You’ve got a lot of tightening up to do. Your rent is outrageous but there’s probably nothing you can do about that. Your payroll is way high. I can’t believe Doug is getting one percent of the gross. Where did that come from?”
Fred talked rapidly, forcefully, and confidently. He was a regular businessman who just happened to have the looks of Jon Bon Jovi, if Bon Jovi wore a pin-striped suit.
“Do you get along with Doug? I bet you don’t. I bet in his head he’s the only one who knows how to do it and he hates having you there.”
“Fred, I’ve looked around the restaurant and I see places where I can make a difference. I want to get it painted. I’m going to buff up the back room. We need more fresh flowers.”
Fred sighed and shook his head. “You don’t get it, Carol. That’s the fun stuff. Your place is in critical condition. You don’t have time for the fun stuff.” He grabbed a piece of paper. “This is what you have to do.” He leaned over the conference table, writing quickly. When he finished, he took the piece of paper and turned it toward me. On it he’d written:
A new lease.
A bookkeeper (Are you making or losing money?).
Settle with the IRS.
A strong general manager.
Rebuild Nathans—its brand, its image.
Sell it, or learn to enjoy it.
“You think I can do all this?” I asked.
He pulled one of the chairs closer and sat next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was a friendly, almost brotherly gesture.
“I know you can. You’re smart enough and strong enough. But you have to stop being a victim and a martyr and start being a survivor and a winner. Carol, you’re in denial and you’ve got to get over it. This is your problem. It’s your problem and nobody else is going to fix it for you. Only you.”
———
AFTER MEETING WITH Fred, I picked up Spencer at school, took him home to the babysitter, returned to Nathans’ basement office, and made some calls to Larry King Live. Then I asked Doug Moran to join me in the quiet back dining room, which was empty in the lull between lunch and dinner. His mop of blond hair was still wet. He’d just returned from the health club. We sat at a round table by the windows. Bright afternoon sunlight was streaming through the glass. The spring weather was beautiful. The sidewalk outside was bustling with shoppers, tourists, students.
“We have to find a way to work together,” I said. “It’s not good for the staff to feel we’re at odds.”
“It’s hard for me not having Howard here,” Doug confessed. No matter what their disagreements, they had been a team.
“It’s hard for me, too, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“I worry that you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “And I worry you’ll go up to New York and meet someone and get married and he’ll take my job.”
I was flabbergasted. “Doug, the only husband I want is the one I just buried! I’m trying to do the best I can here. My entire focus is on Spencer, Nathans, the IRS, and Larry King Live. That’s all. I have no room in my life for anything else.”
“Are you going to lose the business?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not. I have new lawyers and I’m hoping for the best.”
“Well, I know you can’t run this place without me,” Doug said. “If I’d died instead of Howard, Nathans would be closed already.”
“Yes, Doug, you’ve told me that before.”
Chapter 12
“THIS IS HOW we think Howard was working out the math,” Miriam Fisher said. She, Sheldon, and I were sitting in their conference room as she explained the details of Howard’s tax crimes. Thick legal binders were stacked on the table. It had been almost six months since Howard died. My new lawyers were now read up on the case. I trusted them. I liked them.
Everything circled back to Howard and his father. Mr. Joynt was involved in the restaurant from the moment in 1969 when he decided to buy it for his son. He bought out the founding partners and negotiated a lease with the landlords’ lawyer, Dimitri Mallios. It wasn’t a very good tenant lease. It heavily favored the Halkias family, who owned the building. Howard had agreed to pay property taxes, insurance, and upkeep for the entire building. He had waived any number of rights. He couldn’t assign the lease without the permission of the landlords, and the lease set a very high base rent for the time—according to real estate experts, the highest per square foot in the city. It was a fabulous location but the rent was unrealistic for a 2,500-square-foot bar and restaurant that served a limited number of people. “If you were using the whole building to serve booze and food, that would be one thing,” Fred Thimm had told me. “You pay rent for the whole building and use only one floor. You have the potential to raise your gross from $1.7 to $5 million.”
With that 1969 lease agreement, the Howard Joynt era of Nathans was launched, and Nathans became a white-hot focal point of Georgetown and Washington nightlife. Fans stood five deep at the bar. Critics loved the northern Italian cuisine, new to Washington in the early 1970s. The fettuccine Alfredo, prepared by Chef Giuseppina, was sublime. The Washington Post ran a front-page political prognostication story with the headline AT NATHANS, THEY SPLIT ON CANDIDATES. But even with business booming, my lawyers said, Howard had financial problems. Nathans often needed money and Mr. Joynt provided it.
Miriam and Sheldon uncovered an earlier tax evasion. It happened in 1977, just as we were beginning our romance, possibly simultaneously. The IRS hit Howard with a bill for $700,000 in back taxes. I was speechless—a reaction that was becoming a pattern in meetings with my lawyers. “His father advanced him the money, bailed him out.”
Was that the wedge in the marriage that was ending when I met Howard? I wasn’t going to ring up the ex-wife and ask her, but it entered my mind. Sheldon and Miriam estimated that over the twenty-eight years Howard owned Nathans, his father had knitted up the shortfall to the tune of $2 to $3 million. Miriam said that in the 1980s, Mr. Joynt advanced Howard even more money to keep the business afloat. “His last loan to him was for $500,000, and before he died”—of prostate cancer in 1989—“he forgave the debt and gave Howard the promissory note. Howard probably figured he was paying the money back to himself. He didn’t consider that income—he was just repaying the debt—so he didn’t pay tax on it. Also, he didn’t give himself a salary. He just figured what was Nathans’ money was his money, not unusual in a small business.”
“And this will fly?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” Sheldon said, flattening his hands on the table, “but that’s where we are.”
A welter of emotions was running through me as I left that particular meeting. The news weighed me down with dismay and sadness. Were my last twenty years just one big lie? Were Howard and I that different? How did he carry around these burdens? Were they burdens? Maybe not for him, but they were for me.
When Mr. Joynt died, Howard’s safety net vanished. He was on his own, no more bailouts. Without Mr. Joynt’s subsidy, Nathans couldn’t afford itself. The landlords had no interest in working through tenant problems. If there was an issue, they simply ignored it; what they cared about was the rent. The rent was too high and Howard’s lifestyle—our lifestyle—was too expensive. Howard was a beneficiary of the trust established under Mr. Joynt’s will, but the income wasn’t enough. And then there was everything he passed through the business.
Howard faced a choice: Pay the rent or pay the taxes, and he chose to pay the rent. I couldn’t comprehend how he could forgo giving the feds their withholding tax. Miss one month or two months, maybe, but consistently over five years? That’s not an accident; it’s larceny. You have to have some real guts to do that, but the courage, if that’s what it was, was misplaced. Howard knew the landlords would definitely miss a monthly payment, whereas the federal government would not, at least not immediately.
Howard had liked playing the pirate, the bad boy. He wasn’t the first man who grew up soft and
well off, secure and with a safety net, who liked living dangerously. The Runyonesque romance of the saloon business encouraged a boys-will-be-boys attitude and made it possible to believe that laws were for grown-ups, not for cowboys on barstools. Howard spent his working hours among the daytime barroom clientele—bookies, gamblers, drunks, fellow saloon owners, and others who lived life on the margins. Many of them seemed to be hiding from something, trying to stay off the radar to avoid a society in which most people played by the rules. In Howard’s case, this game didn’t pay. Somehow my husband had lost his way, and it pained me that he hadn’t wanted to tell me.
I wondered if the dependence on his father was at the root of his deeply buried rage. It can’t be easy for a man—and a proud man at that—to rely so much on his father’s largesse. It wasn’t money Howard could take at will; it had to be bestowed, and usually with a lecture about not getting the job done, not measuring up. Where’s the manliness in that, especially if with each bailout, as helpful as it was, he felt like less of a man? Eerily, it was not too far removed from my accepting gifts after one of Howard’s violent episodes. Did his tirades at me occur within days of receiving money from his father? I’ll never know.
I was beginning to understand the nights I would roll over in bed in the wee hours and notice Howard wide awake, staring at the ceiling. But when I met with the lawyers, I kept those thoughts to myself.
Miriam and Sheldon didn’t pass judgment; they just rattled off numbers and possible adjustments. They were confident that some of the items could be negotiated down or away. Where the IRS would not budge, they said, was in the matter of withholding. The government was understandably intolerant of an employer who withheld taxes from employees and then put the money in his own pocket. It was the government’s money. There would be no mercy.
“I’m selling things,” I told them. “I’m sending stuff to auction, to consignment, selling it to friends. Whatever, wherever.”
“That’s good,” Miriam said. Her expression changed. The lawyerly veneer gave way to a more compassionate face. “This is hard, isn’t it?” she said. I nodded and probably betrayed my sadness. “I know. But you’re doing the right thing. We don’t know how this will turn out, but you have to be prepared.” She moved her hand toward mine on the table. She didn’t touch me, but the gesture was sensitive. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “But I hate this. I’m so afraid of losing my home. I can’t imagine what effect that would have on Spencer. To lose his father and then lose his home …” I was worried about the effect on me, too. I was not ready for that kind of ripping away. I could give up a lot, but I would rather live in our house with cots and sleeping bags and paper plates than have to let it go. It was the one solid thing in our lives.
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Miriam said.
“I want a summer there,” I said. “We need the summer on the Bay.”
“I can’t say you won’t have to sell it, but you can have a summer,” she said. “I promise you that.”
Miriam said she would meet soon with Deborah Martin, the IRS agent. “And at some point you have to tell me about yourself and your life with Howard. The whole story. This will be a large part of your defense. But I’m not ready for that yet.”
How could I share the whole story with Miriam, with anyone? Which parts did she need to know? The love story was real. He had swept me off my feet. He was my prince, and I still loved him as much as ever. It would be easy for me to tell Miriam about the fabulous times we had together, with all the fun, beauty, adventure, and affection. They were real, or at least I thought so. I was holding on to them like trying to remember a dream, even as the good parts begin to fade as the day wears on until eventually, sadly, all you can remember is that it was a good dream. Or should I just go right to the version of our lives that was emerging, the darker version in which Howard was coming more clearly into focus as a tragic charmer who lived large and fell the same way? I knew this: He had loved us, and he didn’t want to hurt us, but by doing what he thought was helping, he did hurt us. His tragic flaw was his passion for the “lifestyle.” You see it in all of literature’s lovable rogues. In fiction it may be charming, but in real life it leaves a mess.
Arrangements were made to inventory our possessions. Two friendly enough strangers came into my home and fingered, fondled, and assessed everything from our socks and underwear to books, lamps, knives and forks, plates, chairs, tables, towels, Spencer’s toys, appliances, clothing, and carpets. Every last thing we owned, everything that was dear to us, was given a dollar value. The appraisers would ask me what something cost and I would hazard a guess. They would ask, “Are we lowballing or highballing?”
“What?”
“Do your lawyers want the estate to come out worth a lot or a little?”
THE PSYCHIATRIST SAW me once a week. That was barely enough. No matter what, I fit him into my schedule. I couldn’t afford him. Neither could I afford Spencer’s therapist. But we couldn’t afford not to have them. At least our health insurance paid for part of it.
“Talk to me about anger,” he said in one session. “What are you doing with your anger?”
“I don’t feel any anger toward Howard, if that’s what you mean—at least none that I recognize.” I thought I spoke truthfully then. “I try to understand what happened but I bang into walls,” I told the doctor. “I just don’t have room for negative energy.” At that time succumbing to anger would have been like hooking an anchor to my life. It would have weighed me down, stopped me in my tracks. Everything was about survival; everything was about getting through the day, getting through the nightmare. Anger would have to stand in line to own a piece of my flesh, my soul.
To survive I had to stay positive, and I was determined to survive.
“Did he think I wouldn’t love him if we didn’t have a Jaguar in the driveway or a suite at the Carlyle?” I asked the doctor. “That stuff was fun but I didn’t love him for his cars.”
———
SPENCER RECOVERED AT his own pace. He had good days and bad days. Sometimes he was ahead of me, sometimes he lagged behind. I made time for us to be alone together. We took walks. We had picnics by the Potomac. One night we slept in sleeping bags under a starry sky on the lawn of our home on the Bay.
“Do bugs live forever?” Spencer asked me. “I want to find out what lives forever and make it so everyone can live forever. I want you to live forever, Mommy. I don’t want you to die.”
“We all die,” I said. “That can’t be changed. Remember the ‘Circle of Life’?” That was Elton John’s great song from The Lion King. I had taken Spencer to see the movie when he was three years old, soon after Disney released it. In it the father lion dies, leaving behind his young son. We both liked the song and when Howard died a little more than two years later, the film resonated with Spencer and me, especially Tim Rice’s lyrics to the “Circle of Life.” Spencer and I decided together to ask our friend Judith Owen to sing it at Howard’s memorial service, where we hummed along, affirming that the circle moves us through our despair “till we find our place on the path unwinding.”
“I’m going to change that, Mommy,” Spencer said. “I’m going to invent something so you won’t die.” I kissed his sweet head. I couldn’t hold him tight enough. I wanted to blanket him in love.
Another evening, in his bed, we listened through a toy stethoscope to the beating of his heart and my heart. He asked me, “What was it like to feel Daddy’s heart stop beating?”
“It was very peaceful,” I said. “Like he was being lifted up by angels.” Spencer grabbed Baby closer, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and settled into deep five-year-old thought.
IT WAS A quiet evening at the apartment. Spencer was tucked in and asleep. I poured a glass of wine and sat on the floor in the den to sort through old photographs, putting them in groups and loading them into a storage box. Our life together was there in the photos: A Polaroid from our first pic
nic beside a stream in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My brother’s pictures from our wedding, when Howard playfully kissed me with a mouthful of cake. Our honeymoon in Bermuda, both of us on mopeds, tan and smiling. Standing near the surf on the rocky coast of Maine; on a sandy beach in the Caribbean; in Utah during a cross-country drive; on the California coast, my hair wildly frizzed by the salt air; with Spencer between us, only minutes after his birth. So many Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries. Laughter at dinner parties with friends, caught in a flash frame. Silly moments. Somber moments. A portrait here, a portrait there; images of us young, and older, but never old. That’s the photo we’d never have.
In the midst of all the drama and complications of being a solo parent, of having the IRS and Nathans on my back, of the continuing revelations about Howard’s past, sometimes I needed simply to step away and grieve. The pictures made that happen. Tears spilled from my eyes, falling onto the photos. Oddly, as painful as it was, this kind of pain felt better than the pain of coping with Nathans or worrying about where I’d end up with the IRS. Widowhood had its touchstones. Crying over old photos is part of the grieving process. But there was no guide for what I was going through with Nathans and the IRS.
I put all the photos in a big box, sealed it with heavy tape, and packed it away.
Chapter 13
EARLIER I HAD learned that we owned a boat I didn’t know we owned—the Hinckley sailboat Howard sold in Maine—but there was also a boat I knew we owned, one that was usually tied up at our home dock, a thirty-eight-foot powerboat named Arcadia, and I could sell her. In fact, I had to sell her, and fortunately she sold fast and for a good price. The money went into the estate account destined for the lawyers and the IRS, not into mine. Shortly after Memorial Day and just before the boat went off to the new owners, a dear friend, Randy Parks, helped Spencer and me stow our personal gear into canvas bags. We passed them from the afterdeck to the car like a bucket brigade.
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