the 1960s was something akin to a prisoner leaving the penitentiary, my mother later told me. A departing prisoner often has nothing to wear the day he gets out of jail other than the clothes he wore as an inmate, and nuns in the years preceding the reforms of Vatican II faced a similar fate. The clothes my mother had worn all those years ago upon entering Oldenburg had long since been given away. All that she’d had in the way of a wardrobe for nearly a decade consisted of the veils and tunics and robes and wimples that were the property of the Catholic Church. Penniless—as she was obliged to be, thanks to her vow of poverty—she had no civilian clothes to call her own. She literally had nothing to wear back out into the real world.
In the dark of night, after the others had gone to bed, the supervising sisters at Oldenburg stripped my mother of her habit and threw at her feet a collection of ill-fitting rags.
“Put these on!” the two nuns overseeing her departure hissed.
Still mired in her vow of obedience, my mother did as she was told, slipping on a badly stained blouse—some of its buttons missing—and an ill-fitting skirt that smelled. The shoes she was given to wear were equally ill fitting. Not only were they two sizes too small for her size 10 feet, but they were mismatched. The left shoe didn’t match the right. One was navy blue. One was black.
Making matters worse: my mother’s hair. Without the veil, she could not hide the bad haircuts she had endured for nearly a decade. She was nearly bald in places and her hair was uneven throughout. She had no bangs to speak of and no real part. Just a jagged series of cuts above her forehead. It was an unmitigated disaster. It hadn’t been washed in days and hadn’t been properly brushed in years. Sister Aurelia Mary had not owned a hairbrush since 1957 and was offered none the morning of her departure.
My mother was frightened. She trembled and had to hold tight to the railing of the stairwell to keep from careening down it headfirst as she was led downstairs.
When she asked a presiding sister where she should go, what she should do, she was silenced. Family members speculate she was physically assaulted in those final hours in the convent, perhaps with a hand, perhaps with something else. My mother would never confirm or deny the story. Not to me, anyway. But facial bruising was evident when she arrived back at the Pine Patch.
“They really did a number on your mother,” my uncle Mike would tell me, shaking his head at the memory of seeing his oldest sister hours after her departure. “Someone just did her in. She looked like she’d been in a concentration camp when she got out of there.
“She looked like a dog. A sick, mangy dog.”
At the appointed time of departure, my mother was led down a corridor of the main level of the Mother House and told to kneel.
“They left me alone and told me to wait until exactly four o’clock,” my mother would later recount to my father. “At exactly four, I was supposed to go through a door and receive my next set of instructions.”
My mother did as she was told, crying in silence, still shaking in fear.
As the clock struck four A.M., she walked through the door, expecting to find nuns waiting for her with new instructions. Instead, she stumbled into a dark alley where a car sat idling. To my mother’s astonishment, it was her father who had come to collect her. Al Diener was alone, seated behind the steering wheel. There were no nuns to see her off. No one to wave goodbye.
The setting for her exit from Oldenburg was the same as that of her entrance. Anne Diener was still on church property, still surrounded by spires and steeples and lofty crosses. But the circumstances surrounding those final moments were so different. On September 25, 1965, there was no cake, no punch, no pealing of bells. Just the waiting arms of her father, standing by to rescue her. Nearly a decade before, my mother had entered the darkest chapter of her life in broad daylight, a blushing bride dressed in white. Now, amidst her divorce from the church, she fled in the dark of night, wearing nothing but rags.
Chapter 5
Bride of Dale
November 30, 1968
Anne Diener gingerly ran the back of her hand across the bodice of the satin gown that hung over the full-length mirror. It was so rich, so heavy. Trudy would have called it sumptuous. It was sumptuous to be sure.
She’d loved it the moment she saw it in the LS Ayres bridal look-book. The ivory sheath gown featured sleeves that fell just past the elbow, cloth-covered buttons that cascaded down the back, and, best of all, glorious touches of lace. Not just any lace. But the heavy stuff that bordered on being a brocade. The lace was in all the right places—a dash to line each sleeve, some at the hem, lots at the rear of the train that extended five feet when it wasn’t bustled. The lace was so rich and added such dignity and class to the gown. How could it not, when the name of the lace was Queen Anne’s lace? Queen Anne’s lace for Anne Diener’s wedding day.
Her favorite part about the gown: its simplicity. Other gowns she’d looked at had cinched waists, low-cut tops, and excessive amounts of tulle. Some were so short they weren’t so much bridal gowns as minidresses. She knew it was 1968, but she remained a traditionalist at heart. A traditionalist who still sometimes marveled that she was again wearing civilian clothes and that she was getting married in the Catholic Church.
Just three years ago, she’d been a nun, a bride of Christ. And today she was a bride of Dale. Dale Edmund Pflum. She couldn’t quite believe it.
She’d had so many questions when he’d proposed. In fact, she’d had so many that the first thing she blurted out after he asked, “Anne, will you marry me?” was “Can I think about it?”
And thought about it she had. For a week. While she consulted her gut. And Father Vincent. Her darling Father Vincent. He hadn’t wanted her to marry Dale. He’d told her so in letters. He’d told her so to her face. But he’d supported her decision. He would be here today. She’d even arranged to have him sit beside her at the reception. They’d be together, the three of them, Father Vincent on one side of her, Dale on the other.
He’d encouraged her to wait for the right man. But she was thirty-three. All of her classmates and most of her younger siblings—Kathy and Patty and even Al—were married. She didn’t want to wait any longer. If she wasn’t cut out to be a bride of Christ, at least she could be someone’s bride. That was his will, wasn’t it? God’s intent? For those women who didn’t serve him in the church to serve him as wives and mothers?
They’d make things work, she told herself, fingering now the long lace veil her sister Kathy had lent her for the big day. It was the same veil Kathy had worn when she married Joe Boland in Dunkirk’s St. Mary’s Church just a few months ago. Anne and Dale had thought about marrying there, but had ultimately settled upon the chapel at Ball State in Muncie, where they’d met. Anne so loved Ball State. It held for her so many fond memories. Of life in the dorm. Of her pre-convent days of carefree confidence. Of Bongo.
Dale was no Bongo. For one thing, he was much taller. At nearly six foot six Dale was a full foot taller than Anne. And unlike Bongo, Dale was into business, not geography. Dale was—well, Dale was Dale. Who was she to judge how a marriage should feel? All brides surely must wonder about what life will be like with their grooms. Her feelings of insecurity were natural, she told herself. They must be. They just had to be.
“Anne, sweetheart, do you need any help getting ready?”
Anne turned to Kathy. She wore the floor-length blue bridesmaid dress Anne had picked out for her the same day she’d picked out her wedding gown. Kathy would be her only attendant today. Mimi would sing with her fellow nuns in the choir. Patty would oversee the guestbook. Only Kathy would stand up with her at the altar. She’d help her through the day.
“I’d love the help,” said Anne, smiling at Kathy. “Today I can use all the help I can get.”
For the majority of women, the most significant white dress they wear in a lifetime is the gown they wear on their wedding day. That wasn’t the case for Anne Diener. For her, the white dress she wore the day she wed my father ranked, at best, a distant second on the list of Most Important White Dresses. Maybe it came in third. In fact, I’m not sure she would have counted the gown among the top four or five most important white dresses of her life.
It’s not that she didn’t like the dress. Indeed, she often remarked upon her fondness for it when I was growing up, particularly when she spied a wedding gown that she believed to be too, in her words, “over the top.” While I delighted in the dresses sported by my favorite soap opera characters of the 1980s, my mother was typically scandalized. Among her least favorite wedding dresses of my childhood: the lace and sheer silk concoction Hope from Days of Our Lives wore when she wed Bo. My mother was horrified by the “unladylike” look of Hope’s dress, which showed off the actress’s ample bosom, and which was topped off with a gaudy, spiky headpiece that made it appear as if the actress and the tufts of tulle atop her head had been electrocuted.
“Wedding gowns should leave something to the imagination,” my mother would say, making it clear that if I was interested in one day donning a gown cut down to there, I’d probably be better off eloping.
One of my favorite things to do as a little girl was to look at the two wedding albums my mother kept at the base of our living room’s coffee table. I would sit on the olive-green couch, my legs too short to touch the ground, with the albums spread out on my little lap and pore over the photos.
After careful consideration, I made a mental list of what I liked about my mother’s wedding day: 1) how she looked in a white dress with white snow on the ground in the pictures snapped of her leaving the reception on that chilly November day; 2) her bouquet, a breathtaking spread of gardenias and ivy; and 3) her dessert course (there was not only cake, but also a delectable-looking sugar cream pie).
Then I made a list of what I didn’t like ab
out my mother’s wedding day: 1) the cut of the dress (to me, it looked like a tent); 2) the lack of contact lenses (I couldn’t believe my father wore glasses on a day so important); and, above all, 3) the expression on my mother’s face. Even at age five I knew my mother lacked the look of elation I’d seen on the faces of so many other brides. Yes, my mother smiled in some of her wedding photos. But in so many others, she didn’t. She looked pensive, tired, on edge. There was something in her eyes—sadness, I realize now, or perhaps a nagging doubt—that seemed to suggest this wasn’t one of the happiest days of her life, and actually might have been just the opposite.
It was a sad few years that followed my mother’s departure from the convent. Letters show that leaving Oldenburg may have removed her from the realm of the cruel and unsupportive sisters, but the exit also placed her back in the world of her overwhelmed parents, who were often at a loss as to how to give her the support she desperately needed.
Within hours of her return to the Pine Patch in Dunkirk, my mother was a bundle of uncontrollable sobs and sighs, and my grandparents were at their wits’ end.
“She was such a mess,” Uncle Mike would later tell me, shaking his head. He had been frightened by the reappearance of his big sister, stripped of her habit.
For my devoutly Catholic grandparents, who had taken enormous pride in successfully placing two of their daughters in the church’s fold, my mother’s decision to quit the convent presented a problem.
“Anne’s departure,” her first cousin Bob would explain, “was a tremendous embarrassment.” The situation was perplexing. No books had been written on the subject. What should—or shouldn’t—they tell people about Anne?
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