The Promise by Gary Earl Ross

The Promise by Gary Earl Ross

          However experienced in matters of the flesh, no man forgets his wedding night.  For some, that first intimacy after the exchange of vows is the final passage into true manhood–even if those vows are later abandoned.  For others, it is a time of apprehension, a pivotal moment whose success or failure may determine the course of the entire marriage.  For the lucky, it is the start of an enduring adventure fueled by passion, love, and hope.  But for Charlie Jackson, his wedding night was the beginning of the end of his life.

& & &

          In 1942, fresh out of a Philadelphia high school and armed with a business prep diploma, Charlie had joined the U.S. Army.  His clerical skills, particularly his astonishing 100 word-per-minute typing speed, kept him stateside and out of the menial duties generally assigned to black enlistees in those days.  He spent the last fifteen months of the war in a Washington office, and it was in a diner half a mile from that office that he first met Ivy.

          Ivy was tall and big-boned and had ginger skin that sparkled in incandescent light.  She had the well-muscled legs of a career waitress and moved with a self-assurance that Charlie found appealing.  Watching the black seams of her stockings cling to her calves as she walked was like watching a demonstration of fluid geometry.  Many nights Charlie lingered over his coffee and pie just to see her pass.  By the time the Allied Invasion had begun half a world away, he was smitten.

          The courtship was of moderate length, highlighted by Sunday strolls along the Potomac, with Charlie in full dress uniform, and eventually by sweaty nights on the Murphy bed in the room he rented.  In March of 1945, while Allied bombers were saturating Tokyo with fire, he proposed.  When Charlie’s hitch was up, soon after VJ Day, they exchanged vows in a private civil ceremony one Friday morning and caught a train that deposited them in New York City that evening.

          It was there, in a small uptown hotel with six bulbs missing from its corner-mounted sign, that Charlie made the promise.

& & &

          The promise followed three feverish entanglements which had left both Charlie and Ivy spent.  Drifting near sleep, Charlie felt happier than he had since his childhood.  The life which stretched before him was pathless and indistinct but relentlessly joyful.  In later years, recalling his wedding night, he was sure he had been smiling as he slipped into sleep; he was sure because he remembered how heavily his mouth muscles had fallen when he realized Ivy was crying.

          Rousing, he turned to her.  “What’s the matter, baby?”  He slid an arm across her belly.  “What is it?”  His fingers stroked the bare skin of her side, coaxing an answer.

          And the answer poured out of her, urgent and unstoppable.  Between sobs, she revealed that she had been married before but had been unable to tell him earlier.  Now that they were married, however, she could no longer keep it a secret; he had to know everything about her or they would have no chance together.  For his part, Charlie soothed her, reassured her. “It’s okay,” he said.  “I don’t care.”  Divorce was nothing shameful, he thought, and his folks back in Philly never needed to know.

          “I was just a girl with no family left after my grandmother died,” she said.  “Thomas was old enough to be my father and said he’d take care of me.  But he treated me like trash.  He beat me.  He beat me real bad.”

          Charlie stroked her and kissed her, at last understanding the scar above her left eye and the cigarette burn mark on the back of her right hand and the bony protrusion of a mishealed fracture on her left wrist.  He wondered which of the other marks and scars he could chart on this body he had come to know so well might be attributed to this monster from her past.  “Baby, you don’t need to worry,” he said softly.  “I’ll never do anything like that to you.”  He inhaled the smell of her, the hair grease and perfume and sexual sweat.  “Any man does that to a woman beautiful as you…”  Charlie swallowed in anger.  “If he was here right now, I’d shoot him.”

          Then, in the iciest whisper Charlie would ever hear, Ivy said, “I already did.”

          It was back in the South, she explained, after she had fled their small town in northeast Mississippi.  Thomas had tracked her to New Orleans, where she worked in the kitchen of an old hotel.  He was a big man, the color of delta dust, and had hands the size of melons.  He was waiting for her outside work one afternoon, said he’d come to claim what was rightfully his.  He kept his right hand in the side pocket of his suit jacket, the pocket in which he’d always carried his gun, and motioned her into his truck.

          They were out of Louisiana, a couple of hundred miles into rural Mississippi, when the right rear tire blew.  Leaving his jacket on the seat, Thomas went to change the tire by the light of a bull’s-eye lantern. Ivy slipped the big black revolver out of the jacket pocket and climbed out onto the grass beside the road.  On one knee and trying to fit the parts of the jack together in the lantern light, Thomas snarled, “I tole ya ta wait in th’ truck.”  Without a word, Ivy raised the gun and shot him once in the chest.

          The gun recoiled, the barrel splitting her upper lip, and she never saw Thomas topple onto his shoulder in the grass.  She staggered but did not fall.  After a few seconds she moved toward the lantern to check the body.  Once she was certain that her husband was dead, she took whatever cash he had, the lantern, and a horse blanket from the truckbed.  Then she struck off down the road, running whenever she had the strength and the wind.

          “Been runnin’ ever since,” she said to Charlie, “wonderin’ when the law’s gonna knock on my door.”

          Charlie was quiet for a long time, his mind turning.  He lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling and Ivy nestled in the crook of his arm.  When at last he spoke, his voice was hushed, as if he feared someone were listening on the other side of the wall.

          “How long ago’d all this happen?”

          “Almos’ four years.”

          “What happened to the gun?”

          “I buried it in the woods, maybe five miles from…Thomas.”

          “You leave anything in the truck?  Purse, gloves–anything?”

          “No.”

          The fingers of the arm which cradled her tightened on her bicep.  “You ever tell anybody else what you just told me?”

          “No.”

          He squeezed her arm tighter.  “Nobody?”

          Wincing, she shook her head.

          “All right then.”  Charlie relaxed his grip and exhaled for what seemed a full minute.  He remained silent for what felt like hours.  Finally, he turned to Ivy and said, “If they ain’t found you yet, I don’t see how they can.  You got a different name now and you’ll be in a different state and there’s nothing to tie you to him.  As far as the law’s concerned, it was probably a thief that done it.  Anyhow, since when is Mississippi law enforcement gonna put all their time and energy into solving the roadside murder of one colored man?”

          Ivy said nothing, her eyes glistening as she listened to Charlie.

          “Since they can’t find you, it’s best that we never speak of this again.  Understand?”

          She nodded.

          “You can’t never tell nobody else.  I don’t care how close a girlfriend she is or how much the preacher tells you to bring all your sins to God through him.  You make your own peace with God, right here and right now.  Even if I die and you take another husband, you can’t tell him about Thomas.  They never close the books on murder, even if the victim is colored.  One letter or telephone call could put you in the electric chair.”

          Ivy’s small voice bore into him like a diamond drill:  “How do I know you won’t get mad at me and turn me in?”

          “Because I love you and I’ll always love you.  I swear to you now, on that love and on my mother’s life and on anything I hold sacred, that I will never, ever, mention this again.”

          Apparently satisfied she had shifted her burden onto other shoulders, Ivy soon slept.

          Charlie, however, was still awake at dawn.

& & &

          Charlie and Ivy settled in Philadelphia to be near his family and friends.

          At his mother’s insistence, they had a second wedding ceremony in the Blessed Trinity Baptist Church, where the family had been members since Charlie’s older sister Edith was two.  Halfway through the ceremony Charlie noticed the porcelain-skinned angels and porcelain-skinned Christ in the mural above the altar were staring at him with their deep blue eyes.  He faltered in repeating his vows after Reverend Portee, and the smiles that split the faces of the guests showed they sympathized with his nervousness.  Later, he tried to convince himself his fumbling was simply the result of wedding jitters.  But for the next several months, whenever he went inside Blessed Trinity, he felt the discomfort of divine scrutiny and a growing sensation that every eye which met his could read the secret his held.

          Eventually, he gave up going to church, saying all the years of Sunday school followed by morning worship followed by afternoon worship followed by evening worship had finally taken their toll on him.  “I’m churched out,” he told his indignant mother, who continued to take Ivy with her every Sunday.

          Charlie’s father worked for the transit authority and had offered to help Charlie get a job.  But Charlie declined and took his Honorable Discharge down to the main Post Office, where he found work as a mail clerk.  At first, sorting letters as they moved past on a conveyor did not appeal to Charlie but the federal benefits certainly did.  After a few months, however, he was surprised to find he liked his job and, unlike many of his co-workers, looked forward to his eight-hour shift.  The constant reading, sorting, and slotting gave him little time to think.

          It was his time away from work that he found most stressful, the long hours seated across from Ivy at the dinette table in the their small apartment or perpendicular to her in their parlor as they listened to the radio.  Sometimes he caught himself staring at her, staring at her face and wondering what thoughts lay behind it, staring at her hands as they darned socks or served food or dragged a hot straightening comb through her hair.  He tried to forget that those large but graceful hands had murdered a man.  In those days before the burning bed legal defense and the battered wife hotline, the reason seemed less important than the killing itself.  Ivy had killed in cold blood, and sometimes when she touched him, Charlie was powerless to stop the small but perceptible shudder that rose from deep within him.

          The passion they had shared before their marriage had all but disappeared by their first anniversary.  Nevertheless, Ivy seemed content to be a part of his family and community and expressed no displeasure at the infrequency of their time together.  Charlie, who had slept only fitfully since his wedding night, found it increasingly difficult to sleep at all.  When he closed his eyes, he sometimes saw Ivy in hotel kitchen whites, firing a revolver at a dark man kneeling in grass.  When he slept long enough to dream, sometimes he was the man in the grass, his hand almost snapping the jack handle as he waited for the bullet to punch into his chest.

          It was about this time one of the radio crime dramas introduced him to a term that would haunt him for the rest of his life.  “Not telling what you know,” Mr. District Attorney had said to a reluctant witness, “makes you an accessory after the fact.  You could serve time for that.”

          Charlie’s sleeplessness had long since shown in his face and posture.  He looked to be in his mid-thirties instead of his early twenties, and his shoulders were stooped and rounded, as if something heavy were tied around his neck, making it difficult to stand straight.  By their second anniversary his distress had manifested itself in his personality.  He became ill-tempered and impatient, having little to do with people outside his family.  Childhood friends who had been so happy to see him return to Philadelphia no longer visited.  Despite how charming a hostess Ivy proved to be, Charlie was rude and uncommunicative and seemed to find no joy in conversation or reminiscence.  One of the last old friends to visit had said within Charlie’s hearing, “Why, he can’t even look you in the eye no more.”  In photographs taken by big, boxy cameras at family gatherings, he looked more and more like an old man.

          Before long he began to feel vulnerable and exposed under the gazes of his parents and sister.  Everybody thought it was time for a grandchild, and Edith consoled Ivy on her inability to conceive.  Charlie’s mother thought her baby looked and acted sick and urged him to see a doctor or at least try Lydia Pinkham’s Tonic for his health.  His brother-in-law John tried to interest him in bowling, and his father continued to invite him fishing, no matter how many times Charlie refused to go.  Both his parents begged him to return to the church, to “let God handle whatever is botherin’ you.”

          Instead, Charlie filed for a transfer, and he moved Ivy to Buffalo.

          Things improved for a time.  Ivy actually became pregnant but lost the baby in her third month.  For the first and only time in his life, Charlie drank himself stupid, his last thought before sinking into oblivion, We killed our baby too.  He woke in a panic in a strange bar, uncertain of where he was or what he had said.  He never so much as inhaled alcohol again.

          The marriage continued another twelve years, until Ivy, who never indicated she understood the disintegration of her husband, could take no more.  They had no friends, no children, no life, she said before leaving.  Amid Charlie’s profound desolation of spirit, they didn’t even have each other.  They ended their relationship without rancor, neither of them breaking the promise they had made to each other on their wedding night.  Ivy remained in Buffalo.  Charlie transferred back home, passing up an opportunity to take a middle management job–which would have used his clerical skills–for assignment to the Philadelphia dead letter department.

          Charlie worked diligently, sorting for destruction those pieces of mail which had lost their destinations and couldn’t be returned.  There was something satisfying about envelopes and bundles full of promises that would be incinerated before they incriminated anyone, secrets he could never share because doing so much as peeking at a mislabeled postcard could cost him his job.  He could never penetrate the public’s secrets, and as long as he was in the dead letter office, the public could never penetrate his.

          Charlie bought a small house in Germantown and cultivated roses and geraniums in the back yard.  He grew more reclusive as time passed, more distant from his family.  After his parents died in the Seventies, he cut off all contact with his sister, who had already given up hope he would respond to her phone calls with any regularity.  Charlie never remarried and seldom traveled or dined out or went to movies or concerts or plays, even after his retirement in 1985.  In fact, his was a singularly unremarkable life, its one consistency the ascetic anonymity reserved for the penitent and the hidden.

          Charlie’s story would have ended, without postscript, upon his death from natural causes in 1994–if not for Bob Lattimore.  Lattimore had sorted mail beside Charlie in Buffalo and had been the closest thing he had ever had to an on-the-job friend.  For years Lattimore had used the postal service to keep track of all his old co-workers’ addresses so he could send them his annual Christmas card.  No matter where he had lived since leaving Buffalo, Charlie received Lattimore’s holiday greeting and family update letter, which he briefly answered four or five times.  It was in a scribbled addendum from Lattimore, who’d run into her in a supermarket, that Charlie learned Ivy had remarried in 1962 and had two sons.  It was in a telephone call from Lattimore that he learned of her death in mid-August thirty years later.

& & &

          Unaccustomed as he was to traveling, Charlie responded to a strange mixture of grief and curiosity and undertook a trip to Buffalo, to attend the funeral discreetly.

          Tired from his flight and stiff from the low bucket seat in his rented Escort, he sat in the back of the church.  The service was sad and lasted nearly an hour and a half, church member after weeping church member coming forward to tell of the kindness and unselfish faith of Sister Ivy Wright.  Except for his parents’ funerals, Charlie had not entered a church since his announced withdrawal from Blessed Trinity so many years ago.  Grateful the casket was closed throughout, he averted his eyes from the stained glass faces which stared down at him from either side of the sanctuary.  At the end, he dutifully filed past when the lid was opened to give mourners a last glimpse of the deceased.

          The cancer had left her angular and drawn, but she was still Ivy, beautiful in her wrinkles and resplendent in her pale blue deaconess dress and hat studded with mock pearls.  Charlie looked down at her for only an instant, just long enough to whisper, “I never breathed a word, Ivy.  Never.”

          Turning away and shuffling back toward his seat, he saw her family in the front pew, her sons holding their wives’ hands, her  grandchildren fidgeting–and her husband, a light-brown-skinned man with a narrow chest, high forehead, and pouched red-rimmed eyes.  Locking gazes with Charlie, Lawrence Wright caught his breath and seemed momentarily dazed.  He doesn’t know me, Charlie thought.  He’s trying to place my face.

          After the service, Charlie wheeled his rental into the line of cars bound for Forest Lawn and followed Ivy to her final rest.  The graveside rites were brief.  At the close, Charlie passed the half-lowered casket, tossing onto it the handful of rose petals he’d scooped from the undertaker’s pass-around basket.  As he moved toward his car, a slender young man in a black suit–one of Ivy’s sons, he realized with a shiver–intercepted him and said, “Excuse me, sir.  My father would like to speak with you.”  He gestured toward the open rear door of the family limousine across the road from the gravesite.  Stunned, Charlie followed the man to the black Cadillac, slid into a jumpseat, and found himself face to face with Lawrence Wright.

          No one else was in the car.  After the door closed behind him, Charlie glanced over his shoulder and out the tinted window.  He could see both of Ivy’s sons standing by the door, as though guarding it.  He turned back to Wright.

          Wright was studying him.  “It is you, isn’t it?” he said finally.  “Charlie Jackson.”  He sucked in his teeth and shook his head, frowning.  “I recognized you from a picture Ivy had of you.  You look the same–except older, a lot older.”

          Charlie swallowed.  “Ivy kept my picture?”

          “I found it in her things one day soon after we were married and she told me all about you,” Wright said.  “You got some nerve coming here like this.”

          Now Charlie looked confused.  “I don’t understand.  Ivy and me, we parted on good terms.  We–“

          “Parted on good terms?”  Color rushed into Wright’s cheeks.  “Why you lying son of a–”  He was shaking, his fists clenched.  “All these years, all these years!”

          Charlie felt a spasm of fear in his chest but forced himself to remain calm.  “What are you talking about?”

          “All these years, thinking you were dead.  It tortured her.  Tortured me.  Never able to talk about it and always waiting for somebody to knock on the door.”  Wright looked Charlie squarely in the eyes.  “I hate you for what you did to her.  I’ve never hated anybody much as I’ve hated you.”

          Charlie stiffened.  In a moment of stark, paralytic clarity, he saw Wright–truly saw him–for the first time.  He saw how creased and haggard Wright’s face was, how stooped his shoulders, how weary and circumscribed his life.  My God, Charlie thought as Wright looked away.  Seeing him is almost like staring into a mirror.  Charlie felt tears in the corners of his eyes.

          Wright hissed, still unaware of their kinship but noticing the tears behind Charlie’s glasses.  Abruptly, the rage seemed to seep out of him like air out of a balloon.  His natural coloring returned, and he slumped against the back of the seat as if sinking into a pool of liquid leather.  Wright took several deep breaths, to regain himself.  Then he whispered, “Just answer me one question.  What happened after Ivy shot you and left you for dead on that road in Mississippi?”

          For a long while Charlie was silent, uncertain whether his tears had sprung from grief over all he had lost or unexpected redemption.  Finally, he lifted his bifocals, dragged the back of a hand across his eyes, and reached for the door handle.  “I told them it was a thief,” he said, his left foot hitting the gravel.  “A thief who took everything I had, and then I died.”

          Walking to his car slowly, Charlie held his head high and hoped his cheeks would dry quickly in the August sun.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Gary Earl Ross 2025