White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  The work was hard, the hours long. There was no air-­conditioning in the factory, and the breaks were brief. Making matters worse, the work was painful. “My fingers would bleed and bleed,” she later told me, wincing as she recalled the deep paper cuts.

  “Couldn’t you have done a different job?” I asked. Her father did, after all, run the factory.

  My mother smiled, shaking her head. “No. Daddy wanted me in that position. He wanted to make clear to everyone else who’d been working there for years that his daughter would get no special treatment. And I wanted to prove to him that I could do it.”

  Her favorite moments came when her father made his way through the factory floor to inspect his troops each day. “When he made his rounds, the whole factory would work harder and begin to whisper, ‘Diener’s coming! Diener’s coming!’ I was so proud. They were talking about my father.”

  While Al became focused upon expanding his role in the factory, Aurelia remained focused during my mother’s high school years upon expanding her role, and visibility, in the larger Dunkirk community.

  By the time Anne entered high school, Aurelia had founded a community research club in which the women of Dunkirk came together on weekday afternoons to discuss books and research timely topics. She’d also developed a reputation for being charitable to the poor. She was known by area hobos as the go-­to woman in town, willing to provide spare bread and leftover food when they stopped by the house. Aurelia even started a Nature Club aimed at conservation, a precursor to today’s environmental movement.

  But the compassion Aurelia displayed toward outsiders and global causes often failed to make its way to her own children, with whom she was often short-­tempered. Part of this, my mother believed, stemmed from Aurelia’s ongoing cycles of pregnancies and subsequent miscarriages.

  When Aurelia became pregnant for the twelfth time and made it successfully to the third trimester, there was quiet cause for celebration. It was my mother’s sophomore year of high school. The pregnancy had been a difficult one for Aurelia. The doctor, conscious of her previous miscarriages, confined her to bed rest for the bulk of the pregnancy.

  As her due date approached, the doctors announced that they thought it best for Aurelia to undergo a cesarean section. Together with Al, they picked a date that seemed suitable, at what doctors then thought was at or around the thirty-­eight-­week mark in the pregnancy.

  But the doctors miscalculated. Aurelia was not at the thirty-­eight-­week mark when the C-­section was performed. Almost as soon as they made the incision, the medical team realized they had made a grave error. The baby boy was premature, his lungs not yet fully developed. He was blue and eerily silent upon delivery. For two days, he managed to cling to life, but by the third, Kevin Walter was gone.

  Aurelia’s previous miscarriages had come and gone with no discussion and few tears. But this one was different. Kevin was a fully formed baby boy. He had arrived with an adorable nub of a nose, a perfectly round head, porcelain skin. My mother and her siblings had visited him in the hospital, said prayers for him. This time, the loss could not be ignored. My mother sobbed, as did her siblings. A full Catholic funeral Mass was held and a tombstone erected.

  For the first time, my mother saw the frailty of her mother in full. “Mother was inconsolable,” she later told me. “I heard her tell Daddy, ‘I so wanted this baby!’ ”

  Al responded by breaking down in tears alongside his wife.

  A pall fell over the house. The loss was not discussed. But the grief could not be ignored.

  “It was so unbearably sad,” my mother would later say. For the rest of her life, she was haunted by Kevin’s passing, speaking of him any time she learned of the loss of an infant among friends and neighbors. “He was so very perfect. I wonder so often what he would have been like had he had the opportunity to live.”

  More than a year passed before Aurelia became pregnant again. And when the happy discovery was made, she was again confined to bed rest. This time, she was even more serious about following doctor’s orders. My grandfather did his part, going to Mass daily to pray for his unborn child, escorting the priest back to the house to deliver Communion to Aurelia.

  My mother and her siblings tiptoed around the house, afraid that any noises or disruptions could cost their mother yet another pregnancy. And when word came that this was to be another C-section delivery, together, as a family unit, they worked with the medical team to determine the baby’s birthday.

  “We picked February twelfth,” my mother would later tell me, “because it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. We reasoned nothing tragic would happen on Lincoln’s birthday.”

  As it turns out, they were right. On February 12, 1953, Michael Francis Diener was delivered by cesarean section. He entered the world with red-­brown hair, a strong pair of lungs, and a ready-­made place in the Diener house as an answer to a family’s prayers.

  The entire Diener family rejoiced. My grandfather jumped for joy and wept before heading to church to light candles with which to give thanks to his Lord. And Aurelia breathed a huge sigh of relief. After all of those miscarriages, at last she’d managed to again deliver a healthy baby. For weeks, my grandfather forced the entire family to don surgical masks, so afraid was he that they would once again lose a baby. But beneath the masks, the family—­especially my mother—­sported broad grins.

  For Anne, Mike’s birth was a source of tremendous pride and joy.

  “He was the baby all of us had dreamed of,” she explained. “He wasn’t just Mother and Daddy’s baby. He was all of ours.”

  Seventeen years older than Mike, Anne was old enough to be his mother. And many times, she and her sisters tended to Mike as if he were their own child. They changed his diapers, fought over who got to hold him, warmed his bottles, bundled and swaddled him.

  The good news of Mike’s arrival coincided with the joyful end of my mother’s senior year of high school. On the heels of Girls Nation and becoming a big sister again, she was filled with joy. She organized unescorted trips with her girlfriends to Indianapolis to see hit musicals, including South Pacific. Later, she helped coordinate a class trip to New York City. “It was magical,” she would later tell me of her first time in the Big Apple, her eyes glistening. “We were all from little tiny Dunkirk, and all of a sudden, we were staying at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City.”

  Among her activities: a trip to see The King and I and a trek to see the then brand-­new United Nations. “I couldn’t get over it,” she told me decades later, visiting the city when I was a college student. “World War Two was so big, so horrible. And here was this gleaming new building that looked like something from the future. White and modern and designed to prevent any more wars.”

  The travels did much to bolster my mother’s confidence as she prepared for commencement.

  “It was such a special time,” she would later reflect. “It was such a neat class.” She was happy for her girlfriends who were engaged to be married, encouraging of those classmates who would soon go to work full-­time in her father’s factory.

  Filled with hope, Anne left the Pine Patch in the summer of 1953 for Ball State University. And when she arrived on campus, she hit the ground running. Rooming with three other girls in a cramped dorm room, she made friends quickly and threw herself into campus life, including its Greek system. She also remained true to her Catholic roots, attending Mass regularly and becoming actively involved in Ball State’s Newman Club, an organization devoted to young Catholics.

  It was in the Newman Club that she was introduced to a handsome underclassman named Bob Mings, a blond-­haired, blue-­eyed fellow Hoosier. Few on campus actually called him Bob. Instead, he was famously referred to by his fraternity nickname: Bongo. Like my mother, Bongo was intellectually curious and active in the Greek system. Also like my mother, he was a devoted Catholic. Soon, the two were inseparable, my mother
attending a host of dances on his arm. There are scores of photos of the two of them together. In some, they’re dressed in formal attire, she in a white evening gown, he in a white dinner jacket. In all the photos, my mother appears luminous: her face glows, her hair—pulled back—shines. Her smile is big and broad, her laughter leaps through the lens.

  “Bongo was dreamy,” my mother would often reflect over the years when talk would turn to college life. “And kind.”

  Among my mother’s favorite tales, one that she would regale me with for decades was of the time after a college formal when she and Bongo piled into his old convertible, which he’d nicknamed The Rivet, and took a drive. My mother loved the car and even wrote Bongo an illustrated poem about it.

  It gave her a sense of freedom, of importance, of magic, she would later tell me, to ride in that car with the top down alongside a dashing suitor. During her high school years, she’d been on the outside looking in when she’d seen the girls in Dunkirk squired about on dates in convertibles. Now it was her turn.

  “Bongo drove that Rivet into a dark alley that night after the dance and then”—­my mother paused, sighing at the memory—­“he saw them: roses. On a trellis. Someone in Muncie had planted them, cared for them, clearly worked on them. Bongo got out of The Rivet and climbed—­climbed!!—­that trellis.”

  At this, she would stop and sigh again.

  “And then he plucked by hand, rose by rose, a beautiful bouquet for me. Just for me. Thorns and all.”

  Bongo was soon invited by my mother to the Pine Patch. He met her brothers and sisters, took part in family dinners, spent entire weekends with the family. They seemed the perfect match, my mother’s siblings tell me. Anne and Bongo were bright and witty, young and fit and attractive. And, it seemed, they brought out the best in each other.

  “He made me laugh,” my mother told me.

  “She made me a kinder person,” Bongo later told me, referring to my mother and her do-­gooder ways as his own personal moral compass. “She was so good about keeping me in line. If I wasn’t kind enough, patient enough, or was being sort of a jerk, she let me know I could do better. And she was right about those things. Without fail, Anne was a truly good person and knew how to encourage me to be the same.”

  Among those praying for an Anne-­Bongo marriage was Aurelia. Life was humming along back at the Pine Patch, now more smoothly than ever. With my mother at Ball State and Mimi in the convent, there were only four children at home. And with Patty preparing to head to college, soon there would be only three. Al was doing well at Armstrong Glass. There was financial light at the end of the tunnel, especially if Anne wed. Soon, part of Al’s paycheck might reach a savings account, maybe even a stock portfolio.

  Anne wasn’t sure what to think. She knew her feelings for Bongo were stronger than his for her. But as young woman after young woman in her sorority was “pinned” by a fraternity man—­essentially engaged to be engaged—­she couldn’t help but wonder if her time might be coming, too. She wrote Bongo notes when they weren’t together, leaving them for him on the windshield of The Rivet. The notes were eager, enthusiastic, and clearly penned by a young woman with a serious crush. They asked about his day, invited him to Patty’s high school graduation, told him how her baby brother Mike—­whom Bongo had met during visits home to the Pine Patch—­was growing.

  In the spring of 1956, Bongo dropped a bombshell on my mother: “I’m leaving Ball State,” he told her. “I’m transferring to Indiana University.”

  Bongo had decided to study geography—­and not only a little bit of geography, but geography at the PhD level. Ball State didn’t have the sort of program that he needed for what he wanted to do. He’d be leaving Muncie for Bloomington in the fall, he told her.

  The news was devastating on more than one level for my mother. Not only was Bongo leaving Ball State, he was also leaving behind whatever there was of a relationship with her.

  The news drove my mother into the first major depression of her life. The summer after Bongo announced his plans to leave Ball State, my mother stopped eating. Her clothes began to hang on her. Her hair fell out in clumps. Circles formed beneath her eyes. She alternately slept, then cried, for hours before experiencing periods of insomnia that lasted up to two days at a time. Bongo, who would later explain he’d always viewed my mother not as a girlfriend, but instead as a “very good, dear friend” with whom he liked to go to dances, knew nothing of my mother’s deeper feelings for him, nor of the depression she fell into.

  “When I left, I thought I was just saying goodbye to a dear friend with whom I’d stay in touch,” he later explained to me.

  Back in her childhood bedroom in Dunkirk, my mother lay in bed, the blanket pulled to her chin, rereading the class motto written upon her high school yearbook: “Forward forever, backward never. Within ourselves our future lies.” Facing a life without Bongo, my mother saw for herself no future and utter darkness where there had been light.

  Chapter 4

  Bride of Christ

  August 12, 1958

  Mirrors were frowned upon at Oldenburg, as they were at most convents, so Anne couldn’t be sure how she looked. But from what she saw of what she wore—­the white cotton wedding gown that puffed slightly at the sleeves and cinched at the waist and fell into a full skirt—­she knew she looked pretty. A white lace veil was attached to the back of her nearly shoulder-­length hair with a pair of hairpins the sisters had helped her with. It fell past her elbows, just the way it had for Aunt Mary Jane when she married Uncle Bob and for Grace Kelly when she married Prince Rainier.

  So this is what it felt like to be a bride. A bride of Christ, that is.

  It still felt surreal. Had it really been less than five years ago that she’d been at Ball State, living in a dorm, going to fraternity dances, driving in The Rivet with Bongo? How drastically her life had changed.

  Back at Ball State, her biggest challenge was carrying those loads of books from the bookstore back to the dorm, studying for an exam, finding the right dress to wear to a dance with Bongo. Her Bongo. Now her challenges were many: identifying God’s will, doing God’s will, and, above all, obeying and pleasing the other sisters. There were so many of them to please.

  In a few minutes, she’d enter the chapel, march down the aisle, take her place at the altar, become an official nun. She’d been preparing for this moment since she’d arrived at Oldenburg last year. And she’d been thinking about it, toying with the idea, longer—­even before Mimi became a nun. She’d always wanted to become one with her Lord. And now she really would be. And Daddy would be there, front and center, to watch.

  He’d nearly cried when she told him that she wanted to be a sister. She thought he’d be so proud, so impressed, so in awe. But instead of pride, there seemed to be something else in his eyes when she’d sprung the news. Surprise? Hesitation? She thought he’d be ecstatic. Wasn’t this what he’d always wanted?

  Trudy and Dad Diener and Grandma and Grandpa Arvin had been against the idea. Anne only knew of some of the squabbles, questioning why their Annie, their bright shining star, was signing herself up for a life of solitude and childlessness at such a young age, at a time when she seemed on the verge of accomplishing so much. She’d been to meet the president! they’d argued. “Tell her she’s making a rash decision that can’t be undone!” they’d begged.

  But Al and Aurelia were resolute. They’d been twice blessed, they told their parents. First Mimi and now Anne had been called to become official members of the church. They’d done their jobs well. In the eyes of the truly devout, they were parents to look up to. Their daughters wished to devote their lives to Christ.

  Anne had prayed mightily to the Blessed Virgin prior to announcing her decision. The prayers had been long, often filled with tears. She’d had no vision, not the way she’d hoped. But at the end of the day, she’d decided it was the right thing to do. M
ore right, certainly, than graduating from college with no boyfriend and no clear idea as to where she was headed.

  No, at Oldenburg, she hoped to feel again the way she’d felt at her happiest at Ball State, before that awful summer after Bongo had left, before those strange two years at Marian College. Mother and Daddy thought she’d find herself if she transferred to Marian. It was a Catholic college. It was in Indianapolis. And at Marian, she wouldn’t be surrounded by memories of Bongo. But Marian had made her lonelier, more confused. The only thing that didn’t confuse her was her desperation to please her family, to become one with God. So here she was.

  Outside the neat brick building that served as the Novice House, the dorm in which the nuns-­in-­training lived, the sun shone brightly, and Anne heard birds singing in the enormous sycamore trees. It was a beautiful day in Indiana. Her family must be here by now, gathering in the chapel: Mother and Daddy and little Mike. And Aunt Mary Jane and Uncle Bob and her cousin Bobby and all the grandparents. It was the first time they’d all been together since her college graduation. They’d come to watch her get married to Christ. Afterward, they’d all pose for photos and celebrate with cake and punch.

  Surely the gorgeous weather was some kind of sign for her and her fellow nuns-­in-­training—­her eight classmates—­who were also to become brides of Christ today. Surely it meant God in his heaven was smiling at her decision.

  All brides, Anne remembered reading, had moments of doubt on their wedding days. If that was true, she thought, adjusting her lace veil once more and letting out a long sigh, today she was a very normal bride.

  I did not discover my mother had been a nun until I was nine years old. And even then, it was an accidental discovery. It was a cold gray Sunday in November, and my best friend, Kim Swanberg, and I, unable to go outside to play, declared for all the world to hear that we were bored. So bored that we decided to spend the afternoon going through a paper bag filled with old photos we’d found in the back of the guest room closet in my house. Sitting cross-­legged atop the bed, we examined the pictures closely. There were several of my mother with her brothers and sisters in their early years in Indiana. There was a picture of my teenaged mother standing in the Rose Garden of the White House, posing beside President Truman. And then, sandwiched between some old photos of my parents on their wedding day and of me the day I was baptized, we found them: a curious collection of old black-­and-­white photos of my grandparents standing on either side of a young woman in a nun’s habit.