White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  But my parents wanted to have their baby publicly sworn into the Catholic fold. Funny that this ­couple who beamed so publicly in presenting their newborn daughter to both their parish and God were working feverishly to hide so much about the rest of their lives.

  From the beginning, the marriage of Dale and Anne, my father says, was in horrific shape.

  “I couldn’t perform on the honeymoon,” he told me. “I couldn’t come close to performing.”

  My mother, who had taken a perverse pride in remaining a virgin for more than thirty years, even during the free love era of the 1960s, was devastated that her wedding night didn’t go at all as she’d planned. Half naked, half dressed in the negligee she had carefully selected from the lingerie department of LS Ayres, she cried in the hotel room they shared in the quaint resort town of French Lick, Indiana.

  “Is it me?” she asked her new husband, her tone desperate. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Was it her lack of sexual experience that was ruining things? she wondered. She’d made out with boys in her days before Dale, necked and petted, but had never gone all the way. Maybe the “fast” girls had been the smart ones. Maybe they’d learned to master things in the backseats of cars and in the bedrooms of fraternity houses that she’d only read about.

  “What can I do?” my mother asked, pleading for direction from my father.

  My father, rather than come clean, grew angry. He yelled. He screamed. He pounded his fists. He hit walls. On more than one occasion during those first days of the honeymoon, my mother told me, he caused her to bolt for the safety of a locked bathroom.

  Three days into the honeymoon, with the marriage still not consummated, my mother struggled to find a means of saving her flailing marriage. Her solution: “Why don’t we visit Father Vincent?” Her tone, my father said, was bright, hopeful, as if it were perfectly normal for a blushing bride to want to visit a favorite priest in the middle of her honeymoon.

  But Anne had her reasons. If her honeymoon had started out on a bleak note, Anne rationalized that it could end on a good one with the help of her longtime rock, Father Vincent. She couldn’t turn to her parents in her hour of need. She could never discuss her sex life with her father, Al. And while most women would have turned to their mothers at a time like this, Anne feared that her mother, Aurelia, would never understand. If Aurelia had slapped her days after she left the convent, when she needed her most, what would she do with this bit of unspeakable information? No, Anne needed someone who would be there for her. That person had been Father Vincent for nearly a decade. If anyone would know what to say, what to do, it would be him.

  Unable to come up with a better solution, Dale complied and packed the car. Together, they checked out of their honeymoon lodging and headed to Oldenburg, the site of my mother’s wedding to Christ a decade before and, more recently, the site of her shameful departure.

  Upon their arrival that evening, Father Vincent greeted my mother warmly, wrapping her into his arms in a giant bear hug. To Dale, he was more reserved, cautiously extending his hand with which to perform a perfunctory handshake.

  Taking a seat behind his desk, narrowing his eyes, Father Vincent looked my father up and down. “So, Dale,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

  My father took a deep breath. “The marriage to Anne isn’t working out,” Dale said, his voice trembling.

  “Why?” demanded Father Vincent, his tone one part concerned and one part angry. What in the world, wondered the priest, had his Annie gotten herself into when she married this man? Hadn’t he warned her in those letters?

  “I can’t,” Dale stammered. “I can’t—­”

  “Can’t what?” demanded Father Vincent. The priest kicked himself now. He should have been even more direct with Anne when he’d had a chance to talk her out of the marriage. She would have listened if he’d ordered her to run away.

  “I can’t perform,” my father said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Surely, Dale thought, the statement would lead his new wife’s beloved priest to begin the talk of annulment. Surely that was the rightful out for all of them.

  But much to his surprise, Father Vincent did not bring up annulment.

  “You mustn’t give up so easily,” Father Vincent commanded. “You must work to fix this.”

  “But the church is clear,” my father stammered. “If we can’t consummate the marriage, the marriage is invalid.”

  “And the church is also clear,” countered Father Vincent, “that the man and wife should strive to save the marriage at all costs. You’ve not even been married a week. Are you really trying?”

  At this, Father Vincent leaned across the desk and looked Dale squarely in the eye. “You made your vows to stand by Anne. The onus is on you to keep those vows and to save this marriage.”

  Father Vincent didn’t like Dale. He had made that clear to Anne on numerous occasions. But a marriage was a marriage. It was a commitment. The church, the Bible, all were clear about this. His Annie, God bless her, had already failed at her marriage to Christ. He would do what he could to save her marriage to this man. Dale wasn’t good enough for her, Father Vincent believed then, had always believed. But Anne had made her choice. The deed was done. Now it was time for Dale to step up to the plate.

  Dale nodded, agreeing. He would work to save the marriage. He believed in the church. And if the church said he was in the wrong and needed to fix things, he would listen.

  Anne, for her part, was committed to helping in any way she could. She knew that Father Vincent would come through for her. It was Father Vincent to the rescue yet again.

  After a brief overnight stay and a teary goodbye—­Anne again taking comfort in an enormous Father Vincent hug—­Dale and Anne made their way out of the rectory and into their new life in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where my father was stationed as a sales representative for Eli Lilly and Company.

  In Michigan, they quickly settled into life in a comfortable home. Dale did well as an Eli Lilly sales rep. Anne found work at Western Michigan University, working as a receptionist for a professor. They filled their evenings, making casserole dishes, shoveling snow-­filled driveways, and dreading time alone in the bedroom. Indeed, the first months of marriage remained a sexual disaster.

  My mother told me years later that she tried everything to seduce my father. She went to the beauty parlor frequently to have her hair set so that she would look like the pretty women she saw in magazines, who seemed to have no problem with men. She invested in new perfumes, fancy soaps. When it came to lingerie, she tried it all: lace, then velvet, then silk. Nothing seemed to work. Her husband was positively unexcitable.

  It was not until her grandfather, devoted husband of Trudy, beloved father of Al, died that things began to turn around.

  Back in Indianapolis on the night of the funeral, while attempting to comfort Anne, Dale was surprised at what he felt: aroused. He was even more surprised when his level of interest in intimacy increased instead of waning, as it had countless times before.

  At last he was able to not only sustain the erection, but ejaculate and, at long last, consummate the marriage.

  Dale was relieved. Anne was ecstatic. Her daily prayers had finally been answered.

  “It was nice,” my father would later recount. “For both of us. It was nicer than I’d ever thought it could be.”

  Dale’s first time with a woman pointed the ­couple in a new direction. The marriage remained largely passionless—­more a friendship than a romantic relationship, my father said—­but now, once a week, Dale found a way to perform his husbandly duties. My mother longed for more—­for the two and three and four times a week that the characters in her favorite romance novels enjoyed, and that women’s magazines increasingly implied was “normal” for the lovemaking-­loving sixties—­but for now, once a week would do. That’s all she needed, she
hoped, to secure what she longed for more than anything else in the world: a baby.

  Anne’s wish came true shortly after their weekly lovemaking began. In March 1970, not long before my father learned he was to be transferred back to Eli Lilly’s headquarters in Indianapolis, my mother discovered she was pregnant.

  And on December 1, 1970, Anthony Richard Pflum entered the world.

  My mother took to mothering like a duck to water. For her, the baby and the sleepless nights that came with him were far easier to navigate than marriage to my father. At least, she reasoned, the baby, even amidst his bouts of colic, truly wanted her. Anne quickly developed routines: morning baths; an hour devoted to watching the then new public television show for kids, Sesame Street; afternoon strolls around the neighborhood. On weekends, she visited her parents, sometimes taking the baby for overnight trips. During this time of new motherhood, she reconnected with other members of her family as well. She frequently dined with her aunts and uncles in Indianapolis. She flew to see her sister Patty in California. She paid a visit to her baby brother, Mike, who was now in school at Notre Dame.

  Both sets of grandparents welcomed the baby with open arms. For Anne’s mother, in particular, Anthony’s arrival was a source of tremendous relief. Aurelia Diener had worried about Anne and Dale in those early days of the marriage. She’d fretted that the wan, worried look on Anne’s face signaled that the union was over before it’d begun. She didn’t know what she would do if Anne’s marriage failed so soon after her departure from Oldenburg. Leaving the convent was one thing. But being a childless divorcée—­particularly in a family so Catholic—­what could Aurelia possibly come up with to tell family and friends? And what would she do if Anne moved back to the Pine Patch again? With Mike at Notre Dame, Aurelia was finally getting the alone time with Al she’d craved since she was a teenager. The last thing she needed was a depressed daughter back home. No, with the arrival of Anthony, Aurelia’s fervent prayers for Anne and the well-­being of Anne’s marriage to Dale had been answered.

  Of course, things were not all right with Anne and Dale. But they were right enough. The new baby smoothed things over in a way that nothing else could. In Anthony, they at last had a common goal. He gave them something to talk about, to laugh about, to uniformly fret about.

  But for Dale, in particular, life continued to implode. The corporate life of Eli Lilly that he thought he could embrace quickly turned into a tension-­filled nightmare. He loathed the growing pressure to host and take part in ­couples-­themed dinner parties with his straight colleagues, who invited him for rounds of golf and encouraged him to look at ever-­more-­expensive houses in the desirable neighborhoods of Indianapolis.

  “I didn’t want any of it,” my father later explained regarding what he called “corporate culture.”

  He wanted a life that was not his to live. A life unlike the one he increasingly felt he’d been forced into.

  In 1971, in a bid to escape from the growing expectations of straight bosses and colleagues, Dale requested and was granted another transfer from Eli Lilly, this time to Wisconsin.

  “Are you sure?” sobbed a devastated Anne. “Don’t you like Indianapolis? I don’t want to leave.”

  “I need to be away from corporate headquarters,” he said with conviction.

  “Can’t you just look for another job here?” she asked. “Or maybe Cincinnati?”

  She’d grown accustomed to, addicted to, weekly visits with her parents, particularly with her beloved father, whom she’d fallen even more deeply in love with since leaving Oldenburg. Now that he had more time and fewer children to worry about, her visits with him and her mother had been enjoyable, leisurely. They played cards, cooked up dinners of steak and breakfasts of eggs and sausage, attended Mass together. She was in heaven.

  She was finally approaching the happiness that had eluded her for a lifetime. She had a home. Friends. A baby. The sex wasn’t great. But surely, she told herself, that would come.

  “No,” Dale told Anne with conviction. “If you want me—­if you want us—­I have to get out of here.”

  Anne knew what he meant. If she wanted this marriage to survive, she had to do as he said. Just as she had been beholden to a Mother Superior, she was now beholden to Dale. And he’d made up his mind.

  The transfer job to which Dale was assigned was as a regional sales representative for Elanco, an animal health division of Eli Lilly. The job was a perfect fit for Dale. It combined his rural upbringing—­his understanding of and fundamental respect for farmers and farm animals—­with his gift of gab and astute business mind.

  After mulling over where to live for the better part of two months, my parents ultimately settled on Beaver Dam, a small town of fourteen thousand that rested in the heart of Dodge County, a rural county known for its many dairy farms, about an hour’s drive from Madison.

  My mother sobbed intermittently throughout the move. In all her life, she had never lived so far from her beloved Indiana. Even at the women’s hotel in Cincinnati, even during her year with Dale in Michigan, she’d never lived more than two hours from the Indiana state line.

  “It’s not so far,” Dale would tell her good-­naturedly. “It’s only Wisconsin.”

  But for Anne, it might as well have been Mars. When the sadness overcame her in those first weeks after he announced the move, she clung to Baby Anthony, stroked his soft tufts of blond hair and his chubby legs. Sad though she was, she’d made those vows to stand beside Dale. She’d pledged her devotion to him before God. Before her parents. Before her darling Father Vincent. She wasn’t going to go back on her word now. If Wisconsin was what Dale wanted, then this was what God must want, too.

  In the end, Dale and Anne settled on a two-­story red house that sat on a full acre of land on the outskirts of Beaver Dam. It stood at the end of a street populated by a dozen other homes in a new subdivision called Sunrise Acres. Cornfields lined two sides of the yard. For my parents, the house’s setting was a perfect blend of country and city living. My father saw in it the opportunity to start life anew.

  And shortly after the move into the home, that opportunity seemed to multiply a hundredfold when my mother discovered she was pregnant with me.

  From the moment she found out I was on the way, Anne threw herself with renewed gusto into the task of building a proper nest for her growing family in Beaver Dam. She became an active member of Beaver Dam’s Newcomer’s Club, volunteered to help lead the local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), encouraged my father to sign up for the Lions Club, where he went door-­to-­door selling oranges in a bid to raise money for the vision impaired. They attended Mass at St. Peter’s, volunteered for weekly church gatherings. My father lectored at Mass. My mother oversaw bake sales and book sales. Together, they helped organize annual neighborhood picnics.

  As my mother’s belly grew, as the phone started ringing with more and more invitations from newfound friends to come to dinners at local supper clubs and barbecues in backyards, Dale was conflicted. On the one hand, he was relieved. The risk he had taken in moving the family hundreds of miles away from their home state and from both of their families had paid off. They were fast becoming pillars of a growing young community, where no one knew of his desire for men, or of how long it had taken them to become husband and wife in a biblical sense.

  On the other hand, he was sadder and more desperate than he’d ever been. The wife and child and career and house that were supposed to make him happy and cure him of those impure thoughts and desires had failed. He was still miserable. If anything, he felt more trapped than ever.

  It was around that time in August 1972—­two months before Anne was due to give birth to me—­that Dale spied the article: in the pages of Time magazine, he read the story detailing the burgeoning gay movement in the United States. Homosexual men, the article said, were increasingly finding friendship and
much more in bathhouses in urban areas.

  “I read the article again,” my father told me. “And again and again and again.”

  There were no bathhouses in Beaver Dam, of course. But, he realized, there might be in some of the cities he visited on his business travels.

  Shortly after reading the article, Eli Lilly sent him to Minneapolis for a business conference. On his first night there, Dale called my mother early in the evening, then set out on an adventure he would later call “life altering.” His destination: the city’s then infamous gay neighborhood.

  “I was nervous at first,” my father would later tell me. “But after a while, I somehow felt at home.”

  Stumbling upon a bar called the Gay 90’s, Dale says he was immediately enthralled. Behind the large windows lay what appeared to be a wonderland: there was an ornate antique wooden bar, an old-­school piano, and beautiful old lamps that, my father said, his antique-­loving mother would have coveted.

  “I knew I had to stay and have a drink,” he told me.

  Without another thought—­without any fear of being spotted by colleagues—­my father stepped inside and took a seat at the bar. Within five minutes, he’d ordered his first drink. Within a half hour, he’d made his first new friend. He and the man, someone my father described only as a “Minnesota native and nice looking,” talked for the better part of an hour. They spoke about Minneapolis. About life.

  The next night, after a day of business meetings, my father sprinted back to the Gay 90’s for more. This time, he made a pair of friends with whom he ate dinner. Delighted to learn that Dale hailed from the hinterlands of Indiana and Wisconsin and was new to their world, they took him out barhopping that night to Minneapolis’s finest gay bars. At night’s end, Dale hesitantly asked about those bathhouses he’d read about in Time magazine.

  “You don’t know of any place like that here in the Twin Cities, do you?” he asked, half hesitantly, half hopefully.