The Day I Died

By Natalie Peck

I was born with the name David DeLuca. I’m a woman. My grandfather picked my name before my parents were even married. My grandmother ran our family The Way Grandfather Would Have Wanted. She told us how to dress, where to go to school, how to act, how to think, and what to believe.
When I was still in elementary school, I fell in love with my husband-to-be, Willard Halloran. When I was eighteen, we eloped. This is the story of the day I died.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Electric Scroll
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781946888068

Natalie Peck

Natalie Peck lives in Gilbert, Arizona with her family and a thousand romance novels. She enjoys dining from her good china by candle-light, especially when the special guests are her husband and children. She loves to hear from her readers, and promises to answer every email.

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Natalie Peck

Copyright 2021, The Electric Scroll

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by The Electric Scroll. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher. For information contact The Electric Scroll, 745 N. Gilbert Rd. Ste 124 PMB 197, Gilbert, Arizona, 85234.

The characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and entirely in the imagination of the reader.

Cover Image by mangojuicy via Shutterstock. Used by license.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

The Day I Died

About the Author

Books by Natalie Peck

Connect with me online

Foreword

This is the life story of a fictional woman, David Halloran, whose masculine name was mandated by her grandfather, but whose friends call her Viddie. She was raised Catholic, and only went searching for another religion as an adult. Viddie was born in 1933; this story begins when she is eighteen, in 1951. There have been many changes in the Catholic church since that time, but for historical accuracy some of their older rules are used in this book. For example, in 1951, while the Catholic church recognized legal marriages between non-Catholics as valid, they did not recognize a marriage between two Catholics as valid unless it was performed by a priest. This rule changed in 1988.

Catholic mass was still being performed in Latin until the early-to-mid 1960s, so it is reasonable to assume that other church business would also be conducted in Latin.

Although annulments and excommunications were rare in the early 1950s, it was within the rules and doctrines of the Catholic church at that time that they could be used as punishments in the way I have described. Those rules shifted and were much relaxed in 1988, nearly forty years after these fictional events.

I do not intend any disrespect to the Catholic church in writing this book. I've tried to be careful to show that the disruptions come to Viddie and Willard's life mostly through the prejudices of Viddie's grandmother, using the tools she has at hand: her influence over their bishop through her deceased husband's connections and the rules then in place within the Catholic church.

One

I suppose the entire story begins with my death. Or maybe it ends there, I'm not really sure. But more about that later.

First, the vital facts. I'm the fourth-born child of my parents, and according to the dictates of my grandfather's will, I was named David. My twin sister, just a few minutes older than me, was christened Joseph. My grandfather planned that my mother would produce a whole pile of boys and had chosen the names for the first six of us. All male, all biblical; and as we lived in his house with my grandmother now at the helm, mother did as her father had decreed – to do otherwise would have rendered her homeless.

I turned eighteen in early May of 1951, and two weeks later graduated with honors from Our Lady of Sorrows, the private Catholic high school nearest grandfather's mansion. Our family was Italian by birth, and Catholic by grandfather's decree. Mother had told me when I was twelve that I must make up my own mind what I actually believed, only I was never to speak anything but the pure Catholic line to my grandmother, the nuns at school, and the Bishop at church – to preserve my father's job and our nice apartments in my grandfather's home.

Monday morning, three days after graduation, I dressed carefully, and packed my suitcase even more carefully. I'd stolen my birth certificate from my mother's room last week. I'd told my mother I wanted to frame my high school diploma, so I hung on to it after they'd handed it to me. I'd packed the pair of documents, along with my most prized possessions, in a school book bag, and handed it over to Willard for safekeeping in case my mother searched my suitcase or purse. There was no way I could justify taking those to a non-existent summer camp, but I'd need them where I was really going.

It was difficult having to keep my secrets from Josie, but it would be easier for her in the long run to be able to honestly tell Grandmother she didn't know where I was. We'd been inseparable when we were young, but the older I'd gotten, the more secrets I'd had to keep about how I really felt, and that had put an emotional gulf between me and the rest of my family. I wasn't particularly close to anyone anymore, except for Willard.

I had to fill most of my suitcase with underthings and the sun dresses, blouses, and long shorts that were allowed at girls' camp, but I put in one nice dress, to wear to Mass on Sundays, I told mother, along with a pair of nylons and my good shoes. For travelling, I wore another nice dress, along with a fashionable hat and white gloves, and the new pearl necklace I'd received as a birthday gift, because, as my grandmother had told me as she slipped the double strand around my neck, at eighteen, you are now a woman, and every woman should have a nice pearl necklace.

Mother inspected the contents of my suitcase, disappeared for a moment or two, and returned with a second, smaller case that she filled with a packet of writing materials, toiletries, and a flashlight. I said nothing. I wasn't about to tell her I wasn't going to any sort of camp.

Now, you'll write, won't you, Viddie? Mother said as she snapped the case shut. My name had been shortened from the masculine 'David' to the more feminine 'Viddie' within hours of my birth, just as my twin's 'Joseph' had been whacked off to 'Josie'.

I'll write, mother, when I can, but the Sisters at school said the camp is remote and doesn't have regular mail service. You're likely to go a while without hearing.

Where is this camp?

I'm not sure, exactly. Only that Sister Agnes arranged everything, and that I'd be met off the bus. It's a camp for underprivileged children in Scranton, and the nuns have everything all arranged.

And this is a paying job? she asked. She seemed suddenly suspicious of every detail I'd already told her, but maybe I only heard the suspicion because most of it was lies.

Yes, I'll be getting three dollars a week, plus my 'tent' and board, as a junior counselor at the camp. I'll be working with children and nuns from Scranton.

And you'll be back in the second week of August, ready to start your college classes on the seventeenth?

Yes, Mother. I'll see you in August. But I'm not saying which August that would be. Does that make it less of a lie?

Mother gave me a long, tight hug. I savored her scent. I wouldn't be seeing her again for a long time. She finally stepped back from the hug and handed me my round-trip bus ticket to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Don't lose the second half of this. And if you need anything, call me collect.

I put the ticket in my purse, snapped it shut, and hung it off my left arm.

I won't lose the ticket, I'll call you if I need anything, and…I love you.

I took the two cases downstairs and handed them to Hawkins, our family's chauffeur, then followed him out to the car. I was mildly surprised that mother hadn't decided to come to the bus station to see me off, but then, I suppose she wouldn't be caught dead in a bus station. People like my family always travelled by train, or car. Only poor people took the bus. People like I was about to become.

Two

I got off the bus at the first station, when we stopped in New Jersey to take on more people, and was met by the love of my life, Willard Halloran. I asked the driver to get my larger case from under the bus, and he said he couldn't, as it had been checked through to Scranton. I hadn't been counting on that problem, so I consulted with my partner in crime. He felt the easiest way to manage things, and the best way not to be remembered later, was for him to simply buy a ticket to Scranton, and we'd change routes later.

He was shortly sitting beside me on the bus, as we began the journey of our lifetime. Between taking all the back roads and stopping every half hour to change passengers and their luggage, it took us half the day to get to Scranton and claim my other suitcase. We went to the counter and I cashed in the return half of my ticket. I tried to hand Willard the money, because in my experience, men were in charge of the money. He wouldn't take it. He dug into the book bag and brought out two envelopes and handed them to me. One was the envelope with the money I'd saved for the last two years. I peeked inside the other one; it was also full of money.

We are to be married, Willard said, and in my mind, that makes us partners. Business partners divide up the work; each one does different things, but they work together to make everything turn out right. In my family, my father is in charge of making the money, and my mother is in charge of managing it. Dad doesn't care what she spends it on, so long as the bills are paid and everyone's fed and clothed. It's been working for them for nearly thirty years, and I can't think of a better way to split up the money responsibilities, can you?

I shook my head. In my family, grandmother makes all the decisions. For everything, and everybody. It's not a good way to do anything. I like your way better.

Willard laughed. Partnership is always preferable to dictatorship. Put the money in your purse, and let's get lunch and buy our tickets. There's no way anyone can make me believe that a woman who gets As in algebra can't handle money.

Willard hefted the book bag and the two larger, heavier cases, while I picked up the smaller cases. We ate in the bus station café, and then bought tickets for Philadelphia. They didn't ask to see any identification, so I gave my name as Lavidia Halloran; not too different from my soon-to-be married name, and I could still go by Viddie. In Philadelphia, we bought tickets for Las Vegas, and several long days later, on June fourth, I used the bus station ladies' room to change from the dress I'd travelled in to my other good dress.

We left our luggage in a locker at the bus station and walked to the nearest wedding chapel. There, we showed our birth certificates, signed our proper names on the papers they gave us, and became Mr. and Mrs. Halloran.

Though we met in Catholic school when we were twelve, Willard was from a working-class Irish-Catholic family, and my wealthy, 'mafia-class' Italian-Catholic family barely tolerated him in a group of other friends from school. They would never have allowed the marriage no matter how much we loved each other. Willard and I had been saving every penny and planning this trip since we became secretly engaged at my sixteenth birthday party.

We walked back to the bus station, retrieved our luggage, and bought another pair of tickets for Mesa, Arizona, the nearest bus station to Gilbert, where Willard's cousin Hal lived.

We got off the bus at six-thirty in the evening, though the sun was still quite high above the horizon. The June heat slammed into us like a sledgehammer.

We looked for a phone to call Willard's cousin Hal but the only one we could find had the handset cut off it. The man at the ticket desk said he couldn't let us use his phone. Willard asked him where the nearest phone was that we could use, and he said he didn't know what businesses would still be open, that might let us use their lobby phones.

We asked him other questions and discovered that although Mesa had a couple of bus lines, none of them would take us any closer to Gilbert, because the few buses Mesa had all shut down at six, operating just long enough to help workers get home when their shops closed at five. If we wanted a taxi, we'd have to pay an extra surcharge plus the miles to get one to come all the way here from the airport in Phoenix – a goodly twelve miles away.

There didn't seem to be any other way to get to Hal's, except to start walking and hope we could find a phone along the way. He really did try to be helpful, pulling out a map and showing us the route we needed to take. He even lent us a piece of paper and pencil to write down the turnings and wished us the best of luck.

It was only about seven miles to Hal's house, so it wasn't really all that far. If we took it slow, we should be able to make it in about three hours or so.

We hefted our suitcases and walked through the station and out into the city. After consulting the directions we'd obtained, we set off. Four suitcases and a book bag isn't much to start a new life with, even counting the two hundred eighty-four dollars and eleven cents we'd saved up from Willard's newspaper route, my babysitting, and summer jobs we'd taken. That was what was left of our nest egg after we'd paid for the bus tickets, food along the way, and the marriage license and officiant.

We'd reckoned without the heat. Hefting four suitcases and a small book bag through heat in June, in Mesa, Arizona, is no small feat. We had to walk, hauling all our possessions through the horrible heat. No, horrible wasn't a bad enough word for it. I could almost feel each pore, standing open, producing sweat one small bead at a time. The only reason we weren't dripping was because the air was so starved for the moisture we were producing that it stole each droplet before it could even fully exit our skin.

My head was pounding, and when we'd gone about two miles, I had to rest. I sank onto the scorching hot wood bench of a bus stop, and Willard set off across a parking lot producing visible heat waves to see if the grocery store was open, and had either a phone, or something cold to drink that might be purchased.

He returned nearly half an hour later with the news. Although the store was closed, the pay phone outside worked. He'd gotten hold of Hal's wife Caroline and she was on her way to pick us up. Willard also handed me a cold bottle of soda from the vending machine next to the phone.

I drank the soda down, and immediately broke out into instantly evaporated sweat. Then I started feeling queasy, and I was retching up the soda into the gutter as Caroline