A Girl Called Honey

Five

When Joshua Crawford was a little boy his name was not Joshua Crawford. The Joshua part had been with him all his life, but the Crawford part had become his when he made out his diploma a few days before graduation from PS 105 on Hester Street.

The teacher, a sad-faced man with fallen arches and red-rimmed eyes, went through the traditional pre-diploma rites of New York’s lower East side. “You may now, for probably the last time, change your names without the formality of a court order,” he intoned. “This is the last chance for all Isaacs to become Irving, for all Moshes to become Morris, for all Samuels to become Sidney.” And all the Isaacs and Moshes and Samuels were quick to take advantage of the opportunity, the last chance, never quite realizing that all they were accomplishing was the strange metamorphosis of Irving and Morris and Sidney from English to Jewish names.

Joshua Cohen liked his first name. It was his — his father and mother had given it to him and he wanted to keep it. But he had no such feelings toward his surname, which was properly neither his nor his father’s. When his father had migrated from Russia the Immigration Officer had stood, pen poised, and asked him what his last name was.

“Schmutschkevitsch,” said Joshua’s father.

The Immigration Officer didn’t make the mistake of attempting to find out or guess how Schmutschkevitsch might be spelled. He asked, instead, where Joshua’s father had been born. It was convenient to use the place of birth as a last name, far more convenient than worrying over the possible spelling of Schmutschkevitsch.

“Byessovetrovsk,” said Joshua’s father. The Immigration Officer, who sincerely wished that all these Russian Jews had had the good sense to be born in Moscow or Kiev or Odessa or something simple like that, closed his eyes for a moment and wiped perspiration from his forehead.

“Your name’s Cohen,” he declared. “Next!”

When Josh Crawford walked off the little stage in the small auditorium on Hester Street with his diploma in his hand, he felt thoroughly comfortable with his new name. Some of his classmates tried to make him a little less comfortable — it was all well and good to change Isaac to Irving, but the boy who changed Cohen to Crawford was taking a pretty big step. Josh ignored them, and in the fall he registered at Stuyvesant High School as Joshua Crawford and nobody saw anything wrong in the new name.

Even before the graduation ceremonies at PS 105, Joshua Crawford’s life was mapped out and set on its course. He would go to Stuyvesant and graduate at or near the top of his class. From there he would move on to City College where Ivy League educations were dispensed at no cost to the recipient.

Meanwhile he would work — afternoons after school, evenings, and Saturdays. His mother would not approve of his working on the Sabbath but this could not be helped, for law school was not tuition-free and he had already decided that he would go to law school immediately upon graduation from CCNY. In order to do this he would have to have money saved up, and in order to save up money he would have to work, and if Sabbath observance had to suffer that was just one of those things. Even at the age of nineteen, Josh Crawford had come to the profound realization that the only way to hold your head up and enjoy life in America was to have as much money as possible. America was filled to overflowing with money and he was out to get his.

He got it. It was not easy and it was not accomplished without work and sacrifice, but Josh was a born worker and a willing sacrificer. He was by no means the smartest boy at Stuyvesant but he finished far ahead of most of the brighter boys. Many of them were dreamers while he was a planner and this made a big difference. He studied what had to be studied and worked over what had to be worked over and his marks were always very high.

He worked afternoons pushing a garment truck on Seventh Avenue for a dress manufacturer who had lived on Essex Street just a block or two away from where Josh was born. The work was hard and the pay was small, but while he did not earn much money he spent hardly any at all. He worked Saturdays wrapping parcels at Gimbel’s, and he saved that money, too.

When he went to City as a pre-law major his studies were correspondingly harder and he had to give up the afternoon job. But it didn’t matter — by the time he had completed three years at City, he had enough money and enough academic credits to enter law school at New York University.

Law school, clerkship, bar exams, flunkey work. Junior partner, member of the firm.

Hester Street, 14^th Street, Central Park West, New Rochelle, Dobbs Ferry.

$15-a-week, $145-a-week, $350-a-month, $9550-a-year, $35,000-a-year.

His life was a series of triumphs, triumphs represented by titles and addresses and numbers. The setbacks, such as they were, were negative rather than positive disappointments. He never failed at anything he set out to do, not in the long run, and his few setbacks were in point of time. If it took him a year longer to become a junior partner, an extra few years to become a member of the firm, if his salary (or, when he was a member of Taylor, Lazarus and Crawford, his average annual income) moved along more slowly than he wished, this was unfortunate but something swiftly corrected.

The apartment on 14^th Street was more private and more comfortable than the flat he had shared with his parents on the Lower East Side. The apartment on Central Park West was still more comfortable, as were in turn the house in New Rochelle and the larger and more desirable house in Dobbs Ferry.

Somewhere along the line he got married. Marriage never figured prominently in his plans. After a time it became professionally desirable, and when that happened a marriage broker in the old neighborhood went to work and came up with a wife for him.

The girl, Selma Kaplan, was neither homely nor attractive. Her reasons for marrying Josh paralleled his reasons for marrying her. She was at the perilous age where an unmarried girl was well on her way to becoming an old maid, an altogether unappealing prospect. Joshua Crawford was a young man with all the earmarks of success, a definite “good catch,” and as his wife she would have security, respect, and a small place in the sun.

They were married between 14^th Street and Central Park West, and a month or so before the junior partnership Selma Crawford was deflowered at a good midtown hotel and broken to saddle during a two-week honeymoon at a run-down resort in the Poconos. She was neither the best nor the worst woman Josh had slept with, just as she was neither the first nor the last, and her general lack of enthusiasm for sexual relations was cancelled out by her lack of distaste for the sex act.

She was a good cook, a good housekeeper, an adequate mother for Lewis and Sybil Crawford. The family’s living quarters were never untidy, the cupboard was never bare, and the children grew up without displaying any of the more obvious neuroses that Selma read about periodically in the books that were periodically being read on Central Park West.

Her life was her home, her children, and her female friends who lived lives much the same as her own. Her husband’s life was his work, his own advancement in the world, his business acquaintances. If you had asked Selma Crawford whether or not she loved her husband, she would have answered at once that she did; in private she might have puzzled over your question, might have been a bit disturbed by it. If you asked the same question of Josh Crawford he would probably answer in much the same way. He, however, would not puzzle over the question — it would be answered automatically and forgotten just as automatically the minute he had answered it.

Love, all things considered, had nothing to do with it. Joshua and Selma Crawford lived together, brought up children together, worked separately and together to achieve the Great American Dream. They enjoyed what any onlooker would have described as the perfect marriage.

That is, until Josh Crawford did a very strange thing, a thing which he himself was hard put to explain to himself. He might have blamed it on his age — he was forty-six — or on the fact that his professional advancement had more or less leveled off to an even keel. But wherever you place the blame, the action itself stands.

Joshua Crawford fell in love with a young prostitute named Honour Mercy Bane.

“Accredited Paper Goods,” said a female voice.

“This is Joshua Crawford.”

A pause. A name was checked in a file of 3 x 5 index cards. Then: “Good afternoon, Mr. Crawford. What can we do for you?”

“I’d like a shipment early this evening, if possible.”

“Certainly, Mr. Crawford. We’ve got a fresh shipment of 50-weight stock that just arrived at the warehouse a week ago. Good material in a red-and-white wrapping.”

“Fine,” Crawford said.

“You’ll want delivery at the usual address?”

“That’s right.”

“We can have the order to you by nine o’clock,” the voice said. “Will that be all right?”

“Fine,” said Crawford.

Crawford rang off, then called Selma in Dobbs Ferry and told her he’d be working late at the office. The call completed, he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The phone call to “Accredited Paper Goods” wasn’t particularly subtle, he thought. Fifty-weight stock in a red-and-white wrapping meant a fifty-dollar call girl with red hair and white skin, and by no stretch of the imagination could it have anything in the world to do with paper.

But the subterfuge did have a certain amount of value. It kept any law enforcement personnel from gathering anything other than circumstantial evidence over the phone, and it kept undesirable clients from getting through to the girls. Besides, he thought cynically, the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it all lent a certain air of excitement to the whole routine.

Crawford finished the cigarette and put it out. He was looking forward to the arrival of the shipment. It had been almost two months since he’d had any woman other than his wife and that was a long time, especially in view of the fact that it was a rare night indeed when he and Selma shared the same bed. He wasn’t a chaser the way so many of his friends were, didn’t want a young thing to make him feel young again, didn’t make a habit of seducing his friends’ wives or chasing down the young flesh that worked around the office.

He was a man who believed in buying what he wanted, and when he wanted a woman he bought one. The fifty dollars or so that it set him back for a woman was inconsequential to him and, in the long run, far cheaper than wining and dining a girl for the doubtful joy of seducing her free of charge. This way seemed far cleaner to him — you dialed a number, said some crap about a shipment of paper goods, had a good dinner at a good restaurant, and then went to your apartment on East 38^th Street.

The apartment, which cost him a little under two hundred dollars a month, was something which he had to have, anyway. There were enough nights when he had to work late legitimately, sometimes until two or three or even four in the morning before an important case, and at that hour it was a headache to look around for a hotel room and a pain in the ass to drive home to Dobbs Ferry. He’d had the apartment for better than five years now and it was a pleasure to have it, a pleasure to be able to run over there for a nap in the middle of the day if he was tired, and a pleasure to be able to have a girl there every once in a while.

He knocked off work a few minutes before five, had a pair of martinis in the bar across the street with Sid Lazarus, and had a good blood-rare steak and an after-dinner cigar at the steakhouse on the corner of 36^th and Madison. One of the junior partners had recently managed to become a father and the cigar was the result of the occasion; it was a damned fine Havana and Crawford smoked it slowly and thoughtfully. He took a long time over dinner and a longer time with the cigar, and it was almost eight-thirty when he took the elevator to the third floor of the apartment house on East 38^th Street.

The girl who arrived on the stroke of nine was young and lovely with chestnut hair and a full figure. They had a drink together and then they went to the bedroom where they took off their clothes and slipped into the comfortable double bed and made love all night long.

It had been better in Newport.

The thought was a disloyal one and Honour Mercy took a long look around her own apartment to get the thought out of her head. She and Richie had been sharing the apartment for almost two weeks now and it was a pleasure to look at it. It was easily the nicest place she had ever lived in her life.

Shortly after she and Marie had “gone to see a man about a whore,” Honour Mercy had learned that it was unnecessary to live in a rat-trap like the hotel on 47^th Street where they had taken a room. The man Marie had taken her to see had decided that Honour Mercy was too damned good-looking to waste her time streetwalking and had put her on call. Since she didn’t have to take men to her apartment but went either to theirs, or to a hotel room rented for the occasion, she didn’t have to live in the type of hotel that would let her earn her living on the premises. She could live wherever she could afford to live, and after a few days on the job she saw that she could afford to live a good deal better than she was living.

She earned roughly two hundred dollars the first week on the job and close to three hundred the second. If a man wanted her for the afternoon or evening it cost him fifty dollars, if he wanted her for a quickee it cost twenty-five, and half of what she was paid was hers to keep. The organization which employed her took care of everything — she had a phone at the apartment and they called her periodically, telling her just where to go and exactly what to do.

One day she had seven quickees in the course of the afternoon and evening. Another day she was paid to entertain an out-of-town buyer from noon until the following morning, accompanying him and another couple to dinner and a night club. That time she was paid an even hundred dollars. Then, too, there were days when she earned nothing at all, but with her half of the take, plus whatever tip a client wanted to give her, her take-home pay added up to a healthy sum.

As a result, there was no reason in the world for her and Richie to be living on West 47^th Street. It took her two days to decide this and a few more days to find the right apartment, but now she was settled in a first-floor three-room apartment in the West Eighties just a few doors from Central Park West. It might be pointed out irrelevantly that her apartment was right around the corner from the apartment in which Joshua and Selma Crawford had first set up housekeeping eighteen years ago.

And it was very nice apartment, she thought. Wall-to-wall carpeting on the floors, good furniture, a tile bathroom, a good-sized kitchen — all in all, it was a fine place to live.

Much better than the Casterbridge Hotel.

She shook her head angrily. Then why in the world did the thought keep creeping into her head that things were a lot better in Newport? It didn’t make sense, not with the nicer place she was living in and the nicer money she was earning.

The trouble was, things were so all-fired complicated. In Newport, things couldn’t be simpler. You got up and went to Madge’s house and went to work. You turned a certain amount of tricks and went home to Richie. You sat around, or maybe went to a movie or spent some time talking to Terri, and then you went to bed with Richie. In the morning you woke up and went to work, or in the evening you woke up and went to work, and either way it was the same every day, with the same place and the same people and the same thoughts in your head.

But not anymore. Now she was working in a different place every day, taking cabs to hotel rooms and apartments, working all different hours. And Richie wasn’t at the apartment all the time the way he was always at the hotel room in Newport. You’d think that with a nice apartment to stay in he’d be home all the time, but not Richie. She wondered where he was now, where he’d been spending all his time.

“You got a pimp?” Marie had asked her once. She had told her that she hadn’t, and then another time she had mentioned Richie.

“This the guy who’s your pimp?”

“No,” she said. “I told you I don’t have a pimp. He just lives with me.”

“He got a job?”

“No.”

“He lives on what you make?”

“That’s right.”

Marie laughed. “Honey,” she said, “I don’t know where the hell you’re from, or what the hell they call it in Newport, but you got a pimp, whether you know it or not.”

This sort of talk didn’t exactly bolster her morale. Honour Mercy knew what a pimp was, certainly. She knew that almost all the girls in the business had one. But she had never thought of Richie in just those terms. Oh, he fit the definition well enough. She supported him and he didn’t do any work at all, didn’t even look for work.

But...

Well, he couldn’t work. That was what she told herself, but it was harder to believe it in New York than it had been in Newport. He was about as safe in New York as a needle in a haystack, and no Air Police all the way from Scott Air Force Base were going to chase clear through to New York for him. But he still didn’t try to get a job.

She shook her head. No, she had to admit it was more that he didn’t want to work. Whenever she brought the subject up, he went into how it wasn’t safe, how they had his fingerprints on file and he couldn’t make a move without them getting on his trail. Each time he explained it to her, but each time the explanation became just that much less convincing. Why, he could get a job without getting his fingerprints taken. And he could surely be as safe on a job as he could walking all over the city and heaven-knows-what.

She paced around the apartment for a while, sat down, got up and paced some more. A good friend would help, she thought. Somebody like Terri, for instance. For a while she had thought that Marie would take Terri’s place, but with Marie being a Lesbian, things just didn’t work out that way. Whenever she was with Marie, the older woman would want to do things that Honour Mercy didn’t want to do, and the situation was strained on both sides. Now she hadn’t seen Marie in days and didn’t much care if she never saw her again.

She paced some more, sat some more, and started pacing again.

She kept walking and sitting until the phone rang and she was in business again.

While the cab carried her to 171 East 38^th Street, she wondered what kind of a man Mr. Crawford was that he wanted her again so soon. He was a very nice man — he tipped her ten dollars both of the times she had visited him at his apartment and never asked her to do anything that she didn’t like to do. He was good, too, and when she was with a man all night she had a chance to enjoy it if he was good. Sometimes this made her feel a little disloyal to Richie, but then she would tell herself that this was her work and it was no crime to enjoy your work.

But the thing about Mr. Crawford that she especially liked was that he didn’t make her feel bad. And that, when you came right down to it, was what made New York worse than Newport. In Newport you were just with a man for a few minutes and he didn’t have a chance to make you feel bad, but in New York you were with a man sometimes for the whole night — and with the out-of-town buyer about twenty hours — and when you were with a man that long, you usually felt bad by the time it was over.

Not from anything the men did. Not from anything they did or said, but from the way they felt toward you and the way you felt toward yourself when you were with them. When you were with a man that long, you couldn’t have sex all the time, and when you weren’t having sex you felt uncomfortable. It was hard to explain but it was there.

That was the good thing about Mr. Crawford. She never had felt uncomfortable with him, not either of those times. The second night she had been so at ease that, when they made love, she just closed her eyes and pretended to herself that she and Mr. Crawford were married. It was funny, and very weird, and afterward she felt guilty, but while they were doing it, it was very good for her, and it was even good afterward when they lay side by side in silence and he looked at her with his eyes gentle and his mouth smiling.

He was waiting for her when she got to the apartment. He opened the door for her, closed it behind her and took her coat. He led her to a chair, handed her a drink, and took a seat in a chair across the room from her.

“It’s good to see you,” he said. “How have you been, Honey?”

“All right.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “I just lost an important case.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I, but I expected it. Damn fool of a client didn’t have a leg to stand on, but he insisted on going to court. Some of them are so damned stupid they ought to be shot. They get the idea of suing for a few hundred thousand and the numbers get them intoxicated. They smell money they haven’t got a chance in the world of collecting, and the money-smell goes to their heads. I told the damn fool he couldn’t collect, but he was determined to go to court. What the hell — I figured we might as well get the fee as some shysters. But it’s a pain in the neck, Honey.”

“I can imagine.”

His face had been very serious and now it relaxed. “By the way,” he said, “do you call yourself anything besides Honey? It’s a hell of a name.”

She told him her name.

“Honour Mercy,” he echoed. “I like that. Has a good sound to it. You mind if I call you that instead of Honey?”

“Whatever you want, Mr. Crawford.”

He laughed, and after she realized how funny it was to be calling him Mr. Crawford, she laughed too. “My friends call me Josh,” he said. “Josh belongs in the same class with Honey as far as I’m concerned. Why don’t you try Joshua?”

“Joshua,” she said to herself, testing the name.

“The guy who fit the battle of Jericho.”

“And the walls came tumbling down.”

He nodded. “You know, there’s a rational explanation for that whole episode. If you find the right note for a certain object, the right vibration, and sound it long enough, the object’ll fall or crack or whatever the hell it does.”

She didn’t understand, so he went over the explanation in more detail, which wasn’t easy because he wasn’t too clear on just what he was saying. But they talked about the battle of Jericho, and the Bible in general, and Honour Mercy started suddenly when she realized that she hadn’t been thinking of the conversation as part of turning a trick. It was just two people talking, two friendly people in a pleasant apartment, and the real purpose of the visit had gotten lost in the shuffle.

When he had finished talking about vibrations and wave lengths and other sundry physical phenomena, there was a moment of silence and Honour Mercy realized that he couldn’t turn the conversation or the mood to sex now, that he was probably a little embarrassed and that it was up to her. She got halfway out of her chair, intending to go to him and embrace him and kiss him, but before she was on her feet he shook his head and she sank back into the chair.

“Let’s just talk, Honour Mercy.”

She nodded agreeably.

“I mean it,” he said. “I just want you to sit here and talk with me. For the moment, anyway.”

Normally she would have gone along with him. That was automatic — if a customer was paying for your time and just wanted to talk or watch a floor show or listen to music, that was his business. Marie had told her that quite frequently homosexuals engaged girls for the evening to kill rumors about themselves, that other men actually wanted no more than an evening’s companionship exclusive of sex. Already she had met men who liked to build themselves up by talking for hours before getting down to business.

But this time — perhaps the closeness she was beginning to feel for Crawford — made her ask: “Is that what you called me over for? To talk?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at him.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t have anything in mind one way or the other when I called the agency. Neither sex nor conversation. I felt a little disappointed about the case I had been working on and a bit annoyed over things in general and I simply wanted to see you.”

“All right.”

“I wanted somebody,” he said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to want somebody — not anybody specifically, but just somebody to relax with? I wanted to talk to somebody. Who could I talk to? My wife? I haven’t talked to her in years, just the usual where-did-you-go-what-did-you-do crap. My partners? With them I could talk law. That’s all we have in common — law. My kids? They’re good kids, fine kids. I don’t know ’em, but they’re good kids. If something happened to them it would kill me. I love them. But how in hell could I possibly talk to them? We wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” She didn’t say anything.

“Forty-six years,” he said. “Forty-six years and I’ve done fine not talking to anybody. Forty-six years and I haven’t missed it. So this afternoon I felt like talking for maybe the first time in forty-six years, and there wasn’t a soul I could talk to. It’s a hell of a thing.”

He lapsed into silence. She waited a minute and then said: “What do you want to talk about?”

“You talk. I’ve talked too damned much already.”

“What should I talk about?”

“I don’t really give a damn,” he said. “Talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about. Tell me what you eat for breakfast, or where you get your hair done, or who you like in the fifth at Tropical. I’ll just listen.”

She wondered what he was driving at. She thought that he was probably making some sort of a pitch, a private speech, a summation to a private jury. But he was a nice man and she liked him and so she started to talk.

She started with her childhood — perhaps because that’s an easy place to start, perhaps because coming of age in Coldwater is hardly a controversial topic of conversation. She started there, and before she knew what was happening she was giving him a short history of her life. She talked about Lester Balcom and Madge and Terri and Dee, about Richie and Marie, about the way she felt when she was home alone and the way she felt riding in a cab to an assignation. She needed to talk at least as much as he did and the words poured out of her, and as they did they had a somewhat therapeutic effect upon both of them. Any priest will tell you that confession is good for the soul even if there has been no sin, that the urge to share experience with another human being is a powerful urge that demands satisfaction.

Neither of them kept any track of the time. Finally she had run out of words and the two of them sat quietly and stared thoughtfully at each other. Honour Mercy sipped at her drink and discovered that her glass was empty. Perhaps she had finished it or perhaps it had evaporated; she had no memory of anything but a continual monologue.

Crawford stood up, walked over to her and looked down at her. He reached into his pocket and took out two bills, a fifty and a ten. He handed them to her.

“Go on home,” he told her.

She handed the money back to him. “You can’t pay me until I earn it.”

“You’ve earned it. More than earned it.”

“Joshua—”

He smiled when she said his name. “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want to... sleep with you. Not now.”

“Because you’re paying for it?”

He didn’t say anything.

“You listen to me now,” she said. “You’re going to take this money and put it back in your pocket. Then you and me are going back in that bedroom and we’re going to bed together. And when we’re done you’re not giving me any money because I’m not going to let you. You understand?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly.”

“Look—”

She stood up and looked straight into his eyes. He had very dark brown eyes that were almost black in the artificial light of the room. “You wanted me to talk to you,” she said. “I liked you and so I talked to you. I told you a lot of things I never told to anybody else.”

“I know.”

“I told you because I like you. And now I want you to go to bed with me. Don’t you like me enough to do that?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Take my arm, Joshua.”

He took her arm.

“Now... now lead me to the bedroom. And afterwards don’t you dare to try to give me money or I’ll hate you. Maybe I won’t hate you but I’ll be mad. I mean it.”

He took her into the bedroom and put on the small lamp and closed the door. He stood motionless by the side of the bed until she had removed her dress; then he too started to disrobe.

When they were both nude they turned to look at each other. He looked at full thighs and a narrow waist and firm breasts; she looked at a body that was still youthful, at a chest matted with dark curly hair.

He didn’t move. She stepped close to him and her arms went around his body.

She said: “Please kiss me, Joshua.”