A regular stopped me at the bar one night. “Nathans feels like it’s coming to life again. It feels warmer.”
THERE MAY HAVE been warmth at Nathans but there was a definite chill at CNN. Becky seemed ready to hang me and I gave her the rope. My presence at the show became more unpredictable. Preoccupied with the demands of the IRS, Nathans, and trying to raise some cash by selling everything that was superfluous to my life, I was late for meetings or had to leave early. Wendy, my lifeline, had an erratic schedule, too, and it seemed to be the opposite of mine. We saw less and less of each other. The guests assigned to me for booking were moving down the ranks. I may have been the show’s nominal big-game hunter, but I was bagging game from the B and C list. I sat at my cubicle, watching everyone else work. Sometimes whole shows were produced without my involvement. I was beginning to feel like a visitor.
As we sailed into the choppy waters of the Christmas holiday season, I kept my focus on the year ahead. I knew Christmas would be rough for Spencer and me, but I had to get us through it.
As we did in all the years before, we went to Bob’s Trees to pick out a Christmas tree. While I got it secured in its stand in the living room, we listened to Christmas music and watched a Christmas movie. Spencer helped me hang a few ornaments but was more interested in the movie. “Does this make you sad?” I asked, referring to the tree decorating.
“Yeah. A little bit,” he said.
“Well, it’s a lovely, sweet tree. Our first tree on our own. Maybe we should get some special ornaments to mark the occasion.” He liked that idea.
“We can get an angel for the top of the tree that looks like Daddy,” he said.
I had a little laugh, doubting whether Martha, Sheldon, Miriam, or Deborah Martin at the IRS would appreciate the image of Howard as an angel.
In the car on the way to the store we talked about what Spencer wanted Santa to bring him on Christmas morning. I fished around, hoping to get clues on toys that would make his wish list. From the backseat came, “Mom, if I could have a dad for Christmas I wouldn’t want anything else. Not even a computer.”
One night I went through his backpack to look for any school newsletters that might be inside. I found some crumpled papers on which he’d practiced writing words such as “egg” and “dog” and drawings of squid, aliens, and laser blasters. There was his “magic pen,” which was really a wooden stick. At the bottom, folded and clearly much fondled, was a picture of Howard.
Spencer came with me to CNN to pose, along with the staff, for the Larry King Live holiday card. We all dressed like Larry, in white shirts, ties, and suspenders. Spencer, very much the mini Larry King, stood beside me as we smiled for the camera. In the picture we were a big happy family.
Holiday parties were not high on my list. We did only a very few. There was something wrenching about exposure to too much family happiness. The best event was the Christmas pageant Spencer’s school presented at the Washington Cathedral. His school made him happy. As his teachers worked with him and as he slowly adjusted to being the boy without a father, school bolstered his confidence and helped him be part of a community. I watched misty eyed as he paraded with his classmates down the center aisle of the huge cathedral and took his place at the foot of the altar.
Another holiday ritual was a visit to the national Christmas tree on the Ellipse south of the White House. I fondly remembered annual visits with my family after we moved to the Washington suburbs when I was eleven. The tree towers over the fifty smaller trees surrounding it that represent each of the states. It is the centerpiece of a spectacle called “The Pageant of Peace.” While not striking during the day, the tree is magical in the evening when its thousands of colored lights fill the darkness. I suggested an after-dinner visit. Remarkably, considering the crush of people, I found a parking space near the White House. Hand in hand, Spencer and I walked alongside the state trees. The colored lights were cheerful, the carolers sang with gusto, and Spencer was thrilled by the miniature train that chugged around the base of the big tree. It was cold and our breath made mist that caught the lights from the tree. Every now and then we heard a child shouting out “Dad!” or “Daddy!” or a mother saying, “Go ask your father,” or “Have you seen your father?”
I didn’t anticipate this reminder of our lives without a father and a husband. It came as a sudden stab of pain, but there was nothing to be done. We had to push on. Spencer held my hand tighter. I tried to direct his attention to different ornaments or to the carolers. He was such a handsome little boy in his puffy brown jacket and the dark green hat that made his blue eyes look green—he looked so cuddly. We stood and watched, then began to sing along with the carolers on the stage. The more we sang the more our mood lightened. Spencer pulled me down to tell me, “I think our tree at home is the prettiest tree, because it has our own ornaments on it.”
When Christmas morning arrived my spirits were up. Spencer had slept in my bed in his Santa and reindeer pajamas, and at dawn he jostled me. “Mom, Mom, wake up! Santa’s been here!”
He jumped like a kangaroo as he made his way to the living room and then stopped and took it all in before making a lunge at the pile of presents. I sat on the floor beside him and tried to keep order and an eye on the dog, who kept disappearing in the discarded paper and ribbon. I noticed Spencer put a package under the tree. On the card he had written in his childhood scrawl, “Mom. Love Mom. I love you Mom. Spencer.” Inside was a plaster cast of his tiny hand, glazed in deep blue.
For a while the Christmas presents thrilled him and made him happy. After that he lost interest. He pushed the presents away, got up, and walked past me down the hall to his bedroom. I followed. He was on his bed, holding his cuddle toy Baby very close, with his thumb in his mouth. I eased him over and stretched out beside him, wrapping my arm around him. He put his head under my chin. He spoke but his thumb was in his mouth and his words came out in mumbles. I pulled out his thumb with a pop like a cork from a bottle.
“I wished Santa would bring me Daddy. That was what I wanted most for Christmas.”
At bedtime I said he could take a present to bed with him. He picked only one, a needlepoint pillow that said I BELIEVE IN ANGELS.
With Spencer now soundly asleep I filled the bathtub with water and submerged myself so that only my nose was above the surface. I stayed like that for maybe fifteen minutes, shutting out the world. The silence was a sweet present I could give myself.
I TOLD MY friend Randy Parks that there was only one thing I wanted to do on New Year’s Eve. At midnight we stood in the middle of Key Bridge watching the twinkling lights of Washington, from the Kennedy Center to the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. The cold and glistening Potomac flowed beneath us. When the clock struck twelve I screamed at the tops of my lungs. I wanted to shake the city with my howl. That was my way of saying good-bye to 1997—certain it was the worst year of my life.
Chapter 31
IT WAS JANUARY 1998, a New Year and twelve harrowing months since I’d taken Howard to the hospital. Whoever I’d been before Howard died, I wasn’t her anymore. A little late maybe, but I was becoming self-sufficient. I didn’t want ever again to be the sheltered, pampered, and indulged woman who didn’t know what a mortgage was or what escrow meant or whether her husband paid taxes. That woman was gone. Now I paid the bills, I decided where and how the money would go, I did the driving, and I paid the taxes. I wanted another man in my life at some point, and he would love this Carol, not that Carol: not perfect, by any stretch, but able to stand on her own two feet.
Early on Martha had said, “You’ll make mistakes but you’ll survive them.” She was right. I did make mistakes, and I would make many more. But they were my mistakes.
It’s a time of reckoning when what you had isn’t what you have anymore. Money bought ease; less money meant much less ease and less generosity, too. Paying the electric bill was more important than sending off a check to the National Gallery of Art. I had to watch eve
ry dime, every dollar. I became a Scrooge in a lot of situations where I used to be first to open my checkbook. It’s called adapting, and I adapted and learned to accept the new reality. Only I didn’t want my friends to see me sweat.
Some moved on. Only a few rejected me outright. It was inevitable. I wasn’t in their club anymore. Also, without a man I was the odd number and hard to place at dinners where everyone else was part of a pair. I was still included, but not as often and rarely on weekends. Weekends were the weirdest time, when the aberrant nature of my new life was underscored by the quiet of no calls and no invitations. I had Spencer, and we had fun, but he wasn’t another adult. I have an enduring image of myself. It’s a weekend evening. I’m dressed casually in jeans, no makeup, hair in a knot, walking the dog. I’m at a stop sign and a car pulls up. Inside are a man and a woman, dressed for a cocktail party or dinner out, talking to each other in that casual, familiar way married people do. I’m staring at them from the outside, they’re on the inside, and I’m thinking, “I used to be them.” That moment happened many times, and for me it told the whole story.
When I was included in the grown-up fun it felt like winning the lottery. At big formal dinners—galas and charity events, the few where I still had a little mileage from earlier giving—I was invariably seated between the priest and the gay man. At one, the men on either side of me were each almost one hundred, and neither could hear very well. A Washington social secretary volunteered that there was too much risk seating “even remotely attractive” unmarried women next to middle-aged married men. “The wives won’t have it,” she said. I wanted to suggest that maybe having a separate table for “remotely attractive” unmarried women would solve the problem. Instead I sucked it up and went along with the rules, making my way through dinner parties by shouting into hearing aids, talking about Jesus, or trading tips on lipsticks and hairdressers.
There is a myth that widows are looked out for and that people, especially men, feel sorry for them. That’s true up to a point, and that point is reached rather quickly. Women simply have it harder, even the toughest and smartest ones. There always seems to be room and need for an extra man but not an extra woman. Why? Because there are more of us. Men die sooner and younger.
Widows also seem to be hung with a neon sign that shouts EASY TARGET. The two-legged sharks find their way to a widow as easily as their brothers in the sea spot chum. They know a husband is not going to step up and call them on their behavior or pop them one. In the course of that first year, I had to fight hard to win battles on many fronts that had to do with just getting through the day—the credit card companies, the utilities, the banks. It was a trial to have a plumber do what needed to be done without trying to sell me an unnecessary bill of goods. Initially I played the widow card, thinking that would inspire compassion and perhaps going the extra yard. Eventually I didn’t reveal whether there was a man of the house, one way or the other, and asked lots and lots of questions.
The Halkias family, my elderly landlords at Nathans, even though there were three women to two men in the group, seemed to doubt my ability—as a woman—to run the business successfully. Dimitri Mallios told me that for the longest time the men received the rent money and then doled out the women’s share. “That’s why you now have to write five separate checks,” he said. “The girls don’t trust the boys.”
The January anniversaries got to my heart, but my attention had to be focused on other events that happily had to do with moving forward. The closing on our new home was less than a month away. After I sorted and packed what we needed, everything else was up for grabs. I had an open house for friends to come get what they wanted of Howard’s. My brother wanted some of his tools. A sailing friend took his foul-weather gear. Other friends claimed a mirror. Someone else bought the rubber dinghy. A local auction house took worthy items I could no longer use or have room for; the Salvation Army got the surplus of whatever we had in multiples: mattresses and beds, children’s clothing and toys and furniture, kitchen utensils and appliances, towels, blankets, rugs, lamps, odds and ends. At first I was relieved to be lightening our load. We had so much. I couldn’t keep it all. Things had to go. Later I would have little fits of remorse, wondering why I gave a particular item away, but then I got over it. I had to learn that they were material possessions, even the most sentimental. They were totems of the good life, but not necessarily what made life good. Over the years I became very clinical about what we had. If a precious item could go to auction and help pay school tuition, bring down the mortgage, or cover a Nathans debt that attached to me personally, it went to auction. If I worried about these decisions at all it was the effect they had on Spencer. In time, most of our furniture went out the door to auction.
I worked during the day and packed at night. It was the small things that made me cry, like a cowrie shell Howard had found in Florida, or a random anniversary or birthday card he’d given me, or his reading glasses. Most of his clothing went to the church to distribute to the homeless, but I saved some of his fine tailored suits and sport jackets for Spencer. It’s not that I thought Spencer would one day wear them as much as I wanted him to have them to touch and to get a sense of his father’s style.
One January morning en route to CNN, I was stopped at a light. While I sat there I looked up the street toward the Washington Hospital Center. It was only about ten blocks beyond my turn for work. When the light changed, rather than make my turn to CNN, I drove toward the hospital. It’s a big hulking building. It’s the best hospital in Washington for critical care, but there’s nothing to distinguish its appearance. I drove around back, near the helipad and the entrance to the emergency MedSTAR unit. I stopped the car and sat with my foot on the brake. I leaned against the wheel and looked through the windshield until my eyes caught the big glass window at the end of the hall that I used to call my wailing wall. I looked up and imagined myself standing there, weeping. It seemed both like a decade ago and only yesterday. Then my eyes scanned to the right until I found the sliver of glass that had been Howard’s window. I could see myself at his bedside, overcome with fear, fighting to be strong, begging God to intervene. I stared at the window wondering what poor individual was in there now, fighting for life.
At Larry King Live there were a few interviews for me to set up before the end of the month and my move. Paul Newman mattered the most. Newman was private and elusive. He was one of my most challenging pursuits, but eventually he relented. I was proud of that. This was no bizarre pop idol. He was a remarkable person and talent. I’d met him once, in the early 1970s, at a wedding in Connecticut. He was, of course, friendly, approachable, and gorgeous. After the wedding ceremony everyone settled on the lawn for a concert by a string quartet. Over to my right I saw Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward. She sat on the grass and leaned against a tree. He was on his back, his head in her lap. He looked up at her and she looked down at him, fiddling with his hair. I thought, “Wow! That’s beautiful. That’s the marriage I want.”
From my cubicle at Larry King Live I dialed Paul Newman’s number to go over the interview. The voice that answered the phone was immediately familiar and transformed me into the fifteen-year-old girl in the tenth row at the Virginia Theater, watching Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain as Newman pulled Julie Andrews behind a curtain to give her a kiss that gave me goose bumps. If only I could pull him through the phone line. Instead, I shook off my fantasy and we talked about the interview.
“Please tell Larry I’m not a naturally funny guy,” he said.
That was endearing. “Of course you are,” I said.
“I don’t have any jokes.”
“You don’t have to have jokes.”
“I hope not. I don’t do that kind of thing very well.”
“All you’ll have to do is sit and be yourself and answer his questions, have a conversation with him. You’ll be fine.” When we finished talking, and the phone was back in the receiver, I savored the moment. My career of talk-show gets include
d presidents and vice presidents, world and national leaders, captains of industry; pioneers of medicine, science, art, and music; great writers and innovators; movie stars, rock stars, Broadway stars, comedians, scoundrels, and the people whose roof was torn off by last night’s tornado. Paul Newman was the candle on that cake.
I sent a memo to Becky requesting two weeks of stored up personal time for my move. She scrawled across it “No! Personal time cannot be used for a move. You will have to use vacation time.” Apparently Paul Newman didn’t count for much.
I showed the memo to the unit manager. “Carol, when are you going to get the message?”
The pressure of the move got to me. As the date drew near I was up before dawn to make lists of all the things that still needed to be done. One morning as Spencer was getting ready for school, my thoughts were elsewhere. When he didn’t hustle to get dressed I raised my voice. He sat on his bed, dressed for school, and said his sock hurt. I took off his shoe, took off the sock, and put on a new sock. I put the shoe back on. He said the sock still hurt. “You should put on your own socks and shoes,” I said, “then you can get it right.” He was in tears. I said, “You’re going to miss the bus, you’re going to miss the bus!”
He threw himself on the bed sobbing. “But Mommy, my sock hurts me.”
“Well, go to school with no socks, then. Wear your Uggs.” He followed me down the hall, still crying.
“But I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Haven’t you gone already?” I asked.
Innocent Spouse Page 24
