Introduction

They had to be here.

They just had to be here. Somewhere.

But where?

Where?!

I felt the wave of panic wash over me and struggled to breathe. The smell, that horrible smell of the place, made my stomach churn. The air was heavy, steeped in the sickening aroma of a rancid barn that had been deprived of fresh air for the better part of a decade. I felt the vomit burn at the back of my throat.

Not now, I told myself. Not now! I could get sick back at the hotel. Now I had to find them. And I didn’t have much time.

I struggled to move. But my feet were gone. I’d lost them between the front door and the landing of the staircase. They were buried somewhere beneath the mountains of Milwaukee Journals, the unopened mail and once-used cat leashes and the dozens and dozens of disposable cameras, some of them still wrapped in the yellow plastic Kodak packaging. She’d always loved to take the pictures but never wanted to look in the mirror.

How could I have failed to find a way to rescue her from this?

Slowly, I inched my way to the staircase. Up the stairs is

When disaster strikes, no matter where in the world, no matter what the circumstances of the destruction, be it fire or flood or wind, people behave the same. Young or old, rich or poor, people want tosave their lives and the lives of loved ones first. And they want tosave the little things second. The once seemingly big and importantthings like furniture and electronics—the shoes and dishes and ap­pliances, even the cars and bikes they once spent months selectingand saving to buy—don’t matter. No, after the lives, it’s the familyheirlooms—treasured rugs, handmade quilts, family Bibles, home­made cards and letters—that victims of disaster work desperatelyto salvage.

And so it was today. I couldn’t have cared less about the furni­ture. Had no use for a car. I just had to save them.

We had never had any real family heirlooms to speak of. Not from my mother’s side of the family, anyway. No, my mother and I—we had white dresses.

Like rings of an old oak tree, white dresses marked passages of time, our milestones in life. Both the good ones and the bad. The dresses were not just important. To us, they were sacred.

My mother was not a slave to fashion. But she did adhere to certain rules. Skirts were always to be worn with nylons or tights unless a girl was under the age of twelve or playing tennis. Two-piece bathing suits and halter tops were absolutely verboten for women of all ages. (When it came to swimming, my mother always said a one-piece was, without exception, the way to go.)

And white was to be worn only between Memorial Day weekend (formerly known as Decoration Day weekend) and Labor Day. Never was it to be worn in fall, winter, or early spring, unless there was a christening, First Communion, graduation, or wed­ding involved.

I openly called my mother’s first two fashion rules ridiculous and spent the better part of my teenage years railing against them. But the last rule—what I came to refer to as the White Commandment—I not only accepted, but embraced.

My mother taught me to love all that white represents: clean­liness, innocence, simplicity, sophistication, and, above all, pos­sibilities. And not just possibilities. In my mother’s estimation, white represented Infinite Possibilities. For her, white—a blank canvas—was the embodiment of hope and the promise of new beginnings and good things to come.

On the happiest day of my life—my wedding day—my moth­er’s White Commandment was in full effect. I wed Dean on Me­morial Day weekend in a crisp white Vera Wang gown that had to be specially ordered since most modern brides, I was told, prefer ivory to true white. Not me. Not Mom.

Today the Vera Wang gown was safe. It lay in a sealed wooden box beneath the bed I shared with Dean, a thousand miles away in New York.

But the fate of the other white dresses? I didn’t know. I only knew I had to save them.

For her. For me. For us.

My head spun as I struggled to mount the stairs. Still strug­gling to breathe, I saw spots. First yellow. Then black. They dis­torted my view of the staircase. Of what used to be a staircase. There were no steps in sight, just an enormous fabric slope. It looked as if a dozen washing machines had thrown up, spewing down the staircase stained blouses and old pants, long-forgotten scarves and mittens and towels and decades-old linens. I had to get out of here or I was going to faint, fall into one of the moun­tains of random stuff that was mixed in with the garments, with no rhyme or reason: the unopened boxes of baking soda and man­gled cardboard eggs containing unworn panty hose; the discarded fast-food bags and dirty Styrofoam cups and Kleenexes.

“Oh my God,” I gasped upon entering.

The entire space—once pink and ruffly and girly and light—had gone remarkably dark, covered now in a black sooty dust.

The heavy layer of grime had taken hold of everything, includ­ing cherished dolls whose blond hair was now gray and science fair trophies that had turned from golden to a yucky brown. The pink burlap bulletin board that still hung above my twin bed re­mained littered with faded photos and ribbons from a citywide track meet. Cobwebs hung from all four corners of the room. The lone window was covered in a murky film, allowing only a few rays of winter sunlight to stream in.

I shook my head in disbelief. It was gone. Virtually everything in the room as I had once known it was gone.

I took a deep breath. The second-floor air was a bit less noxious than that on the main floor. It was also considerably colder. That was because of the hole in the roof. The one my uncle discovered last year. That’s how, they think, the bats got in. I cringed at the thought. Bats in the house.

Slowly, I made my way to the closet, covered by a now-sooty poster of Tom Cruise, copping his best badass look as Top Gun’s Maverick. Then I said a little prayer and slid the right-hand door open.

There, hanging on the long metal rod, I spied a familiar splash of yellow yarn. It was a shawl I’d worn to an Easter Sunday Mass when I was four. The once-bright yellow was now a dull yellow owing to all the dust. I reached to touch it then screamed as a long, leggy spider—what my mother used to call a daddy longlegs—made its way down the length of it.

Beside the shawl hung a fading aqua-blue Forenza camp shirt from The Limited that I’d used my babysitting savings to buy my junior year in high school. It wouldn’t have looked so faded had it not been caked in the thick layer of soot that had swallowed the rest of the room.

My heart beat harder now. I felt the panic rise up again, like an impatient tidal wave. Please. Please! They had to be in here. Everything else could go—everything else could be torched—but I couldn’t leave without them.

I reached past an old sleeveless peach dress—another Easter relic. Then an ivory lace cardigan. It was full of holes, half eaten by moths.

No—no—no—no white dresses.

But wait! There to the far right on the rod, pushed up against the wall of the closet, I saw It: my First Communion dress. It had hung there in a place of honor every day for nearly three decades and remained, somehow, impossibly white. The deep recesses of the closet had served as a sort of protective armor, shielding it from the storm that had engulfed the house. Miraculously, the long, semitransparent sleeves remained pretty, the lace on the bodice delicate and unspoiled. Even the pleats and long satin sash remained intact.

“Oh, thank God,” I cried aloud, pulling the dress, hanger and all, off the rod and hugging it to me. “Oh, thank God!”

I had one white dress, one piece of her. One piece of us. Now if only I could find the rest.

Chapter 1
My Mother’s Baptism

September 1935

On a sunny fall day in 1935, they stood, the three of them: Al, hand­some in his dark suit, his curly brown hair blowing in the wind; Aurelia, in the navy-blue drop-waist dress that she’d paired with a matching hat in a bid to mask a mop of disastrous curls; and their infant daughter, Anne. Anne Virginia Diener.

The baby—bald save for a little shock of dark peach fuzz—squirmed in the long white cotton dress enveloping her. The gown, a present from her grandmother Trudy—her father’s mother—was beautiful, something Trudy referred to as “Sumptuous! Absolutelysumptuous!” Trimmed with lace at the bodice and the hem, it fea­tured mother-of-pearl buttons down the back and, when paired with a matching bonnet, made the baby look every bit the vision of the proper little girl Trudy had hoped for when she learned of Anne’s birth.

Yes, it was the Depression, and money was terribly tight. But, Trudy reasoned, this was her first grandchild—her oldest child’s baby girl!—and God knows those kids couldn’t have afforded to buy such a thing. For goodness’ sake, they couldn’t even afford a proper crib. Not even a cradle! Much to Trudy’s horror, the baby was sleep­ing in an old dresser drawer Aurelia had once used for sweaters, now lined with blankets.

Just four weeks old, Anne alternately cried and slept as her par­ents took turns holding her in the autumn breeze. An hour before, she had managed to sleep through most of her own christening. It was only when the elderly priest, speaking Latin, doused her with water that she’d stirred, then fluttered open those big brown eyes.

After the ceremony, Al and Aurelia had gathered with their new charge in a park not far from Trudy and August Diener’s North In­dianapolis home for an impromptu photo op. The threesome stood first this way, then that way. And while Al managed a few smiles, Aurelia remained largely subdued. She knew she was supposed to be happy, but this baby business was more than she’d bargained for. So far, she wasn’t liking much of it at all. The baby demanded near-constant attention. She didn’t have a moment to herself—and worse, barely a moment alone with Al. Before the baby, there’d been late-night dinners, time to read, time to write, and oh! those near-nightly explosions of passion that had made the baby in the first place.

Aurelia had wanted Al from the moment she saw him, had plotted to catch him when she spied him at that birthday party in high school. The gathering had been organized by a local ice-cream shop owner for his niece and nephew. Aurelia went to school with the niece, Al with the nephew. And when Aurelia saw Al, that was all she wrote. She wanted him. With all her heart. And then some. It hadn’t been easy. Al came from a good family, old money rooted in a monument business that had been the best in all of Indiana and one of the most prominent in the Midwest. Aurelia came from nothing to speak of. She’d grown up the daughter of a brilliant but deaf father, who, unable to find work as an accountant during the Depression, was forced to take on odd jobs. At one point, he worked as a launderer, cleaning women’s soiled undergar­ments among other things.

But differences aside, there were notable similarities. Al was Catho­lic and so was Aurelia. He was brilliant—valedictorian of his high school class. And she was brilliant—valedictorian of hers. She would win his heart, she vowed.

For years, they dated. Al tried to tell his parents it was a casual rela­tionship. But it was anything but. In June 1934, the pair secretly wed.

Aurelia coaxed Al into the elopement using that deadliest of weapons: Catholic guilt.

“We can’t live in sin forever,” she’d told him one night, her blouse unbuttoned, her skirt hiked up over her knees after yet another session of heavy panting and petting.

Filled with a combination of guilt and lusty ardor, Al agreed andarranged to take Aurelia for a quickie marriage in a neighboring townwhere he’d called in a favor and gotten a bishop—a bishop!—to agreeto marry them. For the better part of a year, they told no one except Au­relia’s baby sister, Mary Jane, of the marriage. Eventually, they let theirparents in on the truth. Trudy sobbed at the news, then shouted at the topof her lungs, then begged for an annulment. Didn’t Al see that Aurelia would ruin his life? Didn’t Al see the life in medicine that he’d dreamed of—that Trudy had dreamed of—would be doomed if he was with Au­relia? But it was too late. Anne was already on the way. Al opted to forgomedical school in favor of engineering in a bid to graduate, and score apaying job, more quickly. He did, after all, have a family to support.

Now there were dirty diapers, soiled burp cloths, and, in Aurelia’s case, aching breasts. Aurelia tried for all of two days to nurse Anne before declaring she didn’t have enough milk to give. Secretly, she knew she probably did. But she didn’t need one more reason to be saddled with a screaming, red-faced baby. Bottle feeding gave her a freedom nursing wouldn’t. Now she had the chance to drop the baby off at her parents’, or, if need be, his. They didn’t like her. Hated her for marrying their eldest son. For trapping him, they said. But Lord, how they loved that child.

Al had been smart, Aurelia realized, to insist upon naming her Anne. St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was among Trudy’s favorites. Anne was the saint Al had prayed to when Trudy was ill. The fact that Al had chosen to give the cherished name to his firstborn thrilled his mother no end, showing her that despite his taste in brides, the Catholic seeds she had planted within him as a boy had taken hold and blossomed. Anne was a blessing. She was their little Annie.

The entire family was smitten. Even Peg, Al’s gorgeous dark-haired sister, who modeled professionally and was often mistaken for a film actress, fell head over heels for the infant.

All delighted in the squirming baby, save Aurelia. For her, Anne was more of a means to an end. With Anne’s birth came a guaran­tee that now, at last, Al was hers. Forever. Never would he leave the mother of his child. That Catholic guilt would kill him.

After Al and Aurelia had their turns holding the baby and posing for the photos that autumn afternoon, Trudy and August and Peg took theirs, cradling her in their arms. Upon looking at Annie, their hearts melted, their eyes grew moist. There she was. A perfect little girl born out of a completely imperfect situation. Amidst the orange and red of the changing leaves that had begun to litter the park, against the vivid blue of that late September sky, the baby was a dream. Their little Annie. Their vision in white.

From the beginning, my mother, Anne Virginia Diener, was known for three things: a round, open face; deep brown eyes; and a boundless sense of curiosity. Within a year of her arrival home from the hospital, it was evident to all who knew her that Anne was anxious, almost desperate, to explore the world. She loved to put on performances on the front lawn of her Dunkirk, Indiana, home. She relished going for walks and greeting the neighbors, calling to those she knew by name. And she enjoyed dancing around the garden surrounding her house, committing to memory the names of the various flowers. There were rhodo­dendron and hollyhock and the fragrant lilacs that sprang from stubby bushes. And in the spring, there were my mother’s favor­ites: peonies. The big fat blooms that burst from those little buds fascinated her, as did the colony of bumblebees they attracted, each fatter and fuzzier than the last.

But as interested as Anne was in flowers and insects, she was most interested in getting to better know and understand her family. She was especially curious about, and desperate to please, her father. Possessing a deep voice and a brilliant mind, Al Diener was a strikingly handsome man whose eyes were just as dark and beautiful as hers. Standing five foot eight, he was wiry, tanned easily, and looked equally good in the dark suits he wore to Mass and the t-shirts he sported when he did yard work or indulged in a post-work cigarette. Al was something of a mystery to Anne. He left for work soon after she rose in the morning, reporting to Armstrong Glass, a gigantic glass factory, where he’d put his degree in chemical engineering to use as a plant manager. And often, he arrived home after her mother had put her to bed. It was only on weekends that she saw much of him. And a good part of that time was spent going to Mass.

Al Diener had three great loves in his life: his mother, Trudy; his wife, Aurelia; and the Catholic Church. And more often than not, the women took a backseat to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In Christ, in the sacraments, in the words of the pope and the cardinals and the presiding parish priest, Al found life’s meaning and order. And in that order—in those traditions and rigid commandments—he placed his undying faith. The church provided the structure around which all things, both personal and professional, revolved. So it was no accident that Al chose as the first home in which to raise his family a rambling gray house next to St. Mary’s, the only Catholic church in Dunkirk.

For my mother, it became evident early on that if she wished to spend more time with her father, to find a way into his heart so that she could be certain he was thinking about her during at least some of those many long hours he spent away from her at work, she needed to do so through the church. Saying the rosary with Daddy, attending weekday masses with him, helping set the table when a priest was invited over for dinner, all scored her additional moments with her father, and, more importantly, additional doses of the love and approval she so desperately craved. She was in­trigued by the stories her father told her about the saints, listened with rapt attention to the Gospels, and marveled, with a combi­nation of fear and intrigue, at the robed priests who held court before the altar, engulfed in plumes of smoke that spilled out of their incense decanters.

But while embracing Catholicism was the clear path to reach her father, less clear to Anne was how to find an “in” with her mother.

Aurelia Arvin Diener longed to become many things as a child, but a good mother was not at the top of the list. As a child, in the wake of her father’s devastating loss of hearing and her stern mother’s growing arthritis, she had watched the family’s fortune dwindle to nothing. One minute, they were living a life of teas and dance classes in Cincinnati. The next, the family was destitute. For years, Aurelia scrounged for coal along train tracks to keep the family’s modest home in Indianapolis heated, worked on nights and weekends for a car dealer so that she could buy her younger sister a winter coat. She prayed that when she eventu­ally married, she could exhale. But motherhood was anything but relaxing.

The constant penny-pinching and nose wiping that came with motherhood made her feel, more often than not, trapped. And it showed. She snapped often or retreated, burying her head in newspapers and cherished books instead of paying attention to the house or her children. To a young Anne, her mother’s moodi­ness made her feel as if she were doing something wrong, as if she weren’t the daughter she was supposed to be.

The level of stress in the young Diener home only intensified as my grandmother became pregnant again—and again—and again—in rapid succession. Fourteen months after my mother came another daughter, Mary, whom my grandparents would call Mimi. The delivery was so fast that the doctor dropped my poor aunt as she exited the womb. My grandmother winced as she heard the baby’s head hit the table. Thankfully, she survived. Soon after Mimi came Patty, a curly-haired dirty-blonde who, almost from the day she was born, clashed with my mother for her parents’ affection. Then came Kathy, a dark-haired beauty with a sweet smile and doe eyes. Finally, after four girls, my grandfather got the boy he’d always dreamed of: Albert Joseph Junior, a.k.a. Al Joe, a strapping boy who commanded his family’s attention.

Dealing with five babies in six and a half years prompted Au­relia to turn into something of a robot. She approached childcarein an increasingly pragmatic fashion, seeming less interested indoling out hugs and praise than in managing chaos. Meals wereserved systematically at five o’clock. All the children—includingmy mother, the oldest—were in bed by six o’clock. In this way,Aurelia carved out time for what she really desired: being alonewith Al. There was now no time for writing, for completing thosenovels she’d dreamed of penning as a teenager. And there wasless and less time for reading. But Al? She would always maketime for her beloved husband. By all accounts, he was what shelived for.

The house they dwelled in on Broad Street had two stories, but it was small. All the children were forced to share one room, the girls sleeping two to a bed.

To combat fuel costs, heat was limited to the downstairs. Con­sequently, during the winter months, the children slept in two or three layers of clothing and two pairs of socks at a time to ward off pneumonia.

“Oftentimes,” my mother told me, “the house was so cold I could see my breath when I got dressed. And the sweaters on the drying racks became solid as blocks of wood.”

Other times, she said, her mother’s bottles of cheap perfume turned into fragrant ice cubes.

Aurelia displayed intermittent bursts of warmth during the difficult times. She treated the children to popcorn and Coke on holiday nights when finances allowed. She was a capable nurse when her brood came down with bouts of chicken pox and mumps and measles and whooping cough.

But for the most part, she ruled the house with something of an iron fist. For Aurelia, the implementation and enforcement of rules was a means of controlling the chaos engulfing—and some­times drowning—her. That quest for rules reared its head when she decided it was time for a young Anne to be separated from her beloved childhood blanket, Pooh. For years, the blanket, tattered and torn, was my mother’s one true constant through the changes of more siblings. She slept with it clenched in her chubby little fists at night, played with it alongside her dolls by day, even at­tempted to bathe with it.

“I loved my Pooh,” my mother would later tell me. “It was more than a blanket, it was a friend.”

But for Aurelia, Pooh was a problem. Anne was the oldest, and enough was enough. It wasn’t proper for Anne to keep a blanket. That’s what conventional wisdom told her, and that’s what she’d adhere to.

One morning when my mother was out playing, Pooh disap­peared.

“Where’s my Pooh?” my mother asked innocently upon return­ing to her bedroom at lunchtime to seek out the comfort of the blanket.

“Pooh is gone,” Aurelia responded curtly, snapping string beans in the kitchen sink, an apron tied around her waist.

“What do you mean, g-g-g-gone?” asked my mother, her eyes widening, her voice rising. She had begun to stutter when she spoke, and moments like these, when she was especially nervous, made her stuttering more pronounced.

“Gone,” Aurelia replied firmly, placing a roast beef sandwich in front of her daughter. “I’ve told you before. You’re a big girl now. Big girls don’t need security blankets.”

“But it wasn’t a s-s-s-s-security blanket,” cried my mother, con­fused. Her stomach churned. The tears started. She didn’t even know what a security blanket was supposed to be. All she knew was that she loved her Pooh. She needed her Pooh. “It was m-m­m-m-m-mine.”

She couldn’t breathe. She tried to eat the sandwich in front of her, afraid to make her mother any angrier. But each bite made her feel sicker and sicker.

For hours, then days, she cried for her Pooh.

“You’ll get used to life without Pooh,” her father told her matter-of-factly that weekend before diving into the enormous to-do list of household chores Aurelia had compiled for him.

But Anne never got used to life without Pooh. For years, she kept one eye open for the tattered blanket, hoping against hope that it would turn up beneath a sofa cushion or at the back of a kitchen cabinet. It never did. And my mother’s relationship with her mother was irrevocably altered.

The bedwetting episodes started soon after Pooh disappeared. Though she’d long been potty trained, Anne regressed, wetting her bed on a nightly basis. She tried to hide the soiled sheets from her mother but failed more often than not.

“You naughty girl!” Aurelia would cry, pressing her nose to the sheets before angrily stripping the bed. “You’re the oldest! We don’t have time for these things!”

The overarching result of all the chaos of the household was that Anne was shipped to her grandparents to stay for long stretches of time. Each time a new baby arrived, each time a crisis gripped the household, she was sent away for days, sometimes weeks, as her mother worked to get the new dose of chaos at home under control.

My mother loved both sets of grandparents, but it was her pa­ternal grandparents—her Trudy and Dad Diener—to whom she became especially close and with whom she spent the greatest amount of time. The love Trudy had for her eldest son, Al, was passed on to my mother in great supply. Trudy took my mother to fine lunches in Indianapolis’s LS Ayres tearoom, taught her how to set a table and place a napkin on her lap, how to properly eat her soup, tipping the bowl just so, moving the spoon away from her as she scooped. She purchased for my mother school supplies—colorful pencils and fancy notebooks—and pretty dresses that Al and Aurelia Diener could not afford. Most significantly, Trudy gave my mother a place to call her own in their North Indianapo­lis home.

“Your generation has television,” my mother would tell me as I rolled my teenaged eyes. “Mine had the real deal: radio.”

Radio, my mother said, soothed her to sleep during count­less nights and offered hours of comfort as she suffered through childhood fevers and the mumps. The dramatic chords of the organ used to narrate The Guiding Light, the melodic strains of Glen Miller, and the jokes shared between Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, between George Burns and Gracie Allen, all served to calm my mother and make her feel as if every­thing, even on the scariest of nights, was going to be all right. She was afraid of the typical things of youth, monsters beneath beds chief among them. And she was afraid of the issues gripping the adults of the nation, including a polio outbreak that was forcing public pools to close and children her age to live out their days in iron lungs. But the sounds of the radio took her mind off of her worries, if only for a few minutes. In radio, Anne Diener happily escaped.

“You haven’t really learned how to imagine,” she would later tell me, “how to really see a story come to life in your mind, until you’ve spent an afternoon just listening—really listening—to words.”

While August Diener instilled in my mother a love of radio and the spoken word, Trudy Diener instilled in her a love of the arts. Decked out in a mink stole she’d been given long before the Depression struck and a pair of gloves that buttoned at the wrist, Trudy squired a young Anne to musicals in Indianapolis’s finest theaters, ice shows featuring the figure-skating sensation Sonja Henie, and orchestral concerts at symphony halls. Over the course of months, then years, Trudy painstakingly introduced her young charge to Bach, Brahms, Beethoven.

“I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Emperor Concerto,” my mother used to sigh. “I felt as if I’d discovered something so special, so exquisite, I wanted to share it with everyone and with no one all at the same time.”

And at night, Trudy introduced a young Anne to more music: lullabies. While Aurelia and Al were more often than not too busy to sing to their children at bedtime, Trudy was not. Sitting beside Anne in a darkened room after her eldest grandchild had completed a day of tree-climbing and radio-playing, Trudy sang song upon song: “Rock-a-bye Baby,” “When the Fairies Sing,” and my mother’s favorite, an old Native American tune. Trudy belted out the plaintive melody to my mother as she tucked her into bed. My mother lay, both mesmerized and torn, not sure which she wanted more: to stay awake to enjoy her grandmother’s performance or to retreat to a world of sleep.

“Trudy made me feel safe. Her voice, her song, they made me feel as if I mattered,” my mother told me one night from the post of the rocking chair in my bedroom before breaking into her own version of the lullaby.

But almost as important as music to Trudy and my mother were movies. Every Saturday, Trudy accompanied my mother to the cinema. Oftentimes, they attended a double feature. They were nondiscriminatory and ran to whatever was playing, loving virtually all genres: romantic dramas, whodunits, adventure capers. The darkened theaters introduced my mother to worlds she increasingly longed to be a part of: far-off lands, mysteri­ous castles, happy homes. She may not have seen as much as she would have liked of her parents in those early years, but she saw plenty of Shirley Temple and Cary Grant and Joseph Cotton and Fred Astaire. They became her heroes, her surrogate friends. For a few hours she forgot about her cold house and quarreling siblings.

If my mother loved one thing more than movies during her childhood, it was books. Her most treasured possessions in her early years were her hardbound editions of beloved classics: Little Women, The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe. She ad­ditionally adored the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Bobbsey Twins series. Most of the books were gifts from Aurelia. Money strapped though the Diener family was, my mother often said her literary-minded mother would have let her starve physically before she allowed her to starve intellectually. Every Christmas, a brand-new beautiful book was among her presents. Other books in my mother’s little library were given to her by Trudy and Dad Diener and her aunt Peg. All were kept in places of honor beside and beneath her bed.

“In books,” my mother always liked to remind me, “anything—and I mean anything!—is possible: adventure, peace, stability. And love. Definitely love.”

“When I read Little Women for the first time, I wanted with all of my heart to be Jo,” she said to me years later, reflecting upon the classic tale’s spunky heroine, one of four girls. “What I wouldn’t have given to have had the love of Laurie. Then the professor. And Marmie.”

“Marmie?” I’d asked, confused. Laurie, I knew, was the wealthy boy who lived next door to Jo and shared her sense of adventure and mischief. The professor was the man she’d fallen in love with in New York City over mutual passions for literature and theater. But Marmie?

“Marmie wasn’t one of Jo’s boyfriends,” I said, gently correct­ing her. “She was Jo’s mother.”

“That’s right,” said my mother. At that point, a cloud passed over her face.

“Mother or not, Marmie was one of Jo’s true loves. Every bit as important to her, if not more so, than men. Such a tremendous mother, don’t you think? Loving her girls, taking care of each of them, encouraging Jo to write the way she did?”

I realized then that from the time she was old enough to read, Anne Diener had craved the affection and approval of a mother she couldn’t seem to reach every bit as much as she did the un­conditional love of a dashing suitor. Trouble was, she didn’t have a clue as to how to go about obtaining either.