White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  I nodded, taking my father’s hand in mine and looking at Piper reassuringly. My father was right. It was going to be all right. Piper’s eyes studied mine, drank me in. Then she sighed and smiled and did that little kick with her feet that infants tend to do when all is right with the world.

  I heard my boys laughing in their bedroom as they played with the new cars Opa had brought them from Florida. I heard Dean’s key turning in the lock as he returned from his run to the corner deli to buy flowers for the house. He was humming the tune he always hummed when he was in a good mood. And I realized in that instant that all that I had—­all the amazing love and stability enveloping me in my New York City apartment—­was something that had long eluded my mother. Anne Diener Pflum had worked tirelessly to give me all of those things that she’d been denied in childhood, in the convent, in marriage, in that house. In me, in Piper, she had at last fulfilled her greatest dream. I had lived to realize the “happily ever after” in which she had believed, for which she had long prayed.

  Taking a deep breath, I felt my mother standing beside me for the first time since her death, her arms tightening around me, her laugh filling the air.

  “You’re a good mother, Mary,” my father said, touching a finger to Piper, whose eyes remained fixed upon me. “You know that?”

  “I know,” I said, smiling now. “I learned from the very best.”

  Afterword

  June 2014

  Three years after the death of my mother, I am still trying to make sense of the twists and turns of her life.

  Time has healed some wounds. But scars—­and questions—­remain.

  The process of cleaning out the house in Beaver Dam only recently concluded. For the first six months after my mother died, my brother volunteered to lead the efforts.

  “I need a place to stay,” he told me with a resigned shrug. He had yet to land another job, and in the wake of his divorce, he needed something to focus upon.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “We can hire someone.”

  “Mary, I’m sure,” he said.

  Armed with hundreds of Hefty garbage bags and rubber gloves, he dove into the house, making the basement and main floor his top priorities.

  Some of the cleanup wasn’t so bad, he told me. But some of it gave him nightmares.

  “Mary, it’s bad,” he told me on the phone one night. “I don’t care about the live mice. I can take care of those. It’s the dead stuff that’s gross. Yesterday I found what was left of a bat.”

  “God, Anthony,” I said, taking a seat, “why do you think she wouldn’t let us get her out of there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she somehow felt safe in the middle of all of that crap.”

  My brother deemed most of the furnishings and onetime keepsakes of the house—­the books, the clothes, the dishes, the toys, the lamps—­beyond the point of repair. Heartbreakingly, my mother’s treasured classics that had sustained her during some of the loneliest hours of her childhood—­the first-­edition volumes of The Wizard of Oz, the beloved Little Women and Little Men and the Bobbsey Twins—­were among the carnage, consumed by ravenous mice.

  But hidden in and around the trash were treasures. Photos. Scrapbooks. Letters.

  “Who was Father Vincent?” my brother called to ask me one day.

  “Mom loved him,” I said. “She used to pray with his crucifix. Why?”

  “He must have had some power over her because the only thing that Mom seemed to bother to keep organized are letters from him.”

  Anthony went on to describe the collection of dozens and dozens of handwritten letters that he’d unearthed. They’d been placed neatly in an upright position in a box, sorted carefully according to date.

  “Everything else in the house is total chaos and she’s got a Dewey decimal system going for this guy’s letters,” my brother said incredulously. “It’s like those things were the only things that mattered.”

  I nodded. “I’m guessing that to her they did.”

  “You want them?” Anthony asked.

  “Absolutely!”

  When I received the letters, I was stunned. Though yellowed, they were just as my brother had described them: in pristine condition, devoid of mouse droppings or that awful smell that filled the rest of the house. The notes—­some written by Father Vincent during his time at Oldenburg, others penned by him during his time in New York—­chronicled my mother’s final months as a nun and her first painful years out of the convent. All were windows into his deep affection for my mother, whom he alternately referred to as Anne and Annie. Never as Sister.

  One of the letters was set aside. It appeared to be the most well worn, and presumably most often read. It was the letter in which Father Vincent asked my mother to rethink her decision to marry my father.

  I’m not sure when my mother last saw Father Vincent. Was he one of the reasons she always liked to return to Indiana? Did she pay visits to him after the divorce? I’m not certain. What is certain is that he was on her mind right up until the end of her life.

  When my brother was badly burned in a brush fire behind my mother’s house in the summer of 2011 and rushed by MedFlight to the burn unit at University Hospital in Madison, I made a hurried trip home to Wisconsin.

  “I’m sorry about the house,” he said from his hospital bed. His legs were covered in second-­ and third-­degree burns he had sustained.

  “Forget about the house,” I said, sitting beside him. “Let’s torch the house. Let’s firebomb the thing.”

  “You don’t mean that,” he said.

  The thing is, I sort of did.

  After all the pain and suffering the house had caused first my mother and now my brother, I would have loved to call in a wrecking ball and a crew of bulldozers to raze the house to the ground. But that, I knew, would have broken my mother’s heart.

  In the end, while my brother recovered from his injuries, I hired a pair of professionals to finish the job. Our mission: to sufficiently clean up the house so that it could be sold to a new family. It was a daunting task.

  The remains of the house were something of a time capsule. As we sifted to the bottoms of the mountains of stuff, the years peeled away. On the tops of the piles were things my mother had purchased and periodicals she’d read toward the end of her life in 2009 and 2010. Mixed in with the newspapers were legal pads filled with to-­do lists, half-­written letters, poems, even prayers she’d penned in her familiar scrawl. Below that top layer of the piles came newspapers and receipts and mail from 2008, 2007, 2006, and earlier. At the bottom of the stacks were newspapers that dated back to the mid-­ to late 1990s, around the time when my brother and I had left the house and my mother’s parents moved into the assisted-­living facility. No one will ever know for certain what triggered my mother’s hoarding. What is certain is that once it got under way, it took on the force of a mighty river, consuming everything in its path.

  The cleanup took months. By day, I continued to piece together stories for Good Morning America about presidential elections, live weddings, extreme makeovers. By night, I bathed and fed and read to the kids. And during every moment I could find in between—­late at night and early in the morning and over lunch hours and traveling to and from shoots—­I worked the phones, checking in with cleaning crews, ordering the delivery of Dumpsters, calling local hardware stores in search of items for the house: faucets, window treatments, toilets, bathtubs. Eventually, a new house took shape, replete with new floors, new kitchen appliances, new paint.

  In the end, we managed to sell my mother’s house—­and the newly restored yard—­in April 2013. The buyers were a young ­couple who hailed from large families and were anxious to start a family of their own. In the house, they said, they saw “lots of possibilities.” My mother would have been thrilled.

  Dean and I flew out from New York for the
closing, along with Piper. It was a beautiful day, the kind my mother would have loved. After a long winter, temperatures had climbed up into the sixties, the sun shone, and in the front yard, the pointy green spikes of tulip plants poked through the earth, preparing for the sorts of blooms that had graced the yard on the morning of my First Communion.

  Walking through the house for a final time, I was overcome with a sadness for what might have been—­what should have been—­for my mother. Now, in its refurbished state, there were no stacks of newspapers, no horrific smells. Instead, there were gleaming floors, new appliances, and a feeling of airiness. This is how she should have lived, if only she’d allowed us to help.

  The investigation Dean and my brother and I launched into the cause of my mother’s death was ultimately deemed inconclusive. And though we received tips from hospital staffers on duty the night of her death, indicating my mother was not cared for properly, the malpractice attorney we consulted advised us against going further.

  “The state of Wisconsin deems senior citizens completely worthless,” he told us after reviewing my mother’s case for months. “Even with a compelling case, they’ve put a cap on how much money any older person’s life is worth. New laws mean you’re looking at a maximum thirty-­thousand-­dollar payout even if a judge and jury think your mother died because of bad care. You’ll spend three or four times that much getting the case ready for trial. At least.”

  He was disgusted, he told us, by the anti-­senior laws. So were we.

  Our focus shifted from getting even to remembering and honoring my mother.

  To that end, we speak of her often, visit her grave in Dunkirk, include her in our nightly prayers.

  My father has mourned her loss mightily.

  “She was special,” my father says often. “So very special.”

  Still, he’s moved on. Last fall, he flew to New York to legally marry his partner, Javier, a Latino bank teller he met at one of his favorite bars in Florida. Javier was with him the night I called to tell my father that my mother was dead. Dean and I agreed to serve as witnesses for the weekday-afternoon ceremony at city hall, then later took my father and his new husband to Little Italy for a post-­wedding dinner.

  The most heartbreaking part of losing my mother so suddenly—­and so soon—­is knowing my children will never know firsthand the wonder that was their grandmother. They’ll never listen to her quote from Shakespeare or “The Hound of Heaven.” They’ll never see her wonder at the sun setting over a lake or at the first star in the night sky or at a great big pile of colorful autumn leaves, her observations one part wise and one part childlike. They’ll never watch her grow excited at the sight of crop dusters tipping their wings over fields of peas, flocks of geese flying south in the fall, tiny buds bursting into enormous peony blooms in the spring. Perhaps hardest for me, they’ll never get to see her so heartily and enthusiastically lead by example a life of unwavering faith.

  My mother liked to marvel at miracles, look for them in her everyday life, but she failed to realize she was a miracle in her own right. Time and again in her life, she managed to believe in God, in a Holy Spirit, in a divine truth, when there was no seeming physical or rational reason for doing so. In her darkest hours, over and over, she forgave those who hurt her most. And she loved. Not just a little bit. But a lot. With all that she had within her. And not just for part of her life, during those few-­and-­far-­between times when things were going well. She loved mightily throughout all of her life, especially when things were at their worst. That’s when she hugged hardest. And longest.

  The church that had beaten her down to the depths of her despair in Oldenburg somehow, inexplicably, remained a sanctuary for her. Through loneliness and medical maladies, through a devastating marriage, through the stench of a decaying home, it was what she clung to, her chosen shelter in the storm of life.

  Some might call that level of faith blind and ignorant. And in the wake of recent church scandals, many have. But here’s the thing: my mother was okay with that. She liked to look beyond what man had made wrong with the church to what she believed pure and unadulterated faith could make right.

  Once in my senior year of high school, when I didn’t want to attend an early-­morning Mass with her, I snarled, in typical teenager style, “What’s your deal? Why do you love a church so much that doesn’t love anyone? It rejected you when you left Oldenburg. It rejected you when Dad divorced you. How can you still love it so much?”

  My mother stood at the foot of my bed and thought long and hard. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I guess for me, how can I not? At the end of the day, the church I see isn’t about cold ­people making mean rules and bad decisions. For me, it’s about the other stuff. The good stuff.”

  In piecing together the story of my mother’s life, cleaning out the last of that house, it occurred to me that I had never been to Oldenburg, where she’d prayed so hard and where she’d been so hurt. So one recent June morning, during a visit to relatives in Indiana, I loaded the kids into the car and took the twisting road to the little town in southeastern Indiana where she’d pledged her life to the church.

  Magnificent steeples still define the town. Now, in addition to fields and orchards, the community is surrounded by little coffee shops and cafés. In the center of it all stands the convent—­still made up of a series of imposing buildings—­surrounded by neatly manicured lawns.

  The sister who answered the door when I rang the bell sported short gray hair and a stern expression upon her face. She smiled at Piper, situated in my arms, and frowned at the squirming boys, who sat arguing at my feet. There was no habit in sight. The nun before me wore civilian clothes—­a sleeveless shirt and cotton slacks—­that she’d paired with a cross that hung around her neck. The enormous habits of my mother’s generation had been retired, slowly but surely, after Vatican II.

  “Who are you here to see?” she asked, looking me up and down.

  “I’m here to learn more about my mother,” I said, straining to make my voice heard over the boys and their screams. My two-­year-­old and three-­year-­old both wanted the same Hot Wheels car. “She used to live here,” I explained.

  “What was her name?” asked the sister suspiciously, fingering the cross that hung around her neck.

  “Anne Diener,” I said, stumbling as Augie attempted to pull me down to my knees so that I could help stop the fight.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” said the sister, narrowing her eyes. She glared at Augie and began to close the door. “You’ll have to call back. Tours must be scheduled at least a week in advance.”

  “Sister Aurelia Mary!” I cried, reciting the name my mother had adopted as a nun. “Her name when she lived here was Sister Aurelia Mary.”

  The sister stopped abruptly.

  “Sister Aurelia Mary? What year was she?”

  “Late fifties?”

  “I knew your mother,” she said, nodding. “She was smart. Extremely smart.”

  She looked intently at me, then at the children, and after hesitating for a moment, motioned us inside.

  For the next hour, the sister showed me around Oldenburg’s Mother House, the chapel, the dining room, through all the places where my mother lived and worked—­and suffered. I marveled at the floors on which we walked. Beautiful marble, they gleamed in the sunlight that shone through the enormous windows. I wondered if they gleamed as a result of women like my mother who had knelt to meticulously clean them for hours and days on end.

  The chapel appeared untouched, a magnificent shrine of white, defined by its massive altar and equally massive pipe organ.

  So this, I thought, looking at the pews and old kneelers, is where my mother prayed mightily for a sign from Mary, Mother of God. This is where she thought she’d been told by heaven to leave, and to go out into the real world to have a daughter.

  On a pair
of walls leading up to the convent’s dining room, there were portraits, some of Mary, some of Christ, and many of unsmiling nuns. The nuns in the photos wore the sorts of habits my mother had worn: large, severe veils and yokes that appeared to swallow them whole. I studied the faces. The eyes that peeked out from all of that fabric appeared, more often than not, cold and unhappy.

  “Those are the Mother Superiors,” my guide explained.

  Some wore glasses. All looked stern. Which of these women, I wondered, told my mother to simply pray away her illnesses? Which one ordered my mother to wear those rags for her shameful exit? Which ones on this wall had behaved cruelly in the name of God?

  I knew my mother would forgive them. That was her way. But knowing how Oldenburg had scarred her—­knowing how the years of youth she’d lost here had haunted her—­I wasn’t so sure if I could do the same. They’d crushed her. They’d put her in a place so dark, so low, that she never fully recovered.

  Beneath the photos of women on that wall of nuns hung a photo that made me smile. It was a photo of a man. A priest. He sported dark hair, a kind smile, and twinkling eyes that reminded me a little bit of Bing Crosby in his turn as a priest in Going My Way.

  “Who’s that?” I asked the nun, squatting with Piper to inspect the face more closely.

  “You wouldn’t know him,” said the nun curtly. “He’s long gone. That’s Father Vincent.”

  Of course it was, I thought. I laughed aloud.

  “What’s so funny?” the sister asked.

  “He was a good friend to my mother,” I said.

  My mother had described at length Father Vincent’s kindness. His dark eyes. His great big hugs. She had failed to tell me he was handsome. His was the one smile on a wall of frowns, the only one who looked like he might have been having a good time. Of course my mother had sought him out.

  At the close of the tour, I sat at a round table in the convent’s dining hall, a glass of lemonade the sisters had offered me in my hand and Piper on my lap. The sister who had been guiding the tour had disappeared for a moment and now reappeared, a small, fat book clutched in her hands. Taking a seat opposite from me, she pushed the book across the table.