White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “What’s that?” Kim, who was raised Lutheran, asked, bending to look more closely at the nun swimming in the enormous black-­and-­white garment.

  I tried to explain to her what a habit was, but that’s not what she meant.

  “No—­who’s that?” she demanded.

  I remember staring at the photo. The face that stared back at me was strangely familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

  Kim studied the photo and posited a theory. “I think it’s your mother.”

  My mother—­the nun? It couldn’t be.

  Or could it?

  I took the photo to my mother, who was down in the kitchen that Sunday night, preparing dinner for my brother and me. She was visibly shaken, I realize now, as she stopped stirring the boiling pot of macaroni and turned her attention from the stove to the picture I clutched in my hand. Pale and flustered, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. I guess, in a way, she had. She stared at the photo. After a beat that lasted close to a minute, she spoke.

  “Yes,” she said sadly, awkwardly. “That nun in the picture was me.”

  Entering a convent is by no means a small transaction. From the moment Anne Diener passed through the doors of Oldenburg in August 1957—­a full year before she would don that wedding dress and say her vows—­her life was turned upside down. For much of the nation, the 1950s were a time of great consumption: shiny new cars, state-­of-­the-­art appliances, sleek clothing. But for Anne Diener, the era was all about the shunning of material things.

  The vow of poverty my mother took as a nun meant that she was no longer entitled to anything of consequence: no clothing, no makeup, no personal clothing or record albums. Within weeks of her making the decision to become a nun, the few things she had cherished as a child—­her books, her journals, her clothing, her rec­ords, her beloved movie magazines, even yummy taffeta dresses she had worn to the sorority balls—­were given away by her parents at the instruction of the sisters. Her identity went with the possessions. Upon entering the convent at Oldenburg, she was no longer Anne Diener. As was the case with her sister Mimi, she was given a new name: Sister Aurelia Mary. Now she bore the name of the mother she’d tried so desperately for all of these years to know. The name had been the convent’s choice, not hers. And my mother’s vow of obedience meant she had no choice other than to accept it.

  My mother’s decision to enter the convent perplexed virtually all who knew her. Her grandparents cried. Her aunt Mary Jane openly questioned her about her choice. Even Bongo was stunned by the announcement.

  “She wrote me a letter one day and said, ‘I have news,’ ” he recalled of the letter she sent him after his transfer to Indiana University. “She said she was going to enter the convent. In all the time that I’d known her, there’d been no signs she was leaning in that direction. It was very out of the blue.”

  Her sister Mimi, who by this time had been in the convent for eight years, was similarly shocked.

  “Did you see it coming?” I asked.

  “Hardly.” My aunt laughed. “She called one day and asked me if I thought it was ‘all right’ in the convent. And when I told her it was fine, she told me she had decided to enter the convent, too. I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say.”

  Anne reached the decision during her time at Marian, the Catholic, mostly women’s college she’d transferred to after Bongo left Ball State. The transfer to Marian had been Al and Aurelia’s idea. After my mother’s summer of insomnia and weight loss and fits of sobbing in 1955, they reasoned she needed a change of scenery.

  But Marian didn’t eliminate Anne’s depression. If anything, the new environment—­more rigid, less lively than Ball State—­exacerbated the situation. While there are hundreds of photos to be found of my mother’s days at Ball State, as well as scores of souvenirs, ranging from pennants and yearbooks to corsages pressed into books between layers of wax paper, there are virtually no artifacts that remain linking her to Marian. Certainly no happy ones. The pictures that do exist show her with a furrowed brow, shorter hair, and an increasingly gaunt, almost skeletal, figure.

  Marian in the 1950s was primarily for serious young Catholic women, a few of whom decided to enter the convent each year. My mother, depressed and directionless, was influenced by the not-­so-­subtle pressure to consider a life of prayer. As a nun, her education could be put to good use, she was told. And as a nun, she could travel the nation—­even the world—­tending to the poor, doing the work of the martyrs and saints she had spent a lifetime reading about. At a time in which her world felt hopelessly unstable, the absoluteness of a life of prayer made sense. More sense, anyway, than any of her other options. If Bongo wouldn’t have Anne, maybe God would. And unlike Bongo, God wouldn’t transfer to another school, leaving her behind. If anything, God would bring her closer than ever to the parental love that had always eluded her. It seemed, particularly in Anne’s depressed state, a logical and noble move.

  The convent my mother chose to enter in Oldenburg, Indiana, was founded and presided over by the Sisters of St. Francis, an order long associated with the education of children. It had long been populated by a number of Marian graduates. Situated in a picturesque valley amidst rolling hills dotted with apple orchards and horse farms in southeastern Indiana, the convent—­even now—­is the kind of place that time seems to have forgotten. Street signs remain labeled in German, the native language of the town’s founders. And the only real distinguishing features of the burg remain the spires of the convent’s chapel and its accompanying Catholic school.

  It made sense in so many ways for Anne to gravitate to Oldenburg. It was relatively close to Dunkirk—­just over an hour’s drive—­and its legacy of educating was in keeping with her own love of learning. Above all, the order was consistent with my mother’s goal of helping others. Members of the order branched out from the Mother House to far-­flung areas of the world, ranging from inner-­city New York to South America. They were educated women helping to educate the young, feed the poor. What, wondered my mother, wasn’t admirable about that?

  For the new sisters, the schedules were grueling. Days began at five A.M. First came morning meditation, then morning prayer and morning Mass. All of this came before any food was ingested. Following breakfast with the other nuns in the dining hall, there were chores and work. In my mother’s case, that meant a day of teaching at the academy. At noon, there were more prayers. And in the evening, more prayers, more Mass. Then came dinner. Following dinner, there was an hour of recreation, then an hour of study and preparation for the following day. At nine P.M., it was lights-­out. Talking after hours was strictly forbidden.

  The nuns with whom my mother cohabitated were to become her new family, her whole world. The convent sought to cement this notion by keeping a novice nun’s contact with family and friends from her former life to a bare minimum. In Anne’s first years at Oldenburg, no home visits were allowed, and visits from family and friends were limited to a few hours on weekends. Contact with family members was maintained largely through letters. But even the letters were closely monitored. It was not uncommon to have packages that were deemed inappropriate seized, and letters read, shared, and even destroyed prior to reaching the intended recipient. My mother was not aware of this practice and was caught off guard when her Mother Superior summoned her to her office one day.

  “Sister Aurelia Mary, there is something I have been meaning to ask you,” said the Mother Superior sternly. “Who’s Bongo?”

  My mother’s jaw dropped open. She looked at her leader, stunned. She hadn’t uttered Bongo’s name to anyone at the convent, had tried to prevent herself from even thinking about him. And Bongo had not visited. The last time she saw him was shortly before she entered the convent, when she was still at Marian, and when he was happily entrenched at Indiana University. With his new girlfriend. Was this the work of God—­or something else?

  “Bong
o?” asked my mother, convinced she had misheard.

  “Yes, Bongo,” answered the Mother Superior impatiently. “Who is Bongo?”

  “He’s an old friend,” my mother answered, still confused. “How do you know who Bongo is?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” the Mother Superior told her curtly before dismissing her.

  Years later, my mother would learn that Bongo had written to her several times at the convent over the course of a few years, but each and every one of the letters was intercepted before my mother had a chance to read it.

  “Why didn’t you write back to me?” he would ask her a decade after she’d made her vows. “I wrote you all those letters.”

  “I never got them,” my mother told him, sadly shaking her head.

  The seizing of my mother’s letters was one of the many things the sisters of Oldenburg viewed as a means to an end. Their goal: to develop a band of women wholly committed to the church and to a life that put uniformity and conformity before all other things. Even, at times, before God.

  Everything the sisters did, they did together. There was no time for privacy, save for brief visits to the restroom and moments stolen away in the chapel. They were together for meditation, together for Mass, together for meals. At night, they gathered as a group to listen to a communal radio situated in their shared living room. For my mother, at least this part of convent life was reminiscent of her childhood, of those evenings with her blind grandfather, listening to all of those speeches and baseball games and Amos ’n’ Andy shows. As a group, the sisters listened to newscasts and papal sermons. For nearly four entire days in November 1963, they gathered, struggling to digest the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president.

  The sisters also gathered in the common living space after dinner to enjoy books as a group, taking turns reading aloud a pair of chapters before bed. Among my mother’s favorite times in the convent were these reading episodes. She particularly liked Mr. Blue, a novel by Myles Connolly exploring what would happen if a wealthy man like Jay Gatsby had embraced the pauper life of St. Francis of Assisi, and Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, in which the famous author chronicles his road trip across America with his beloved dog.

  “I’ll never forget the chapter when Steinbeck stopped at a diner and no one was there. I thought for days, for weeks, for years about that diner. About where the ­people might have gone. About that trip. About just driving, just going the way he and Charley did, without any plan other than to be together.”

  By all accounts, my mother threw herself into her new existence as Sister Aurelia Mary. She didn’t want to be just a nun. Family members say she wanted to be the best nun that she could be. She wanted to be not only a sister, but The Sister, a sort of alpha nun. Just as she had always thrown herself full force into building the family home as a girl, and helming high school and campus projects as a student leader—­striving for the approval from her father, the A from her teachers—­now she strived to do the same at Oldenburg. If she had to give up her life of independence, her clothes and movie magazines and Girls Nation trophy, then she wanted to make her sacrifices count for something. She wanted to be a model nun, recognized by her superiors.

  A friend of hers from Marian, Marian Robinson, had entered Oldenburg at the same time, and observed my mother’s passion for her new surroundings. “Anne never did anything wrong. Ever. She followed the rules of the convent to the letter of the law.”

  A case in point, she said, came at the close of the recreation hour at night. “When the hour was up, a bell was rung,” Marian explained, “and you were to stop everything and go absolutely silent. If you were in the middle of the sentence, you weren’t to finish that sentence. Or else. Most of us ignored that rule and finished saying what we had to say. Not Anne. When that bell rang, she was absolutely silent.”

  But hard as she tried, her siblings and cousins saw that my mother’s life as a nun was one that didn’t seem to agree with her. The Diener family concurs that Anne fit into the convent about as poorly as her frame fit into the enormous black habit, which swam on her.

  “I just remember going to see her and thinking, ‘This is not a happy camper,’ ” my mother’s youngest brother, Mike, would tell me in later years. “She didn’t smile during those Sundays when we drove to Oldenburg and visited her. She looked so sad, sitting on the lawn of that convent, like that habit was eating her alive.”

  There was much to be sad about. For one thing, she was constantly hungry. Among the primary things Anne and her fellow sisters were expected to forgo in the name of Christ was food. For young nuns, fasting was a way of life. Numerous times throughout the year, notably during the long stretches of Lent and Advent, a sister’s level of devotion to Christ was measured by her ability to shun food for hours and days at a time. The presiding nuns made clear that the less a nun ate, the holier—­and in turn, the closer to God—­she was.

  My mother did her best to comply with the strict diet, but her body was ill equipped. Since childhood, she’d suffered from low blood pressure and low blood sugar. The problems only got worse at Oldenburg. On more than one occasion, she passed out between meals, infuriating some of her superiors, who ordered her to “pray harder, eat less!”

  The only times the nuns could eat in excess were on holidays. Easter Sunday and Christmas Day were times of gluttonous, daylong feasts, in which, my mother reported, nuns ate from dawn to dusk, starting each of the mornings with pans full of sticky buns and rounding out the days with plates laden with roast beef, baked hams, mashed potatoes, homemade bread, and copious amounts of cookies, pies, and cakes.

  “I ate until I got sick,” my mother would later say. “We all did.”

  The endless cycle of fast-­then-­feast destroyed Anne’s relationship with food. For the rest of her life, she gorged herself on rich food, eating big Danishes and butter-­laden bread and plates of meat ravenously, as if any of it might be taken away from her at a moment’s notice.

  Compounding the lack of food in the convent was the heavy attire. The white dress my mother wore when she made her vows was light and airy. The habit she donned as a nun at Oldenburg was the opposite: dark and heavy and made entirely of wool. Sister Aurelia Mary wore the classic penguin costume parodied in film. A white yoke engulfed her face and neck, leaving only a tiny window for her face. The black veil that extended from the yoke was massive, ballooning up into a rigid rectangle atop her head before falling down well past her shoulders.

  The entire ensemble was so heavy, my mother would later tell me, that it sometimes caused her head to throb and her back to ache. Making matters worse, the heavy material trapped in the heat, which proved problematic in summer months. There was no air-­conditioning in the convent and only a few fans. My mother attempted to stay cool, but on more than one occasion she passed out.

  “Pray harder, Sister Aurelia Mary,” her superiors told her before instructing her to take salt tablets.

  And then there was her hair. Even though Anne could easily have kept her pretty waves and curls beneath her enormous veil, in a barrette or a bun, the supervising sisters commanded her to cut all of it off. The mandatory haircut reduced my mother’s nearly shoulder-­length hair to a closely shorn crooked bowl cut that left parts of her head bald. The drastic cut robbed her of what was left of her youth and beauty. Before the haircut, Anne appeared her age of twenty-­three, if not younger. Afterward, she appeared an aging spinster, as did her classmates, who had been subjected to similar hackings.

  “But I don’t understand,” I told my aunt Mimi during a conversation about convent life in the 1950s. “Why would anyone care what a sister’s hair looked like underneath the veil? If the veils hid the hair, who cared how long the hair actually was?”

  Aunt Mimi chortled at my ignorance. “In order to understand that, you must first understand the goal of the convent. Nuns were to
look and to feel as sexless and unattractive as possible. No one was to look at us as anything other than servants of God. No one was to look at us at all. The goal was to make everyone forget we were women.”

  The push to make my mother and her fellow sisters at Oldenburg unattractive was further helped by the inability to bathe regularly. There were no bathtubs. Showers were permitted, but only at night and not every day. My mother told me showers at Oldenburg were typically short and unpleasant.

  “The water was cold,” my mother once told me when I was in college. “I think it was done on purpose. They didn’t want us lingering in the showers—­or to have the opportunity to look at each other naked. They didn’t want us to get any ideas.”

  It was the only time my mother would hint at the sisters’ efforts to prevent lesbian relationships. But it wasn’t only lesbian relationships that were frowned upon. The forging of close alliances, even the simple act of confiding in each other or sharing a private conversation, was also verboten.

  “Relationships of any kind,” Aunt Mimi told me, “were not tolerated.”

  She had endured this practice, accepted it as the norm for her twenty years of ser­vice to her convent, until she left.