White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “I can’t watch Law and Order at home,” she said, still not meeting our eyes. “The TV doesn’t work.”

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since a few months ago.”

  This was news to me. When I was last in the house, there were two working televisions.

  “What about the one in the basement?” I asked.

  “That’s the one I’m talking about. The one in the living room hasn’t worked for years.”

  I exchanged glances with Dean. My mother looked so heartbreakingly sad—­and embarrassed—­at the admission.

  “Well, we’ll fix it,” I said. “I’ll call the Best Buy in Madison tomorrow. We can have one delivered to you as soon as you get home.”

  “No!” cried my mother. “Don’t do that!”

  “Anne,” interrupted Dean, as he sat down beside her on the couch and took her hand, “it’ll be no trouble. We’ll take care of the TV and make the arrangements. It’ll be easy.”

  “But they’ll want to come inside,” my mother said, panicking. Her voice rose an octave. “They always want to come in. I don’t want anyone in the house.”

  The terror in her voice broke my heart. When I was growing up, Anne Diener Pflum was unfailingly assertive when it came to getting things done. If one of my teachers wasn’t performing up to snuff, if the coffee in the restaurant wasn’t hot enough, if there was a change in local church policy that seemed discriminatory—­she spoke up. Even after her hospitalizations for the deepening depression, she took on school administrators, restaurant managers, and church councils with ease. She had been fearless. But now, when it came to doing something as seemingly simple as allowing a stranger to enter her home to install a television, she was timid as a child, afraid of any shadow that threatened to darken her decaying house’s doorstep.

  TV was the one link to the outside world that she’d still been able to enjoy in that albatross. The idea of her going without newscasts and old movies and Law and Order reruns because of her growing paranoia was just too sad to bear.

  “Listen to Dean, Mother,” I said, sitting down between her and Dean. “Please? Let us fix this.”

  It wasn’t easy, but after a week of cajoling, Dean and I finally convinced her to allow the Best Buy team to do its magic. Within a week of her return to Beaver Dam, the old TV had been removed and a new television and DVD player were delivered and installed by an electronics expert my mother deemed “unbelievably helpful.”

  My mother was ecstatic. “I can’t believe how good Vincent looks,” she gushed the day after the television was installed.

  “Vincent?” I asked.

  “D’Onofrio,” she said, referring to her favorite Law and Order actor. “He was so blurred the last time the old TV actually worked. Now I can see him.”

  But while she could see Vincent now, she still couldn’t see the floor of the house on any of its three levels. That’s what we learned from her brother Al, the only person I knew, aside from the Best Buy deliveryman and a property tax assessor, who had been allowed to view the interior of the house since 2000.

  My uncle Al entered the house in 2009, nearly four years after his quest to help my mother began.

  A resident of Decatur, Illinois—­he moved there from Chicago after his divorce, when his four children were grown—­Al was the only one of Albert and Aurelia’s six children besides my mother who had remained in the Midwest. A former IBM executive, Al was the closest sibling my mother had in physical terms and, soon, in emotional terms as well. They hadn’t been particularly close as children owing to the age difference. Al was six years younger than my mother and had seen little of her once she left for college and then the convent. But with Al and Aurelia gone, my mother was hungry to fill the void they’d left behind and to reconnect with fellow Dieners. Uncle Al was just what the doctor ordered.

  Shortly before Dean and I got married, Al started calling my mother more frequently and driving up to Wisconsin to meet her for a dinner here, a lunch there.

  “When we started getting together, just the two of us, after all those years,” Al said, “she was a bit like a scared animal. I had to win her trust.”

  Slowly but surely, both he and the meals broke down my mother’s defenses, and Al became a trusted confidant in her life.

  “Your mother is an unbelievable woman,” Al said, referring to their shared childhood, then life with Dale and beyond. “I have so much respect for all that she’s been through.”

  I was grateful for his newfound friendship with my mother. She was willing to listen to her brother in a way she wouldn’t—­or couldn’t—­listen to her children. And just as he represented a source of comfort to my mother, he represented a source of hope for me. Here, at last, was an ally in the battle to save my mother from her depression, and from the house.

  What started as long talks between two siblings eventually turned into monthly meetings and in-­depth conversations. For years, my mother balked at the idea of allowing Al into her home. She was reluctant to have him so much as drive into the driveway when they met for meals in Beaver Dam. Eventually, however, Uncle Al talked his way into the house. And though I had warned him in telephone conversations about its condition, he was unprepared for what he saw.

  “Mary,” he said, his voice full of incredulity when he called me a few days after his breakthrough, “you can’t open the front door.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The front door of your mother’s house,” he repeated. “I couldn’t get it open.”

  “Is it sealed shut?” I imagined my mother accidentally spilling something on the threshold years ago—­syrup or paint—­and never wiping it up, and the door remaining stuck forevermore. Crazy as it might sound, it wasn’t an unrealistic scenario.

  “No,” he said. “The problem is the stuff. There’s so much junk in there that you can’t physically push the door open wide enough for a human being to enter. I had to go in through the screen door in the garage. And that entrance is almost as bad. I was swimming through stuff.”

  “Swimming?” I asked, my heart racing. “Was there a flood?”

  “No,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. You wouldn’t have been able to tell if there was one. Your mother has so much junk in there that it was like wading through a swamp. My feet never touched the floor the whole time I was in there. It’s chest-­high in places. Three feet in the shallow areas. And I never made it farther than two rooms—­just the living room and the kitchen.”

  I nodded in silence.

  “Mary,” my uncle said softly. “It’s bad. I think it’s probably even worse than you thought.”

  There was the smell, he said. The whole place reeked. There were the appliances. Uncle Al said nothing in the kitchen worked. Now the stove was broken as well and joined the broken microwave and broken dishwasher in the kitchen that had become a morgue. And then there were his safety concerns.

  “Mary Elizabeth, I could hardly walk. Your mother is seventy with arthritis and cataracts. I promise you this: she is going to fall over or into one of those piles of crap. And chances are she’s not going to be able to get back up.”

  In subsequent weeks, Dean and I had long talks with my uncle, trying to cobble together a plan of action. There were no easy answers.

  Dean and I talked about moving closer. If we relocated from New York to the Midwest, she would have an incentive to clean up—­wouldn’t she? Or maybe our presence would serve as an impetus for her to move to a condo—­or even to a wing of a house we would buy for our family.

  “If she moves in with us, we could help her find new furniture and new clothes,” I said hopefully. “Or if we help her to move into a condo of her own, we could hire a maid to help her keep things clean.”

  “And what about her current house?” my uncle asked. “And all of the stuff in it?”

  “We’ll get
rid of it. All of it. That’s the whole point. Without the junk, she can finally start over.”

  My uncle sighed. “Mary, I think you need to accept the fact that your mother’s problems go way beyond an inability to keep a house clean. She has been suffering in silence for years. A new home—­even a new home with a maid—­that’s just window dressing. Her real problems go much deeper than that.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice breaking. “But we can fix this.”

  “You can hope and you can try,” said my uncle. “But sometimes when things have been broken for a long time, they . . .”

  He stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts before continuing. “They can’t be fixed.”

  I didn’t want to believe that this was the situation for my mother. The house was broken. I could live with that. I didn’t care. Let the damned house fall apart. But I couldn’t bear the thought that my mother could be so broken that she couldn’t be brought back to the land of the living.

  So when I lay there in that New York City hospital bed that night, with those IVs in my arms, and that beautiful newborn baby boy by my side, and called my mother in tears to ask, as the nurse suggested, whether she might be able to fly out to see me for two days—­to help me with the baby until the infection subsided—­I still had a glimmer of hope that she was fixable.

  After I cried my way through my recounting of the doctor’s orders to get family assistance to the hospital immediately, I paused.

  The trouble is she paused, too. That pause, that hesitation, said it all.

  “Honey, I’d love to help,” she said nervously. “I would. But I have to work. You know how I have all of my students. And the principal doesn’t like for me to take time off work.”

  I nodded, crying. It was just like when I had the lung procedure. She wanted to help. I could feel it in my heart. I could hear it in her voice. But she couldn’t.

  “And there’s the house. I just can’t leave the house like that on such short notice.”

  That damn house.

  “What about Dean?” she asked brightly. “He’ll be able to help, won’t he?”

  I silently shook my head, then rested it against the cool of the IV pole.

  “Only for a ­couple of hours a day,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “He already took time off for Augie. And he has meetings and—­never mind.”

  My womb hurt, my head hurt, and I continued to shiver from the fever. Augie, thankfully, lay contentedly for the moment in the car seat attached to his stroller that they’d rolled into the room and placed beside my hospital bed.

  “You understand, honey,” said my mother, almost pleading. “You need to get better. And I’d probably just drive you and the hospital staff crazy if I came.”

  I nodded sadly once more. She couldn’t see the nod. She couldn’t see the tears. It was just as well.

  “But I’ll get the house together for you—­just the way you’ve been asking me to do. I have a plan. Just you wait and see what Uncle Al and I are going to do with the place this summer.”

  “Okay,” I said weakly.

  “Get some sleep, sweetheart—­and call me tomorrow. Infections are very serious business. I’ll be saying lots of prayers. And I’ll light a candle for you tomorrow after Mass. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. I listened to her hang up and sat stunned, unable to move. What was I going to do? I wondered. About the infection? About caring for a newborn while my very tired body worked to fight the infection? About my mother?

  “What’d your mom say?” the nurse asked me moments later when she popped back into the room to take my temperature again. “Is she coming?”

  “She’s working on her flight now,” I lied, knowing that if I said otherwise, she would take Augie away from me.

  “Aren’t moms the best?” she asked.

  “Totally,” I said, fighting back the tears as the nurse jammed the thermometer into my mouth.

  When the nurse left, I finally allowed myself to break down. Heaving and sighing, I cried harder than I’d cried in years.

  Slamming an IV’d fist into my hospital bed, I let out a strange mix of sobs that was one part anger, one part sadness, one part fear. I cried because my exhausted husband wouldn’t answer the phone. I cried because my mother couldn’t bring herself to leave that wreck of a house. I cried because I had never felt more sick or weak or helpless in all of my life—­and I wanted nothing more than to put my head down, but I couldn’t because I had a teeny-tiny little baby who needed me.

  I racked my mind, wondering whom else I could call. My father had been of tremendous help to me when I was sick with TB. He could be of help to me now. But I knew from his latest phone calls and e-­mails that he was in Texas, helping my sister-­in-­law watch my brother’s kids. He was off the list.

  My father’s youngest sister—­the aunt I was closest to—­lived in Indiana. But she was a nurse and would have to work. My girlfriends all had jobs and children of their own. This was that time when a girl needed her mom.

  Not surprisingly, my tears roused Augie. What started out as little newborn moans quickly escalated into a full-­on wail that told me he was hungry and ready for his food source to come to the rescue. I looked at my IVs. Then I looked nervously at the door, waiting for the nursing staff to swoop down on me and toss Augie out of the room. I had no choice.

  I gingerly reached to stroke my tummy, which continued to feel as if it were on fire. This wasn’t going to be easy. But he needed me. Drawing in one long breath, I managed to steady myself at the side of the hospital bed and reach for Augie. Gently, I cupped his torso into the palm of one hand and pulled him to my breast with the other. I winced, muttering a few four-­letter words owing to the pain. But as Augie’s bellowing mouth found the waiting nipple, his cries ceased, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you, babe,” I whispered to him, the tears still flowing. “At least I’ve got you.”

  Three days and several courses of antibiotics later, I was released from the hospital, infection-­free. Against the odds, Augie had remained by my bedside during the entire hospital stay. It took some doing. With Dean unable to get the time off work to stay with me and Augie, I’d had to do more than a bit of tap-­dancing with a suspicious nursing staff. But by strategically placing Dean’s sweater and briefcase on a chair in the hospital room and arranging for Dean to drop in at a few key times—­once before work, once at lunchtime, and once in the evening—­I’d managed to convince them that Dean was staying with me in the hospital.

  Only one of the nurses caught on to my scheme. When she came to check my vitals at midnight on the second night of my stay, she surveyed the room, shook her head, and waved a disapproving finger at me. But since she was a mother herself, she agreed to keep my secret.

  By the time I left the hospital, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I made a solemn vow to Augie: never would I let a house—­or anything—­prevent me from coming to help him or any of his siblings in their future hours of need.

  No sooner had I returned home from the hospital than I started receiving ever-­lengthier phone calls from Uncle Al about my mother and the house. She was apparently serious about letting him help her remove some of the bigger piles of debris as she had allowed him to set up a three-­ton Dumpster in the driveway. It peeved some of my mother’s image-­conscious neighbors no end to have the eyesore of the Dumpster so publicly displayed in the neighborhood, but the gigantic trash bin served a vital purpose: it enabled my uncle to painstakingly remove some of those five-­foot drifts of debris from the main floor of the house.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much stuff we threw out!” my uncle said. “That’s the good news . . .”

  “But the bad news?” I asked, dreading his answer.

  My uncle paused.

  “Mary Elizabeth,” Uncle Al said, then stopped. �
��I need to ask you some rather personal questions about your mother and the house.”

  This didn’t sound good. I took a seat on the rocking chair in our living room and pulled Augie onto my lap. “Okay,” I said hesitantly.

  “Did you have much of a problem with vermin when you were growing up?”

  “Vermin?” I asked, my stomach clenching. “You mean like mice?”

  “I mean vermin,” my uncle said.

  “Blackie caught a mouse in the garage once,” I said.

  “Not a mouse in the garage—­I mean multiple mice. And bats. And chipmunks. In the house.”

  I swallowed. Was this why my mother had been asking about chipmunks when I wanted to bring Mesut home from Turkey for a visit?

  “Multiple? In the—­”

  I paused and pulled Augie closer.

  “They’re in the house?” I asked at last.

  “Yes,” said my uncle solemnly. “They’re everywhere.”

  “Where are the bats coming from?”

  “Best I can tell is from a hole in the roof your mother hasn’t had fixed. I don’t know if she even knew it was there. She spends most of her time in the basement, as you know.

  “But I wanted to know if there’s a history of the problem—­or if there’s an exterminator or someone you or your mother used over the years?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Does she know you know about the . . . creatures?”

  “That’s the thing with your mother these days,” my uncle said. “I don’t know that she even knows. It’s like she’s closed her ears and her eyes to them. She lives in her world and they live in theirs.”

  It made me think of Grey Gardens. I’d gone to see the musical about the real-­life Long Island mother-­and-­daughter team, living in modern-­day ruins without ever seeming to fully grasp the depth of their living conditions. Was this what my mother had become? A Big or Little Edie, living in denial?

  I stroked Augie’s hair with one hand while I held the phone with the other. “Uncle Al, let me come out there. If she’s let you in the house, maybe she’ll finally let me in. Dean and I can come this weekend—­”