Innocent Spouse

by Carol Ross Joynt

  At that point I agreed to have dinner with him. He chose the Park Avenue Bistro on lower Park Avenue. We sat side by side. He insisted I wear his World Series ring, which engulfed my finger. Celine Dion sang in French over the sound system, and he sang along; we ate roasted chicken and French fries, and drank a lot of red wine. He was very affectionate. He put his arm around me. He tried to kiss me.

  “Whoa,” I said as he deftly moved in for a smooch. I don’t know how he played on the ball field but he definitely had major-league moves on the banquette. “We don’t even know each other.”

  “Then let’s get to,” he said, pawing my arm.

  “I’m not ready for this,” I said, gently easing away.

  “How many guys are after you?” he asked.

  “None,” I said.

  “Can I spend the night with you?”

  “No.” This was everything I feared a date with a single man would be.

  “What if I just sleep with you? No sex?”

  “Do I look that naïve?”

  “Can I see you again? Will you call me to let me know when you’re coming to town again?” he asked, nuzzling my neck, nibbling on my ear.

  “Yes, yes, sure.”

  In the cab outside my hotel I gave him a quick kiss good night. Not twenty minutes later the phone rang in my room. It was Keith. “Are you in bed yet?”

  “Just about,” I said.

  “What are you wearing?” he asked.

  “I can’t believe you only just met me and you are asking me this. You are something else!”

  “I had a good time tonight,” he said. “I like you. I can’t wait to see you again.”

  Keith thoroughly confused me, but it was not his fault. He was a red-blooded unmarried male and entirely available. That scared me, in a screwy widow way. Keith was the opposite of what attracted me to Paolo. My head was spinning. At least I had a story to take home to the boys at the bar. I regaled them with the glossiest version, but I knew that one night the man stood me up and the next he crawled all over me. Either it was just a baseball thing or I’d entered a brave new world. I hoped I was brave enough to handle it.

  Chapter 25

  SALOON OWNERS HANG out at the bar. If you want to find one, that’s the first place to look. You’ll find him—yes, most of them are men—there most nights, moving from table to table greeting guests, hobnobbing with them, pouring drinks, playing the jovial host. It’s the first law of the barkeep. I wasn’t typical. I wasn’t typical at all. It was hard for me to play by those rules. I wanted to spend most of my evenings with my little boy.

  Almost nine months after Nathans fell into my lap I still didn’t feel comfortable playing the role Howard had played so well. I was delighted to see people packed five deep at the bar. I thanked Howard every day for having created one of the best-looking rooms in the city with yacht hulls and marine prints and charts and other nautical memorabilia. The polished teak floors, the dark navy walls, the antique fans, and the low lighting gave the room unique charm and character. If a Hollywood production designer was asked to create a Georgetown bar, it would look like Nathans. When James Brooks shot Broadcast News, he filmed there for a whole day. (Alas, the scenes didn’t make the final cut.) The room at its best buzzed with the low hum of conversation broken by frequent peals of laughter and music floating from the jukebox. The bar gave off the warm and intimate aura of an earlier time.

  But I was a backroom girl. Always had been. That’s where Howard and I had dinner on the rare occasions when we had eaten there. It’s where Spencer and I ate pasta. And it’s where Martha joined me one October evening for one of our regular dinners together in booth 26.

  We faced each other on the cozy red leather banquette. She ordered her usual—a glass of merlot with a side of Diet Coke. I felt the need for a real drink. The waiter obliged with a supercold Stoli martini. Much to my delight, the other tables were filled. The place was hopping. Miles Davis soothed through the multiple speakers that lined the ceiling. The staff seemed happy. I prayed that it would last.

  Lying between us on the red-and-white checked tablecloth was the reason I wanted the support of a Stoli martini: the outline Miriam Fisher and her team had prepared for my defense. It included the “story of Howard and Carol.” I needed Martha to read through the outline, to make sure what I had told the lawyers about Howard’s life before we met was correct. I could only tell Miriam what Howard had told me, but Martha had lived through it.

  I wasn’t proud of what the report said about me, but not because Miriam got the facts wrong. She got them right. That was the problem. The report showed the truth, and the truth made me cringe. It hurt. It made clear that in my marriage I had given over control of my life to another person. I was too trusting. Sheltered would be the polite word. Idiotic seemed more like it, even stupid: “Throughout her career and her adult life Carol steadfastly avoided getting involved in financial matters, because she knew they were complex and she did not understand them. She would hire professionals or defer to her father or husband.” I was proud of my professional career, where I was more than competent, I was good. I’d gotten awards and acclaim. How, then, did I let things slip into this, this … ignominious state of affairs?

  When the report didn’t make me feel like a fool, it made me feel like a concubine. That wasn’t a good way to feel, either. “Carol met Howard in May 1977 when she was twenty-six and he was thirty-eight years old,” Miriam wrote. “They fell in love almost immediately. Carol was enticed and overwhelmed by Howard’s ability to make decisions and get the job done, and his obvious comfort in a good life she had never before experienced.” I’d been hired by Walter Cronkite when I was twenty-two, for God’s sake! I’d lived in New York, the West Indies, and France.

  “For a girl who had worked since high school and who furnished her apartment with camping equipment, this was an exciting and exotic new world.” Well, yes, it was exciting and new, and Howard made me feel like a princess. I could love him for that alone. He made me feel marvelous. Beautiful. Desired. And he made me laugh. It was all magic carpet and, with his adoration, I was not alone. He made everyone he focused on feel they had wonderful, hitherto hidden qualities that he could see at once. He made us feel better about ourselves. That is a great gift. I wondered how he had felt about himself as his life caught up with him and slipped out of his control. I would never know the answer to that.

  “At twenty-six,” Miriam continued, “Carol had never owned anything, never had investments, never had a loan, never owned a car; her only financial responsibilities had been rent, food, clothes, and the phone bill.” Yes, and I liked it that way. “She fell in love with Howard believing he would be able to take care of her and would never let anything happen to her. That was her Faustian pact.”

  Faustian pact. There it was, the truth that haunted me, the truth I was unable to speak. My version of a Faustian pact. It was that. It always was that. I’d sold myself for what I thought would be a better life. In terms of possessions and the roof over my head, it was better. I was a good wife, homemaker, and mother. I stuck with our marriage when it was rough and savored the pleasures when it was good. I didn’t realize I was living in a fairy castle built on sand. When the tide came in, my lovely castle was washed away. I had to believe I genuinely loved Howard, but our life together, which had appeared so solid and “real,” was only as solid as that sand castle, as a dream. Dreams have their own reality, but no matter how vivid or real, upon waking the dream passes like a shadow. None of what I had savored was ever mine. I should have probed. I never did. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t insist on answers. I didn’t want to know. It was marital don’t ask, don’t tell. I liked my comfortable world where I was safe and protected and, well, innocent. But there are all kinds of innocence, and while I clearly qualified for innocent spouse by the IRS code, it was largely because I was stupid and silly. I’d preferred ignorance and innocence to knowledge. I wasn’t proud of that.

  In booth 26 I sippe
d my drink. We put off ordering. I wasn’t particularly hungry. My anxiety level was high. Martha had walls around her when it came to the IRS case. It was too ugly, too disturbing, a fiery car crash with her brother—and to some extent her family—in the wreckage. She didn’t know what to say or how to make it right, and she chose to remain at a safe distance. I granted her the buffer, but now I needed to hear what she had to say. She was the only person who could vet Howard’s story about himself. Martha read the report while I watched her face for reactions. They started almost immediately. She stopped reading and looked up at me.

  “Howard didn’t graduate from Choate,” she said.

  “He didn’t?” I asked. “He told me he did.”

  “No,” she said, “he was at Choate for a while and then returned to Washington and graduated from St. Stephen’s.”

  “He talked about it a lot, graduating from Choate.”

  “Well, it’s not true.” She read more and stopped again.

  “He didn’t go to Harvard,” she said, a droll smile crossing her face. “Did he tell you he went to Harvard?”

  “Yes. He said he went there for six months before getting kicked out because of ‘a case of booze,’ and he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “That part is true. He did go to Penn. But I think he got kicked out of Choate for drinking. He didn’t go to Harvard, unless I missed a big chunk of his life, and I don’t think I did.”

  “Why would he say that? It’s not like Penn was chopped liver.”

  Martha returned to the report but stopped again when she got to the part about the Joynt family trust and Howard’s inheritance. Her eyes popped. Miriam reported what Howard had told me: that he received twenty thousand dollars a month from the trust.

  “That’s just wrong,” she said. “That’s just plain wrong! It’s not even close to twenty thousand.” She laughed. “A ridiculous exaggeration. What was he thinking? Why would he do that, Carol?”

  I took another sip of my drink. “Because the money was coming from here,” I said, “from Nathans, and that was his cover.”

  “This is amazing,” Martha said. “I had no idea he told so many fibs.”

  “Lies, Martha.”

  We drank in silence for a few moments, trying to absorb all this. My tangled emotions dueled somewhere between gladness and sorrow. Glad because my principal motivation was to survive and Martha’s revelations would help my defense. Sorrow because each new truth moved me a greater distance away from the man I loved. The more Howard came into focus the less he was the man I knew.

  “Martha,” I said, “you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to talk to the lawyers with me. You’ve got to tell them everything you’ve been telling me. They have to hear it from you. Your pieces of the puzzle are critical. They could save me. Please, Martha, help me. I’m alive with a son to support. Howard’s dead. None of this can hurt him now.”

  A meeting was hastily scheduled in one of Miriam’s conference rooms. One of the lawyers who’d assembled the report was there, too. The lawyers sat on one side of the table, Martha and I on the other. Martha’s expression made clear she would rather be anywhere than where she was. The process started slowly, tentatively.

  Miriam took the report and read off a point. “Howard graduated from Choate before attending Harvard University and then the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “No,” Martha said, her voice low. “He didn’t last at Choate. He graduated from St. Stephen’s in Alexandria. He didn’t go to Harvard. He did go to the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “Did he graduate from the University of Pennsylvania?” Miriam asked.

  “No, he didn’t last a year. He transferred to Georgetown.”

  “Did Howard receive a payment from the Joynt family trust of approximately twenty thousand dollars a month?”

  “No. He received a quarterly payment, and at most it was about fifteen thousand.”

  “His ex-wife was of Spanish royalty, a princess of some sort?”

  Martha laughed out loud for the first time. “She was part Spanish and part Russian. I’m sure she thought she was a princess or royalty, but she wasn’t.”

  Point by point Miriam went through the report, with Martha making corrections and the lawyers taking notes. Martha was not as forthcoming as she had been over dinner, and I knew why. She loved her brother. She had always been the responsible sibling, always there for him. She didn’t want to feel as if she was betraying him. Me? I’d stepped outside myself at that point, wanting only to get a nod from Miriam that this information would bolster my case.

  “I know this is hard for you, Martha,” she said. “But this will help Carol and Spencer a lot. These shadings of the truth show a pattern in Howard’s behavior that backs up our argument that he didn’t tell Carol how he ran his business. This will make a difference.”

  “I’m stunned by all this,” Martha said. A lifetime of Joynt family honor was at stake. You could see it in her face, the anguish and embarrassment. When we were finished she was drained dry. I wasn’t. As inappropriate as it may sound, I was enthused. Through his sister, Howard had come to the rescue, giving me help from the grave. He seemed to be in the room, saying, “Here, take these flawed pieces of me and use them to save yourselves.”

  We stood up, walked out of the conference room without speaking, and waited quietly at the elevator. I broke the heavy silence. “Thank you, Martha. I know you didn’t want to do this, but it will help so much.”

  “I hope so.” Martha stood in her proper suit and sensible shoes, holding her handbag, looking resigned and uncomfortable. “Carol,” she said, “there’s something I didn’t say in there, and I didn’t say it because I figured you didn’t need to know.”

  The bell rang, signaling the arrival of the elevator. “What was that, Martha? Try me.”

  “I don’t want to cause you more pain.”

  “That’s okay.” More pain? I’d become nearly immune. “I can take it. What is it? You can tell me.”

  The elevator doors slid open. It was empty. We stepped in. “You believe Howard had two marriages before you. He had another wife you didn’t know about. A first marriage. You aren’t his third wife, Carol, you’re his fourth.” I put out my arm to stop the doors from closing.

  This time I really was shocked, and it showed on my face.

  “I didn’t want to make it look worse,” Martha said. “He was in high school. He forged her signature for the license. It didn’t last long. Only a few months and then it was annulled.”

  “Martha, this doesn’t make it look worse.” I was recovering from my shock and beginning to smile. “This is better. Don’t you see? It will help our defense even more. That’s not bad news at all. We’ve got to go back and tell Miriam. Come on, we’ve got to tell Miriam now. I pulled Martha out of the elevator and back into the law offices, calling, “Miriam, Miriam … Where are you? … Wait till you hear this!”

  Miriam finalized the report by the end of October and submitted it to Deborah Martin. My fate was now in the hands of the Internal Revenue Service.

  Chapter 26

  I’M NOT A blabbermouth. Journalism, while based on digging out the facts from the rumors, teaches discretion. You learn to keep what you know between yourself and your editor and you learn to build trust with sources by protecting their confidentiality. Why, then, was I sharing what had befallen me with friends, colleagues, and even casual acquaintances? This was not my normal MO. A lot of people in my shoes—maybe most—would have reacted like Martha—lips shut, locked, and the key thrown away. Me? I talked. The cascading revelations about my tax-cheating, mysterious stranger of a husband had knocked me for a loop. I needed to air them with someone beyond the lawyers and the psychiatrist. It was part of my coming to terms with him, with our marriage, and with myself. I wanted my friends and my colleagues at Larry King Live to understand this wasn’t simply a matter of my husband’s death. I hoped they would cut me some slack. Howard’s death had changed my l
ife, and was continuing to change it in ways I could never have foreseen. The aftershocks seemed to go on and on and on.

  From Howard’s and my friends, though, I needed more. Was I the only one who had missed it? Had they looked at our lives and seen the masquerade and just assumed I was in on the ruse? Had they known what Howard was up to? Some told me later they had had their occasional doubts about “where it all came from,” but most had taken Howard at face value. He was larger than life, with so much natural grace, wit, and intelligence that it was hard not to be impressed by him, to like him, and to like being around him. Without him, life would have been a lot less fun. Maybe that’s the artistry of the world-class liar. Plus there was the plausible backstory, including the family money, which was real, and the packed bar at the best corner of the city’s best-known intersection. Only people who knew the saloon business, people such as Fred Thimm at the Palm, understood that the visibly packed bar didn’t necessarily translate to a profitable business, especially when there was an owner who was deft at shenanigans. But outside of the bar business, there were few friends who got the picture.

  I had a long, late kitchen dinner with someone who did understand: Terence Smith, who lived near us on the Chesapeake Bay with his wife, Susy Elfving. As couples go, we had spent more time with them than any other. For Howard, a man who really wanted and needed only one friend—me—his friendship with Terry was refreshing and welcomed. Terry’s no pushover, and Howard liked that. He can be full of himself sometimes, and Howard liked that, too. He came up through the New York Times, in the tracks of his father, the legendary sports writer “Red” Smith. We met when he was a White House correspondent at CBS News. Now he was with the NewsHour at PBS. Like Howard and me, he was also a sailor. Terry was a good reader of people. He’d met plenty of men who live life by a roll of the dice.