White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  My mother paused and searched for the right word.

  “I’ve just been . . .” she said, her voice trailing off once more.

  “I guess I’ve just been tired. No, I’m not like those shows at all.”

  I nodded. She’d seen the shows. She’d seen the piles of filth. She’d seen the hoarders in denial, the families in tears. But she’d failed to see herself in any of it.

  The room began to spin. I was a grown woman. Over thirty. Mother of three. And for a moment I felt as though I hadn’t escaped from Beaver Dam after all. It was exactly the same—­except different. My mother and her hoarding still made me feel embarrassed, powerless, unbearably sad. But now I no longer had the delusions I’d had when I was younger, that she’d one day clean up for my wedding, that I’d one day spend Christmas with my children in the home. I was faced with the grim reality that the situation was only going to get worse because now I realized that my mother was never going to see she had a problem.

  “I—­I’ll be right back.” I stood and made my way to the bathroom. I waited until I was safely in a stall before breaking down in tears. My brilliant mother—­known for her empathy, always lauded for knowing who in a classroom full of children needed hugs or support, how to bolster confidence in the most insecure of young charges—­seemed to know herself least of all.

  Dean and I remained in Wisconsin for three more days. But we were never invited back to the house. It was just as well. My mother was happier—­less anxious—­when we gathered at hotels. And in the end, so was I. So it was only appropriate that we spent the last night of our visit at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, the grand hotel where we’d stayed for our wedding, the lodging my mother adored above all others.

  We had named Augie in part after the beloved hotel. His middle name is Pfister. And to honor Master Augie’s arrival in his namesake, the hotel pulled out all the stops, upgrading us to its famous Governor’s Suite—­a grand two-­bedroom, three-­bathroom suite—­and preparing a four-­tiered wedding cake for Baby Augie that was wheeled into our room with great pageantry.

  My mother delighted in all of this. Fresh from the house piled high with debris and mice and bats and chipmunks, she reclined on the couch in the suite’s giant living room, directly in front of the largest of the suite’s three enormous televisions—­looking, of course, for Law and Order.

  Dean and I treated her to a room-service steak dinner that night and bought her favorite wine as an early birthday present. As we made the transition from dinner to dessert, she surprised us by being the one to bring up the house.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said the other night at Ben Venuto’s.”

  “You have?” I asked, surprised. Dean and I exchanged glances.

  “I don’t know what it is about the house. You know—­I always had such great plans for it. I wanted to put a back deck behind it so we could watch the sunset. Add a sliding glass door so that we could get a nice cross breeze. Make at least one bathroom wheelchair accessible for when Mother and Daddy visited. I even hoped they might move in with me after they left the Pine Patch instead of going to that assisted-­living facility.

  “I would have liked that.”

  She talked, looking not at me and Dean, but at the flowers the room ser­vice team had delivered with our meal.

  “I thought about putting another window in the dining room. I even thought how nice a swimming pool might be.”

  I nodded, remembering how she had talked about this when our next-­door neighbors, the Swanbergs, put their pool in when my brother and I were still in elementary school.

  “I always wanted to do something to make the house mine.”

  “But, Mom, the house has always been yours.”

  “No,” my mother said, still looking at the flowers as she shook her head. “Your father picked it out. He picked the state we’d live in, the town, the house. He picked everything. I just followed his orders. He picked the paint, the wallpaper, the trees we planted in the yard. He made all of it his. Even when he left—­”

  She paused, her voice breaking off.

  Then, drawing in her breath, she finished her thought: “He made it his.”

  I nodded sadly, realizing that some of this mess was starting to make sense. When she got out of the convent, she had nothing. When my father left her in a house he’d picked out, she still felt like she had nothing. So she filled the house with things she had bought, things that, cheap and messy though they were, were hers.

  “I always thought I’d get around to fixing it up,” she continued. “But then you and Anthony left. And then Mother and Daddy died. And then—­well, then I got tired. And then things got out of control.

  “When you don’t pick things up for a while, it’s hard to know where to begin.”

  “We can help you with that now,” said Dean, his eyes growing moist. He reached his hand across the table in search of hers.

  I nodded vigorously. “That’s all we want.”

  “It would be nice to have a place that I picked out. That was mine. I just don’t know if it’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re not trapped.”

  I remember her using those same words to me—­when I worried about the financial crush of losing my job at CNN immediately after getting saddled with that stupid condo in Atlanta. Now I was giving her a dose of her own advice.

  “You’re never trapped,” I said.

  “I guess not,” my mother said softly. “You know, Mary, you’ve asked me so often over the years why it is your father seems to behave so much nicer—­so much more empathetically—­to distant relatives and perfect strangers than he sometimes seems to act toward you and me and your brother.”

  I nodded. I’d asked her to explain the phenomenon to me for decades.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, too. This is what I’ve decided: When your father left, he wanted to get rid of every part of his life that made him feel trapped. You and your brother and I—­we made him feel trapped. That house made him feel trapped. Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that he loves you. When he acts the way he does toward us—­it’s just because he couldn’t stand how trapped all of us as a family unit made him feel.”

  My mother paused and took my hand.

  “Does that make sense?”

  A tear rolled down my cheek, and I nodded, remembering him happily loading his things into that pickup truck with his gay friends the day he moved out and pulling away without looking back at the mess he’d left behind.

  “Yes.”

  I squeezed my mother’s hand. “But just because Dad got to escape from feeling trapped by that house doesn’t mean that you can’t. You can escape, too, Mom.”

  “I wish you were right,” she said, squeezing my hand in return.

  When Dean and I returned to New York, our lives kicked back into high gear. Fall was approaching. That meant back to preschool for our older boys and an increasingly hectic work schedule for Dean and me. In my case, the crazy work schedule was dictated by the intense battle brewing between Good Morning America and our archrival, the Today show. After years of being narrowly beaten in the ratings race for number one morning show, we at GMA were at last within spitting distance of taking the top spot. It was all hands on deck.

  Some mornings I started work in the studio at four A.M. Some evenings I stumbled home after midnight. I wrote, I scripted, I pitched stories, I oversaw shoots. And in between shoots and interviews, I continued to breast-­feed—­dutifully pumping milk for Augie at the office during those hours when I couldn’t nurse him directly. Add to that the demands of raising the older boys—­of taking part in helping on parent days at their co-­op nursery, and taking them to and from the pediatrician and music classes—­and my plate was full.

  But I wasn’t about to give up on my mission. So
on—­very soon—­we would extricate my mother from her mess of a house. We could save her, I told myself repeatedly. On that last night at the Pfister, she had seemed open to help, receptive. We were on the verge. I just knew it.

  There were signs of hope: that fall, she allowed her sister Kathy and her brother Mike to fly out to Beaver Dam for a weekend to help Uncle Al tackle her living room, dining room, and kitchen. At last, she was letting more loved ones in. Literally and figuratively.

  “It was just like those hoarding reality shows,” Uncle Mike would later recount. “I watched the shows to do some homework and, walking in, that’s exactly what we saw.”

  “It was heartbreaking,” Aunt Kathy said. “I had to keep trying to tell myself to view the process as some kind of archaeological dig and not dwell on the fact that she’d been living like that for so long.”

  The trio of siblings filled trash bag upon trash bag. In just two days, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of newspapers, magazines, remnants of takeout meals were at last laid to rest. But there were casualties. My mother snapped when she discovered that a poetry collection she’d been writing—­and kept stored in a dirty kitchen drawer laden with debris—­had been tossed by Al.

  “The drawer was full of junk. I thought it was all junk,” Al said, defending himself.

  My mother was devastated. Decades ago, her own mother, Aurelia, had thrown out all of her old plays and short stories when she’d joined the convent. My mother was crushed to find them gone when she returned to the Pine Patch. Now her writing had been destroyed again.

  Back in New York, I tried to further advance our mission to rescue my mother by tracking down a pair of hoarding experts. One was a university professor, the other ran a hoarding clinic. In a series of telephone calls, I conferred with them about my mother.

  “Your mother is hardly alone,” the professor assured me during one particularly lengthy chat. “But remember—­if you’re looking for a magic bullet when it comes to hoarding, there isn’t one.”

  He warned me repeatedly of the hazards involved in trying to “cure” a hoarder by cleaning a house in his or her absence, against his or her will—­or of doing any kind of dramatic cleanse or purge of what the rest of us deemed “junk.”

  “Hoarding comes from all kinds of places. You don’t want your mother to resent or hate you for your efforts—­since those efforts might make her feel unsafe and even more vulnerable. She’ll wind up turning against you. And then you really won’t be able to help.”

  “Be patient,” he implored. “Just get her to get some help. From someone. She needs to start that process of talking and realizing and healing.”

  I took the advice. During subsequent phone calls with my mother, between talk of the kids and our jobs and the weather, I addressed the matter head-­on. “Mom, what about seeing a counselor? Remember how you used to get so much out of seeing Dr. Graupner?”

  Kenneth Graupner, a Beaver Dam–based psychiatrist, had seen my mother through the divorce and her years of depression that followed. Were it not for Graupner and her near-­daily visits to St. Peter’s to pray, I’m not sure that my mother would have survived those dark days in the 1980s.

  “I know,” my mother said wistfully. “I wish he hadn’t retired. I just don’t know who to see . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “It could be helpful,” she conceded. The fall had been a trying time for her. She was terribly worried about my brother. His marriage had broken down irretrievably, and now that the divorce was final, he was living in a motel in Dallas, away from his children.

  “I could help you find a good therapist,” I offered, my tone hopeful. “I could make some calls and get some recommendations.”

  “I know, honey. But why don’t you be the daughter and let me be the mom? I’ll ask around at church.”

  Her tone wasn’t harsh. Just tired.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” she said before hanging up.

  Two weeks after she made her promise, Good Morning America sent me to London to cover the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton. For five days, I staked out Buckingham Palace, interviewed Princess Diana’s wedding dress designer, enjoyed the celebratory mood of all of those Brits thrilled for a new generation of royals finding love.

  GMA had given me many wonderful opportunities over the years, but the royal assignments—­those were my favorites, in large part because of my mother.

  Like so many mothers the world around, Anne Diener Pflum woke her daughter early on the morning of July 29, 1981, to watch Lady Diana Spencer become a princess. I loved every moment of it: the dress, that train, all the pageantry. My father had already left us for greener pastures. But in the living room that early morning, all that mattered was the fairy tale unfolding before our eyes. I’m not sure who was more excited by all of it—­me or my mother.

  Over the years, my mother remained a loyal Diana fan. To her, Diana was something of a kindred spirit. Both of them, my mother liked to remind me as we pored over ­People magazines bearing her photo on the cover, were victims of circumstance—­marrying men who would never love them, then working like mad to make their bad marriages somehow work.

  “I wish I could have been there,” said my mother wistfully as we chatted about London in late November after I returned.

  And I wished she could have, too.

  “I’m going back to cover the wedding in April,” I said. “You should try to come then.”

  “I’ll have to work,” my mother reminded me. “But what an exciting life you live. I so often wish I’d gotten to live your life when I was young. I really would have liked that.”

  “You still can,” I reminded her. “There’s still time.”

  “I don’t know,” said my mother wearily. “But the thing is, I get to do something even better. That’s what I realized when I went to Mass tonight.”

  More than forty years after leaving the convent, my mother still did not feel that her day was complete without going to Mass.

  “I realized, after Father’s sermon, that far better than having any of those adventures I’d dreamed of having for myself is getting to watch you living such an exciting life. You’re doing what I only dreamed of doing when I was growing up. When I was your age—­well, when I was your age, I wasn’t happy. I get to watch you being happy. At the end of the day, that’s all any mother wants—­for her children to be happy. You’ll see.”

  In December 2010, Dean and I made plans for the holidays. We would drive to the Midwest and meet my mother there. We were excited for the New Year. This would be the year of overcoming hurdles, making miracles happen, I told myself. 2011 would be the year we’d get my mother out of the house.

  We rented a car for our journey, arranged for my mother to spend the night before we met up at the Pfister, and began to pack our bags.

  On December 15—­a Wednesday—­Dean and I sat in our kitchen, finishing up a late-­night dinner after tucking the kids into bed. I wore the white Vera Wang nightshirt my mother had given me for Augie’s birth. I’d worn it nonstop in the months since his arrival, but the shirt had held up well. It was my favorite nightgown, and I stroked it contentedly as I sat with my arms crossed, talking with Dean about what we should buy the boys for Christmas.

  We were just preparing to make our way to the bedroom when Dean’s cell phone rang. I looked at the clock. It was eleven P.M.

  “Should I answer it?” he asked.

  “It’s a 920 area code,” I said, confused. “That’s Beaver Dam.”

  My heart leaped into my throat, and I grabbed the phone from him.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Dean?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.

  “No—­it’s his wife, Mary.”

  “Is this Mary Pflum?” asked the voice.

  “Yes,” I said hesitantly.<
br />
  “I’m calling from Beaver Dam Community Hospital. Your mother, Anne, was admitted earlier today—­and I’m calling because she recently flatlined.”

  “She what?” I asked, my voice shaking.

  “I’m afraid your mother expired.”

  I pitched forward in that Vera Wang nightshirt—­that snow-­white perfection of a nightgown—­and struggled to breathe. My mother—­my touchstone—­was gone. And I hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye. Worse, she’d died before I could save her.

  Chapter 12

  A New Beginning

  May 2012

  I stood in the living room of our Upper West Side apartment, my heart racing. We were late. Or about to be. And there was so much to do. I had to find Roman’s shoes. They were lost. Under a dresser somewhere. Or maybe he’d left them in the laundry room again?

  We had to pick up the cake from the bakery. We’d ordered it just that morning. Fingers crossed that it would be ready for the three o’clock pickup we’d requested and that they’d spelled the name right. I cringed, remembering how a different bakery had misspelled Augie’s name on his big day—­and had declared, “Congratulations Angie!”

  And then there was the church. We had to get there. In just thirty minutes. Our guests would be waiting for us.

  But before any church or any cake, there were more important matters to attend to: the dress. I had to get her dressed.

  I’d already slipped into my white dress—­well, my off-­white dress. I’d scored the short-­sleeved eyelet number at the Nanette Lapore sample sale last week. The baby wasn’t even sitting up and already she was hitting New York City sample sales with me. She’d watched from her position in her Baby Bjorn carrier as I picked through hanger upon hanger on the jam-­packed clothing racks. I’d almost settled on a red dress when I found the ivory dress. It had me at hello. Its short sleeves had delicate little bows and its cloth-­covered belt showed off my slowly-­but-­surely-­getting-­back-­to-­normal figure. And its color was just right. But better than any white dress I would wear today would be what I had in store for Piper.