Innocent Spouse

by Carol Ross Joynt

  THE YACHT YARD near us on the Chesapeake Bay sent out a periodic newsletter. It was not something I usually read, but when the new issue arrived it got my attention. On the cover was a tribute to Howard. It saluted his sailing skills and commended his attention to detail when he refurbished a boat. At the end it said: “We will always remember his lovely Hinckley Pilot 35, Penguin, and how beautifully he spruced her up.”

  Penguin? A Hinckley Pilot 35? We didn’t own a Hinckley, and the sailboat we did own, a little eighteen-foot day sailer, was named the Carol Ann. There had been a Hinckley Pilot 35 at the yard a year or so earlier. Howard took me out on her one beautiful sunny day, put her enthusiastically through her paces, even brought a picnic lunch, and when I was happily relaxing he announced she was for sale. “Should we buy her?” he asked. She was a lovely black-hulled gem, and I knew he considered Hinckley to be the ultimate in boatbuilding, but we already had a sailboat.

  “No,” I said. “Not now. We don’t need another boat.” And, as far as I knew, that was that.

  I dropped the newsletter and called the yacht yard. I thanked the yard manager for the nice tribute to Howard.

  “I’m going to ask you a question that may sound dumb, but please answer me honestly.” He was silent. “You mentioned the Hinckley Pilot 35, Penguin, in your write-up.” I paused. “Do we own that boat?”

  “Well, yes, you did. Mr. Joynt had her here for a while. He had a lot of work done on her. Made her really sweet. Sold her at a good price, too.”

  “He sold her?”

  “Yeah. Sold her up in Maine. That was earlier last year.”

  Clearly, when Howard took me sailing on the boat and asked me whether we should buy her, he already had. That’s why the fabrics that covered the cushions and bunks down below were from a manufacturer we used for our home. At the time, I considered it an appealing coincidence. What a dunce!

  The discovery rattled me. The IRS, a surprise sailboat, big loans from his checkbook, guys who have tabs at the bar, “the Bank of Howard,” two sets of books—how much more didn’t I know about my husband? One stage of grief is denial, but it’s tough to be in denial when there’s so much evidence to the contrary.

  To ease my pain and confusion, I would lose myself in Spencer. He needed me but I needed him, too. I felt normal when I was alone with him, even if our moments together were anything but. I’d tuck him into bed each night and curl up beside him. “Tell me stories about Daddy,” he’d say, and I’d try to pull something up to enchant him. While I talked he would suck his thumb, hug his cuddle toy Baby, and stare into the middle distance. When I stopped he would plead, “More! More! Tell me another story, Mommy. Tell me about Daddy.” Sometimes he would cry and I’d hold him until the tears were dry and he was asleep.

  Chapter 8

  NOTHING IN MY background prepared me for the three-ring circus my life became after Howard’s death. Lawyers and the IRS in one ring, Nathans and Larry King Live in another, and in the center ring, my son and our home life. The big top was lit up, it was showtime virtually round the clock, and I had to lead the action in each ring simultaneously.

  For the moment, the lawyers at Caplin and Drysdale got the most attention. We spoke often over speakerphone. Much of our conversations had to do with their discussions with Deborah Martin at the IRS. The message was clear: I was not gaining ground.

  At Larry King Live, I tried to keep the productive pace I was known for before Howard’s death. In early 1997, I was in the middle of negotiations for several big-ticket projects: Rosie O’Donnell, who’d started a new TV talk show the year before, the notorious Leona Helmsley, who’d been mum since she got out of prison for tax evasion, fashion mogul Calvin Klein, and the Christie’s auction of Princess Diana’s dresses. These were front-burner gets. I had another dozen or so long-term projects: Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Doris Day, Sting, the Duchess of York, Marv Albert, Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford, the pope, and Queen Elizabeth. My get list, particularly the pope and Queen Elizabeth, made friends laugh, but I assured them that in the talk-show game we were motivated by the fact that, sooner or later, almost every celebrated person would give an interview. The show’s hard-charging executive producer, Wendy Walker, was deadly serious about every pursuit, even the most far-fetched.

  It was common for me to bag at least one but sometimes as many as two or three household-name guests in a week, and I always had a notorious Triple-A boldfacer in the pipeline. They say that people enjoy diets because it gives them a feeling of control in their lives. After my world turned to chaos that’s how I felt about Larry King Live. I was in control; everything else was in free fall. But as much as I wanted to shut my new life out of my CNN cubicle, it wasn’t possible.

  “Carol, you have a call,” the office receptionist said, popping her head into Wendy’s office where the two of us were having a booking conference. Wendy’s eyes lit up, hoping it was a callback from one big target or another. Eager, I dashed out to take the call, but the wind left my sails as soon as I heard the voice at the other end. It was the manager of Nathans. He never had good news. I didn’t want to take calls from Nathans but I had to. I couldn’t ignore the lawyers, either, who had my life and Spencer’s in their hands. If an emergency at Nathans—there were a lot of emergencies at Nathans—demanded an immediate decision, I had to make it. When I returned to Wendy’s office she looked up, hoping for news of a hot “get,” not of another legal setback or a burst kitchen pipe. These distracting calls became routine. At the beginning she didn’t comment on it, but I knew that too much personal drama was seeping into my job.

  Howard had made Doug Moran the general manager of Nathans twelve years before. Doug loved Nathans. He’d worked his way up from waiter and floor manager, knew the culture, knew the customers, knew the neighborhood, looked out for the police on the beat with lunch or coffee on the house, and showed up at the tedious Georgetown business association meetings. Howard had relied on Doug to do a lot of the work he found boring. But there was another side to Doug. Maybe twelve years as general manager was beginning to wear on him. Howard had also thought he was lazy, sometimes arrogant. A little too often for Howard’s taste Doug would make money, menu, or inventory decisions that Howard found out about only later. There would be an argument—usually over the phone because neither man liked confrontation—and then for a while life at Nathans would return to normal. Howard didn’t work out his problems with Doug at the bar; he brought them home. Sometimes our pillow talk was one Doug rant after another.

  I came into owning Nathans carrying a lot of baggage as the wife who had listened patiently to her husband’s rants, the woman who had waited to begin dinner while listening to her husband yell into the phone. Doug probably assumed that after Howard’s death he would be fully in charge, and I would be a shadow owner. That might have happened had Howard’s crime not landed on me. But I was caught in the crosshairs of the IRS and I had no options where Nathans was concerned. I was stuck with it and I needed the money it brought in. I needed, as much as it made my hair hurt, to try to understand the place. I also needed Doug—but I didn’t need his resentment.

  Over dinner a friend who owned another restaurant said, “He’s still working for Howard and he clearly doesn’t want you there. You better watch out.” I respected the warning, but watch out for what? I didn’t know enough about the business to recognize my weak spots. Well, they were all weak spots. I needed Doug to run the place, like him or not, and any thought of giving him the boot was knocked down by the lawyers, who counseled, “We don’t know what he knows. You need to work with him.”

  A month or so after Howard died, as I started to come to terms with the landscape, I met for a drink with John Laytham, a part owner and the real management force behind Clyde’s, which had grown from one 1960s-era Georgetown bar to a corporate family of fifteen or more restaurants throughout the Washington area. Howard and Clyde’s founder were friends—but Clyde’s had made its owners seriously rich. Nat
hans was not in their league. As we sat in the bar, warm and fuzzy memories of Howard gave way to a clear-eyed view of Nathans. John displayed an impressive knowledge about my business. “I’ve never understood why Howard let his general manager work the same hours he did,” he said. “It’s just a management point, but you should change his hours. He certainly gets a good salary. Howard gave him one percent of the gross, which is very generous. I’ve heard of general managers getting a percentage of the net but not the gross.”

  “I didn’t know any of that,” I said. “I have no idea what he makes.” Why didn’t I? I asked myself. My entire professional life taught me to ask questions, yet here I was mute, tiptoeing around, perhaps because it was so overwhelming, or because I feared the answers. Would I know what to do with the information? Rare was the question that prompted a reply that made me happy.

  John told me Doug’s salary and the details of his arrangement with Howard. “He makes top dollar in this town.” He paused. “He’s okay, though. I think he’s honest, and that’s rare in this business.” That’s what Howard had said, too. At the end of a day in which he and Doug were at loggerheads, Howard would say, “He’s honest. Full of shit sometimes, but honest.”

  Sitting with John I couldn’t help but recall Howard’s philosophy about shenanigans in the saloon business. There was what he called “tolerable theft.” Now more than ever I wished I’d probed what that meant. Where was the line and did it apply to management as well as staff, or did it apply only to the owner?

  Once the IRS case landed in my lap, I started seeing Doug with new eyes. He had greater value to Howard than simply managing Nathans. As far as the lawyers were concerned, his job was to look the other way. In one of our speakerphone meetings, a disembodied legal voice said, “If Doug knew Howard wasn’t paying taxes there was no way he could fire him.” Did Doug know? Was that what got him the big salary—a good chunk of it off the books—and his job security? He swore to me he had no idea.

  I gave Doug a ride to the office of the accountant, Martin Gray. I expected a routine meeting to bring me up to date on the financial picture at Nathans. Martin’s office was cramped. Cardboard boxes were stacked all around, “Nathans” written across most of them. “What are those boxes?” I asked him.

  “Nathans checks,” he said. “They’re being coded for the IRS.”

  “Oh.” There was never an answer that made Howard or the situation he left me in look good.

  “Every check that Howard wrote is coded into their report,” he said. “They can call up any check they need.” So many boxes, so many checks, so much of my life bundled in stacks, wrapped in rubber bands, “coded” for the IRS, and stuffed inside boxes. I sighed.

  The meeting had just started when Doug spoke up. “Howard promised he would make me a partner. He said he would give me five percent of the business.” That was news to me. I was stunned. “He talked to me about it. I figured it was going to happen soon. I’m prepared for it to happen.”

  “I don’t know, Doug. I’ll have to think about it.”

  Martin, who knew all the players well, seemed equally shocked by Doug’s statement. Later, privately, he said his surprise was “not that Doug would ask for it, but that Howard would have offered. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  This much I knew: Howard wouldn’t have given anybody 5 percent of his business. If he had even been thinking about it, he would have mentioned it to me at the very least. His view of partnerships was “If you have to take a partner, then get out of the business.”

  A lot got said in the office at Nathans—by Howard, to Howard, with or without Howard in the room. Fabrication and exaggeration weren’t uncommon. With Howard suddenly dead there was ample opportunity for people to come to me with their versions of events, their claims of promises he’d made. Employees were scared, especially as rumors spread about an imminent IRS bloodbath. Doug was scared. I was scared.

  As much as I wanted to fire him and make a clean start, I finally realized I couldn’t run the place without him, at least not at that early stage. We needed each other. We both knew that. What I hoped was that he’d come to me and say, “I’m here for you. Whatever you need, just ask.” Instead, he decided to campaign for a piece of the action. I told him “no,” and he bristled. He stewed for a few days, and then a letter arrived from his lawyer.

  In careful language it made clear that Doug knew private details of the IRS investigation. It mentioned rumors of illegal practices that went on at Nathans about which, the lawyer wrote, “Mr. Moran was completely unaware.” The letter cited the pink checks Howard had given “off the books” to Doug and others, and said Howard had promised to cover the taxes Doug owed on that income. The amount was many thousands of dollars. The letter said Doug expected me to honor Howard’s promise and pay those taxes. The lawyer made ominous references to what would happen if I did not pay. It was lawyerly and guarded, but the message was clear: Pay up or Doug will talk.

  I faxed the letter to Caplin and Drysdale. They took it seriously enough to convene an immediate meeting over speakerphone. “You’d better pay,” advised a faceless voice. “We don’t know what he knows, but he knows something. It could hurt you.”

  One of the lawyers spoke up. “It would be a mistake to fire him.

  You have too much at risk. Keep him. Find out what he knows. Don’t let him wander off the reservation.”

  Another asked, “Don’t the landlords like him and trust him? Aren’t they difficult? Doug is someone you need right now.”

  In a brief exchange with Doug in the cavelike, cluttered basement office, I said I would “lend” him the money for the taxes but that it would have to be paid out in stages, not in a lump sum. And that he would have to pay it back. That demand was folly but it made me feel in charge. Doug’s reaction: “If I had died, and Howard was left running the business, it would be closed already.”

  THE SPRING THAW had arrived. Soon the daffodils would be in flower. I needed sunlight, the outdoors, vitamins, sleep, and a laugh. Every Friday, Spencer and I drove to the house on the Bay. It was good for us to be out there.

  “Mommy, come play with me! Mommy! Come on, don’t sleep.” I was collapsed on a lawn chair, a zombie, as Spencer stood beside me, his adorable little face not more than a foot from mine. It was hard to find the energy to play with him but I dragged myself up and chased him into the woods. They were not deep woods, but deep enough to thrill a five-year-old. He had a little spot among fallen trees he called “Spencer’s Lair,” where he fancied himself a woodcutter and carpenter, like his heroes Norm and Steve on This Old House. I sat on a log nearby as he focused on his “tooling”—banging stick against stick—and talked to me about Howard. I moved leaves around, head down, and listened.

  “Do you think Daddy is watching us?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I know he’s always watching you. He’s watching you, loving you, and looking out for you.”

  Spencer pretended to saw one piece of wood with another, but he was listening closely and thinking hard.

  “If he can see me, why can’t I see him?”

  “Because he doesn’t exist as a person anymore. He’s a spirit. But that’s good. That’s how he can be wherever you are. If he was a person your teacher might ask him to leave the classroom or the playground. Because he’s a spirit he can always be there and no one else has to know but you.”

  “I like that,” he said. “But I wish he was really here, like a real person.” Spencer looked off into the distance. “I miss Daddy,” he said.

  “Oh, me too,” I said. “All the time.” My sorrow was part of me, like a second set of internal organs that went where I went, day or night, but it was made twisted and more painful due to what I was learning, on an almost daily basis, about my baffling husband. I couldn’t at that stage accept that he’d done this to us on purpose, but I knew it didn’t happen by accident.

  I took a small sharp rock that was shaped like an arrowhead and carved words into a tree
, one below the other:

  LOVE

  HOME

  DEATH

  TAXES

  Chapter 9

  GEORGETOWN AS A business community does not wake up until after the heavy morning rush hour of suburban commuters from Virginia and Maryland who stream through the neighborhood on their way to work downtown. The people who work in Georgetown—at the boutiques, the restaurants and bars, the galleries and delis—don’t begin to appear on the brick sidewalks until mid-morning. Nathans sat at the convergence of almost all auto and foot traffic. It was impossible to pass through Georgetown’s commercial center without passing Nathans.

  In its day, the brick and stucco building had looked smart. The top two floors were painted a pale dusky blue and the trim a dark navy, what’s called a San Francisco paint job. At ground level the walls were the original red brick with white trim around big windows. It was built in the Civil War era when Georgetown was a seaport and a major thoroughfare for Union soldiers traveling from encampments on the Mall to battlegrounds in Manassas and Leesburg. Legend has it the basement had been a prison, the middle floor a tavern, and the top two floors a brothel. In today’s commercial real estate parlance that would be excellent “mixed use.” Members of the Halkias family, who owned the building, recalled that when they lived upstairs in the 1940s and ’50s they had operated a deli on the ground floor and would pull taffy in the windows. “All the children stood outside to watch,” George Halkias had told me.

  When Howard died in 1997, both the business and the building were past their prime. The once-smart paint job was faded and cracked, the roof needed repair, the kitchen equipment showed its age. Nonetheless, the brass plaques gleamed on either side of the corner front door; the navy blue awning hung proudly. The plaques and awning each had only one word: NATHANS. No apostrophe. Inside, the wide-beam teak floors got buffed with a fresh coat of polish every morning by the dishwashers, who were the first to arrive at work, followed soon by the cooks. When the day bartender arrived, the five rows of liquor bottles on the back bar were replenished and polished to an inviting shine, the barstools were lined up neatly, and the bar was wiped down and made ready for business.