White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  For my grandmother in particular, who increasingly relished her role as small-­town club leader, and as the respected Al Diener’s wife, this was a worrisome matter. My mother’s return was an unwelcome addition to her nearly empty nest and a blemish on her household, according to family members. Should she address the subject head-­on or not say anything about it at all? What should she say if someone asked her point-­blank why Anne had left Oldenburg?

  My mother sensed the discomfort in her parents and retreated even further into her already-­fractured shell.

  “She was just awkward to be around when she returned,” Bob explained, referring to the first extended family gatherings with my mother post-­convent. “She used to wear the habit. And now she had none. She felt awkward. And Aurelia clearly felt ashamed, as if she’d just as soon hide her in a back room when company came if she could. No one knew what to say or do.”

  Making matters worse was the erosion of my mother’s relationships with her beloved grandparents. It’s not that Trudy and Dad Diener didn’t love her. They would always love their Annie. But while she had once been the apple of their eye—­the grandchild who had met the president and could do no wrong—­she now had become more complicated to love and, in turn, to be around. Like her parents, they weren’t sure what to tell friends about Anne, how to explain that she had quit the convent. And they were at a loss as to what to do when she broke down into gut-­wrenching sobs, often with little or no notice. Theirs was a generation that had weathered a Great Depression and two world wars. For them, when life got tough, one was supposed to throw one’s shoulders back and soldier on. When Anne failed to do this, they were at a loss for words. She felt awkward in their presence, and they in hers.

  “Anne had always been the favorite grandchild before Oldenburg, the one who got the most attention and the special treatment,” her sister Patty would later explain to me. “But after she got out of the convent, there was a noticeable shift.”

  It wasn’t just the grandparents whose attitudes toward Anne had changed. The aunts and uncles who had once doted on her, including her father’s beautiful sister, Peg, now treated Anne differently as well. In Peg’s case, much of this had to do with the erosion of her personal life. Married to a successful business executive who had moved to New York without her, Peg now lived in a big lonely house in Winnetka, Illinois, unable to help herself, let alone her lonely niece.

  Even my mother’s brothers and sisters were at a loss as to what to say or do. Mimi remained a nun, busy teaching in her own convent. Kathy, Patty, and Al Joe had all graduated from high school and were busy with their respective young-­adult lives. Only Mike remained at home, and he was too young to know what to say to his older sister, whose appearance, he says, made him feel sad and uncomfortable.

  “It was a really rough time for her,” he explained.

  Back at the Pine Patch, away from the strict order and routine of convent life, my mother flailed about in search of a sense of safety and stability that was not to be found. For years, she had lived according to a strict, orderly structure, in which every minute of the day was accounted for. Now she had no schedule to speak of. She was no longer a nun. But she also no longer felt like a citizen of the world. The world she’d known and understood when she entered the convent back in 1957 had vanished. In its place was a strange new nation.

  It was now the mid-­1960s. Hemlines were shorter, waistlines more defined. With the advent of Elvis and the Beatles, music had changed dramatically, as had haircuts, attitudes, even vocabularies. Anne Diener didn’t understand this world. What’s more, she had forgotten all the little things—­what it was like to handle her own money, how to make her own decisions about what to read and where to go.

  Anne’s dramatically changed world pushed her further into the pit of depression she’d fallen into at the end of her days at Oldenburg. She sobbed uncontrollably in her bedroom at the Pine Patch, and even during meals with her parents. For Aurelia, the strain of the mood swings was often too much to bear.

  “Snap out of it this instant!” she’d yell at my crying mother.

  But Anne didn’t know how to snap out of anything. She felt like a failure on a multitude of levels.

  One afternoon not long after my mother’s return, Aurelia, unable to take the strain anymore, did the unthinkable: she slapped Anne across the face. Hard. A stunned Mike, home at the time, witnessed the encounter.

  “I’d never seen anything like it before,” he told me years after the event. “I’d never seen my mother hit anyone like that.”

  After the altercation, it was Anne who apologized to Aurelia, not the other way around. Later she retreated to her room to cry and convulse some more.

  Just as troubling as her crying spells were her sleep patterns, which were all over the place. Sometimes she slept for twelve hours. Other times, she was up all night. With sleeplessness came an increase in the stuttering that had plagued her since childhood. She was often unable to get her thoughts out to her parents without stopping and struggling to start her sentences again and again.

  “I-­I-­I n-­n-­need t-­t-­t-­to use the t-­t-­t-­telephone,” she’d stammer.

  “C-­c-­c-­can I p-­p-­p-­please b-­b-­b-­borrow the c-­c-­c-­c-­c-­car?”

  Only one light remained in her darkened world: Father Vincent.

  Anne may have left the convent, but she had hardly abandoned her relationship with the Oldenburg priest. At Father Vincent’s instruction, she phoned him daily, sometimes two or three times a day. Without fail, he took her calls. His letters to her spelled out his schedule, letting her know when he would be away. When he was sent to New York for several months, he made certain she knew where and when to find him there as well.

  “You are never alone, Annie,” he told her. “I will always be there for you.”

  Conversations between the two remained focused on Anne’s future. Father Vincent alternated prayers and lighthearted banter with pep talks. “Take one day at a time. Remember to pray. Remember you are not alone. Remember the Lord is with you.”

  In time, Anne’s hair grew back. She managed to return to an increasingly normal sleep schedule. And, thanks to her sister Patty, she embraced a new wardrobe that was in keeping with the times.

  By this time, Patty Diener had moved to the greener pastures of Beverly Hills, California. She’d gone there in her early twenties, in part because of her friendship with her college roommate: Linda Hope, entertainer Bob Hope’s eldest daughter. Linda and Patty had become fast friends as undergraduates. During college, Patty brought Linda home to the Pine Patch on weekends, where the Diener family taught her how to bake a cake. Linda, in turn, took Patty home to Beverly Hills. When it came time to decide where to use her nursing degree, Patty opted to leave the Midwest for the warmer and more exciting world of California.

  Just as Patty’s mailing address changed in the 1960s, so did her attitude toward Anne. A girl needed options, Patty told her older sister. And she also needed good clothes. So when Anne left the convent, it was Patty who turned to her own closet and to the closets of her girlfriends to organize a quasi clothing drive.

  “Anne always said she had nothing to wear until Patty came to the rescue with the boxes of dresses she sent to her,” my father would later tell me.

  From Patty and Patty’s California girlfriends my mother received her first miniskirts, minidresses, sleeveless shifts, polyester vests, paisley scarves. They were hand-­me-­downs, to be sure, but they were better than the scant offerings my mother had. Patty, who had once dreamed of getting out of her sisters’ shadows, had now officially done so. She was no longer following. She was leading.

  Aunt Patty didn’t stop with clothes. She also introduced my mother to men, including the gentleman she arranged to escort Anne to her own wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Patty had gotten to know several men during her years in Hollywood, but the man who u
ltimately stole her heart was a successful psychoanalyst she’d met while working at the Los Angeles veterans’ hospital. He was learned. He was older. And he was something more: Jewish. When Patty informed her family that she was not only marrying a Jewish doctor, but that she was also converting to Judaism, it was a shock, particularly to Al and Aurelia and their strict Catholic beliefs.

  But the family rallied, agreeing to stand by Aunt Patty on her big day. Al Diener gave Patty away. Kathy served as maid of honor. My mother was an invited guest, looking on with a mixture of awe and confusion as her now platinum-­blond sister wed beneath a chuppah. My mother’s hair looked more beautiful than ever on the day of the wedding. Its body and sheen were returning. Thanks to Patty, she’d had it set into a nice series of waves and frosted to a lighter color that turned her brown to a deep dirty blond. She wore a sleek blue shift that accentuated her narrow waist. And beside her stood a handsome escort, tall and dark.

  The date had been carefully selected by Patty. A German immigrant, he had escaped from East Berlin in 1961 by swimming through waters not far from the newly constructed Berlin Wall.

  “He told me they tried to shoot him as he swam, but the bullets bounced off the water,” my mother told me years later as we watched a documentary about the building of the wall.

  “Was he handsome?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She smiled sheepishly. “Very.”

  My mother would talk about her date for years, always noting what an “intriguing” and “fascinating” man he was. But she wasn’t sufficiently intrigued to see him again after the wedding. In those fragile months following her departure from Oldenburg, Father Vincent remained the only man outside of the family in whose company she felt safe.

  Back in Dunkirk, my mother continued to question who she was, where she was going. The struggle to readjust reared its head on a near-­daily basis, including the day the IRS called and informed her she was being audited. After years of being off the books, my mother’s reemergence as a citizen of the world made the federal government think something was amiss.

  “Thankfully, the man who audited me was so nice, so gentle,” my mother would later say with a laugh. “He sat down at the dining room table to go over my papers with me and was so amazed. He kept telling me he had never met a former nun.”

  As she slowly readjusted to civilian life, one thing became increasingly clear: she had to escape from the Pine Patch. The tension with her mother was palpable. As a child, Anne had had no choice other than to put up with Aurelia Diener’s bouts of aloofness. But now Anne was a bona fide adult. She was old enough to know when she wasn’t wanted, to know when her mother was ashamed of her and wanted her out of her sight. She was old enough to make the decision to leave.

  With the help of Father Vincent, Anne secured a teaching job at a Catholic high school in Cincinnati and moved into an all-­women’s hotel called the Fontbonne. The downtown hotel provided her with the sort of camaraderie she’d sought at Oldenburg but that had long eluded her. Ironically, the Fontbonne was a Catholic hotel, overseen by a group of nuns who imposed strict curfews and glared at young women they deemed unsuitable. But the Fontbonne’s nuns were a far cry from those my mother had known at Oldenburg. At the Fontbonne, Anne did not have to fast and wasn’t punished for sleeping late or for asking simple questions. More importantly, the young women she encountered at the hotel were almost without fail a friendly bunch with whom she felt comfortable. Most hailed from the Midwest and, like my mother, were in need of a place to stay as they navigated careers and single life in the city of Cincinnati.

  They joined my mother in eating breakfast in a communal dining room each morning before heading off to their respective jobs as secretaries, teachers, actresses, even models. Then they came together again at night, back at the hotel or at local coffee shops and restaurants nearby, for dinner and to celebrate birthdays, job promotions, even engagements.

  In eating and shopping with these new neighbors and friends—­only some of whom were Catholic—­my mother learned what it was like to laugh and trust again. For years and decades, she would reminisce about the women she’d met and the lessons they’d taught her.

  “They were such a neat bunch,” she would later tell me. “They showed me that independence was fun and that life didn’t have to begin and end with the Catholic Church.”

  That’s not to say that Anne abandoned her Catholic roots. During her time in Cincinnati, she still attended Mass daily. She still visited Father Vincent when time permitted and continued to write and call him at least once a week. But now she counted Lutheran and Jewish and even agnostic women among her closest friends. What’s more, thanks to new friends at the Fontbonne, she even learned how to curse.

  “It felt so good to say ‘shit’ for the first time,” my mother recounted, “and know that it might not send me straight to hell. I never knew one word could feel so good.”

  She laughed as she told me this one day when I was thirteen, not long after I’d had spinal surgery. I hurt so much that I didn’t know what to do with the pain.

  That’s when she told me about the power of one well-­placed curse here and there.

  “Sometimes words like ‘darn’ and ‘dang’ and ‘geez’ just don’t cut it,” she said, surprising me with her candor. “Sometimes only a really good ‘shit’ makes you feel better.”

  I would wonder years later if she regretted not knowing how to curse—­or curse her superiors out—­during her days as a nun. My guess is she did.

  At the Fontbonne, Anne kept a rosary tucked in her purse and prayed the novena frequently. And perhaps the most telling sign of her ongoing relationship with the church: after receiving Communion, she spent an inordinate amount of time making her way back to her pew, as nuns in the 1950s had been taught to do. Moving too quickly suggested that one wasn’t taking the sacrament of Communion—­the acceptance of the body of Christ—­seriously. Even after marriage, my father would tell me, my mother remained loath to move faster than a few paces a minute after accepting her Communion wafer.

  “It was really something to see,” my father would tell me years later. “Everyone in the church would stare and wonder who in the world your mother was.”

  Still, the positive results of leaving Oldenburg were unmistakable.

  Within a year, Anne had gained weight, and color had returned to her cheeks. Now she was ready to take the next big step in her life: graduate school.

  In entering the master’s program in speech pathology at Ball State University, my mother had several goals in mind. She wanted to continue to attend Mass every day. She wanted to attain a graduate degree that would enable her to help those who, like her, suffered from stuttering and its sometimes debilitating effects. And, back on the campus where she had met Bongo all those years before, she wanted to begin to date again.

  The first two goals were easily attainable. The third, she knew, would require some work, particularly since she had dated so little in her life, and the majority of the men she’d had any real contact with since Bongo were, like Father Vincent, unattainable men of the cloth.

  Anne was cautiously optimistic. And when she was introduced to Dale—­a tall, gangly, bespectacled farm boy from Connersville, Indiana—­not long after rejoining the Newman Club, she was both curious and vulnerable.

  Anne Diener met Dale Pflum in the fall of 1966. My father was on campus to get his master’s degree in business. Together, he and my mother bonded over the excitement of Vatican II and bringing aspects of it to the Ball State campus under the guidance of Father Jim Bates, a then young Catholic priest and college chaplain who would become a lifelong friend to them both.

  For Anne, Dale was a nice companion. He made her laugh. And on many occasions, he made her think. They both had doubts about the Catholic Church. They both loved their Indiana roots. They both loved their families and said they wanted families of their own. At the end of th
e day, she enjoyed his company. He was no Bongo. But he was good company. And that was a start.

  Dale, for his part, thought Anne was nice and respectable.

  “She was the kind of person I think I thought I was supposed to be with,” my father told me years later.

  Together, they began to frequent Muncie pizza parlors and attend house parties held by their fellow grad students at which they drank cheap wine and ate fondue atop trunks that had been transformed into makeshift coffee tables.

  While my mother was initially hopeful about the relationship, there were signs of trouble early on. As time went on, Dale showed a moody side, she would later explain, and seemed increasingly noncommittal.

  “He seemed more interested a lot of the times in his friends than in me,” she would tell me when I was in high school.

  Sometimes he was jovial and lighthearted, and other times he snapped at her, pushing her away.

  She craved warmth and at least a hint of romance, but more often than not, he was most comfortable giving her sisterly pecks on the cheek after an evening out, or ribbing her the way he’d joke with a pal.

  She wanted a commitment. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  The trouble was noted a year into their relationship in a letter from my mother’s beloved Father Vincent.

  “I know you are disappointed in Dale and to that extent I am too,” Father Vincent wrote. “But let me tell you, you are talking my language when you say that you want to mean something special—­EVERYTHING—­to the man that is to be your life’s companion.

  “Personally, I would not want one for a life’s companion who does not know what he wants, or who cannot make up his mind, or who cannot give a full quotient of love for the love he receives.”

  As it turns out, the source of my father’s indecisiveness was not an overarching love of freedom or adventure, nor of cigars, alcohol, or other women. No, the source of Dale’s inability to commit to Anne—­almost certainly the source of that pained look on my mother’s face on their wedding day—­was something far more scandalous in the 1960s. My father was gay.