At 47th Street, they saw a hotel sign down to their left, toward Ninth Avenue. This was the kind of hotel she had in mind. It was made up of three tenement buildings, five stories high, combined into one building, with the same ancient coat of gray paint on the faces of all three. The entrances of the flanking buildings had been removed, replaced by windows indicating that additional rooms had been set up where the entranceways had been, leaving the front door of the middle building as the only remaining entrance to the hotel. A square sign, white on black, stuck out over the street, saying simply, “HOTEL,” not even gracing the place with a name.
“Down this way,” she told Richie, and gently steered him around the corner. He saw the hotel sign then, and homed on it gratefully, anxious to have once more the sanctuary of four peeling walls around him.
The hotel didn’t have a lobby, all it had was a first-floor hall, with stairs leading upward, a few dim light bulbs ineffectually battling the interior darkness, and frayed maroon carpeting on the floor and staircase. Just to the right of the entrance was a door to what had probably been the front apartment, when this building had been a separate entity and not yet a hotel. There was only the bottom half of a door there now, with a board about ten inches wide across the top of this half-door, and a grizzled, grimy old man leaning on the board, his elbows between the registry book and the telephone.
Honour Mercy, knowing Richie would be unable to effectively go through the process of renting a room, did the talking. The old man didn’t bother to ask if they were married, and didn’t bother to look at the false names Honour Mercy wrote in his registry book. He asked for fourteen dollars for a week’s rent, gave Honour Mercy a receipt and two keys, told her room 26 was on the third floor, off to the right, and that was that.
They climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor, and turned right. The hall, narrow and dim-lit, passed through an amateurishly breached wall into the next building over, and at the end of it, left side, was room 26. Honour Mercy unlocked the door, and they walked into their new home.
It was a step down from the Casterbridge Hotel, back in Newport. The walls were almost precisely the same color, which didn’t help, and the one window looked out on the back of a building on the next block. The dresser was ancient and scarred and sagging, the closet had no door on it, and the ceiling was peeling, as though it had a gray-white sunburn. There was a double-bed in the room, which would perhaps be a bit more comfortable than the single bed they’d shared at the Casterbridge, but that was the only good thing in sight.
They unpacked, trying to get some of their own individuality into the room just as rapidly as possible, and a couple of brown bugs dashed away down the wall when Honour Mercy opened the dresser drawers. Before she could get at them with a shoe heel, they’d disappeared under the molding. The Casterbridge Hotel hadn’t had bugs, and no one had prepared her for the fact that New York City was infested from top to bottom with cockroaches, nasty little brown bugs with lots of legs and hard shell-like backs, who took one generation to build up immunity to virtually any poison used against them, which made their extermination more wishful thinking than practical reality.
The sight of the bugs made Honour Mercy want to get out of there for a while. They could come back when it was dark. She had a childish faith in the power of electric light to keep bugs from venturing out of their crannies in the walls.
Richie was torn between the desire to just sit down in the middle of the room and breathe easily for a day or two and a hunger that had been building since Cleveland. The hunger, aided by Honour Mercy’s prodding, won out, and they left the hotel to find a place to eat.
They had dinner at a luncheonette on the corner of 46th and Eighth, and then went back to the hotel. It was dark now, and Honour Mercy hopefully turned on the bare bulb in a ceiling fixture which was their only light source. The bulb, in an economy move on the part of the management, was forty watts, and gave a smoky light not quite good enough to read by.
They sat around on the bed, digesting and talking lazily together about their successful flight from Newport. After a while, Honour Mercy spread their money out on the blanket and counted it, finding they still had a little over three hundred dollars. At fourteen dollars a week for the hotel room, and the cost of food, and movies or whatever to fill their time, it wouldn’t take long for that three hundred dollars to be all gone.
There was only one sensible thing to do. She should go back to work right now, while they still had some money ahead, rather than wait until they were broke. The idea of having money ahead, in case of emergencies of one sort or another, appealed to Honour Mercy both as a child of thrifty parents and a girl in a risky line of work.
A little after ten, she gave Richie two dollars and told him to go to a movie for a while. They’d seen a whole line of movie marquees on 42nd Street, on their way to the hotel, and Honour Mercy was sure she’d heard or read somewhere that 42nd Street movies in New York City were open all night long. And if she were going to go back to work, she would need a room with a bed in it. She was pretty sure this was the kind of hotel where she could carry on her trade unquestioned.
Richie was reluctant to leave the room. In the first place, the outside world was heavily patrolled by police-men of all kinds; city police, state troopers, Air Police, FBI agents, Shore Patrol, Military Police, and the Lord knew what else. In the second place, the idea of Honour Mercy bringing work home served only to force the nature of her work — which was supporting him — right out into the open, where he had to look at it. Back in Newport, Honour Mercy was “away at work” eight or nine hours a day, and he could more or less ignore the facts of the work. Here, he was going to have to be away, while Honour Mercy worked here, right on this bed. It made a difference.
“Don’t be silly,” she told him. “You certainly can’t get a job, at least not yet, not until you’ve been gone long enough for everybody to have forgotten all about you. And there’s only one way I can earn enough money for both of us to live on. And besides that, I really don’t mind it. It isn’t the same as with us, you know that, it’s just what I do, that’s all.”
It took her half an hour to soothe his newly-risen male pride and hurt self-respect, but finally he admitted that she was the practical one and he would follow her lead, and he went off to the movies, skulking along next to walls.
Honour Mercy’s next problem was one of location. Back in Newport, there’d been no problem about where to go to find work. One just went downtown, that was all. But New York was a different matter. To the new arrival, New York seemed to be one giant downtown, extending for miles in all directions. Now where, in all of that, was the section where Honour Mercy’s trade was plied?
Honour Mercy didn’t know it yet, but she was lucky as to location. Eighth Avenue, in the Forties, is one of New York’s centers of ambulatory whoredom. Just a block away, on 46th Street, there were a couple of bars, interspersed with legitimate taverns and restaurants, which specialized in receiving telephone calls for predominantly feminine clientele. The building in back which she could look at from her window was jam-packed with whores, most of whom were at the moment making exactly the same preparations Honour Mercy was making in the communal bathroom down the hall from room 26.
So Honour Mercy wasn’t going to have to walk very far.
She left the hotel a little after eleven, and started retracing her steps toward 42nd Street, which had looked more downtowny than anything else she’d seen so far in New York, and which therefore seemed like the best place from which to start her search for Whore Row.