Dale told no one, including, of course, my mother. Still, Anne must have sensed something was wrong early enough in the relationship to prompt her to tell him when he eventually proposed marriage in 1968 that she needed some time to think over his offer.
“I told him big decisions require lots of time to think,” she told me.
Even as a little girl, I knew that didn’t sound right.
But the truth of the matter was things weren’t right. After years of reading about the love affairs involving her literary heroines and their dreamy partners, in which hearts pounded and lips quivered, my mother had hoped she would find a man breathless with excitement at the very thought of her. But with Dale, those moments never came. Not only was there little passion; moments of intimacy, or the pressure to have intimacy, often brought out in Dale bouts of terrifying rage.
My mother told me she knew the marriage was in trouble as early as the honeymoon.
“When things didn’t go quite right,” she told me one night after dinner, looking off into the distance to a place only she could see, “he chased me.”
“Chased you?” I asked.
“Chased me,” she repeated. “I knew I had to run.”
“Run?” I asked, still incredulous. My mother despised exercise. A gym teacher she’d had back in Dunkirk during elementary school—some woman she later described as “monstrous”—had scared her out of ever wanting to have anything to do with physical exertion after publicly shaming my poor mother on more than one occasion for failing to execute a somersault. If my mother had run—and run on her honeymoon!—the situation must have been extreme.
“He was so angry,” my mother said, still looking at that far-off place. “I knew whatever I did, I couldn’t let him catch me.”
The thing was, though my mother was the one afraid of getting caught, my father was the one who felt trapped.
Dale Edwin Pflum was born June 10, 1941, in southern Indiana to a young farmer, George Pflum, and his even younger wife, Bernice.
George and Bernice were farm kids who met and fell in love at a barn dance when my grandmother was just seventeen. As a child, I would stare for hours at their wedding photos. Unlike the photos of my parents’ wedding, those of my father’s parents showed a young, beautiful couple very much in love.
After a one-night honeymoon at an Indianapolis hotel, George and Bernice threw themselves headfirst into the task of making their new farm a resounding success and raising a family to help them achieve the task. First came Richard, my father’s older brother, born in October 1938.
Three and a half years later came my father.
And four and a half years after my father’s birth came the tragedy that would shape my father’s entire life and my parents’ entire marriage.
It was February 1946. After a day of errands, my grandmother headed back to the farm with my father to greet Richard, then a first grader, as he got off the school bus. They were running late, my father later told me. As my grandmother approached the drive to their farm in Rushville, Indiana, she spied the school bus—and something more.
My father would later recount that there is one sound that will never be erased from his memory, no matter what kind of dementia might eventually set in: the sound of my grandmother screaming with maternal intensity and urgency as she ran toward that bus, “Richard’s hurt!”
Richard was getting off the school bus and crossing the road to reach the farm when a car driven by a prominent Rushville woman who lived in town failed to brake. Apparently in a hurry, she hit the gas and, in the process, killed an uncle I would never get to meet.
Studies have shown that the death of a child is the most stressful thing a married couple can ever expect to endure as a unit. And so it was with my grandparents. The death of Richard, a handsome boy with a mischievous grin, silenced the once-happy home and drove my grandmother into a deep state of depression she would wander into and out of—often for months at a time—for the remainder of her life.
More children would eventually come—two girls. But the sadness of Richard’s loss remained. He was the son forever mourned, a ghost whose presence was forever felt. Richard’s clothes and school books were cherished and saved. A kitchen window he’d broken with a baseball the week prior to his death was never replaced. Instead, the crack was taped over with Scotch tape, then retaped as the tape grew old. Decades later, I used to eye it curiously when I went to the house and helped to wash the dishes after a holiday meal, knowing even then that the window held some sort of special power over my grandparents and great-grandparents; that it was as sacred as any stained-glass window in any church. The cracked window would remain in place until well into the 1980s, some forty years after Richard’s death.
When Richard died, he left a hole that would never be filled. And my father did what so many surviving children attempt to do: He worked to fill that hole at all costs. Even at the cost of denying his sexuality.
In later years, my father would tell me he always knew he was gay. As a small boy, he longed for the times when both parents were out of the house so that he could dress up in my grandmother’s dresses, even putting on her faux pearls. And though he was tall—climbing to nearly six foot six—he preferred the world of theater and pageantry-filled operas to the Indiana basketball that other boys in his school embraced. But coming out during or shortly after his childhood would not only have been socially unacceptable—it also would have added to the anguish in the family home. My grandparents had already lost one son. Bearing witness to my father’s coming out of the closet would have caused them to lose their lone surviving son, not to mention their reputation as a respectable family within a closed, conservative community.
So, my father said, he did the only thing he felt he could do at the time: “I wanted to become the man Richard would have been.”
To that end, he developed into an affable young man. He earned good grades. He was popular in school. He won multiple blue ribbons showing cattle and chickens at the county fair. He took attractive girls to the prom and joined a fraternity at Purdue University, eventually moving into the Alpha Gamma Ro house and assuming positions of leadership within the campus Greek system. His secret—that big, dark, awful secret—was meticulously hidden.
No one knew of the secret world he was embracing, the one involving liaisons with other young men he would meet in the university library and who followed him home to various dorm rooms with a mixture of excitement and shame.
“One of the guys I met in the library forced himself on me. I liked it,” he would later confess.
When Dale eventually met Anne, she stirred something in him: thoughts of his deceased brother.
“Your mother was exactly the kind of woman I thought Richard would marry,” he later told me. “I felt like I needed to marry her because I felt like that’s what Richard would have done.”
He proceeded to tick through the reasons he felt certain Anne and Richard would have been a fine couple: “She was six years older than I was, which would have made her close to Richard’s age. And she was kind and smart and down-to-earth.”
The fact that my mother was a former nun seemed to only add intrigue to the picture. For years, my father had thought the priesthood might be his destiny. As an altar boy, he loved the drama of the Mass, the pageantry of the frocked priests. During the year he lived in Italy as part of an exchange program in college, he had spent time at the Vatican, reveling in its rich history and tradition. To Dale, the idea of the former nun marrying the almost-priest seemed oddly appropriate.
My mother, of course, knew nothing of my father’s line of reasoning when she finally agreed to marry him. Nor did she know about the conversation my father had shared with a priest in the months leading up to their wedding day. Apparently feeling a bit guilty about the way in which he was misleading my mother, and questioning his decision, m
y father turned for help to a man of the cloth in a hushed conversation in a parish rectory.
“Father, I’ve become engaged to a Catholic woman. She’s good. She’s kind. And we’re to be married in November.”
“All sounds very well, my son,” responded the priest. “Whatever is the problem?”
“I have thoughts, feelings, often about—” started my father.
“About?” asked the priest.
“About other men,” my father at last confessed.
At this, the priest took a sharp breath.
“These things are normal. Natural.”
My father, the priest assured him, was not gay. His solution: my father should marry my mother.
So Dale threw himself full force into his marriage to Anne.
Anne never knew of Dale’s doubts or of his secret longings and desires. She knew that her parents were comfortable with him and she with his parents. She knew that with Dale at her side, she would officially be able to move past the long shadow that had been cast by Oldenburg. She would no longer be Anne the Former Nun. Now, she’d be Anne the Wife. Most significantly, Anne knew that with this very tall, sometimes charming farm-boy-turned-businessman, she might have a chance of starting the sort of family she’d always dreamed of having.
“I wanted to be a mother more than anything,” my mom would tell me when I was a teenager. “I just knew that’s what I was supposed to be.”
But by agreeing to marry my father she effectively moved from one abusive relationship—the one she’d had with the convent—to another, more intense one.
Perhaps sensing the sad road she was heading down, Anne seated herself at her own wedding reception squarely between my father and Father Vincent. It’s as if on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, she was already reaching out for reassurance, a guiding hand who could manage to make right things that felt all wrong.
Looking at those wedding photos—at the somber expression on my mother’s face, the sadness in those big brown eyes, as she ate her wedding dinner in that beautiful white dress—it was clear: serious Catholics though she and my father might have been, desperately well intentioned though they were, my parents’ marriage never had a prayer.
Chapter 6
My First White Dress
November 1972
Anne stood over the infant, her hands shaking. It was after nine o’clock, and Mass started in under an hour. They were running late. Dale hated to be late. Especially when his parents were in town. Bernice Daniels Pflum was a good woman, but nothing if not a perfectionist. She equated tardiness with cardinal sins as unseemly as unswept floors and undusted tabletops. They just had to be on time. Especially today.
The infant squirmed as Anne struggled to fasten the buttons on the back of the long white dress. The gown, nearly a century old, was growing yellow in spots. Dozens of Daniels and Pflum children had been poured into the gown in their first weeks of life. Some had not reached adulthood, but most had, including Dale.
“Anne, are you ready?” Dale called impatiently from his post at the foot of the stairs.
Anne bristled. If only her family were here. If only Mother and Daddy lived closer. They’d come after the baby was born, making the drive from Dunkirk to Wisconsin in the span of one very long day. Her mother had been so helpful, rocking the baby to sleep at night, helping her with the laundry. But they had to get back to Indiana. It was only Dale and his family who would be there to witness everything this morning.
Anne felt the familiar flutter in her stomach. The one that made her feel as if she were about to throw up or, at the very least, fly into a fit of dry heaves. But she willed herself to do what Father Vincent always told her to do. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said a little prayer to St. Francis. She’d get through this. She had to. If not for her sake, then for the baby’s. Today her infant daughter was going to be baptized. And not just baptized. But baptized in public. For the first time in the history of Beaver Dam’s St. Peter’s Church, a baby was going to be baptized during Mass. Public baptisms were all part of Vatican II. Babies had once been privately baptized after Mass, away from other parishioners; now they were brought into the light, welcomed to a community by priests who spoke English, not Latin. A new generation of Catholic children was emerging, a generation that would be seen and heard. And Mary Elizabeth was going to be part of that generation.
Anne smiled now at her newborn. Mary Elizabeth was such a pleasant baby. Anne still couldn’t believe that she had a girl. Birthing Anthony two years ago had been a tremendous joy. He had been her first. But Mary Elizabeth’s arrival was special in a different way. It symbolized the fruition of that vision she’d had all those years before at Oldenburg. She’d told the Blessed Virgin that should she have a daughter, she’d name her Mary in her honor. And here she was—Mary Elizabeth—the living, breathing, kicking fulfillment of the promise.
The doctors had classified Anne’s pregnancy as high-risk. There’d been frequent visits to the top hospitals in Madison, an amniocentesis—a then relatively new procedure. They’d been fearful that the medication Anne had been taking for myasthenia gravis, that nervous condition that she’d first been diagnosed with at Oldenburg, would affect the fetus, render the baby physically or mentally handicapped. But they’d been wrong. Tipping the scale at nearly nine pounds, measuring nearly twenty-three inches, Mary Elizabeth had entered the world big and pink and extraordinarily healthy. She’d dwarfed the other babies in the ICU where she’d been placed while doctors ran tests to double-check her blood work.
Now, home for several weeks, the baby was faring better than her mother. Anne’s hands continued to shake as she struggled to fasten the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons that lined the back of the christening gown. A residence filled with tension was something she’d grown used to during her years at Oldenburg. There, she’d feared the admonishment of the elder nuns. Here, at the two-story house in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, she feared the admonishment of a force almost as scary as the sisters: Dale. Sometimes he was in a jovial mood. On good days, he laughed, smiled, might even hug her unprompted. But increasingly, he was on edge, unfurling explosive bouts of anger with little or no warning. A sink full of dirty dishes, towels that were hung crooked in the bathroom, even calling him “honey” or “sweetheart”—all were grounds for criticism or, worse, the pounding of fists, a raised voice, a flying coffee cup. She didn’t know which was worse, when he was home or when he was away and unreachable for hours, even days at a time.
When they’d left Indianapolis last year, Dale had convinced her that the move to Wisconsin would be a good one. She’d been reluctant. She didn’t want to leave her parents—not when they’d established such a wonderful system of weekly visits to Dunkirk, regular meals that felt, at last, relaxed and not forced. Dale had been insistent, promising her they’d settle into a warm community, grow closer as a family and as a couple. But twelve months later, their marriage was arguably more strained than it had ever been.
In his new capacity as a sales representative for Eli Lilly’s animal pharmaceuticals, Dale was on the road several days a month. Sometimes he called when he got to the hotel at night. But other times he didn’t, blaming dinners that started and finished late. Anne didn’t know what to believe. She did know that she was determined to make this marriage work. She just had to.
She turned Mary Elizabeth from her little tummy to her back and smiled at the baby. The big beautiful newborn was a gift from God. Who would have thought back at Oldenburg that Sister Aurelia Mary would birth a baby as beautiful as this one?
“Anne!” barked the voice. “Anne!” it cried louder.
“Dale, we’re coming!” cried Anne. The gagging started anew. This time it wasn’t a false alarm. She felt the burn of vomit in her throat. Grabbing a diaper from Mary Elizabeth’s changing table, she threw up into the Pamper.
Taking Mary Elizabeth into her arms, she held the infant to her, trying to comfort herself as much as the child. “Please, Father in Heaven, help me through all of this.”
The first white dress I wore in my life was the white gown I was baptized in the month after my October birth. It was a family heirloom—one of the few that I have on either side of my family of Western European immigrants. The gown was first worn by my father’s maternal grandmother, Katie O’Connell. She was one of a dozen children born to Irish immigrants. Her parents, like so many, had sailed from County Cork in the late nineteenth century to escape from the ravages of the potato famine and from a poverty-stricken existence.
How my great-grandmother’s family managed to scrape together the money to assemble the beautiful lace gown—long and white, rimmed with a lovely silk ribbon that tied at the front and extended down the length of the dress—I’m not sure. And how the gown came to be passed down to my great-grandmother and her sister Margaret rather than to their many other siblings, I perhaps will never know.
But I do know that the gown went on to be worn by all four of my great-grandmother’s children, including my grandmother, and, in turn, by every single one of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well as a multitude of her nieces and nephews.
Legend has it that the gown was nearly destroyed twice, once by my father, who, at birth, tipped the scale at ten pounds and all but tore the fragile dress to shreds when he was squeezed into it in a manner befitting a sausage.
By my family’s calculation, I was the sixtieth baby to wear the gown, in that first public christening at St. Peter’s Church in downtown Beaver Dam, a rural burg in southeastern Wisconsin. Prior to my christening, babies at St. Peter’s were typically baptized on weekend afternoons, away from the prying gazes of other parishioners.
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