White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  Months later, he tried again with a different plan, this time on a plot of land he’d bought outside of Beaver Dam shortly after I was born. At the time of the purchase, my father had a fleeting dream about moving all of us out to the land to start a working farm. He would be Farmer, my mother would be the designated Farmer’s Wife, and my brother and I would be Dutiful and Happy 4-­H Kids, in a slightly revamped and, he hoped, improved version of his own childhood.

  The property was picture-­perfect. Situated high on a hill, it boasted an apple orchard, a pair of old barns, and stunning views of some of the most beautiful farmland in Dodge County. His instinct was right. The setting would have made an idyllic home. But we never moved to that land. Instead, as my father’s inner demons caught up with him, the property became a painful reminder of the man my father thought he was supposed to be but would never actually become.

  “That farm became a symbol of my life at that time,” my father said. “It was one unfulfilled dream after another.”

  After the Minneapolis visit and his foray into the world of bathhouses, my father had been unable to stay away from the gay lifestyle that now not only called to him, but, in fact, screamed his name. He increasingly sought out during business trips to Chicago and Minneapolis and Milwaukee the sorts of gay bars, bathhouses, roadside rest stops that gay men in situations like his—­married and feeling trapped—­used to gather in during the 1970s. When he frequented these venues, he did not introduce himself as Dale Pflum, husband of Anne, from Beaver Dam. Instead, he created for himself a whole new identity.

  “I gave myself an entirely different name,” my father explained. “I told everyone in those bars that I was Steve from Waupun, Wisconsin.”

  Dale’s dalliances as Steve the Gay Man were temporary, he told himself, and meant nothing. They fulfilled a passing need, provided him with quick-­fix Band-­Aids to get him through the long days of his real life as Dale, the dutiful husband who still accompanied his wife and children to Mass and went door-­to-­door on weekends, selling oranges for the Lions Club.

  At first, my father was all right with his dual life and got into a certain rhythm of denial then dalliance, denial then dalliance.

  “Then,” he told me, “I met someone.”

  That someone was a truck driver who had once been married and had a family. By the time my father met him, he was out and leading the gay lifestyle my father could only dream about.

  “He was handsome,” my father says. “He was sexy and charming. He seemed confident and daring. And I fell in love.”

  This was more than a dalliance, my father would later tell me. This was the partner with whom Dale wanted to share his life. When Dale came home after a business trip to Anne, who was anxious to hug and kiss him and snuggle up to him in the comfort of their king-­sized bed, his stomach turned. When he saw his new love, his heart skipped a beat.

  The affair quickly became all-­consuming, Dale working to get away from Beaver Dam as often as he could.

  “Dale, what’s wrong?” my mother asked, her voice increasingly high and pleading, when he came home late or shied away from even a peck on the cheek.

  “Nothing,” my father would snap.

  “But there must be something. You’re never home and we never . . .”

  At this, her voice would trail off. She was trying to remind him that after I’d been born, they’d had sex only once. She’d begged, she’d pleaded, she’d attempted various ploys of seduction. But—­nothing. No perfumes, no rounds of raw oysters, not even trips to Las Vegas, in the privacy of swanky hotel rooms, worked.

  For more than three years, she went without sex. The strain took a toll on her physical appearance. Just as my father gained weight, so, too, did she, climbing from a size 10 to a 12 to a 14/16. If she couldn’t take comfort in her husband’s arms, then she’d take comfort in the cream-­based soups and chowders and icing-­laden sweet rolls she’d been deprived of for long stretches at a time at Oldenburg.

  “I repeat, Anne,” barked my father. “Nothing. Is. Wrong!”

  And at this, he would reach to throw something—­a plate, a jar, an ashtray filled with the ashes of the now nearly three packs of cigarettes he smoked a day. Sometimes he reached for larger things. Once, he threw a fire extinguisher. Another time, it was a clothes hamper. Sometimes the banging of his fists knocked a framed picture from the wall.

  When my father lashed out, my brother and I retreated to another room. Sometimes we tried to focus on an evening episode of The Electric Company in the living room, turning up the volume so that it helped to drown out the yelling. Other times, we hid around the corner from the action, standing so that we could see the throwing without actually getting hit. We were both fascinated by and afraid of the rage in my father’s face.

  After each outburst, my mother would recoil, retreating to a bathroom or the laundry room, where she would cry. Sometimes my father would storm out and get into his company car and drive away. Other times, he would take a breath and carry on, as if life with a wife and children in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was swimming along in a normal fashion.

  But caught up in his affair, Dale knew nothing in Beaver Dam would ever feel “normal” again. Now he was no longer content to live a lie.

  “Let’s run away together,” Dale told his new love. They could be a ­couple, Dale told him. He’d figure out what to do about his marriage later.

  To Dale’s surprise, his new partner was resistant.

  “Dale, you don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “Trust me. You’re better off not being with me. If you stay with me, I promise you that you’ll get hurt.”

  “It’s okay,” Dale said, half begging, half demanding. “I can handle it!”

  For Dale, this was new, to be the one in the relationship pleading, instead of the one who was doing the pushing away.

  “No,” his love said with certainty, a shadow passing over his face. “No, I’m telling you, you can’t. We can’t. I’m nothing but trouble.”

  What my father didn’t know at the time was that the man with whom he’d fallen in love had an affinity not only for rough sex, but also for violence. In later years, he would be arrested and sent to jail for severely hurting at least one sexual partner in an S and M stunt gone terribly wrong. He was pushing Dale away in a bid to save the father of two from his clutches. But at the time of their quasi-­breakup, all Dale knew was that he’d seen a life he wanted more than his current life in Beaver Dam. More, for that matter, than life itself.

  “If I couldn’t have a life with him, I didn’t want any life at all,” he told me later.

  And so one evening my father drove his Oldsmobile station wagon to that abandoned property that he’d bought south of Beaver Dam in the hopes of building a dream farm with my mother and raising a dream farm family, sad and desperate and resigned to end it all. With a heavy sigh, he turned on the ignition, made certain all the windows and the exhaust pipe were tightly sealed, and prepared to die.

  “I had it so carefully planned,” my father said. “I thought carbon monoxide poisoning was the way to go. I just couldn’t live with myself anymore.”

  In the dark of his car, Dale clung to that steering wheel, said a prayer, and waited. The carbon monoxide slowly seeped into the body of the car. Initially, it did the trick. Within minutes, Dale lost consciousness, amidst thoughts and visions, he would later tell me, of his dead brother, Richard.

  But then, unexpectedly, came what he has since called a miracle.

  When he awoke, he wasn’t dead. Instead, he was lying on the ground beside his still-­running car, looking up at the sky.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he told me later. “Everything was planned out.”

  Whether he awoke half conscious and instinctively worked to save himself—­or whether he accidentally slumped onto the door handle in his state of unconsciousness and fell out of t
he car by chance—­he doesn’t know.

  “I remember lying on that ground, on that gravel driveway. I was crying and angry and I said, ‘Oh shit—­I can’t even manage to kill myself right,’ ” my father told me. “I felt like such a failure at everything. I lay there for the longest time.”

  Badly shaken, he eventually made his way home to my mother, pale, incoherent, and in tears. Slumped down in a chair in the kitchen, he haltingly told her enough to let her know she needed to get him to a hospital. Fast. Within minutes, she found a babysitter for me, then gathered up my brother for moral support.

  My father lay in the backseat of the car, sobbing. My frightened brother sat in the front passenger seat. My mother took her place behind the wheel, entirely numb. Together, the three of them drove toward Madison.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong with Daddy?” my brother asked repeatedly.

  “Daddy’s sad,” my mother told him, her voice breaking. “We’re taking Daddy someplace that will make him better.”

  The first time my father was committed to St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, it was for four weeks. The second time, it was for even longer. In between those stays came a hospitalization in Fond du Lac where my father grew so enraged with the hospital staff, he told me, that he broke entire pieces of furniture, including chairs.

  Each time, my mother handled the hospitalizations flawlessly.

  “Daddy’s going to be in the hospital for a while,” she explained to my brother and me, as if it were a common occurrence to have a father confined to a mental ward where nurses worked side by side with big, burly orderlies who doubled as bodyguards.

  “Daddy’s not feeling well,” she’d continue. “We need to make him feel better.”

  Each day, for weeks at a time, my mother would wait until we were done with school and swim lessons, then load us into the back of our old beige VW with its rust streaks on the sides. As a threesome, we would make the hour-­long trek to whatever hospital he was confined in at the time.

  I remember parking the car, riding in the elevator, making our way down the hallway to the mental-­health wing, where we would settle into the recreation room. My brother and I especially liked the waiting room in Madison. It featured a foosball table and an old-­fashioned exercise bike that my brother and I would spend hours fighting over. My mother, unable to afford a babysitter, would disappear for an hour when we arrived, leaving my brother and me alone. Sometimes during our visits, my father would come out to join us. When he did, he often cried. The tears frightened us. “Why is Daddy crying?” I’d ask.

  “He’s crying because he loves you so much,” my mother told me the first time.

  “He crying because he’s tired,” she told me the second time.

  “He’s crying because his medicine makes him feel funny,” she told me on a third occasion.

  None of the answers, I knew, seemed right. I was relieved when we were in the car, heading home.

  On the way back to Beaver Dam, my mother would work to make up for the strangeness of the visits by doing something decidedly normal. Sometimes, she took us to a shopping mall. Other times, we stopped at McDonald’s for hamburgers or at local diners for milkshakes or tall glasses of chocolate milk. Oftentimes, we talked.

  On one of those trips home from St. Mary’s, we discussed at length Little Women, which I had read during all of that time spent in the hospital waiting room and had promptly fallen in love with. “Jo should have married Laurie and not the professor!” I cried, real tears rolling down my cheeks.

  My mother smiled at the seriousness with which I had taken Louisa May Alcott’s characters. “But she loved the professor,” my mother protested.

  “Who cares?” I cried. “Laurie loved Jo more!”

  On another drive home, she told me about the many different colleges to which I could one day apply.

  “But, Mommy,” I protested, concerned. “I’m too little to go to college!”

  “It’s never too early to start thinking about the places you’ll go,” my mother said.

  If Anne Diener Pflum had failed to see the world when she was young and had the chance, then she was determined to make certain that her daughter didn’t make the same mistake.

  Without question, a sexless, virtually husbandless marriage in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was not the life she had bargained for when she agreed to marry Dale Pflum. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t bitter. She was sad. Horribly sad. And she was in need of answers.

  Chief among them: Who was her husband seeing?

  If Dale wasn’t having sex with her, Anne reasoned, he must be having it with another woman. But who? she wondered. Was it an old flame from his undergraduate days at Purdue? Maybe someone from Beaver Dam they’d met in the Newcomer’s Club? Perhaps it was one of the bunnies who’d waited on him at one of his meetings at the Playboy Club?

  The not knowing was exhausting. Worse, it was lonely. Anne wanted to turn to someone during these emotionally draining times. The trouble was, in her new home of Wisconsin, she had few, if any, options.

  Her parents remained at the Pine Patch, eight hours away by car. Even if they had lived closer, it would have been difficult for them to be of much help to Anne physically, owing to Aurelia’s deteriorating heart and worsening arthritis. And even if her parents could have been there for her physically, Anne knew it would be next to impossible for Aurelia, in particular, to be there for her emotionally. Aurelia Diener had overcome tragedy in her life: a deaf father, a poverty-­stricken childhood, multiple miscarriages, the death of a child. But she’d never had marital difficulties. Not like Anne’s, anyway. Aurelia had never had a problem getting her husband to have sex with her. If anything, her six children and her dozen-­plus pregnancies were evidence that Aurelia had difficulty keeping her husband away from her. Anne would have killed for such a problem.

  “There are things your grandmother just was never able to understand,” my mother told me years later. “It’s not that she didn’t want to. It’s just that she wasn’t able to.”

  Anne was able to count on her sister Kathy for some moral support. During Dale’s hospitalizations, the sisters regularly chatted by phone. But with Kathy living in Colorado, there was only so much she could do.

  And while my mother longed to confide in a girlfriend, her Wisconsin pickings were extraordinarily slim. The women she’d met at church and in the Newcomer’s Club all seemed and acted so happily married. She didn’t know who, if anyone, would understand her sexless marriage or Dale’s multiple suicide attempts—­and, moreover, who would honor a request to keep anything she confided a secret. It hadn’t taken Anne long to discover that in Beaver Dam, as in so many small towns, women loved to gossip. She needed a sympathetic ear, but she most certainly did not need the details of Dale’s hospitalizations to fall into the wrong hands.

  No, Anne came to realize, it wouldn’t be her parents or siblings or new friends who would sustain her during this crisis. Instead, it would be the loves of her life: her two small children.

  She couldn’t confide in my brother and me, of course, couldn’t ask us for advice, the way she could a trusted adult. But she could hug us to her and know we’d hug her back. She could greet me with a warm declaration of “I love you” and know, with certainty, that I’d return her greeting with an “I love you more!”

  As her dreams of a happy marriage imploded, she drew strength from the very act of caring for my brother and me: making our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, snuggling with us as we watched an episode of Sesame Street. She fed off our love—­our need—­of her. To us, she more than mattered. To us, she was the whole world. And at a time when she questioned when, or if, her husband had ever really wanted her, that did more to bolster her mood and sense of purpose in the world than any medicine or self-­help book possibly could have.

  It’s at this time that our family unit of three was cemented. Together, withou
t my father, my mother, brother, and I learned to care for our great big yard. My mother mowed the lawn and oversaw her beloved flower beds, just as her mother and Trudy had taught her to do so many years before. My brother raked. I helped with the trim work. Together, snuggled on her lap, we read bedtime stories as a unit every night: three books for Anthony, three books for me. And together, as a threesome, we went to church.

  Every Sunday, without fail, my mother took my brother and me to the ten fifteen Mass at St. Peter’s. Week after week, we sat in the front pew, my mother hunched over the kneeler, praying mightily for an explanation as to what was wrong—­really wrong—­with her husband.

  Eventually, after more than a year of hospitalizations, the truth came out at a joint session between both of my parents and a presiding psychiatrist at St. Mary’s Hospital.

  In a cramped doctor’s office—­in which, my mother would later recall, there was a brown and nearly dead spider plant that withered depressingly in an old green pot—­my father came clean.

  “Anne,” he said, sobbing and looking to his nodding psychiatrist for reassurance. “Anne, I’m gay.”

  My mother sat stunned for a moment, then surprised him with an audible gasp of relief.

  “Thank God,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “What?” Dale asked, incredulous.

  “All I’ve been praying for all this time is an explanation. Now at last we know what we’re dealing with.”

  The sessions continued, now with greater progress. My mother was devastated, but resigned and, increasingly, supportive. She drew strength from her belief in God and the teachings of St. Francis to be accepting of others for who they are, not for who she wanted them to be.

  Still, Anne didn’t know what any of this meant for her or her marriage. One psychiatrist talked to her about the possibility of sending Dale to Canada to take part in a program that claimed to “cure” gay husbands. But my mother wouldn’t hear of it.